Our Chinese Holiday Season

Hey everyone,

It’s been quite a while since our last post. While we do apologize for letting work, travel, and our social lives interfere with our writing, much of the delay has been due to reasons out of our control.

The Internet in China simply has not been the same since the last CCP Congress and handover of power. Many American websites are blocked in China, such as the ones we use to write this blog and host the images we include on it. We have been unable to connect until this week when our VPN program updated to work around the changes. Keep your fingers crossed.

In other less depressing news, we have had an excellent holiday season here. Some of you follow us on Facebook and have seen and/or read about our holiday times, but for those that don’t, here’s a brief rundown. If you are Facebookers with us, prepare to hear in prose what you’ve seen in pictures.

For Thanksgiving, an American couple that we are friends with approached a local restaurant about hosting the foreigners and their Chinese friends/spouses for a traditional meal. They roasted a turkey for us, made mashed potatoes and attempted stuffing, and plenty of other dishes. While not exactly an American Thanksgiving meal, it was delicious and we had a blast celebrating with our foreign and Chinese friends alike.

Our Christmas season in Zhangjiagang was festive; quite a few Christmas parties were had. Our buddy Dennis hosted two: one at his house so that a Chinese friend could film a local TV news segment on foreigners during Christmas time; and a Secret Santa party at his bar. Both were a lot of fun; we’ve made some great friends in our short time here.

Our friend Joe, who filmed the party.

From L-R: the party's host Dennis, our colleague Bella, our flatmate Jesse, Brett

Liz and our good friend Bella. She's the Chinese 7th grade English teacher at our school.

Secret Santa party aftermath. We got sweet new mugs!

We were also given tickets to see a Chinese ballet as a Christmas present from our school. It was one of the more fascinating things we’ve seen yet – it’s called Yang Liping’s “Spirit of the Peacock” or sometimes just “The Peacock” if you’re interested.

Curtain call for "The Peacock" ballet. Photography was prohibited.

For Christmas Eve-Eve (the 23^rd), our British friend Nick (actually, he’s from Guernsey) cooked a traditional British meal. It was beyond delicious. He also made mulled wine, and we stayed up late singing Christmas songs and telling stories. It really helped with our holiday homesickness.

The cook, and our good mate, Nick.

Our Christmas meal. Exquisite. 

On Christmas Eve, our school cancelled classes for an all-day Christmas concert/pageant. Even while it was below freezing that day, it was a blast. The students sang and performed dance routines, some teachers sang in a medley of Chinese pop songs, and the foreign teachers all performed. It was an experience we’ll never forget – singing Christmas songs for a crowd of a few hundred Chinese elementary school students all wearing Santa hats.

The poor freezing students.

Our adorable hosts.

Here we're singing "Winter Wonderland."

For Christmas Day, Liz and I stayed in and opened presents and watched Christmas movies all day. We even made the Bridgewater/Penn family broccoli casserole to make us feel at home.

A small taste of home all the way in Jiangsu.

New Years’ Eve was more laid-back; the usual crowd of Zhangjiagang foreigners met at one of the foreigner-friendly pubs in town for a few drinks and a NYE countdown. It was much more subdued than an American New Year’s Eve, as the locals that were there do not celebrate their New Year for another two months.

So, that was a brief synopsis of the holiday season. In other news, we’ve really settled in to our roles here at our school and have made some great friendships with teachers and students alike here. At first, the language and culture barrier really made it hard to bond with the students. Now that we’ve adjusted more, we’ve begun to really care for our students and about their education.

It’s really important to us that our students walk away from our classes with a broader conception of Americans, the world, and what it means to interact with other cultures in an understanding way. We think we’re doing a good job – our school principals seem to really like us and tell us we’re popular with the students and teachers alike. It makes us feel really good about our decision to come here.

Speaking of which, our school approached us to give a lecture to the 10^th graders at our school. They said it would need to be an hour long and could be about anything related to American culture. We decided to give a mixed lecture on and performance of American folk music in many of its myriad forms. We played some clips of Native American music first, then began with Shaker songs and played our way through time all the way to 1960’s protest songs. The students seemed to enjoy it as much as 10^th graders can enjoy a mandatory extra-curricular lecture, but the school staff and music teachers were really impressed; they want us to give another lecture next semester.

We are both really excited about the next two months. We have one more week of work before get a full 6 weeks off for Chinese New Year. We’ve planned a backpacking tour of northeastern and eastern China for the first four weeks. We will begin in Harbin for the Harbin Ice and Snow Festival, followed by a whole week in Beijing staying with some friends. After that, we’ll visit a few ancient walled cities and small villages before ending in Qufu, the birthplace of Confucius. Neither of us can sit still thinking about it. We’ll try to update you regularly while we’re travelling.

Tonight we’re headed to a concert in town to see the TwelveGirls Band – a band of yes, you guessed it, twelve women who play traditional Chinese music with modern touches. We’re quite excited.

So, with that, we need to get moving. We’ll be sure to try and update you all during our travels as much as we can, but there will be times when we don’t have Internet. Stay tuned.

Love you all!
Brett and Liz