January 31 - Exams, Customer Service, and New Firsts

January 4th was the day of the final exam, which was to be held from 10am to noon. I had drawn up more than one version of the test and had been hoping for a gymnasium test so I could properly keep an eye on all my students. I had written up rules of conduct and allowed materials. I had given notice of my zero tolerance policy for cheating and had gone over my plans with the school administration. The administration told me they could not accommodate my plans for using a gym for all the students at once and, in fact, had never even heard of such an idea before. Instead they wanted to divide my students into several classrooms in one building with a couple of invigilators to watch over each room. This meant, of course, that I had to divide my attention among different rooms, so I couldn't ensure the rules were followed adequately.

My students all cheated blatantly.

January 31 - Christmas and New Year's

I spent my first ever Christmas away from my family this past holiday, which was quite sad. I did manage to get on Skype and give them a call to spend some time with them, but it's not the same. I think my parents must have been very lonely too. My brother was also away in Europe at the time on a last-minute vacation, so they were hit with their first ever empty-nest Christmas.

圣诞节(sheng dan jie; holy birth festival) is the Chinese name for Christmas, and they celebrate it exactly the same way we do in the West, albeit far more commercially and no pretense at all of any relation to religion. 圣诞老人(sheng dan lao ren; Christmas Old Guy) is their name for Santa, which I completely cracked up about when I first heard it. My friend couldn't understand what was so funny, so that was a bit awkward, but I couldn't stop smiling. I think it's cute.

Missing photos of dumplings from previous post

So here are dumpling photos. Good lighting was at lunch, harsh lighting was at night. Gratuitous pics of ice cream and booze.

January 28 - Winter Solstice Festival

They have a festival here in China called 冬至 (dong zhi; winter's arrival), which is their name for the winter solstice. There doesn't appear to be any real folkloric aspects to celebrating this festival, but a requirement is that everyone must make their own 饺子 (jiao zi; dumplings) for themselves and eat them in massive quantities. Some restaurants will accomodate large groups and some will provide the filling and dough for the dumplings in addition to boiling them for you, while others make you bring your own food which they will boil for you once you've put them together.

I was invited by some of my students to take part in this festival which I am tempted to dub 'Dumpling Day', but will refrain from doing so since I think it devalues the real happiness Chinese people in the North derive from this special day (in the southern parts of China, they don't really experience winter, so they don't celebrate the festival).

January 28 - Catching up (and going all the way back to December 19!)

So this is the first in a series of back-logged things that I wanted to post, but never got around to doing. I'll hopefully get it all out soon.

When I arrived here, back at the end of October, I was planning to stretch about $500 I had brought with me until my first paycheque arrived, supposedly one month later. As I learned, however, that is frequently not how things work here.

It started out simply enough. I was advised to bring enough money to cover one month's expenses before the first paycheque, and $500 turned out to be way more than I needed to cover my first month's expenses, especially since my students were always paying for things for me at that time in the rush of paying their respects to their new professor.

However, payday arrived and no money came. I wasn't worried, but I fired off an email just the same to my employer in Canada. After that, things got ugly. Apparently, my employer thought it was only their responsibility to pay me if they had received payment of my salary first from the university in China (I have a middle man arrangement whereby the recruiter in Canada pays me to work at a university in Zhengzhou). The university here, for there part, were bureaucratically bumbling incompetents who weren't getting their act together. This process dragged out, and I ran out of money, to the point where I was living on my food stores (white rice, instant noodles and water) and $6 for three weeks.