Yes, as has been pointed out by some of you, I have fallen unforgivably behind on my blogging... The reasons for this: I've been lazy, I've been busy, too little or too much has been happening. On wednesday, I begun writing an entry, but was interrupted halfway through by a couple of my students calling me to ask me out for a beer. I was then taken by these two men out to a club called 'West Wing City', a place where drinks are ten times the normal price and where you have to pay 20 kwai to get in even in the middle of the week. But it was a night to celebrate for them, as we had just finished exams. Anyway, this is what I had writted before I was interrupted...:
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Only a couple of days of teaching left before the looong holiday. My evening classes are over and done with, I just got home from the final party. And yeah, yeah, of course we had to have a 'party' at the end of it, which actually wasn't all that bad. Played games and had people perform silly things. Very innocent fun, reminded me of being at school, not exactly the kind of party i could see Finnish university students organising, but it gave me a few good laughs and the students really are very sweet. They gave me small presents and a nice card from everyone. We then lit up some candles and sang 'Silent Night' which I had taught them before, and it made me feel quite christmasy :)

Another big thing over and done with today is the exams for my PhD class. I wasn't too keen on the idea of having exams in the first place, but they are required by the postgrad office so I had no choice...
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...so I'll pick it up from here. The way I decided to organise the exams was to allocate each student a 15-minute slot during wednesday, during which they got to randomly pick one of ten topics (that I had shared with them in advance) and talk to me about it for a few minutes. Then I asked them some questions and just had a little chat on the topic. At the same time, I was listening to their pronunciation, grammar, speech flow, organisation, question handling etc, and graded them accordingly. I was dreading the day, actually, thinking that it'd be simply tiring and boring to be doing this for 6 hours, non-stop other than for the lunch break, but in fact I rather liked doing it, just chatting to people all day long. And the best part of it was that I didn't have to get stuck in never-ending conversations like sometimes happens, as I could just tell the students that their time was up and that they needed to leave. Convenient!

Thursday then, just about everyone showed up for the morning class. So, instead of going out for dinner which would have excluded a few people who had other things to do, we decided to head out for lunch with the whole group. I promised that if everyone came, we would cancel the afternoon class and just stay at lunch longer, after all we'd be speaking English. And a long night it turned out to be. I finally had to own up to my promise to drink baijiu, the local spirit, with the men. And I tried my very best, and tried to talk my way out of each glass after a certain point. But they would have none of it, especially one of them, John by his English name, who is the headmaster of the Hebei Police academy, and a big bloke (a pretty impressive sight in his uniform, actually, makes me definitely feel safe having him around, even if we're out late like wednesday night). He kept saying that as he is of Mongol ethnicity, I have to respect his Mongol traditions and oh boy do they have traditions, a million reasons for having to down yet another drink. Let's just say that after that night I don't have that much of my credibility as a respectable teacher left...

But now I'm looking forward to next week. I'll still teach a class on monday morning. Then on tuesday morning I'll head out to Beijing to meet Olli at the airport. If I'm lucky, I'll get a car to take me directly there, if not, I'll have to take the earliest train and somehow find my way to the airport. I guess my handy Lonely Planet Mandarin phrasebook will tell me how to ask the way to the airport... Olli will be staying here for a little over two weeks, the plan is to stay in Baoding over Christmas and then head down south, first to the Tai Shan mountain and then to Nanjing, Suzhou, Hangzhou, and back up to Beijing. But we'll see how these plans will change along the way.

For Christmas eve, the university is organising a dinner for us. Then, on the 25th we'll meet up with the foreigners to have dinner at Griselle's. On the 26th, Zhao Huifeng has promised to take Olli & me to see some sights in Hebei. Olli is leaving on 8 Jan, after which I'll come to Baoding maybe for a day or so, and then I've promised to go to Dalian, a city north-east from here, by the sea, for a week or so with Griselle. And when I'm back from Dalian, it's time to go to Shijiazhuan to spend the Spring Festival with Vivian's family. And I still have to find time to go to Beijing to meet some people from the international organisations. Classes for the next term will begin on 16 February.

So it's a busy holiday ahead. I won't probably be coming online that often, so blog updates and emails might be a little irregular. But keep checking anyway, I'll try to find a way to post something while we are on the road. Whatever happens, and wherever we end up, it'll be an adventure for sure :)