National Teacher's Day

Tuesday was National Teachers' Day in Lithuania. At lunch time, we all went to the great hall. I thought it might be a lighthearted occasion, but it turned out to be quite serious. There were speeches by students and teachers, and performances by students, including opera singing, achordion playing, guitar, piano duets, and a chorus performance, all by music majors. Then all the teachers when to a smaller room for champaign. After a bit, it was time to go, so the men had to finish what was left of the champaign. There were only four men, and only two of them were under 40 (maybe 50), so my roomate and I had to quickly down several glasses of champaign each. Then, we all hopped into mini-busses and drove out to Juozapas, the bewery of Hash'b'Hash beer, where all the teachers got sloshed and ate food--I had ribs, which were great, though I'm still not used to life without barbeques sauce on everything.

Then, after a stop of at a liquer store, we drove out to the Baltic Sea. In our car (all the young teachers), we had gin'n'tonics being passed around (mostely between me and Jurgita) and whiskey colas. We got to the beach, opened many a bottle of champaign, and passed around all the cocktails. Please note: there were five us in our twenties, and the average age of the rest (~20 people) was closer to 40 years old. The Director went wading in, and asked why the boys didn't go in? So, Frenchy (Cedric) and I started taking our shirts and pants off, but then she said swimming was too dangerous, cause waves were high, only wading. We started getting dressed again, and she ran over with a champaign bottle and started dumping it on Frenchy, then on me, but I grabbed it away too quickly, and chugged it. It was sea water! I spat it out and went for some cocktail.

Onwards home, and we were all going out, but Jurgita said she had class at eight a.m. the next day, and couldn't come, we tried talking her into it, and, of course, it turned out that she's engaged! What, I said, are you talking about, you're only wearing a ring on your middle finger?! I lost alot of weight, she said, and now it no longer fits on my ring finger. So, after my third ring mix up in as many weeks, we went on to drink without her.

Long story short, for the rest of the night the remaining four teachers (plus a few students) got drunk playing beirut and speed quarters and eating pickles.