Teacher's Day

Teacher's Day is an awesome holiday that we don't have in the states. It was this past Wednesday. All the students applaud you when you enter the class and tell you happy teachers day. There is a bouquet of flowers at the desk for you to admire while you are in that room. Also there is a banquet for the teachers sometime that week. My school held there's this past Friday. There students and teachers perform. There was a great song and dance performance by the senior 3 class (aka 11th graders). It was ridiculously beautiful. Then the music teachers sang. Two of the teachers have operatic voices, it was quite unbelievable.

Then the food is served. As you go to settle down and eat you soon realize that eating is not the main agenda for the night. Soon our contact teacher tells Shedisha and I that it is customary to go from table to table to toast with different people. He said we call this "making friends". At first it was pretty cool. Everyone is so nice that you have fun going to each table, smiling while Wallace (my contact teacher) says something along the lines that we are glad to be here and to meet them. But soon you realize that you will never get back to that wonderful food at your table and that you are totally getting drunk as you take endless sips of red wine. There was also some crazy strong white liquor that I had a few sips of before I thought I would go into a coma if I continued to drink it, so I went back to the wine.

We went to all the tables and finally were able to give the headmaster and Wallace our gifts. But by the end of the night I was nearly drunk which was not my intention. I was glad however that this was taking place in the cafeteria and I live all of 2 minutes from it so when I need to cut out I won't have to go too far. So just before I was about to leave I wanted to toast with the art teacher since he was the first teacher I met when I got here and he invited me to come to his class whenever I like which I thought was super nice. So I go over to him and he's sloshed! In the middle of our toasting he invites us to have beers just outside the school. Now for all my guys (the asians) you all gave me a very false impression of asian people, they drink like fish over here! Totally red in the face after 2 drinks but they just keep on trucking. So of course in my pretty much drunk state I agreed. So we stroll to the local restaurant and proceed to drink and toast to anything and everything under the sun. If I learn any chinese I will know ganbei which is cheers. And if any chinese person knows any english they know bottoms up, which we were constantly being told because apparently they weren't happy when we had any liquid left in our glass after each toast.

After that we made it home no problem and I had no hang over I was just extremely tired. But I wouldn't have it another way it was extremely fun and it helped introduce me to a lot of the teachers here, who i have to say are some of the nicest people I ever met! So it was definitely a very fun night even if I had more to drink than I intended. But like Wallace said that's how we make friends, so when in China :) drink a lot and toast to everything and anything! And one more thing according to our fellow teachers Shedisha and I are beautiful!!! Which i thought was so sweet :) Even students tell me I am beautiful, which is good since I thought I would be just strange and ugly looking to themO.o But this is all for now, I will write about the next day's excursion with Jasmine (one of the Chinese English teachers) in the next post. Until then kiddies :)