Halloween in China

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.

My attempt at an origami bat

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.