‘Twas the weekend before Christmas…

It’s finals week here at Beihang, so I’m going to keep this short – I don’t have time to go into any great detail about the past week and a half. I’ll give a three highlights, and fill in the gaps at a later date. I promise.

1. I went to RBT (a pseudo-western tea house popular here in Beijing) on Tuesday with Mel to study and practice for our Chinese class. While we were sitting and chatting, VoL’s Skin came on over the PA system. I stopped and stared for a few minutes (ala the Desperado-guy from Seinfeld) and eventually managed to compose myself – it was surreal.

(For those of you who are unaware of VoL – VoL is an underground Christian folk rock band that is virtually unknown, which is why I included this note. The song Skin is about Vincent Van Gogh, his insanity, and his supposedly lopped off ear.)

2. I spent last weekend planning out my listening test (final for my graduate students) It was by far the most stressful forty eight hours of my life (so far) One thing I didn’t think about - and I should have - was that I would have to grade the finals at some point in the near future. Rather than make it multiple choice (easy to grade, cause it’s either right or wrong) I decided to make a fill-in-the-blank style test (hard to grade – full of grey area.) Each test takes about ten minutes to grade. That doesn’t sound so bad, but remember that I have 437 students in these classes. That’s only 73 hours of grading. Oh well.

3. Last night I received my first Christmas gift from Christie Brasser – a huge ornament with my name written on it. It’s large enough that it dwarfs my tree – the tree hangs on the ornament instead of the usual way. It’s large enough to be used as a Christmas piñata – do I dare to start a new Christmas tradition? Yes, I believe I do.

Have a merry Christmas, y’all