Dong zhi

That is the name given to today, the Winter Solstice, the shortest day of the year. The Chinese legend is that on this day, you must eat a dumpling or your ear will freeze. Thankfully, the school cafeteria serves dumplings on Mondays so that will be easy to do. During the flag raising ceremony this morning (mandatory every Monday), I did think my ears were going to fall off (16 degrees out this morning).

On Saturday morning was the Christmas program put on by the Grade 10 classes (called Foundation classes here). It started at 9 am and went until 12:30. A bit long! The parts I enjoyed the most were the traditional Chinese entertainment, but unfortunately there was little of that. Many of them tried to emulate the rap songs and dances, with varying degrees of success. A pic of a student who does ballet:

In the bottom photo, the student is playing an ancient Chinese instrument called a GuQin.

The program also auctioned off student works for charity. I bid on a couple watercolor pictures, yelling out "1000 RMB". It created quite a stir when they realized a foreign teacher had put in a bid.  It was quickly surpassed and ended up going for almost 4000 RMB, but a nice turn at the end was that the person who put in the winning bid presented me with the pictures as a gift. I got all choked up and had a hard time expressing my thanks.

Later that night, we had the Christmas dinner for our staff at a restaurant called China Roast. No hot pot this time, but lots of duck. It was a good dinner with plenty of food to go around.

Christmas falls on a Thursday, but we decided it would be nice to get Friday off and make it a 3-day weekend. The Chinese relented (they don't get the day off and will be covering our classes for us) so we lucked out...

I decided to share some US culture with my classes this week so I'm going to show A Christmas Story. They seem excited about it so we'll see how it goes.

I've got some more pics of the Xmas show but I'll have to post them later as they're on my laptop back at the apartment (where the water went off Friday but thankfully right after I took my shower - it seems to be a regular occurrence).

Stay warm and Merry Christmas everyone!!!