Beginning the year

The Spring Festival holiday lasts two weeks in China. New Year's Eve is the first day of the Holiday and the last is the Lantern Festival. The Lantern Festival is becoming popular abroad as well, since it's one of the more festive Chinese holidays. Lanterns are already hung around town for the Spring Festival and my understanding is that several will be flown on Saturday for the Lantern Festival. If you've never seen it, this is one of the holidays where the sky is filled with lanterns which, when lit, function as miniature hot air balloons. It sounds impressive, but I don't know if there's one place that people go in Chenzhou to send their lanterns skyward, so I'll try to figure out if any of my friends  are doing it this year.

In any case, the year is starting off with a bang. Sort of. I've been glued to foreign news trying to figure out what Donald Trump will do next. People here aren't too worried about it. Chinese people are never worried about the news. The Great Wall isn't just a literal wall in China, there's also a cultural barrier that makes the outside world little more than a novelty most of the time. Even the foreigners feel it while there here. There's a tendency even to just tune out of the news and focus on what's going on here. I fell into that last year and made it my New Year's resolution to start paying attention to the news more. As far as my personal life, not much has changed. The school I moved back to Chenzhou to work at is just getting started. I did a small demo class today at an art school. We're working with them to try to get some of their students to sign up for ours. Parents often send their kids to extra schooling after the normal school day is over and, usually, every night of the week is occupied in this way: Monday night, piano; Tuesday night, dance; Wednesday night, karate; Thursday night, English classes... and so on and so forth. Then we'll have classes all day on the weekends.

My friend Rebecca has been living in Zhuhai since we both moved down there last summer. Apparently she came to like the town and said she was doing quite well and had just found a new job. Then, after the New Year, she suddenly declared that she was going home. She said she was just tired of teaching. She never really enjoyed it anyway, so that was not a huge shock, but she was being payed quite well in Zhuhai, had a very nice apartment in a great part of town, and lived about twenty minutes from the border with Macau. So I thought she was settled for a while. But the new job was at a kindergarten and I can say from experience that's an exhausting job. You really must love it to do it because the little ones keep you going constantly. So Rebecca will be moving back to England in the spring. I wish her the best and hope dearly that our paths will cross again before too much time passes.

Rebecca Darling