Happy Mid-Autumn Festival!

In case you were unaware, this past Thursday was the Mid-Autumn Festival (中秋节/zhōngqiūjié） here in China. To celebrate, almost everybody takes Thursday off of work to spend time with family and eat mooncakes (月饼/yuèbǐng), along with a lot of other food. 

As with any holiday in China, if you get a day off, you generally have to make it up somehow. This year we got Thursday, Friday, and Saturday off, and so we have to work Sunday through Friday this week, get a day off next Saturday, then work Sunday and Monday. Why? Because we also get October first through the seventh off to celebrate the start of communism in China. While the schedule may get kind of hairy from time to time, we enjoy the different holidays that China has.

On Wednesday night, we celebrated by going over to a fellow foreign teacher's home. We stayed up late talking with him and his wife, playing games with his four children, and sampling eight different types of mooncakes. We tried egg, beef, coconut & milk, pineapple, purple potato, red bean, corn, and concubine mooncakes. Yes, you read that right, concubine mooncakes. We think it has something to do with old legends, but your guess is as good as ours. As Shakespeare once penned, "What's in a name? That which we call a [concubine mooncake] By any other name would [taste much better]."   I thought it tasted like a strange tomato soup, but it probably would have tasted much better if they would have labeled it "Minestrone" or something of the sort.

For the actual holiday, we went with my former Chinese teacher to hike a mountain here in the middle of our city. She has no family nearby, so she took us on a short trek. It was a clear, beautiful day, with very few clouds. And of course, the weather in our city is a little behind on the times- it's still getting up to the 80s during the day- so we were a bit roasty-toasty on our hike. Regardless, we had a great time and it was the perfect day for taking pictures.

The next day, I went with a friend to visit her family in a village two hours outside of our city. Leaving the city of 8 million and heading to the Indiana-like countryside was quite the pleasant change-up. The hospitality in the countryside is also quite different from the city: foreigners are more and more common here in the city, but we are a rarity in the outskirts. So I was welcomed into the house and was given tea and beer to drink, along with some pre-meal snacks... grapes, mooncakes, and fried chicken (what a good combination). Mind you, everyone else was off preparing the food, and I was sitting by myself on the couch. Finally I was allowed to go pick cucumbers from the garden, and I sneaked some peaks at what they were cooking for lunch. 

To honor their guests, the hosts tend to prepare a lot of meat. We had huge helpings of steamed crab,  boiled fish, fried chicken, roasted chicken, and who-knows-how-it-was-prepared pig intestine. Naturally when we all started eating, the plate that was closest to me was the pig intestine, and that was the first thing I picked up with my chopsticks. As I was putting it in my mouth, my friend's husband asked if I knew what it was. I knew it was not anything I would normally eat, so when he told me it was the large intestine of a pig, I wasn't all that shocked. The taste wasn't half-bad, but when I went to swallow it, it was a lot longer/stringier than I was expecting and I started to gag because half of it was down my throat while I was still chewing on the other half. I washed it down with my tiny cups of tea and beer, and thankfully I didn't make a fool of myself. The rest of the meal was great (uneventful, really), and we finished off our time together by looking at pictures. I even got the honor of lying on a traditional northern Chinese bed (炕，kàng) that they heat underneath with a stove, even though it was 80-something degrees out. Now if only we could get one of those in our apartments this winter...

This is a Kang, but the one I lied on was much more modern than this.

Today was the last day of our Mid-Autumn Festival break, and so we enjoyed it by having good conversations with friends over Skype and at a small group. We also prepared for the next six days of work. Though this was a busy break, it was an excellent one; we are so glad that we took the opportunities we did to get to know people better and to explore a little bit of our city.

 

And for inquiring minds...

We figure we should post pictures of our apartment so that you get a feel for what our everyday life is like. This is by no means a standard Chinese apartment; this is the apartment our school provides for us in the foreign (think "anyone who is not Chinese") teacher dorm. It's quite a nice set up for just the two of us!

Our living room. All of the furniture came with the apartment, except for our rockin' purple couch. Notice our AC/Heating unit up on the wall? Three of those cool/heat our entire apartment.

This is our bedroom, with quite the menagerie of furniture. We're hoping to paint it this coming October holiday (yes, we get seven days off to celebrate the start of communism in China). Any votes on what colors we should paint it?

This is our spare bathroom. Our "master bath" is exactly like this one, except we have towels hanging all over the place, trying to prevent mold.

This is our kitchen, though this picture makes it seem a lot bigger than it actually is. We pretty much only have room to wash dishes and cook on the gas stove. Having two people in there is pushing it... three is definitely a crowd.

And this is our dining room, with our lovely oven and microwave that we just recently got. We promise that those two bottles on the counter are just white vinegar, though they look like something else. 

So that's our apartment! You should come visit sometime, since it's much better in person.    

Marching right along...

School started this past week, and though it has been a bit crazy, we are still convinced that this is all a dream. It's so good to be back with the students and with our old coworkers. Granted, we're quite stressed with all of the responsibilities that a new school year brings, but we are excited.  We know that we're not always going to feel like this, so we want to cherish these moments. 

I (Marta) get to teach 7 twelfth graders whom I taught when they were in tenth grade. It is neat to see how much they've matured. My relationship with these students seems to have picked up right where we left off, which is helpful for when we start tackling biology. I also teach 8 eleventh graders three different subjects: literature, integrated science, and SAT math (in the spring, I will get to teach them another subject to prepare them for the Test Of English as a Foreign Language). And to round out the schedule, I teach 18 tenth graders just a basic English course. I have enjoyed getting to know these new students, though it's a bit challenging to gauge where each one is at... and to temper my word choice.

Daniel has the opportunity to teach English to 56 fifth graders, the same students he taught two years ago. He also gets to teach them PE, along with 61 sixth graders. His birthday just so happened to be the first day of school, and I'm pretty sure the best gift he got that day was to see those 56 smiling faces as they reunited for the first time in over a year.  

There is no other profession quite like teaching. While it may be very stress-inducing, I would argue that it is one of the most rewarding jobs out there. (Now hopefully we just remember that in the times we feel burned out!)