Calendar Daze

So, while trying to arrange my travel plans here for the upcoming spring festival I've been thinking for the last few days how difficult everything is to schedule here. Not only in knowing which days we'll have our holiday, but just about everything related to time, so here are some time related observations.

1. Almost nobody knows which day it is. Last night I listened to two girls argue whether it was Friday, Saturday, or Sunday. Colin though, made the point that it's probably because they do the same thing everyday, so it really doesn't matter to them. Those two girls work 7 days a week, the same hours everyday and have about two days off each month, so I suppose the fact that it was the first day of the weekend to us is really pretty irrelevant. The lucky exceptions to this rule of 'what day is it?' syndrome are teachers and students whose schedule depends on which day of the week it is, although even this is not infallible as my waiban, Ms. Zeng pretty often doesn't know what day it is.

2. Two calendars is a recipe for disaster. Once the day of the week has been determined we have to figure out what the date is. This always has two possible answers, and although most things in China are on the Gregorian calendar, there are a few lunar holdouts such as holidays. This means the vacations come on different days every year. This year's spring festival is almost a month later than last years, thus pushing back the end of this term. However, the school exams are scheduled on the Gregorian calendar which means that this term will be about two months longer that next term for the grade 3's and one month longer for the rest of the school.

3. July 1st version 2.0. Multiple calendars wouldn't be that bad to get your head around if they didn't keep changing. This past year we actually had two Julys (the reason spring festival is so late). My dad made a good observation when he heard this and wondered if everybody born in July had two birthdays this year. If not, how do you decide which day is actually your birthday? One of my friends got in a lot of trouble because he couldn't remember his Chinese girl-friend's birthday because it changed every year. In another example, there were tons of weddings last week and Chinese tend to schedule their weddings for auspicious days, so I asked for an explanation to which one another one of the teachers answered "Oh, that's because there won't be a spring next year." Hmm... Worry all you want about contrasting political systems, I want to know what the Chinese have done with spring and can we please have it back for 2008?