It's Begining to Look a Bit Like Christmas...

two days after the fact. It never really does look much like Christmas outside the apartments of those of us who celebrate it, anyway. The Chinese decorate a bit and play Christmas songs in stores and such, but they don't get any days off. Actually, that's pretty nice for us because we do get time off fro school and work, so we can go to all the gardens and tourist destinations when everyone else is at work, so it's empty. The weather's been really nice, too. It's great.

My mom bought a guitar for herself, and I want to learn how to play it, too. Right now I only know a few chords, though. I also want to start playing piano again, if I could find music I liked which was at my level. Then I'd be able to play three instruments, including my violin.

Christmas was great. We had pain au chocolat for breakfast of course, and our traditional pork roast. It was delicious. (My dad is an amazing cook.) We went Christmas shopping in this little underground shopping center in Shanghai, and we found some good stuff there, like Axis & Allies (a WWII board game) for John. My dad also ordered books, clothing, and things from the U.S., so I got this shirt. It's awesome.

We'll be going up to Beijing and Harbin for a few days. Harbin is where they have an ice festival with buildings and sculptures made of ice. I think the festival itself doesn't start until after school starts again for us, but we can still go before when they're finishing up everything.

It's going to be cold.

It did snow today in Suzhou, but not that much. It melted as soon as it hit the ground. My mom and I went to the Lions Grove garden to see it in the snow and take pictures, but the snow wasn't heavy enough to get a good shot of it. Oh well.

Beijing

We went to Beijing for a few days, because we had a week vacation (because China recognizes May 1st as a national holiday, and I think the school also wanted an excuse to have a longer break.)

So, my parents arranged to rent camping equipment for one night, from a company that helps organize camping trips on the Great Wall, in the less touristy areas. So we slept on the Great Wall for one night, also as a birthday celebration for John. (He's now twelve.) It was really fun, and we pretended that we were defending against the Mongols. The only problem was that night, when we realized that we only had a little bit of water left and there wasn't time to hike down and get more. So we didn't have any water to drink that morning, which was fine, because we were leaving relatively early anyway, but still annoying.

The driver we had to take us to the wall and back the next morning really liked John. It was cute.

After that we spent two nights in a small hotel in the middle of the city, amid the traditional hutong villages. There was a lot we planned to do but didn't get to, partly because some of them were closed when we went there and also because it's really hard to navigate, between the long line interchanges at the subway stations and the taxis that wouldn't stop for us. But, all in all, it was great. We went to the Forbidden City - which is, surprisingly, called simply the Palace Museum by the Chinese, who usually give places very poetic names. I think we would have been more amazed by it if we hadn't already been living in China for the past eight-and-a-half months. It was still amazing, it's just... we've already seen a ton of traditional Chinese buildings. While that doesn't make any of them less unique or amazing, it does mean that they don't have the same charm to them as they do to someone who has never seen one before except in photographs.

We also tried to go to the Beijing Underground City, which is a large expanse of underground tunnels built under Chairman Mao's regime, designed to support most of the citizens of Beijing in case nuclear war with Russia broke out. Unfortunately, the tunnels are have been closed for renovation since February last year. We're hoping this means that they'll open again soon, and that they are going to open up more tunnels to the public (instead of just making it more commercialized.)

The other thing we didn't get to see was Mao's Mausoleum, where you can see the embalmed remains of the great Chairman himself. The thing is, it's only open for a few hours and on certain days, so, although we tried to take this into account, it still wasn't open when we tried to go there.

All in all, we like Shanghai better (and better yet is Hong Kong), but we still are glad we went there.

We also had dinner one night in a restaurant that advertises itself as "American Home Cooking" with the "best burgers in town," but I'd say that's not quite true. These were the first real burgers I've had since we were in Hong Kong over Christmas. (The western restaurants in China frequently serve "burgers" with minuscule patties so you have to take two bites of nothing but bread and vegetables before reaching the small morsel of over-cooked beef.)

I got my braces Wednesday the week before last. They didn't hurt at all when they put them in. (I slept through the whole process.) However, my mouth felt really sore for a few days afterward. I'm also need to get used to the fact that my front teeth are almost un-useable, so when I was eating corn-on-the-cob I had to cut the corn off before I could even get it into my mouth.

Life In General

I know that I haven't updated in a few weeks. I keep meaning to, but I never have. I've kinda been working on a post about Chinese gardens, but I need more pictures for it.


I'm going to write a little bit about just life in general, since this blog is mostly to let friends and family back home (and elsewhere) know what's going on here. Anyway, Halloween was pretty recent now, however, seeing as there's so much going on right now, we weren't able to do anything for Halloween. We meant to get things tailored, and I wanted to get a long dark blue dress and a long dark gray cloak so I could be a Viking woman. Oh, well. I can do that next year, I just hate waiting.


This Christmas we're going to Hong Kong, from December 19, when school gets out for Christmas, to the 26th. We're going to go shopping and go to some touristy places like Macau. I'm excited because people tend to speak better English there, so I can actually tell them exactly what I want. It's so frustrating. I'm going to be so happy when we go back home this summer and everybody speaks English!!!


Anyway, we'll have our Christmas celebation on the 27th, I guess. We found some Christmas decorations at a Western market, and bought a good five-foot artificial Christmas tree for 79 RMB, or about twelve dollars. Then my mom's friend is visiting for about nine days and I'm really excited.


I love Christmas. I don't love Christmas just because I get presents, it's just so much fun!!! I like the whole mood of it, where we get to just sit around and talk, open presents, have fun, drink hot chocolate with warm pastries, and everything else fun. I can't wait!


I'm kind of just rambling now. I do that a lot. I hope you don't mind.


School is fine. It's still just school. It's really confusing. As I've mentioned before, we have different schedules for different days of the week, so I have a hard time remembering where I'm supposed to go. This is really frustrating for me because I don't like having to dig out my planner every day and look at the schedule (which, by the way are called "time tables," and the planners are "homework journals." Whatever.) I've had four different schedules over my past three years in middle school, and I remember all of them, even the one that I had for only a week before I switched schedules. Frustrating. I guess it makes sense, though, because at Connolly we had only six classes in a day, two periods of English and one each of math, science, history, and two electives. Here we have two languages, math, history, science, technology, art, and PE, for a total of eight. With a fifty-minute lunch, I think because they want the Middle School and the High School to go with the same schedule and we can't all fit in the cafeteria (canteen) at once, that leaves forty minutes for each period. So this year they switched to a block schedule, which means that you have two periods for each class. It makes sense, but that doesn't mean that it's not annoying.


I hate how there's about three or four different types of English. You say one thing in Britain, another in Australia, and yet another in the US and in Canada. It's very confusing. Also, we Americans like to be different, I guess, because in the US when we write the date with numbers we do month/day/year, but in Europe, Australia, and probably some other parts of the world they use the day/month/year format. This, along with the fact that everyone uses the metric system, is also very confusing. I can estimate about ten meters or five liters, but beyond that I'm hopeless. I hate estimating centimeters, too. I can't estimate a distance in centimeters longer than about thirty cm. I know I'll figure it out eventually, but that's just it. Eventually.