Christmas day and evening and Kparty and electronics market

---

Christmas Party

I haven’t done any updating in awhile so I’ll do it all now. If I can remember.

Christmas was a heap of fun, not so much the Christmas day, as it was just another normal day at work, but a few days before Christmas we had the Christmas party. Heaps of fun, but quite embarrassing, they made us sing Chinese songs.
Also it was my turn to be Santa Claus, not something I expected myself to be doing in China, I was pretty impressed at how well everyone got into the whole Christmas celebration thing.

For Christmas evening we felt we (the westerners) deserved some kind of proper celebration so we went into the big city where we hoped to find an English bar, one of our students had her driver pick us up to take us the one hour ride into the city centre. It was a fair mission trying to find the bar but when we got there it was quite a treat. Just like any other bar in New Zealand, with pool and football. We spoke to the bar owner for a while, he was from England and was a super nice guy, the whole bar was full of westerners, no Chinese, it was almost like we weren’t in china at all. They had giant bucket size glasses of hoegaarden. From there we went to another place next to the pearl river, which in itself was really impressive, inside the bar (an African bar) it was quite an experience for me, I’ve never seen so many different cultures in one place all spending time together, and it was huge, so many many people. On the way home we had to take the taxi because we felt bad and didn’t want to driver to wait for us all night, especially on Christmas, so we sent him home. The taxi ride home was great because it was the first time we’ve travelled through the city above ground so got to see a lot more of the city, and again I was amazed by the size.

Then again, there was another trip to Kparty, which we are getting fairly good used to but still its fun. One of the bosses (Evan) (a girl) (I don’t quite understand the English name choice) told me about a ghost that apparently lives there.

Also, I realise this is all in the wrong order, but I can’t remember what happened on what day. But we went to the giant Guangzhou electronics market, which was much to big to explore so just went to one of the general malls that it is made up of. There I bought my brilliant cell phone, which I’m pretty sure is the best thing in the world. It does everything, already the gps and Internet has helped us so very many times. But that didn’t happen until lijiang, so I’ll explain that later.

At the electronics mall, the building we went into was 10 floors each made up of about a hundred little shops, so it took a lot of searching and bartering before I got my cell phone. For lunch we walked through some alleys for awhile until we came out at a restaurant that was out on a lake, it did not seem like it would hold, there like normal the laughed at us a lot more then they served us but still were friendly, Paris was mostly excited be the huge fish with whiskers swimming below us.

And then Lijiang . . .

---

Photos

Jimmy at the hotpot restaurant
we went out for our first real chinese hotpot with some of our students

money folding
a 100 yuan note, very specially folded. very cool. behind it is my satay meal. they think we are very strange at the restaurant when we order satay with noodles, but I noticed today a few of the chinese customers saw wwhat we ordered and asked for the same.

Chris's birthday with john the big boss.
tonight was the first time john came to Kparty with us.

the happy family
this is Kate with her mother and father, so the three main bosses at our work.