It’s over.

I’m sitting on my balcony in the sweltering heat of the evening, sipping a cold, frosty beverage. It’s nice out here – there’s a little bit of a breeze, and I can smell the night jasmine in the park fourteen stories below. The sky is remarkably clear (for the perpetual smoginess of Beijing’s air) and I can see the moon and stars tonight. I’m in an excellent mood – I’m done with classes for the year, and I have a month to revel away before I head back home for the summer.

I finished my “special” class a week ago and I’ve been relaxing for the past week. I have visitors arriving on Monday (my little bro and my mom) and so I’ve also spent a considerable amount time organizing and cleaning my apartment – I think I have almost everything squared away. I’m packed and ready to head back at the moment – hopefully this’ll make it easier for me to travel after my visitors head back to the States.

For those of you who talked about visiting when I left and haven’t yet found the time to mosey on over, I am very disappointed in you. But I’m going to be really nice and stay an extra year so that you’ll have a whole ‘nuther year of chances to visit. This was not an easy choice to make, but I feel that I’ll have a better chance of accomplishing my goals if I spend another school year here in Beijing. For the record, this goal does not involve marriage – I really want to develop my Chinese, and if I stay in Beijing for another year I should be much closer to fluency. I will be heading back to Michigan in July to decompress a bit and reconnect with good ole American culture… and Mexican food. (There is no authentic Mexican food in China, at least none that I’ve seen and I’ve looked hard. There are a few attempts, but they fall short.)

Yesterday I had to attend an awards ceremony for foreign teachers – it was really short. It took 25 minutes, tops. I walked away with a Beihang t-shirt and a Beijing bottle opener. I also had to go to dinner with my department head and random professors. This took substantially longer than the ceremony, and I had to eat “formal” Chinese food – things like spicy fish scales and dried camel hump – yummy! Afterwards I went out with most of the other foreign teachers to Tomato – a German pizza restaurant especially popular with the Korean college students in Beijing. It’s an okay place – they have there own micro-brewery and that’s all right with me.

Let’s see, what else has happened in the past few weeks…………… not a whole lot, apparently. So I’ll stop here.