Today at work I was bummed because I had been slated to do a teacher training session tomorrow afternoon, and because of the layout of my schedule that would mean that I had to prepare this afternoon's classes, tomorrow morning's classes, the training session content, and both Thursday morning and afternoon classes, all in one morning.

Needless to say, by the time I left to teach my afternoon classes, I was still very poorly prepared for tomorrow and Thursday. So I was overjoyed when I got this text message as I arrived at the pre-school:

明天早上不上课！回公司！

Class cancelled tomorrow morning! Hooray.

This was good news to receive at that time, because it let me relax a little for what is one of my toughest kindergardens (how come they send a Chinese teacher with me to teach the tame working class kids, and then send me alone to do the spoiled rich kids?).

The point of the above is to say that I got to spend a relaxing evening with Josh, an old friend from Princeton in Beijing several years ago, eating at the Hunan restaurant that Jodi took me to a couple weeks ago—classy place, well-decorated, and so popular/small that you actually have to wait to be seated, and people do! The funny thing is that Josh and I share very few common memories of our time at PiB, so we spent most of the evening filling in gaps for the other person. Afterwards, we walked down to Lu Xun Park, which was dark but lit up very romantically by red lanterns for an ice sculpture exhibition. Then tea from the Bi Feng Tang tea house 外卖 window, and a short light rail ride later we said goodbye. Josh should be around for a while, and I hope we can meet up again.