Today was a monumental day. The end of the first class. It was also a half day for us. A good thing, too. We needed one badly. We loved our students and directors and interpreters and ultimately even each other. But 16 days in a row for 12-14 hour days over 6,000 miles away from home constituted a nice break. Further proof that General Dave is awesome and just takes care of things as any good General would do came when he marched (again not a real march, just a nice saunter) into Dr. Ho’s office and emerged with another victory. He actually just went along with what Dr. Ho was requesting, but because of our unbridled admiration for our senior ranking official I make the story reflect that love. The deal was that the next class was going to be only 8 days instead of 10. It appears that day 9 would have been on the same day as ‘sweeping’ day, which is a national holiday here in which people go sweep the graves of loved ones. Interesting. Obviously we can’t be holding a class that day. Works for us! And as far as any of us are concerned, General Dave made it so!
There was a good ceremony to hand out the certificates of completion to our participants. Before the certificates were given, both Dr. Ho and General Dave had some words to say. Dr. Ho talked about the course evaluations, and they were quite excellent. Better than most anything they have had before. But there was room for improvement. No worries, we would tinker with the schedule and curriculum and tailor it more towards their needs. General Dave said he had to keep his short due to emotions. He said some very beautiful things, and I think I even saw some moisture in not only his eyes, but Paula’s too. Very touching moment. A lot of hard work and hours went into this project, not just by us, but by many people. General Dave captured that essence with precision. Damn, he’s good.
So after a peaceful afternoon at the hotel, we all walked over to the massage parlor. I suppose we were going to get thai massages. That is not what we got. General Dave said it was more like a shiatsu massage. Remind me to never get one of those again. At one point during the massage, I heard Paula saying ow and could hear a scraping sound. I couldn’t really see what was going on, but I soon quickly found out. A guy came in and used some black hard looking device to sort of scrape the muscles. Well that certainly didn’t feel good. It was quite painful actually. Afterwards, our backs looked like they had been streaked with something. Those streaks are, in fact, bruises. So, please remind me to never get a shiatsu massage again!
Dinner was of course interesting as well. We had duck. Lots of duck. And that includes duck feet. Not bad, but the texture made it almost impossible for me to chew. There was also pigeon soup. And a whole pigeon was in the pot. Dave put a big chunk of it into Paula’s bowl. After one bite, she squealed. Turns out that the WHOLE pigeon was in there, including its still attached head! Paula was done after that! But I must admit that pigeon is actually pretty good. No, it does not taste like chicken. It tastes like pigeon, and pigeon tastes good!
Now for 4 days off. It’s about time!
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