Friday may be the first English department dinner I’m not looking forward to. The department foreign affairs advisor and one of the American teachers have been simmering along to a confrontation. His final exam was a little overly ambitious so it took him longer than the rest of us to turn in his grades, and he left for the holidays early, promising to email them, and she didn’t trust him to do so, so nine days before the due date (the week after I turned in mine) she emailed their contact at his university back in America and the professor sent him a “nasty” email. So on the one hand, his leaving early for the holidays was bad form, but her emailing his school was premature.

He is also having problems with his living space. The doors lock at 11:30, and the guard is very grumbling about waking up to let people in after that. Then he showed up one night with a girl and he wouldn’t let them in at all because she wasn’t his wife. Ironically, they were just friends and she needed a place to crash before taking an early train, and her luggage was in his apartment from a visit earlier that day. My teacher’s dorm also locks up at 11:30, but when girls come to my apartment we start off with cooking dinner, so obviously we can just walk right on through.