My School's Christmas Dinner

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Like most schools in the area, mine wants me to feel at home and enjoy myself. For Christmas this year, they took Roy and I out to a Western restaurant instead of a Chinese banquet. While I like the banquets my school throws (they make sure they always have plenty of food I can eat) I was pretty excited about the prosect of something more traditional for Christmas. I just can't quite get used to Christmas including rice and chopsticks.

Roy, Iris, our new VP, Anthony, the rest of the English teachers, members of the administration, and I all left our school around 6pm. Roy and I cleverly wore the scarves we were given last year. We packed ourselves into a few cars and drove over to the Holiday Inn. The crazy thing is, between the traffic and road designs, I'm sure I could have walked there in less time than it took us to drive there.

In short, we donned Santa hats, we ate too much, we toasted each other like crazy, and then we ate some more.

The school gave Roy and I wonderful presents. He received a very nice long-sleeved golf shirt. I received a scarf so beautiful I couldn't stop gasping. It's a blue I haven't seen since India with gold detailing. It's too lovely to wear. And it's quite long, so maybe someday I'll use it for decorating purposes.

Then we took many, many photos. Iris's turned out a bit better than mine, but since everything on this page is copyrighted to me I won't post hers here.

Then, unlike our entrance which was a bit of a trickle, we abruptly left, waving to each other, commenting on the wonderful time.

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Photos

Chinese Xmas Tree
Note how the lights run up and down... like a runway at the airport.

Chinese Xmas Tree
Note how the lights run up and down... "land here," they say.

Roy and I
We are still debating if our sceptors are for Turkey or Pakistan.

Anthony and Roy
Anthony renamed us Miss Roger and Miss Kristmas.

My dessert plate
The creepygreen thing was actually a crepe with fruit and cream inside--my favorite one!

Card from my 7th grade students
See, it lights up the words "Merry Christmas," and plays music!

Comments

[Elyse]

Nice to feel at home
Kris that is so nice that your school actually cares about you feeling at home for Christmas. I was told Merry Christmas by our contact teacher and one other teacher out of the 200 plus teachers at our school. Pete was even asked to teach his class on Christmas Day and the classes that occurred while we were on our way to the party at Silver Lake. Long Cheng Senior High doesn't really know how to deal with foreign teachers.