First Break

Well, I made it to the first break.  It's the Moon Festival in China this week,  which is also called the lantern festival or mid-autumn festival.  From what I can gather, it's sort of a celebration of the full moon, and there's a folk tale behind it.  Chinese people usually get together with family, drink tea, and eat moon cakes.

Moon cakes are weird.  They're these dense little cakes that may contain a great number and variety of fillings, from nuts to egg yolks (baked whole into the middle of the cake) to chicken.  Not my favorite, but people here can't get enough.  Our family had a Thai women live with us for awhile, and on one of her visits, she brought moon cakes.  It's still a running joke around our house, and I think Dad still uses the tin for cookies at Christmas time.

At school, we had pajama day to celebrate, and many of the students and staff wore pajamas to school. At the end of the day, the teachers and the staff organized a tea room and lantern making, and then the secondary students put on a play illustrating the folk tale behind the festival.  We wrapped up the activities with a pomello eating contest.

 So we had a shortened week this week and next week at school, and I'm finally able to relax for a bit.  I'm sticking around Dongguan and not committing to doing too much.  It's only a six day break, so I didn't feel like going through the planning of taking an actual trip, although many of my co-workers are out of town.  Yesterday, I had a nice day cooking a big lasagna meal with one of the other teachers who stayed, and then we invited all the rest over to eat.  It can be challenging to cook over here.  We spent much of the day going around to 3 different grocery stores trying to find ingredients, and some (ricotta) we just had to make do without.  I also made my favorite oatmeal-chocolate chip cookies.

The cultural center near our apartments is being prepared for the celebrations on Sunday.  there are big sculptures covered with silk flowers, and banners up all over the city.

I'm going to try to get a little bit ahead of the game over the next few days, and plan things out ahead of time.  The workload has been a little brutal recently, trying to keep up with five different classes, helping other teachers with tech issues, preparing for my after school computer clubs...  I keep telling myself that it has to get easier soon; I just hope that soon doesn't mean next year!

I hope everyone stateside is doing well.  I'm getting good reports from some former students: keep it up, guys!  Ellie and Kurt's new twins seem to be doing well, and they have their aunt Rose and grandma Suzanne to help out.  Miss you all, keep in touch, send pictures.

Peace,
Jon