Christmas!

Christmas time was great.  I was able to spend time with my friends and together we could celebrate the birth of Christ!  We travelled to a city about an hour and a half away by bus.  It was nice to be able to get away from Macau for a while while still being with my friends from Macau!

We ended up finding a local church that was having a Christmas celebration, and we watched the performances as the church members sang and danced and performed skits.  It was a lot of fun!  We also listened to a speaker (speaking in Mandarin, translated to Cantonese) talk about how Jesus came to the world to save us!  The book that I am 'reading' right now that teaches me Chinese Christian characters really helped me, because he used almost all of the new vocabulary that I've learned!  So I was happy that it was in Mandarin because I could understand maybe 30% of what he said, as opposed to the 1% I would have understood in Cantonese!  (My Chinese isn't quite that good yet, but when it comes to Christian things, I understand more, because that's the vocab I am studying!)

We also got to go up and sing a song that basically translates as: "We Love because God first loved us".  It was sung in Mandarin, and I knew 90% of the characters, so I was able to go up and sing with them while reading the music.  I felt VERY proud of myself for knowing most of the song.  There were a few words that I stumbled over, but it was ok!  They never gave me the microphone, so nobody ever knew! :)

I was able to relax a little after the performance.  3 friends and I went to the spa while the others went to bed.  I had gone to get a massage before, so I figured that we'd be gone for about an hour and a half or so.  No.  We were gone for about 3.5 - 4 hours.  Turns out this is a fancy spa.  We got in, and were separated ladies and gentlemen.  My friend and I went into the lady's room where we showered, relaxed in a pool with various water massage features, went into the wet sauna (where I spent less than a minute because I couldn't breathe!) and then showered again, after which we were given special clothes to wear for the massage.  We were then given robes to put over the clothes, and went upstairs where we met the 2 guys.  They had been playing pool to kill some time.  We were then taken to a buffet.  After eating, we went into a waiting room where we each had our own TV and could relax.  Then we were taken into the massage room where we were given a 2 hour Thai massage.  Now, I don't want to tell you this to show how pampered we were: the massage actually wasn't all that great, and I was super tired haha.  But I want to show you that this is not something of high-class in China.  This is something completely normal to do.  The total for this entire 4 hour adventure (that could have lasted another 12 hours had we wanted to spend the night there) was 168 RMB per person, which translates to less than 30 USD per person.  That is so much cheaper than you would ever find it in the States.

The next day a friend and I walked around in the morning and we found an arcade, where we played some basketball, air hockey, and completely failed at the extremely difficult chinese version of DDR.  (They go at diagonals instead of straight left/right/forward/back, and they incorporate the hands.  I also accidentally chose an advanced song hahaha!  And it was all in English too, so I have no excuse!)  We then met everyone else and went to eat lunch.  We were able to meet up with 2 other Americans (who are friends of mine) and a few Chinese who I hadn't seen in a very long time!  We had 2 large circle tables full of people celebrating together.  We then did a gift exchange, and were whisked off to the bus station where we caught the bus back to Macau.  We got there JUST in time to get out of our cars and onto the bus!

All in all, it was a VERY fun trip.  I am tired now, because it was a little busy (there were things that I didn't talk about that happened as well...it was very busy!).  Right now I am in the middle of cleaning my home.  Even though I am not teaching right now, I am still super busy, and haven't had enough time to keep my house clean.  I started cleaning last night, but I still have over half the things left on my to-do list!  Time to get back to work on my house, and then go in to the center to plan lessons for next week and to teach Bible class tonight!




I hope that you all had a VERY MERRY CHRISTMAS, and that you have great plans for New Year's Eve/Day!