It was interesting to see whether the New Year would be particularly observed in China, given the importance of the Chinese New Year festival. As it turns out, it’s definitely celebrated – everything runs off the same calendar nowadays, after all – but not to the same extent as in the UK. No loud festivities culminating in a countdown and rendition of Auld Lang Syne (unsurprisingly), nor any firework displays (somewhat more surprisingly, for Karamay). My classes were given the afternoon off lessons to have a party at school and we were given New Year’s day off completely; for the second week in a row, my two busiest days and more than half of my lessons were holidays. It’s a hard life.

What classes I did have revolved around New Year’s resolutions. I tried ‘two stars and a wish’: two good things from 2015 and one wish for 2016, but they’d been taught ‘New Year’s Resolutions’ in other English lessons and were determined to tell me those instead (or maybe my explanation was inadequate…). This evolved over the week into ‘Resolution Bingo’, involving a class-led spider diagram from which I asked students to pick four resolutions. Proceeding with Bingo, picking resolutions one at a time until a student had all of theirs chosen, I started to realise that something was seriously wrong when almost all resolutions had been picked, but not one student had announced their victory. It turns out that my attempts to get my students to be creative came to fruition in that one lesson: having gone over a goodly amount of resolutions as a group, they must have stretched every ounce of imagination to come up with four unique, new resolutions. I had to applaud their effort, which was impressive, while crying inside over the wreckage of my disintegrating lesson plan. I didn’t like to explain that, in this case, their creativity ensured impossibility to win, as I felt it would send mixed messages.

Kieran came down to visit for the long weekend, and we kicked off Friday evening with a visit to a student’s house for dinner, followed by video games with some of his friends. We found this awkward as it would never have been acceptable in the UK, but our colleagues repeatedly assured us it was fine. They put Grand Theft Auto on, but (ignoring the appropriateness of the game full stop), we reasoned it wasn’t the best idea, given large portions of the evening were being uploaded to social media by said students. In the end it was a thrilling showdown on WWE (wrestling, I think) between Tom and Kieran on one team, and two students on the other. They lost to the students, just like they lost at Fifa, despite an early attempt at downright cheating when their opponents left the room temporarily (1 – 6, and the other team was absent for the 1).

The rest of the weekend was spent doing nothing at all, which was bliss. I also put most of the Christmas Video together, to two songs (I Wish it Could be Christmas Every Day and Peanut Butter Jelly), using footage from Christmas and beforehand in Kuitun (so I could include the Golden Trio too). It’s now available on Youtube. We also had the exciting development for travelling that Becca will be joining me and Calum for Guangzhou and Haikou! She is, however, insane: as if 34 hours from Harbin to Guangzhou isn’t enough, she’ll be going back to Harbin from Haikou on a 50-hour train with a ‘Hard Seat’ ticket. By happy coincidence, the ticket I was able to get her from Guangzhou to Haikou (from someone else cancelling their ticket, presumably) is on both the same train and in the same carriage as me and Calum.

Finally: New Year’s Resolutions? Avoid excessive snacking, do more exercise and write and email home more frequently. Happy New Year everyone!

—TJC

Featured image: Students at their New Year’s school party, photographing us.