北京之夜 (One Night in Beijing aka our talent show)

So my last week was probably the most stressful here. I didn't start memorizing vocabulary until about 11pm each night, which is only an hour before my ideal bedtime. So I lost lots of sleep trying to simultaneously prepare for my job as one of the MCs for our talent show AND for the two acts I was in. I treated it as a mini-boot camp to prepare me for Yale. Because at Yale I'll have lots of theatre/a cappella related things to rehearse for and keep up with schoolwork. So it wasn't complete torture because I was doing what I love.

北京之夜wasn't 3 hours of complete boredom like I expected it to be. All the acts were impressive. The students here are all so talented and it was nice to see them shine in their talents outside of pure language ability. It was even great to see people make jokes in Chinese and actually be entertained by a completely Chinese show. The fact that I finally memorized and performed a song in Chinese by myself hopefully bodes well for my future career as a Chinese pop star. (fingers crossed!) It was great to see everyone dressed up and excited and you could tell the teachers were so proud of all the work their students had put into this show and how strongly our improved Chinese was reflected in this show.

We went out to celebrate our last Saturday night in Beijing. This morning we went to our last touristy stop Summer Palace. It was pretty. We took pictures, and mostly just went there to relax and look at the view. I'm glad I will still see most of the friends I made here back at Yale. But we won't spend this much time together and this experience is seeming more and more like a uniquely China sort of thing. I'm also going to miss some of the Harvard friends I made too. And again...I can't even BEGIN to think about how much I'm going to miss these teachers. I really wish we had less homework so I could hang out with them outside of class more often. It's going to be interesting to be able to talk to them in English on Friday. Friday will be our last time for bonding with them. And then 4am I'm off on the shuttle to the Airport. And after some weird time warp I'll be home in NYC at about 3 in the afternoon on Saturday. I can't believe I'm almost home.