I was able to take my painting to the gallery on Tuesday without any complications as it was a public holiday (Constitution Day), but in order for me to make the opening ceremony the next day I had to make up an excuse to my boss and skip my afternoon classes. I will also have to pick up the painting from the gallery on Tuesday so the excuse I made had to be good enough to be a two-parter. I told my manager that I had to get the pages in my passport replaced last week, and this week I will have to go and pick it back up from the embassy. An iron-clad excuse, so long as he doesn’t ask to see my passport. As for the show itself, aside from being my first show, it was nothing altogether interesting. It was mostly an amateur show filled with the works of middle-aged ladies and their flower paintings. Many of them were quite good but there are only so many flowers a person can be expected to look at in a single show before flower-fatigue begins to set in. Can you guess what is a congratulatory gift for a person when they have a show? You guessed it: flowers. Look at the pink bucket beneath my painting above as evidence. All in all it was certainly a worthwhile experience; with luck it will be just the first of many.