60 bottles of beer on the wall

where's wu? yes it's been a month since my last blog entry (and i was doing so good). this last month has been so crazy!!!

for the first time in five years, we as teachers had to "supervise" seniors for writing their senior thesis papers. talk about crazy chinglish, 20 pages of pure awesomeness. i want to pull my hair out when reading some of these papers, they didn't make any sense and those that did make sense, i had to bust for plagiarism (i'll save that for another time). so that's been consuming the majority of my time.

also i've been coaching the department soccer team, who decided that practicing at 6:00am was the best thing for the team. when 13,000 kids share one field for the entire school, field availability times can get a little crazy. even though we get there at 6:00am, we are only given a quarter of the field to practice on. if we are lucky we can actually get a goal to practice on. ughhh, the joys of living in a land of 1.3 billion people. but we just played our last game this week and lost in the semifinals. which is where the "60 bottles of beer" came from. we had a celebratory banquet for the team to finish the season, in which the team and i and some department leaders gathered for one big party. basically it was all the boys and leaders toasting until the cows come home and drinking themselves into a drunken stupor. if you know anything about the "asian glow" these boys had the "glow" going on! since our organization has a no alcohol policy and the leaders and students know it, i was saved from being a causality of the asian glow. even those i was saved from the plethora of alcoholic beverages, i still had to drink something every time a toast was given. which was a problem since every single kid had to toast the coach, so i downed an entire 2 liter of pepsi and some during the festivities (i don't even like pepsi). i've also never seen so many grown adult males cry. every one of the seniors weeped as they thanked me for being their coach and said they should have played better to be the champions. to which i told them, "you're right! you made me get up at 6:00am everyday, and you didn't even win, you guys really are losers!" just kidding, what do you say to these kids after that? i just smiled and said that it was okay. but i did learna few cultural lessons that night:
1. chinese people are even formal when they are having a "party". i tried to imagine american college students doing this, but i couldn't even fathom that.
2. there is an extreme respect for those in authority (teachers, coaches, leaders).
3. when you are being toasted you have to drink everything in the cup or else it shows you don't respect the person toasting you. which meant i had to pee the rest of the night.
3. even big boys cry.
4. i hope samantha inherits the "asian glow" so i can bust her for drinking if she ever tries.

so that's the latest scoop from wu's world. sorry it's been so long.

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coming around thanksgiving of 2010 :)