Sheng Dan Kuai Le and Xin Nian Kuai Le! Holidays in the Chinas were very interesting but above all really, really cold! i attempted to cook some things for Christmas and they actually all turned out well: i made salsa, refried beans and chocolate chips cookies, all from scratch. Our foreigners in China Christmas was a little hodgepodge, but enjoyable all the same. (to the right you should note by bootleg tree, decorated by lights and earrings...)We watched some holiday themed episodes of Futurama and a show called Robot Chicken, which i've never heard of before, but was just gross enough to be hilarious. We then migrated from Nellie's cozy apartment to an incredibly awkward dinner at a Western restaurant near my school. We fit something like 14 people at one table and, then began to chat with the click nearest us. The group that had come from Nellie's was already sufficiently stuffed with bread, cheese, salsa and cookies that we didn't really want to eat, but were forced to order something, being that we were all in the holiday spirit, and had been invited to dinner. There were Chinese, Australian, Canadian, English and American people at this dinner and the age range was from 55 to 16, so it was like an awkward family dinner, but with more international flavor and miscommunications. More foreigners showed up and we mingled about to do a gift exchange... drum roll please... a tin full of hard candies! The conversations were interesting and somehow Nellie and i ended up putting tinfoil on our teeth for entertainment purposes:
S0 that brings us to New Year's Eve, which i'm happy to say all of China took a three day holiday for. Unlike Christmas, while i did end up getting the day off, i had to work the eve and the day after and make up my classes during other days of the week. For the New Year's holiday i went to, can you guess? Shanghai. Nellie has officially moved there and has an amazingly cute apartment in the French Concession. So Gino and i stayed on her couch/bed and we let the good times role! We were all three suckered into paying 300 RMB for a schmancy party at a club on the Bund. It was said to have a fantastic view of the fireworks display. While the Bund did look amazing, the fireworks were partially blocked by a 19th century european building, bummer. The coolest part about midnight, which for the most part can be very anti-climactic, was looking up at the sky and seeing hundreds of giant, fire fly-like paper lanterns. People light them on fire and they float up to the heavens; they're beautiful.
From the point of the evening huddled around space heaters out on the terrace, things took a turn for the drunkest. The reason the party was relatively expensive was because there was free flow vodka and beer all night + champagne. So, long story short: i almost vomited, but danced my way out of the nausea and Nellie got hit in the face when a Turkish and a German guy got in a fight because the Turkish guy sneezed in the other guys mouth. We made it back safely and then proceeded to sleep until 3pm and go out for Japanese to start the year off in China, go figure.
Hope your holidays were at least, if not more, eventful than mine... bring on the 2009!
(ohhh, communist/capitalist China...what's in a name? at least they still have money to burn...)
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