Teacher's Day Celebration

Here in China they have "Teacher's Day". Normally, they have a celebration for the teachers on Saturday and they are required to go to it. If you ask me, the best way to honor teachers is to give them a day off, not make them work an extra one. Anyway, this year, they did the celebration on Friday night instead which was a lot better than working on a Saturday.

For the secondary teachers, hey took us to Shiqiao to a karaoke bar for a buffet dinner and karaoke. It was really quite an interesting place. There were several different floors and lots of different karaoke rooms. The Western teachers were all in one room with our TAs on the 3rd floor. The buffet was either on the 2nd floor or the 4th floor. It was hilarious watching all of the Western teachers at the buffet as we wandered around trying to look for something we could eat. We couldn't even tell what half the stuff was. In contrast, the Chinese teachers all had several plates that they were piling as high as possible. I ended up getting some things I thought I would be able to eat--potatoes, salad, zucchini, and an egg roll. The potatoes weren't really potatoes at all, the salad had a really nasty dressing on it, and the zucchini was marinated in something that was really spicy. I did like the egg roll though. For our second attempt, we went to the other floor and we were a bit more lucky. They at least had some ham fried rice and orange chicken (although I have to admit, I prefer Panda Express to the "real" thing). We also found the dessert table. I'm a bit afraid to even try Chinese desserts because they are never what you expect them to be. But, they did have a chocolate fountain so I figured anything dipped in chocolate had to be good. That wasn't so much the case. The marshmallow things were okay but I wasn't too fond of the different breads that they had.

As far as the entertainment went, only the TAs were really into the whole karaoke thing. I think the Chinese people love that sort of thing. However, after my collegues had a few drinks in them, there were a few who performed. It was quite interesting seeing some of them singing "Summer Lovin'" and "Friends in Low Places". The most entertaining thing of all though was the videos that they had to go along with the singing. They had big projector screens in each room that would play the song with the lyrics, but it never had the corresponding video to go with it. They had cheesey Chinese videos to go with the songs. And they usually had nothing to do with the songs. For example, during the "Thong Song" they were showing random scenes of different people including babies and old people. Not really what you think about with that song. Anyway, it was an interesting night.

Jason and I left around 7:00 pm. (What party animals!) My team leader said we were required to go, but not required to stay. So, there was some shopping that I wanted to do in Shiqiao, so we left and took advantage of the time we had with a babysitter. We wandered around town for a bit trying to find where we were. It was a lot of fun just walking the streets at night. It's quite a big city, but I think of it as small because it's smaller than Guangzhou. We ended up not being able to find our way to the part of the city that we were familiar with. So, we had to call for help. We were actually just about a block away from the road we needed, but we wouldn't have known to go that direction without help. It was a really fun night just being able to explore and be with Jason.