Mooncakes and Lucky Draw

So....Saturday morning. I am awoken from my red wine stupor (more about that in a minute, i promise it's innocent) at midnight on Friday by excited parents and a sister who have just figured out how to make cheap calls to my phone here in China over the internet. I stumble into my living room, I think, speak with them for a minute and then head back to bed hoping that the next time I wake, the numbers on the clock will read at least 9am. But oh, meter-reader lady, you messed up everything!

At 6am this morning I am again awakened, this time to a banging on my door. I sit up thinking, well I just talked to the family on the phone, could they possibly be here or something, did I miss phone details indicating they would be on their way to China now??? Oh no, I open the front door and it's a women in bright green overalls with a clipboard and a funny stopwatch looking contraption around her neck. Before telling me who she is, she proceded to give me a 'talking to' about how my doorbell doesn't work, ok, it doesn't work, sue me. I live in an apartment with less than 800sq feet, I think that if you knock on my door, I'm going to hear it! After that, she lets herself in, maybe she said she was the gas meter-reader insano-woman who comes at 6am on saturdays, but i can't understand her. Instead I just follow her around my apt. She finally stops by the right wall of my kitchen, writes down some numbers and the bolts. Man, what a start to a weekend.

Ok, back to the red wine. Hmm, well red wine might be a really liberal use of the term, as China's national Great Wall wine can, I am sure, also double as furniture surface remover. I can only imagine what it is doing to my insides at this very moment. Anyway, yesterday was teacher's Day and aside from getting lovely little flowers from my kiddos, and a couple of cards and a wind chime from one of my Junior3 girls, and reduced amounts of smartass comments from the backrow misbehavers, there was also a banquet. Now dad, you know how Asian banquets go, so you must be thinking....Kristi, I bet there was a Lucky Draw! You are correct! All the teachers could talk about all day long was the Lucky Draw and the Lucky Draw prizes. First place was 1000rmb...not bad. I didn't win anything...no surprise there, but we all got mooncakes, b/c the lunar festival is next week. From what i hear most of them are pretty gross; all have a raw, sugared egg-yolk in the middle. And they're heavy, super heavy! The NHL should contract China to make their hockey pucks out of the leftover cakes. My box of 4 must weigh over 4 pounds...and they call those personal cakes...tsk tsk.

So dinner. I had a meeting with my program at 2pm downtown, so at 1pm I hop on a bus, get the usual 'weirdo' stare from the ticket-taker (esp. weird b/c I'm in business attire at the time b/c I am going straight to dinner after meeting) and I am on my merry way. I meet up with the other teachers and hear about the problems of the week...students throwing books at each other, throwing paper at the teacher, my trouble with the primpers and the straightening iron etc. The head of the Education Bureau comes and talks to us about how education in China works. Basically in so many words he admitted unfairness. A teacher asked about having to rank each class' behavior from 1-10 after class and how we've all been told to give classes a 10 regardless of whether or not they were rude. Well some of us foreign teachers would like to give them the 8 or 9, but the Head of the Bureau said it won't have an effect, the head teacher will just tear the paper up and make a new one with a new mark of 10, where we had written 9. Hmm, can't win them all.

Ok, from that meeting I had to leave early at 3, to take a bus back home to meet Crystal (my contact teacher's asst.) and Andy and Barbara b/c we're going to go together to dinner. I had asked Crystal if i could just meet them at the hotel downtown, b/c it was SUCH A WASTE taking a 45 min. busride home, only to take another 45 min. ride back into town for the dinner. Additionally we decided, no, actually Crystal decided and Andy was vehemently opposed to, to ride the mini-bus. The mini-bus drivers are the kind of guys who drive like they've been bitten by a rabid dog....luckily our driver wasn't really foaming at the mouth and our ride was relatively free from worries about dying.

Dinner started at 6....that was after we all logically lined up to collect our lucky draw tickets (ie. it was bloody mayhem)! The ticket table was set up in a corner! Thus, not only were there no lines to get the tickets, but you had to step over people who had already gotten their tickets who had stopped mid-trek to talk to friends about the obvious luckiness of their particular number, yeesh. Though, it may seem annoying, this whole evening was so much fun. I love Chinese people when they party. I sat a table with Mr. Yang, Crystal and Andy & Barbara and then 5 of the most beautiful teachers and administrators, that's at least what Crystal told me and I'll agree. Steven sat by his wife Jane at another table, but I caught a gander at the hair the whole school has been talking about. He must be going through a mid-life crisis, b/c last week he bought a bottle of Chinese auburn-colour hair dye and tried it out. Well, it only takes a pair of eyes to see the obvious differences between western and eastern hair.......Steven's little 1 inch formerly brown, western hair and a good part of his bald scalp is now eggpant coloured. It's truly ridiculous.

The food was amazing, but totally overshadowed by the Chinese love for drinking each other under the table. They love the toast. And when you toast you say 'ganbei' which informally means 'darn it you had better drink the whole glass otherwise you will shame me.' sooooooo even though our little wine glasses were indeed little, after about 15 toasts, everyone in the room, all 250 teachers and administrators, were toasted, no pun intended. Such a funny evening. Mr. Yang kept wanting to ganbei people, but he claimed he had kidney troubles so he'd only let the fuwuyuan fill his glass 1/4 while the rest of us had 2/3! The pretty women at our table were on a mission to outdrink me, which isn't hard, but they kept challenging me...it was really funny. Mr. Yang at the end of the night (8:30) told Andy and Barbara to make sure I got home safely in a taxi with them, and then he whispered to me that he thought Andy was drunk, and my Chinese is good, so i better do the talking to the cab driver. Haha.

So funny - I love China