I know that this is a rather late update. I should've updated ages ago about Christmas, but Jeff and I had an apartment to clean, and grades to do, and group reports that I looked over and checked for grammar and whatnot... Excuses are easy to come up with after the fact. Especially when it's this late after the fact...

Anyway, I'm sure you readers are curious as to how Jeff and I celebrated Christmas in Xiangtan, China. I'll start with a few days before Christmas. On Sunday, December 21, we attended our last group meeting for church. Afterward, we had a white elephant gift exchange. Jeff ended up with a really cool statue of Chairman Mao that weighs a ton. (I brought it home.) I ended up with a weird mushroom plushie. I left it in China...

On Monday, I had one of my classes do their final presentations. For about seven classes, I had them work on developing a product as a group to present and try and convince me to invest. There were some pretty interesting inventions--like an umbrella that changed colors according to your mood and then could fold up to the size of a piece of candy, a flying car, paint for walls that changes according to mood, apples with different letters on them with flavors like chocolate, and contact lenses made entirely of water. I got some chopstick holders made by one of the students for their demonstration (they're pretty cool) and got to see a bunch of really good advertisements. After teaching, Jeff and I were invited to a feast compliment of our school's dean. It was very delicious...except I made the mistake of picking up the duck head from the plate as my first bit of meat. I didn't realize it was the head at first until I poked one of the eyes in. It was very hard to get to any of the meat inside the duck, but I did try the brains. They were a nasty texture, so I decided I'd had enough of the duck head and put it down with my garbage. Our Chinese hosts jumped to the conclusion that I didn't like Chinese food (though I now love it), so I ended up eating tons of it afterward to try and make up for it. It was a very relaxed dinner--and quite delicious. I really miss all of the spices...
The following day, we were invited to a 5-star hotel by Lany for a Christmas party. It was pretty intense--and buffet style! They had crab, and duck, and oysters, and seafood, and chicken, and weird jelly-like things--and fried rice! I finally had fried rice in China on December 22. Crazy, no? The buffet was set up very beautiful. My picture of it is blurry. But oh well! It's above, and a picture of my first plate of food is below.
Right. So, Jeff and I rather stupidly decided to just take the number 10 bus home and consequently didn't say goodbye to our foreign teacher friends (I felt really dorky when I realized that) but we were really tired. We didn't stay for any karaoke or anything, and we didn't really participate in the program. We had a host at our party, and Lany kept trying to get us to come up and play games, but we were all quite tired. I did win a raffle prize, though. It was a pretty neat tea set--but the tea kettle was made of glass, and I didn't want to have it break on my way back, so I left it in Xiangtan. Besides, I'm not a particularly big fan of tea. I took one sip of green tea and didn't like it. Milk tea is good, though.

Jeff and I thought that we had English Corner on Christmas Eve...but apparently not. It was sad not going. But that was okay. We vegged and watched movies. Both of us really wanted to watch Nightmare Before Christmas, but I got that for my birthday in Utah, so I couldn't show it. Christmas was Thursday, as you are all aware. And it was my last day teaching. Wahoo! I had my students choose a movie on Monday and Tuesday to watch (I gave each class five choices and had them vote before they started their final product presentations). I ended up watching The Princess Bride, Stardust, and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. My students loved The Princess Bride. It was fun watching them watch it since they'd never seen the ROUS's or anything--several of my students screamed when Westley was attacked. And after class ended, I heard a lot of them say, "As you wish!" to practice. Oddly enough, that movie doesn't have English subtitles--I don't think they understood Inigo Montoya at all... But that's okay. My next class really enjoyed Stardust also. And though I started early and ended late, I still had to cut them off before they saw the end--they were really into it. Not so much for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. But that's okay. They watched it at least. When Veruca was carried into the garbage chute they thought that was pretty funny. And they thought it was funny when Mike Teevee came out after being pulled by the taffy puller.

Anywho, after Jeff and I finished our classes, we went downtown and feasted on...McDonald's! Yay! We heard Christmas music, and I said "Merry Christmas" to the cashier. Other than that, it was basically like any day. Jeff and I didn't get each other gifts. Sad, no? Oh well. It didn't really feel like Christmas. It was quite warm, and there was no hint of a white Christmas anywhere.