Monday, September 20, 2010

Right around the corner...

is the Mid-Autumn's Festival!

As gifts for this holiday, Yali Middle School was kind enough to give each of the foreign teachers:
  • 2 gallons of cooking oil
  • 25 lbs of rice
  • 1 big box of mooncake
So now, as a household, we have 8 gallons of cooking oil, 100 lbs of rice, and 4 big boxes of mooncake (not counting the many more that will surely come from other sources).

The students tried to explain how the tradition of eating mooncake started. Of course, when first asked, they give the same explanation as they do for everything else: "It is just part of Chinese culture, and has existed throughout China's five thousand year long history."

With further prodding, there were murmurs of some woman (goddess?) on the moon and a rabbit (I think...?). Nothing I could really make sense of.

But no worries, there is always Wikipedia.

In other news, here is a video clip I took of the daily morning exercises at Yali. Some of the kids are pretty good at it, but most of them look like they are just going through the motions, wondering why they have to do such silly things.

2 comments:

SC said...

that's the way all the chinese students do the morning exercises. during my time at school, we even had one student that being on the stage to lead this exercises. Except this one, no one is really serious about this activity...

devon said...

So ridiculous, but not as ridiculous as one of the stretches I have to do in football that supposedly stretches your hamstrings.