Towards the end of my first week, 19th - 21st of September, was a holiday for Mid-autumn Festival. We're already on another holiday now after only a week of classes! This time we get a week off for National Day so Izzy, Robin, Sam and I are planning to go to see some round houses in the southwest of Fujian province tomorrow. It'll take almost 4 hours to get there and we don't yet know where we're going to sleep but I'm really looking forward to it and you'll hear about it soon. We really need to enjoy this holiday as the next one doesn't come until New Year, three days off 1st - 3rd January 2014. We don't even have a holiday for Christmas!
When it was holiday for Mid-autumn festival it didn't feel like much of a holiday as our lessons still hadn't started, just a break in all the admin really. There were lots of opportunities to play dice gambling games which were to do with the festival though (how I won my snail fan from China Mobile). The way it works is that you roll several dice hoping to get 4s or 4 of the same number (I think?). When I won my snail fan I rolled 4 1s which is supposed to be good which is why I got such a cool prize. Another big thing with the festival is moon cakes but, although we searched quite a few places, we never found any. We did however, go out on the Thursday night and got to witness a dice dance in honour of the festival! I've tried to upload a video of it but I'm struggling to get any of my videos uploaded to this blog for some reason. For those who haven't been to Chinese clubs before, they're completely different to anywhere I've been in the UK and Spain. Full of bright lights, an odd selection of music, no dancefloor (just a catwalk-like platform) and quite often singers or dancers entertaining the customers gathered around the tables drinking beer or, in the case of Xiamen, whiskey and green tea. In Nanjing they drank cognac and ice tea so maybe it varies by region.
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| Hilary (my room mate) and I at the club (from our friend Sandara's phone) |
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| Dice dance! |
That weekend was when Typhoon 天兔, which could be literally translated as Sky Rabbit in English but my Chinese friend Robin thinks that Holy Rabbit would be a better translation, hit Xiamen. After all the warnings that we would need to have enough drinking water and snacks in our rooms for the storm and to avoid going outside, it actually wasn't that bad. We were lucky as it seemed to get worse once it headed south to Guangdong and Hong Kong. Here's a link to the BBC News article article although it's very centred around HK. It may not be British anymore but the article makes is sound like it still is!
Back at Xiang'an campus it was just very very windy. The basketball courts got ripped up and the nets fell over, the backboards smashing everywhere as they were made of glass, the builders' temporary building collapsed, plant pots were knocked over and smashed and anyone silly enough to leave anything hanging to dry on balconies found that most, if not all, of it blew away. There's still a towel on the roof of the building next to us having been blown away by the wind and got stuck there during the typhoon! There wasn't as much rain as I was expecting, just got a bit wet on my way to the canteen on my bike but bought an umbrella and cycled along with it up Chinese-style (the wind had stopped by then). Again, I took videos of the typhoon but nothing seemed to want to upload and I didn't take any photos of the wreckage although I planned to. If I get hold of any I'll put them on here!
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