"Outside the door listening to our crazy singing"

Every Tuesday kids from Santa Fe come to me for Spanish and Latin tutoring, but by some anomalous grace they all cancelled on me. I was then able to play piano, joke around with my friends, watch the sunset, and talk Borges with my smoky friend Mr. McCracken. Yet I still had another Spanish class to teach at 9pm, my student not being from Santa Fe but from a far away land. His name is Han Qi and he comes from Nanjing, China. He also teaches kids from town his beautiful language. To make the long story short, we have both agreed to teach each other our respective native languages, that is, Spanish and Mandarin, by meeting everyday for an hour. Progress is being made, however we have now detected our particular problems. I cannot memorize the tones and tend to make more consonant sounds in my Mandarin, while he tends to copy my intonation and forget about the consonants. So to get his mind off the tones, which are irrelevant if one follows the Spanish accents, I decided to sing Mexican folk songs with him. The result was beautifully atrocious! What was supposed to be a private Spanish lesson became a loud and public display of our bad singing. As I was trying to accentuate the words, I became gradually louder and so did he, in a completely different pitch. So apparently our dorm buddies were all outside the door listening to our crazy singing, and my RA was wondering if I was having a party. I hope he doesn’t make me sing Chinese songs today.