Halloween

Well, seeing as we completely alone in this town for celebrating western holidays ands traditions, we decided to make them go with a bang.

Halloween was the first significant one to come our way, and we decided to buy some sweets and let the kids come trick-or-treating to our house. We bought 3 pumpkins to carve and about 100 yuan's worth of sweets (only about 8 quid, but a big bag nonetheless). We told all our classes about it and what they had to do and after the last class went back to our apartment to see if anyone would turn up.

Demand slightly exceeded expectations...

Withing minutes we were faced with a huge crowd of junior 1s and 2s stampeding towards our door all shouting 'give me!! give me!!'. Some tried to say trick-or-treat and some of the junior 1s had even made masks but it all soon descended into complete chaos. It was all grabbing hands and pushing and shoving and shouting as the kids ripped the bags of sweets from our hands...

I can't say it wasn't enjoyable though. A bit bewildering, yes, but still quite good fun. It was
good to be able to treat our favourite students, as it was only the enthusiastic ones who turned up.

And man were they enthusiastic.

It turned out afterwards that some teachers had been telling their students to go before dinner, and some had said go after dinner. With this in mind, Anthony quickly ran back to the shop and bought another 100 yuan of sweets, just in case.

It was well worth it. We came back from dinner and the yard outside our apartment was full of kids. Whoever had missed out on the first round
had by now heard all about it and were waiting for us. There were upwards of 300 kids all pressing forward to get into our apartment, and we weren't even in there!! We had to literally fight our way in, and fight our way back out again with the sweets. It was a bloodbath, but so much fun.

When I went into my junior 1 class the next day they all shouted 'trick-or-treat' and held out their hands for sweets. I just laughed at them. No way. I for one am glad this festival only comes round once a year!!

The pumpkins we carved were brilliant. Everyone kept stopping outside our apartment to have a look. They had never seen anything like it before. All we could hear from inside was 'hao guai!' (beautiful) and 'nangua' (pumpkin) as people stopped to look. The Chinese are a curious bunch at the best of times, and this really drew a crowd.

We lit them when it got dark and left them outside our apartment while we went to an evening show. This was some kind of talent/variety show, with singing and dancing, all performed by students from various schools.

There were prizes to be won and a good deal of them were won by students from our school, Yizhong (yi means one, zhong means middle - No. 1 middle school).

Our good friend Li zhe came second with a great dance. Most were traditional folk dances, so we got to see some culture that night too.



















The majority of the performers were Anthony's students, the senior 3s, but one or two were mine, and we speak to all of them anyway, so we had a laugh. There was one act that was absolutely brilliant. This little girl who must have been about 4 years old got up on stage in traditional Indian costume and danced along perfectly for 3 minutes, belly-dancing and bobbing her chin like you see all those Bollywood dancers do. It was amazingly cute.




It all went on rather late though and when we came back we found our pumpkins had quite literally had their lights put out. I think this was the most scary image of Halloween, with the blackened eyes and what looks like blood coming from the back of my little pumpkin... Brilliant.








But we weren't finished with the visitors. These two guys actually managed to make me jump when I opened the door, believe it or not. We eat with these guys every day in the teacher's canteen. Anyone who has the vaguest relationship to a teacher can eat in there. It's an improvement on the students' dining hall as at least here you can sit down and don't have everything slopped into one bowl to eat from. These lads got the meaning of Halloween and helped make it one of the best I've ever had.