East is Relative

Christmas spirit

Look what I found at the local bakery last week.

I could not resist taking my picture with these girls. I was so happy to see Christmas decorations that I actually giggled out loud while I was looking for my bread. There were actually tons of Christmas decorations up – I want to know where they got them. But that’s the only place I’ve seen decorated for Christmas at all. I’m really sad that I’m missing all the Christmas stuff at home, but that’s why I’m going on vacation, right?

9 days until I leave on my vacation and I’m getting really excited. I kind of alternate on different days from being excited about my trip and depressed that it’s still kind of far off. I can’t even pack yet – I’m using my backpack for class this week. I’ll be meeting up with Matthew Muller of Pathology of Wanderlust fame in Changsha, and we’ll be taking a trip to Shaoshan, Mao’s birthplace, the day after Christmas. I’m really excited about that. Hopefully I’ll be able to get into the Hunan Provincial Museum on the morning of the 27th, but we’ll see. If not, I’m going through Changsha again to leave for Spring Festival, so I’ll have time then (and I have 7 days before my parents get into China, so I’ve got all the time in the world). Then it’s on to Chengdu (maybe) and Xi’an! I’m really excited about this whole thing.

This week I have been extremely lazy in class. Last week’s American music class started alright and then devolved into crazy students (as it does every week). This week, I was talking about movies, and with my first class, which is also my best-comprehension and best-participation class, I tried to do a fill-in-the-blank with movie vocab, like “camera” and “scenes” and “actor” and “extra”. Apparently, the clues were too difficult and they didn’t know about 2/3 of the vocabulary, so it was a total flop. I scrambled to get them and the class afterwards to describe the action of some movie clips we watched, but they weren’t getting it. I have thus devolved into letting them watch part of High School Musical for listening comprehension. I don’t feel so bad about this because so far, every class has seen the first 45 minutes in their other English class, so obviously their Chinese teachers are using this movie and technique as well! So we skip to the last part they saw and go from there. I think for my very last class we’ll finish watching the movie before I say goodbye.