Christmas in China was a bit confused. This year, my family is celebrating my fathers 10th year memorial service and i would have loved to attend. Unfortunately, China does not celebrate christmas because they do not have a religion. However we were told by the Shenzhen education bureau that we would be given 3 days off, so I showed this to my school, they approved and  i ended up in a beautiful island in China called Sanya for 5 days.

My school helped to book the ticket and provided information on what to do and how much to take. The day before i left, my school called and told me to cancel my trip because the government changed their mind and I was only entitled to one day off and they didn't want to be responsible for my welfare. I laughed really hard and blatantly told them I was not coming back till the 26th of december and that was final. Arguement went on for 30minutes and we finally agreed that i should send a letter stating that i would be responsible for my own safety.


Some things the chinese fail to understand:

We do not have the same culture, Foreign youths are independent and free spirited and DO NOT expect anyone to be responsible for our safety.(speak for yourself Chichi)

I CANNOT spend my christmas staring at 50kids who do not understand what i am staying.

Its hard to control someone who has been independent all their life.

Sanya is a beautiful island in Hainan China. Surrounded by beautiful beaches. Dadonghai beach, Yalong bay beach and Sanya beach. Yalong bay is the clearest but is restricted to only people living in surrounding hotels. We had to sneak in and pay to use the seats. Plus it wasn't as exciting as Dadonghai and people starred a bit too much.

We didn't have the time to go to Sanya bay but we spent the rest of out stay on Dadonghai beach/area. It is beautiful and has a lot of exciting activities like Jet ski's, Jet boating and parachuting, Yatch cruise, banana boat. It was all reasonably priced as well.  We also played Frisbee and beach ball with friendly people (foreign and local) on dadonghai beach.

Sanya has a lot of foreigners mainly from Russia and Slovakia. The menu's and translation for most things are in Russian not English. They are loads of Russian restaurants and a british pub.

Moving on.... I spent four days (xmas included) relaxing on the beach and meeting new people. I couldn't have asked for a better holiday away from family.

The presence of so many foreigners meant that we had a wide variety of food choices. We had fried noodles and dumplings some afternoons and evenings because it was cheap and delicious. We had English breakfast at Sams pub on Christmas eve and Christmas day and Italian dinner on christmas day.

At night time, we visited the different clubs or stayed at the bar on the beach, listening to the sweet sound of the sea and playing drinking games. We left the beach before anyone got too drunk.

I found it really hard to go back to school, back to reality of teaching my crack head kids.
But I was assured that there would be another holiday for New year celebration 2013. SO i only had to teach for 3 days.

Back to my first statement. I wasn't supposed to get any time off for the holiday, but because everyone has to wait for the government to decided on holiday arrangements, I couldn't plan my trips in advance, even though I eventually had 10 days off. So I couldn't go to Nigeria to visit family. I haven't seen my sisters in two years and missed my cousins weddings and also missed my dad's memorial service.