Last week was Teacher's Day and today in China we're celebrating Mid-Autumn Festival Day. Yippee! The only real significance for us is two things: 1) we get Monday off from school, a major blessing considering it's our busiest teaching day and 2) we get gifts.
What kind of gifts do we receive, you might ask? Well...this year we received:
- Two boxes of apples amounting to a total of 60 apples
- Two boxes of milk with 20 pouches of milk each (that's right, milk comes in bags here, not bottles or jugs)
- Two huge containers of cooking oil, which will take us all of a decade to finish up
- One large bag of rice, two days after we just bought rice at the grocery store!
- FOUR boxes of mooncakes, each individually wrapped, boxed, and bagged. If you're interested in a hilarious take on the Chinese mooncake tradition, you have to read this post. I wish I could explain to you the inconvenience of mooncakes, but this writer does it so well it doesn't make sense for me to try my own explanation.
Not a bad take, although not what you might expect in America. They're all useful gifts given by our employer - we think of it more as a bonus since we don't actually receive a monetary one. So anyway, happy Mid-Autumn Festival to all of you.
2 Comments:
Do you know what they call salaries for teachers in the good old days in China, or at least in the days of Confucius ? It was "A bunch of meat jerky". one bunch from each student. And that's for the salary for the whole year.
You are just lucky these days you get more than just food for salary.
But later, teachers were given room and board, in addition to the "bunch of jerky".
Sounds like some nice gifts for the Mid-Autumn Festival. All I got was mooncakes. It's about the equivalent of the rock Charlie Brown got at Halloween.
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