Happy Halloween from China!
Tomorrow is Halloween, so of course I decided it would be a great idea to teach my students about Halloween! We talked about trick-or-treating, haunted houses, ghosts, witches, black cats and vampires. We even watched a clip from Corpse Bride - ya know the part where Victor goes to the underworld and the skeletons are all singing. Well, anyways they loved it and thought it was hilarious and kind of crazy. When you look at it from an outside perspective (specifically 8,000 miles away outside) it does seem like a pretty crazy holiday - celebrating scary things and dead spirits. Well, at the end of the lesson we talked about what scares us. I asked if ghosts scare them and they all yelled out NO! I was shocked. Why not I said?? In the US the majority of us find the idea of ghosts pretty scary. They kept laughing and saying... No no no! Ghosts are cute! Ha, that's one I hadn't heard before. Cultural encounters come at the most unexpected moments. Then of course, I had to ask, "what scares you then if not ghosts?" The majority of them yelled out SNAKES in unison! And then dogs. A lot of girls yelled dogs. The first thing that came to my mind was, spiders, ghosts, witches, evil spirits, demons etc.... not snakes! And definitely not dogs! Who knew, my Chinese students find dogs and snakes so terrifying. I'll have to look into why that is at some point.
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