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Published: December 24th 2008
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Christmas songs provide the soundtrack to my working life at the moment, and it's no different as I start writing this blog entry. Good tidings we bring etc, oh well, at least being sick of Christmas songs after Christmas will be one of the more normal aspects of this year.
I just gave a really cool music class on some of the cheesy Christmas 'hits' that aren't played in China. I picked out two songs and gave the lyrics with words missing as the handout. My two songs were 'Last Christmas' by Wham!, and of course 'Merry Xmas Everybody' by Slade 😊. The students seemed to like Wham!, and after the class they asked me if they could listen to the song again. I left a copy of the song on the laptop and told them they could listen to it as many times as they could bear. It was good fun going through the lyrics actually, going over the story behind the song, picking out common expressions etc. I'm definitely going to start doing a regular music class so I can introduce my students to a little old school rock. I'd love to do some of the spinal tap
soundtrack but I really don't want to have to explain songs like "Big Bottoms", so perhaps I'll just stick to ZZ Top and the like.
My last entry was all about my visit to one of the main earthquake areas, after which I returned to Chengdu. I was staying in the hostel called The Loft again, which unfortunately still didn't have a loft. By this time I was about to start my first teaching job, teaching 7 - 12 year olds. A few days after we got back from Dujiangyan we were also invited to come to a Chinese wedding. One of Liu Li's friends was getting married, and he was happy for her to bring along her foreign friends. This was a unique opportunity to sample some Chinese culture, and the wedding was awesome. The bride changed into three or four different outfits during the course of the day, but started with the traditional western white dress for the actual getting married part.
The wedding lasted pretty much all day. It started in the late morning to early afternoon, and first on the agenda was getting married of course. Everybody sat around tables filled with good food, and waitresses circulated around the room promptly topping up any empty wine glasses. After the happy couple were married, everybody had eaten and the groom had sung some karaoke, the party moved to the teahouse. This is where I learnt to play mahjong, although I have to say the game hasn't made it onto my favourites list. I much prefer Dou di zhu, a card game played with three people. We kept ourselves entertained with various games and bottomless cups of green tea, and then it was time to go back to the main hall for the rest of the party.
This was when things started to get a little messy on the alcohol front. It started with the traditional ganbei. This literally means cup upside down, and is the Chinese way of telling you to down your drink. This isn't normally an issue as it's usually with beer, but when it's with baijiu then it pays to be careful. Baijiu is Chinese rice wine, and tends to be around 40 to 50%!a(MISSING)lcohol. The groom went around every table to toast to his wedding. When he came to our table, suddenly no more small glasses could be found to hold my baijiu, which meant I was poured a generous helping in a tumbler. Less ideal, but of course you can't refuse the groom... We were informed that if the groom isn't drunk at the end of the wedding then it wasn't a good wedding. If this was the yardstick used to indicate the success of this particular wedding, then it was a roaring success. We ended up staying until the end when there was just one more table of people left, and after every new ganbei our glasses were once again refilled with red wine. At least we'd moved away from baijiu by then. All of a sudden the alcohol became too much for the groom, which meant a little more work for the cleaners later on...
It wouldn't be my idea of a good honeymoon, I would imagine there are better ways to spend your first evening as a married man than being blind drunk and falling asleep. It was a nice wedding though, and I was glad to have been invited. I mean, how many times do you get the opportunity to go to a Chinese wedding?
As I had only just arrived in Chengdu by this point and I was still in the traveling mindset, Zack and I decided to make the trip to Leshan to see the world's biggest buddha statue. It's a day trip from Chengdu, and only takes about two hours on the bus to get there. Once we got to Leshan bus station we were mobbed by salesmen and women trying to convince us to get their taxi or whatever to the big buddha. Of course we told them all to leave us alone, walked out of the station, realised the buddha wasn't walking distance and that we didn't know where to go, so then we got in a taxi anyway. Oh well, at least we didn't encourage the touts at the station because we didn't give them any business.
The buddha was actually fairly difficult to find, with it being the world's biggest and all. The park was full of other random pagodas and smaller versions of the same deity. Some of the fences around the park were covered in locks, something I hadn't seen before. Apparently the locks are for couples, and locking one to a fence near a pagoda is meant to bring good luck to your relationship. Something to do with everlasting love or something, although being forever locked to something seems like strange symbolism for a happy relationship to me.
Apart from the buddha statue itself, one of the coolest things we did around the park was to go and check out some crazy old abandoned house. After seeing all the statues and whatnot, Zack and I spotted a house just a little down the side of a hill. We thought we'd go check it out, and we found a pretty weird scene. Nobody had been down there for several years as there was a thick layer of dust on everything, and it seemed like whoever used to live there left in a hurry. There was one women's shoe and half a deck of cards on the floor, and inside the house there was still a mattress with sheets on it, and a thick layer of dust on top of that. Weird, but we found two chairs somewhere and it was the perfect place to relax after walking around for a few hours, and it kept us nicely out of the way of other tourists.
That week was a national holiday in China, and when it's national holiday in a country with 1.3 billion people, it means it's going to be busy. Really busy. The centre of Chengdu was packed with people, although one thing I noticed was that the atmosphere was still relaxed. Even when all the streets were rammed and you really couldn't rush anywhere, people didn't stress about it or be aggressive, everyone just took a little longer to get places. It was nice to see.
The rest of the national holiday was spent seeing some more live music and exploring the city a little more. I checked out a few parks around the city, photographed some more Chinglish for the collection, and just generally started adjusting to living here for the next little while.
Well, I'm about to go home as I've finished all my classes for the day, then make my way to my old house for a Christmas party. I'm in charge of making punch, so I'm glad I have the day off tomorrow haha. This saturday I should be starting Chinese lessons at my school too, which I'm really looking forward to 😊.
For now, I'll leave you with my photos:
Parties, a wedding and the world's biggest buddha
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