(ed- In response to an email saying "Oh, wasn't your birthday like last week or something?")

My birthday was the 26th. Thanks a lot, jerks.

I jest. (I've told Spratt this already.) I had a swell time. Started with beer at a pool hall (alcohol giving my break little help) and then moved onto beer and soju at a Korean restaurant. The latter being a lemony vodka-like spirit from Korea. I would take a shot glass of this, drop it glass and all into a half full glass of beer, and then down the whole thing. Sweet Lord. That stuff is the shit. I also have to put in a plug for beef bulgogi, perhaps the greatest dish on this humble orb. After four shots of the above, we tipsly went to the nearby bar. Let me brief y'all about this one bar, the Golden Bamboo, that we often go to, mostly because it's the only bar in walking distance from the campus. It's decorated like a bad Jimmy Buffet party, with cheesy bamboo walling, fake shrubbery on the ceiling, and a mishmash of blinking Christmas lights. Sadness incarnate. So we stayed there, drank more beer and tequila, ate some cake, sang some karaoke, drank more beer, engaged in much tomfoolery, and went home actually rather early, 12:30, since my liver was crying uncle. But not before going on my first drunken rampage (I pushed down all the bikes in the bike parking lot.)

Thanksgiving was rather depressing. It was a Belgian guy, an English guy, and me in a mostly empty Chinese restaurant eating Beijing duck and this spinach and eggs dish. Good golly. Although later, we went down to the pub and there was this group of rich bratty, non-Chinese speaking American high school students there. I derived much pleasure from telling them that they made a huge mistake by coming to prom-less car-less China for their senior year of high school.