Every Tuesday afternoon we're required to meet with the bureau for
either a meeting or a demo lesson, where we go to someone’s school and watch
them teach. This week though, the demo lesson was cancelled and no meeting had
been planned. Of course a Tuesday afternoon to ourselves was out of the
question, so we were summoned to the bureau for a ‘cultural exchange’ involving
pumpkin carving. I expected some students to be involved in this too, but it
turned out to be just us in a room carving pumpkins. The bureau had bought one pumpkin between two of us and some knives. There was a
competition afterwards where we all voted. As confusing as this was it was quite therapeutic after my Tuesday morning classes (one of
which is a demon class). The pumpkins are now in a classroom in the
foundation school.
Halloween is not really celebrated in China. There are
decorations in some of the busier places and costumes in some supermarkets. The
children tend to learn about it in their English textbooks but generally it is
not very well known. I didn’t even think of doing anything at school for
Halloween, but one of the teachers told me that the children were very excited
and that last year the foreign teacher made paper bats with them, so I got the
hint. Due to a lack of resources, I had all of my grade 8s at my first school
designing their own Halloween town. My grade 6s and my grade 8s at my second
school would be making paper bats. At first I wanted to be really cool and do some origami bats,
but realised this was a bit ambitious when I tried to do it at home and failed miserably. I went and bought some card and decided to make paper bats with them. I thought this would be too
boring and basic for my grade 8s, but they were really excited when I showed
them what to do. At my first school I ran out of card, so had some tables
making pumpkins and skulls. Halloween turned out to be a great excuse to relax
and let them draw and make things, which they don’t have much opportunity to do
normally. The lack of resources was a bit of a problem; in some of my classes I
had to make 43 kids share one pair of scissors. Fortunately some of them had
scissors in their pencil cases and I even found one girl cutting her bat out
with a Hello Kitty Stanley knife. I decorated my classroom with the Halloween
towns and hung the bats, pumpkins and skulls up. I also decided to buy a
pumpkin at the weekend to carve and take to school for my Halloween shrine.
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| My attempt at an origami bat |
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| Grade 6s doing their bats |
An expat bar in Suzhou called Meisterbrau was holding a
Halloween party on Saturday, with all you can drink draft beer for 100kuai (10
pounds). Expat bars here
are really weird because you sort of forget you’re in China. There are some
Chinese people who go to them but you are still just surrounded by Westerners. Some
are a bit pretentious and not interested in being polite or friendly with other
foreigners. One of these ones shoo’d us out of the way so that he could see the
football screen AT A HALLOWEEN PARTY. Another called me a bitch for having a
wee in the men’s toilets because the ladies had a huge queue and I was going to
wet myself, even though there was no queue and he was actually peeing into a urinal as he called me a bitch. Some
though are lovely and enjoy talking to other expats so there’s usually a really
nice atmosphere. After staying until 100kuai beer ended at midnight, we were
all pretty drunk and decided to head to a Russian club called Pravda. I haven’t
been clubbing very often here, and when we have it’s always been free for
everyone to get in. So it was a strange experience getting to Pravda and being
let in for free as a female when all the boys were stopped and charged 50kuai.
They eventually let everyone in for free but I was still completely baffled by
this. I wasn’t in there for long, I had to go home and vomit. I then spent
Sunday violently vomiting (at one point from the bath into the toilet. Awful). In between the
vomiting sessions I managed to carve my pumpkin, which was crap but my kids
thought it was great so I didn’t need to tell them why hardly any effort had
gone into it.
