Today Jamie left for America...and for a brief minute it was extraordinarily quiet.

Then, I met Josh for a quick lunch, rushed off to Chinese class, from which I rushed to school to prepare for a graduation. Today, a class I have been teaching for 10 months graduated from our program. It was very tiring (which means I can't imagine how tiring it was for the Chinese teacher who did most of the work). Honestly, it's a little unfair that my name gets put on everything first and I get to speak first at the performance and I get to hand out the awards...this teacher has been teaching these students much longer than I, and she worked so hard for the performance day. I think our company wants to emphasize that these students have a foreign teacher...

It was great having Jamie here. She has made it a point to visit me in both Seattle and Taiwan (and Pittsburgh), and we always have a good time. We tried to show her as much as we could of Taiwan, which might have been a bit overwhelming. I know that I have chilled out a lot about traveling since I first moved here, but I still worried too much about every detail. This is something I hope to fix before we leave for Egypt in THREE AND A HALF WEEKS.

Yikes! So much life to live here before then.