By this Author: Jessica_l_ball

It feels like Wuhan has been getting ready for Christmas since I got to China, and in a way, it has. The musical street cleaners have been blasting Jingle Bells constantly and every time my washing machine finishes a load I am treated to a rendition of the same mechanical musical tune. Wuhans Christmas spirit is year long, but it's fixated on the trappings of Christmas, the tinsel and the glitter. China loves to shop and as Christmas in China is the shopping day of the year, China loves Christmas. On Christmas day at midnight, I’m told that the streets will be filled by the consumer conscious masses barging forward to get the newly discounted Christmas merchandise. At which point I imagine that the carefully painted snowflakes in the windows of the stores and the illuminated Christmas trees will be pretty unimportant next to getting discounted handbags and electricals.

While the Wuhan-ese have adopted this glitz and trappings of the holiday I’m still feeling homesick. Although jingle bells is pounding and my ears, all the shop windows are bedecked with tinsel and fake snow,the hotel next to my school has a gingerbread house which is essentially a shed covered in cake, I am still missing home. The little things that make a British Christmas; Baileys with my housemates, warm mince pies with cream and the smell when you just took the lid off of a box of Quality Street. I want next-day turkey sandwiches, Christmas crackers, cheesy jokes, paper hats and my family quarreling merrily, a little drunk all around me.

I’ve decorated my little room, and tried to make it as festive as possible, my little Christmas tree, while tacky and minute, cheered me up significantly.

And I was so happy to receive, in time for Christmas, a parcel from home. This is why Mums are the best, my little box of Christmas made me ecstatic and sparked my Christmas spirit. I don’t think I could of ever imagined how excited I could be by Heinz tomato soup.


Whatever I say about my students, they can be loud and obnoxious and there are days that I would gladly never ever see them again but then there are days, like today, when I actually love the little beasts. My naughtiest class, who never stop talking and can drive me crazy, today presented me with a beautiful Christmas cake. They sang Jingle Bells and danced to Gangnam style for me. It renewed my faith a little bit, my students are good, sweet kids. They were quiet all lesson as well, I didn't even have to shout, my own little Christmas miracle.

Tomorrow I’ll be going to celebrate Christmas day in Hong Kong. Where I’ll have myself a very Hong Kong Christmas. You'll hear all about it asap.

Until I get a chance to write again, have a brilliant Christmas.

Wuhan has several large university campuses, this weekend we visited one of these campuses to have a look at the annual Wuhan University International Culture Festival, an event we had heard about through some of our American friends who would be helping out grilling chicken for the USA stall. The festival is held to celebrate the cultural diversity of the university's student body and allow the students to share information about their country and cultures. The atmosphere was amazing, the feel of universities the world over even though now I find myself slightly tinged with bitterness next to the carefree student teenagers who don't have a stack of marking for tomorrow weighing on their mind and can just get drunk.

On arrival at the festival you could buy a fake passport in which you were encouraged to take to each 'country' and get a visa and short message written by the students at that stand.

The festival was huge and varied with each country sharing a little of their individual culture India had bhangra, The African stalls had bass heavy music and tantalising scents wafting from open barbecues, Korea were rocking Gangnam style, Mongolia had a yurt and the French were handing out delicate little pastries. England, had nothing. Not represented by any English students the English stall stood empty and boring with little interest or care in a country that usually fascination in Chinese students. We have castles, tea parties, fish and chips, the royal family and Harry Potter! After seeing how our great nation had fallen we decided unanimously to come back the next day and sort England out.

The evening was spent making bunting and posters and the next day we returned and did what the English do best, we took over and sorted people into orderly queues. To a soundtrack of The Clash, Blur, Pulp and The Sex Pistols as well as other British artists, we signed passports and had our photo's taken steadily for the next few hours. We were asked to sign our love to people, write our phone numbers and take photo's with children, this was the closest we were likely to get to being famous and we milked it for all it was worth. I was asked to sign a text book from Sir Isaac Newton, I was confused but I did it.
Hours later we left with inflated ego's, blistered hands and temporary blindness from excessive photograph taking.
It was though an awesome weekend, the carnival atmosphere of the festival was so much fun.It gave me so many ideas for countries that I want to visit and gave us the opportunity to meet some of the students from the university, with whom we had dinner and are going to be keeping in touch with.

For more stories about what I'm getting up to in China, photos and teaching activities please look at www.theroadjesstravelled.com

This is the last blog I will be posting on travellerspoint, I really hope that if you enjoy reading this blog you will have a look at www.theroadjesstravelled.com, click on the blog and subscribe.

Seeing as my classes have to finish a test this week, as added incentive to do well, I had promised that if I was impressed they would get a Halloween lesson. Who was I kidding? I wanted to deliver a Halloween lesson so desperately, they knew they were getting one, even if all they did was scribble ‘hello my name is pencil’ all over the test.

Fortunately my kids performed excellently on the test so I didn’t have to demonstrate my weak will and lack of follow through and got to celebrate Halloween properly.

I LOVE Halloween. So much. I love the orange and black, dressing up and the sensation of pumpkins squidging into my nailbeds as I scrape out their insides. It’s probably my favourite holiday and whereas last year I spent Halloween drunk dressed as the murderous and sexually non-discriminatory transvestite Frank-N-Furter, this year will have to be a bit more family friendly. I am planning on revisiting the Halloweens of my childhood to teach the Chinese youth about the joy of wandering around in the half dark with the smell of fireworks in the air, cajoling your neighbours into giving you sweets and loudly demanding that you know THEY ARE home because you can see them moving even though they’ve turned their lights off and not to be so stingy with their sweets.

Halloween was the time for me and my cousins to don bin bags made into capes, wear facepaint and fake blood that would invariably give us some sort of rash the next day and wander the streets feeling like the night was OURS. Pie and peas with the family with the monster mash and Micheal Jacksons thriller playing in the background. The taste of bonfire toffee peeled from a sticky tart case and the fight over who got the biggest haul and would anyone swap an apple for a snickers.

Halloween has always been a favourite, quitting Brownies when an over ambitious vicar asked me to choose between church and my favourite holiday. I haven’t been back to church, whereas I celebrate Halloween every year. Because he was wrong, it isn’t unholy or blasphemous, it let me celebrate with my family, I felt free and glad to be alive, also I got to wear those awesome plastic witch fingers.

So this Halloween I found myself in China, the night before I had planned to give my halloween themed lessons I found myself questioning the point of trying to conjure enthusiasm about halloween in my students, that was round about the time the 80th of 120 cardboard pumpkins was sticking to my hand rather than to the correct bits of paper. Though the day was worth it. Halloween in China was awesome.

After explaining about the origins and customs of Halloween I got my students to name different kinds of costume they might see at Halloween, it took a while but one of them finally volunteered mummy. I had been counting on this and at that point whipped four toilet rolls out of my bag. The game was simple, there would be four teams and the first to create a fully covered mummy would win.

After the chaos of mummy wrapping I got the students to sit and decorate the pumpkin cards I had painstakingly been making for the last three evenings. As they were finishing off I drew the curtains and waited for the attention to fall on me. This is one of my favourite parts of Halloween, the scaring. I wanted the students to practise their public speaking and try making their own Halloween story, to get them started I told a couple of my own first. The first story about the murder of a pet dog by a devilish unknown monster got me some horrified looks but it was the telling of ‘Johnny, I want my liver back’ that got the best reaction. If anyone remembers, ‘Johnny’ is the tale of a little boy who is fed by his penniless mother, the liver of a recently hung criminal. At night little Johnny is haunted by the murderer on the first, second, third step and on until the audience is silent and rapt listening to the story teller whisper “Johnny, I’m on the tenth step, I want my liver back.” Then finally the storyteller grabs a member of the audience and shouts “I’M IN YOUR BEDROOM!” This without fail sent each of my classes squealing but the best reaction by far was Henry and Milly who between them fell from a chair and burst into tears, though it was quickly followed by hysterical laughter.

So I got to wear a witches hat, traumatise some kids and eat enough sweets to make my teeth hurt. All in all, how could it of been a bad day? Halloween wins every other day once again.