Merry sheme sheme Christmas

After my promises of a deluge of blogarific posts... what happened? Well, I have a great excuse, which starts with Merry, ends with Christmas, and has an "I can't remember when last I was sober" thrown into the middle for good effect.

In summary, Christmas in China is pretty much just another day. A couple of shops aren't open, and a lot of others have big misspelt Merry Christmas signs up, but that's about it. For an intrepid band of westeners however, this was not sufficient.

Our group of 20 split for the weekend (Monday and Tuesday being our weekends), with about half heading off to Hong Kong and the rest staying here. I was in the latter group, and so will only tell you what we did (although the most interesting stories for that evening come from Hong Kong...)

Everybody spent the 24th pretty much bimbling about, doing some last minute Christmas shopping, and not really getting up to very much. Christmas eve, we went for a really good dinner at a little place we've discovered. This was followed by a night of not very heavy drinking, and a reasonably early night. (I was in bed by 1).

Christmas day started late, with most people only really surfacing around 11, but it started with a real fire that was going to keep raging yea unto the wee small hours.

The kindergarten staff all came around for lunch around 12, and made what looked like an amazing meal. Myself and a few of the other Westerners wandered off for a more traditional Christmas meal, which after a great deal of walking and arguing (apparently in most families this is traditional for Christmas), we found at a newish restaurant. I got a Christmas hat! Hehehehe - YAY!

Around 5, the rest of the Chinese staff came through for a "few" drinks and snacks. We did our gift exchange, and a merry time was had by all.

From there, rejoined now by most of the guys from Hong Kong, a group of us drifted off to a club we've found, called Happy Hour, which has a bloody great big car in it. It makes my happy just thinking about how happy that hour was. Wait, we left there at 5am - does that make it a happy hour, or a happy happy hour?

I'm afraid that the stories I remember can't be shared, and the stuff that can be shared, I don't remember.

Now, I shouldn't say this, but Wednesday was not a day filled with the useful moulding of young minds. It was in fact a day filled with the useless speaking of old crap.

To the point where my supervisor's approach to checking a lesson plan of mine was to say "are you happy with it?", and my lesson with the 6 year-olds quickly degenerated into a "Here kids, draw a nice picture for Mr. Wood" , the day was a write off for all concerned.

Ok, back to topical blog posts - this one is boring the hell out of me.