Merry Christmas!

Hello everybody! It’s been quite some time since my last post, and a lot has happened since then, so I’ll try to remember the important details, but I’m sure that I’ll forget some.

Two weekends ago: A good friend, Jon, decided two weeks ago that he would be leaving Beijing. As a result, we wanted to show him an excellent last weekend in Beijing. Since Saturday and Sunday were reserved for his girlfriend, Friday night was our only available night, so we made the most of it. The night started with some Beruit (a wonderful game involving ping-pong balls cups – into which you throw the ping-pong balls – and lots of beer). After that, it was “Friday Night Fights,” or so Jon thought. We lined him up to box with another of my friends, Ralph, but when they were getting ready to start sparing, we tackled him, taped up his arms and legs, blindfolded him, and carried him to an undisclosed location. It was essentially a fraternity-style abduction, based on the fact that my group of American friends considers themselves something of a fraternity (Alpha Beijing Nu is the name). So yes, I made it through college without joining a fraternity, but it seems that I have unwittingly joined one here; I’m not too upset about it, though. Anyways, after the abduction and a brief hazing/exit ritual for Jon, we went back to play some more Beirut. After that it was off to Party World for some karaoke! Because we were slow getting out of the door, our initial reservation was cancelled and we had to head to another location to sing. Long story short, we sang our hearts out until about four in the morning and then went home for some sleep.

Last week: The work week last week involved a lot of research and the creation of an economic game that will be played at an upcoming conference with a bunch of Marketing CEOs. My boss, Alex, will be presenting the game which is essentially created to show the benefits of choosing not to compete based on price. For anybody who has taken economics (or anybody who has access to Wikipedia and is curious), the game is based on the “Prisoners’ Dilemma” format. Because economics tends to be boring unless you’re actually watching it in action, I won’t go further into the game.

This past weekend: The only interesting thing that happened last weekend was on Saturday. Weekends tend to be my recharge time, where I just lay around the house and store up energy for the upcoming week. Saturday, however, I went out with a group of friends to the Hohai area to enjoy some nice drinks and conversation. After that, a French friend of mine, Jean, and I went to a club near my apartment to do some dancing. It was quite a blast: mostly American music, lots of people, just good all-around fun. After dancing for a little while I noticed that a very pretty girl was looking over my way, but sadly, she seemed to be with a boy. Since we kept catching each-others’ eyes, though, I decided to try and beckon her over. No success. Convinced that I had no game, I just continued dancing for a while with one of Jean’s friends (actually his Chinese teacher) that we met up with. Later on, though, I ended up next to the original girl and this time, she was willing to dance. To answer the obvious questions: No, I did not go home with her (what kind of guy do you take me for?), and yes, I did get her phone number. To answer the next questions, yes I have called her and yes we will hopefully be meeting up later this week. We shall see how that goes. So anyways, I went home at 4:30 am, and was awoken the next morning by a phone call from my family and my other family (the Tomaros).

Christmas was yesterday, and I had to work. Too bad, I know, but since everybody in China works on Christmas, I really didn’t notice it much. Not too much interesting to say about Christmas day. Sorry :-P.

And now for the big surprise news! I will be home in Madison from January 20^th to the 23^rd. I probably should have put this information at the start of the post so that people will actually read it, but my college friends are on break now (so you can’t complain about schoolwork making you too busy to read my blog), and my family already knows that I’m coming. Anywhoo, one of those nights will be reserved for the family (or for family and friends who love my family). The other two nights, I will be open to whatever people want to do. I just hope that I get a chance to see everybody!!! Hence, if you want to hang out with me, clear your calendar for at least one of the days and let me know what day you want to see me and I’ll try to make everything work.

That’s it for now. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

I'm still alive and kicking . . .

Hey all. Sorry for the lack of an entry last week; I've just been too busy. This week you get one, but it's going to be short.

So this week was pretty mad with activity. I had a proposal to write, a commercial to write, and a looming VIP tour that I had to give on Friday. Hence, I was a busy-body. The proposal is almost done as of today, the commercial is done (though not perfect, but it's going to stay that way), and the VIP tour went quite well.

Actually, I'm just realizing that since I was so busy with all of the work stuff, I really don't have any interesting stories to relate, so it's alright that this blog entry will be very short.

Next week should be a little less hectic, so I'll probably be able to do some interesting things and come up with some good stories for next week's post, but we shall see. For now, I will leave off. I hope life is going well for everybody!