The halfway point!

Good evening wei guo rens! or good day...

A little delayed I know but Happy New year to friends and family. Chinese New year isn't until february 3rd so I will exempt myself from such delayed accusations. I've been here 5 months now i can say i'm at least part Chinese.
I'm here now at the halfway point of the school year as well as my time here and I'll have to say, China has been everything i'd imagined as well as nothing i could've conceived. I can only write about my thoughts and feelings about this place but you really can only fully grasp it by being here. Even then, so much of China is 50/50 that you can never quite pinpoint what it is. For every thing I admire about China, another thing opposes it into almost redundancy. For example, they seem to be uptight about saving energy. They have heaters in the classrooms and buildings but almost never turn them on. I teach my classes in my winter jacket, breath visible from the cold and my hands shaking as they write on the chalkboard. Most restaurants are practically outside. The buildings have no insulation or central heating, they are just concrete slabs. Now coming from Canada, this has been completely backwards to me. We are a culture that is quite prepared and adjusted to the cold, but Wuhan has no idea what to do when the snow comes. I see people outside walking around with umbrellas when its snowing and I can't help but laugh. When i've asked why they don't shut the windows or doors and turn the heaters on they have told me that it would waste power. Also, they believe that if they shut all the windows in a building they will die of not having enough fresh air.
Now heres the redundant part. There is no fresh air in Wuhan! You can barely see across the river on a clear day, through the grey blanket that covers the city. This is also the reason it always feels colder or hotter than it actually is. The sun cannot penetrate the pollution cloud very well. I've noticed it only gets lighter in the morning around 8 or so because it takes the sun awhile longer for its light to penetrate the hazy Chinese horizon. And on the wasting electricity part, they seem to turn there heads when it comes to advertisement or aesthetic. Forget comfort of human beings. Like I noticed back in my first day here the Chinese light up everything. They put huge neon signs on everything the eye can see, advertisements and eye candy glittering 24/7. Even the ancient pagoda in the centre of the city, Yellow Crane Tower, hasn't escaped this fate. At night it's lit by thousands of bright yellow lights.
They pride themselves on proper parenting, they say us from the west are too soft on our children. So they put them through almost 12 hours of school a day and when they get home at 7 or 8 at night its 3 hours of homework or practice before bed. Where is the quality family time in that? They eat breakfast, lunch and dinner at school except on weekends, even then they probably eat at the various training schools they go to. I believe it is too much. This was nailed on the head for me last week during the kids final exams for the semester. One of my favourite students from my grade 4 class came up to me with red scars and bruises all over his face. When I asked him what happened he said his father hit him to make sure he got over 95% on all his tests. And this is one of the smartest kids in that class. This seems like its quite commonplace here. And I don't like it one bit.

As crazy as that all sounds there are many good things about China. I'm still here aren't I? There's just something about being here that's hard to explain in words. It's definitely a love/hate relationship and I'll write about some of the more positive aspects of China in the future. But let me update you all a bit on recent events.

I had a great weekend, I finally experienced a truly Chinese night out on Friday when I was invited by Christian to come out with all his chinese friends. See, while we have all been hanging out with each other on weekends, Christian has gone out and made a lot of chinese friends. Ones that speak decent english, no doubt. Which are hard to come by.
We all went to the roller skating place again. It took me awhile to get used to, but everyone there holds hands. Guys in the chinese group would come up to me and hold my hand while I skated. Which years of hanging out with dudes back home told me was a definite no no. Then, Chinese girls would also come up and hold my hand while I skated. Which years of being around women, told me it was time to throw on the old charm (and fail). Alas, Neither was the case. This is just normal here.
Afterwards, we all went to a typical Chinese barbeque, where we got every type of animal known to man barbequed on a stick. I ate cartilage and intestine for the first time. That was interesting. Then me and Shane, being the canadian men we are, decided to challenge the chinese guys to a beer chugging competition. Let me remind you that Chinese beer is 2.5%, so let's just say we destroyed them.
This all backfired when we noticed all the guys were then quite drunk. Apparently drinking 3 beers in China is a big deal. And if you all remember the last time I was at dinner with drunk chinese men you can imagine how it went from there. Next thing I knew I was driving someones car through the city to a KTV (karaoke) bar. If you also recall what I have written about chinese driving you can imagine my fear. But don't worry mother I only almost got hit by a van once and slightly crashed while parking. Just a dented license plate. No big deal.
About half an hour later I was standing on a couch with two beers in my hand singing Bon Jovi to a room of chinese people. How do you hold a microphone and two beers at once you ask? Easy! You hang the mic from the ceiling.
Chinese karaoke is very different from our karaoke. You basically get a room with a big TV, a couch and a table. You all just take turns selecting songs and sing to each other. It was strange at first but once i got into it I was singing backstreet boys and at the same time wondering where my dignity went.
After getting home at 5am, I woke up the next day and started to prepare for my show. Me and Shane were performing for our second time at the Toucan.

I'm really starting to like this bar. And I think they are taking a liking to us as well. We've played there twice now and every time we do they keep offering us more. We are now booked every second weekend as well as get free food and beer. They also booked us St. Pattys day, which will be ridiculous considering the Toucan is the only Irish Pub in the entire Hubei province. It's such an escape from China being there. You walk in and you could very well be at any pub in Ottawa. They have real beer and real food. I convinced them to make me poutine and we are in talks about getting hockey games played as well.
On saturday we invited all the chinese friends out from the night before and showed them a western style party. Heres a video taken by one of the chinese girls of me and Shane introducing Canadian east coast music to the Chinese populace.

http://www.56.com/u32/v_NTc4NDU4NTM.html

Anyways, now here I am all alone in the building. All the other teachers have already left for their holidays and I don't fly out until Thursday. I'm getting pretty anxious to leave, my bags are pretty much already packed and i've been pacing my room all day. Also, I was sleeping the other night and my bed decided to break. Actually more like implode. It sent me crashing to the floor and as you can imagine it was quite the way to be woken up. Once again, this sort of thing only happens to me.
So I am now sleeping on the floor.
I'm not going to have my laptop with my on my trip so after Thursday I won't be able to update this for a month. But I think i'm going to take my notebook with me and try to keep a written journal of the trip. I'll just type it all up when I get back. I think that might be better than me just trying to remember everything like on my trip to Beijing/Shanghai.
Anyways, i'll write again before I leave.

Good bye!
在见！
ลาก่อน!