Happy Belated Halloween

A post written a few days ago by Lisa. An update will be coming soon.

Happy Halloween from Harbin!

Unfortunately, no one celebrates Halloween here, except for the clubs who cater to foreigners - and they celebrate it just like any other bar or club in America. No thanks. In keeping with tradition, however, Tom and I went to the grocery store and bought a bag of sour Skittles, a bag of M&Ms, and a Snickers bar. They're much smaller than in America - go figure!

I actually had a cute discussion with Kyla via text messaging about Halloween, which was so illuminating that I shall type it up for you to read:

Kyla: Thursday is All Saints' Day!

Lisa: Oh, it is! How do you know that? And what do you know about it?

Kyla: I found it when I was surfing the web. Plus my Canadian friend has told me before. I guess on that day people wear strange clothes and masks. Like ghosts.

Lisa: No, that's Halloween, which is tomorrow. Everybody dresses up in costumes and at night the kids go "trick or treating," which means they go to all the neighbor houses and ask for candy. All Saints' Day is Thursday, but it's a church holiday and no one celebrates it. Thursday is also "Reformation Day," another church holiday. Too much information? :)

Kyla: Sounds interesting! I will go to your home to ask for candy Ho Ho (@^@) [I wanted to say, no, silly, that's Christmas! But I didn't.]

Lisa: Okay, but we won't give you any if you're not wearing a costume :)

I must say today was a good day. One point of note is that we had very positive interactions with virtually every salesperson we came in contact with, which is unusual as business transactions in Chinese culture always seem very rude to foreigners. One of the food vendors was extraordinarily kind - often, Chinese people assume that foreigners can't speak Chinese, so they grunt and point even when you speak Chinese to them - and even the grumpy lady who sells snacks and drinks was polite today. I suppose it would seem strange that people being polite would make my day, but it really does.

Another exciting thing is that I woke up to my phone ringing (actually, I thought it was my alarm and groggily shut it off, whoops) - I got a call from an English school who offered me a job! I am meeting with Ralph, the Chinese guy who runs the school, on Friday, and if everything works out I'll be teaching middle and high schoolers English three hours a week. Hurray! I hope this doesn't mean I have to buy work clothes.

We're supposed to have many, many CouchSurfers this week - four, to be precise: two Australians and two Spaniards. We've cleaned house and made up beds, but even though the Aussies were supposed to call us this morning, we haven't heard from them yet. We shall see.

Despite the recent happiness, today was also a sad day because our friends left this morning for Yunnan. And we got our grades back for our reading class midterm - everybody did terribly. I got a C- and probably was one of the higher scorers in the class. Most frustrating was that (aside from the fact that the teacher scored our answers somewhat arbitrarily) not only did the essays have words we didn't know in them, which we all agree is fair game for a reading class, the questions did too - words that we've never studied and were not in the essay! The whole class erupted about that one.

Next weekend is a "Chinese competition," which means the class picks representatives to compete in speech, singing, and trivia competitions. My family will not be surprised to hear that I got picked for the trivia section, so now I have to memorize 100 trivia questions and their answers about Chinese culture and history (not hard) in Chinese (extremely hard!). Also, it just so happens that, because of the way the school split up the class levels, we, level D, will be competing against levels E, F, and G. We have no hope! So at least I hope we won't be embarrassed. And to think I was going to volunteer to paint "Go D6!" signs! Aiya.

Anyway, I have my work cut out for me, so I better go to it! Until soon!