Thursday night in Beijing is fading gently into Friday morning here, coaxed by a surpisingly decent bottle of Great Wall Red Wine (40 RMB or around 2 pound 75 to you occidental types).
Christmas, old hat for you with its traditional late September UK kick-off, is starting to loom here as we FTs (foreign teachers as opposed to CTs( supposedly Chinese teachers, but better put as Cute Teachers) huddle together and wonder how to spend our one day off (Dec 25th).
Traditional revelry will revolve around me playing my now traditional (well I did it last year) role of Father Christmas at the school's huge Xmas party/speech competition. Last year it featured the twin spectacles of me being obliged to reclaim colouring books from teary 6-year-old Chinese kids that I'd over distributed, after being under briefed, followed me being marrooned on stage and waving farewell and shuffiling in a sheepish (?) crab-style manner off to stage right. Ah, happy days.
Being indistinuishable foreign types, we are obliged to pretend to celebrate every possible Western festival here for the benefit of our kids and, more importantly, their fee-paying parents - including Halloween, Christmas, April Fool's Day, two lots of Thanksgiving (US and Canadian), St Patrick's Day, Valentine's Day and the newly founded Thank-Fuck I'm Not North American weekly event that I've co-founded with the Scotiish, Irish and New Zealand teachers here.
It's stunning, quite frankly, that these buggers - Americans and Canadians - have ever achieved anything as nations (okay, admittedly, lumber and crap songstresses aside, Canada hasn't), but the amount of self-rightous clockwatching and whinging we suffer from our colonial cousins is astonishing.
Frankly it's a wonder the Mayflower ever arrived Stateside as definitely no-one would have agreed to row on their day off, no matter how becalmed the vessel was and woe betide the captain if he tried to serve sea biscuits and rum instead of burgers and Budweiser. Cultural adaptation is not a great strength of Transatlantic TEFL teachers. They're a bit like daleks, only with less charisma, a greater degree of cultural imperialism and a desire to have multiple days off whilst all the other daleks have to do their exterminating for them.
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