Starting today, we have five days off from class because of Chinese New Year (Chun1jie2). It is China's biggest holiday of the year and people typically have lots of time off from school or work and most go home to spend the holiday with their family. After our weekly test this morning, we had a "competition" in which all of the ACC students participated. We were divided into seven teams (there are 48 of us total) and we had to do things like move as many round chocolates using chopsticks, while simultaneously answering questions about answering Chinese trivia questions. There was musical chairs, jiaozi (dumpling) eating contest, trying to blow out candles by saying aspirated chinese syllables. My team came in second place so we won some M&Ms. We were originally going to go out and do some more educaitonal, but it was deemed too cold, so we stayed inside. (It's -3F with the wind chill.)
After the contest we all went to a restaurant for zhong1wen2 zhuo1zi (Chinese table). We had entirely too much food, as usual. During Chinese New Year they traditionally eat fish and will put the entire animal on the plate (the wor for fish is yu2, which sounds like the word for abundance and riches, and it is traditional to serve the entire fish). The teachers at my table also said eating the fish's eyes is very good for one's health, so they proceeded to poke the eyeballs out and eat them. It's also (apparently) good for your health to eat the chicken's head and skin, so those were eaten too.
Despite the extremely cold and windy weather, the air has been much cleaner these past few days (due to the wind) so it has been much nicer to breathe outside.