Last week of teaching

Thursday and Friday were my last days of teaching. We covered one final chapter in each class, and then Friday was a Test Review and "Words of Advice" on how to manage their individual finances. After the end of class, the students gave me a round of applause. Even though they do this for all professors, I was very appreciative of the gesture.

Thursday night, the Teaching Assistants and two university administrators took me to a fancy restaurant where we ate family style in a private room. We sat around a circular table with a revolving glass plate on the table just like a "lazy Susan." The server placed dishes on the glass plate and we rotated the food while we ate. Rather than serving our plate with all the dishes at once, we ate one dish at a time. The meal included turtle, Peking duck eaten with a type of tortilla, goose leg, goose liver with cucumbers (pate de foie gras), bullfrog cooked in spicy sauce, vinegar vegetables, escargot eaten with a toothpick that resembled a pitch fork, crab dumplings, and some other vegetables that I wasn't sure of the name. I impressed my hosts by asking whether the crab dumplings were male or female and they were surprised I would know the difference. The goose leg was just that - the leg of a goose (claws and all) cooked in a sauce. We were given one plastic glove to hold the leg and then ate it like a drumstick. The skin of a goose is too slippery to eat with chopsticks. All you eat is skin because there is no meat. Dessert was a sweet soup of sorts. Three of the four at the dinner had been to Washington and we talked about Mt Rainier, Mt St Helens, Pike Place Market and St Martins University.

Now that I have finished classes I have a few more errands to run before the trip is over.