Ganbei!

Friday night Geri invited Henry and I to dinner with some of her Chinese friends. When we arrived at the restaurant we discovered that the casual dinner we thought we were having was not casual at all. It was at a very fancy restaurant. The dinner was hosted by a police officer who has been learning English for the past 6 months and wanted to have dinner with some of the foreigners here. Renata and Fran ended up being at this same dinner too. Geri had invited them too but they said they had another dinner to go to... ended up being the same one.

Anyway.... The table was HUGE. In China it is custom to cheers/toast different people throughout the meal. Which requires a lot of standing, talking, drinking and little eating. Towards the end of dinner I dropped my wine glass and it broke into a million pieces. I was so embarrassed but apparently it's good luck in China if you break your wine glass at dinner....



After dinner we all went to KTV. KTV is a karaoke bar. We had our own room filled with boxes of beer.. just what I needed at that point.. more alcohol.

The night was so much fun! But it made it incredibly difficult to wake up at 9am to go Christmas shopping with Fran in Nanjing!

ELF

This past week I showed my classes the movie ELF. Which means I got to watch it 6 times! The best thing... I am still not tired of watching it.

The even better thing... I had my students write down what they learned about Christmas from watching the movie... a few of my favorites:

• "On Christmas Eve, an infant crawls into Santa's sack and hitches a ride back to the North Pole. Upon finding his imported cargo, Santa passes the buddle of joy off to a paternal elf, who names the baby Buddy and raises him up to be a full-sized man in a miniature world."
  
• "Christmas is the biggest festival in the world."
  
• "Christmas tree is a must for celebrating Christmas Day, but did you know how does the tree come from? It's said that long time ago, there was a farmer, he met a poor child on Christmas Day, and he warmly welcomed the child, the pine poor child insert a pine on the ground when he left, surprisingly, the pine turned into a tree immediately with many gifts on it, in return for the farmer."
  
• "If you wear a red Christmas hat to bed not only will you feel warm but the next day you will find many presents!"

I love my students. I don't think I have ever left a class without laughing.