What makes you happy?

Oh, I like hacking. Music. Meeting nice people. Nothing too crappy to bring you down, don't you just love the autumn breeze?

Just Randomly: December 1st was World AIDS Day, so I hope those of you who are sexually active have been practising safer sex (and that the rest of you don't share any needles). In other news, Drew's blog seems to have mysteriously disappeared. In other, other news, I just read & became a fan of Ctrl-Alt-Del the online comic... it's very, very funny. But I read it all in two days so now I have to wait for new content. sigh

Some Questions I Have: How did the choir thing go? I mean, I know tons of people were all like "Gar, Mrs. Sinclair OWNS me," but other than that I didn't find many exciting summaries...

Let's pick up where we left off... Tuesday... turns out there WASN'T school after all, even for that junior high class, to my great irkedness. So I went to the Xinguang Mitsukoshi to look at MP3 players. They didn't have any HD ones though plenty of flash similarly priced to the place by the Chen residence. In the evening I went to the music store & practised piano for an hour. It was fun.

On Wednesday, a lot of things happened. Went to Zhong-lun for culture class, only to find us all sitting around randomly. Turns out they had no real plan, so we were "going to Longshan temple." Arriving there at like 11 (after 2 hours of wasted time) we proceeded to not really do anything. I did homework for a while.

After culture class ended, A.A., American Claire, Kaylee & I went out and about. Alex & I bought sausages, then the lot of us went to a random restaurant and had this random thing a server showed us. It wasn't bad, just kind of blah, and the balls in the soup looked somewhere between cat food & hairballs. Go feline theme. It wasn't bad, but it sure wasn't good either, though the sausages rocked.

We headed to Wanfang, nice & early, and went to a tea stand so Claire could get her bubble tea fix (or something like it, I'm not sure the exact type). I foolishly got hot red tea (it's in a thin plastic thing with a straw) so I was kind of hurting my hands for a while. Somewhere in there we managed to end up in a stationEry store, so I bought a Sharpie. And now I have sharpie. yay

Chinese class was kind of weird, like our teacher was the chick and she was surprisingly touchy and stuff. Her expectations were different though she still taught us ever so little. I totally prefer the guy, he is just plain awesome. Like he is a good teacher, but he has that non-uptight classroom environment where the students can actually be into it & w/e, and he can actually teach grammar & stuff. But enough of that.

In the evening it was church choir again. This time there was a random new guy from the Philippines with his tall, fairly good-looking American wife. She was wearing a remarkably short skirt, hence the remark. He was a remarkably good singer, and funnily enough guys just kept foisting solos off on him. He's been living here like a year already and can't speak Chinese at all/understand, and this is his permanent residence. So, I'm confused. But why a random Catholic just randomly moved overseas is beyond me. Helped the drummer set up, so I got to play 5 minutes of drums, w00t... had a random bassist who was kind of sight-reading the music badly.

Today, I had kind of a so-so day. In choir we started this Taiwanese song, like it's all complicated and weird like, but I look at the lyrics and even if I know what half the characters sound like, I don't. Because it's a totally different language with sounds you can't/don't make in Chinese and an unfinished romanization system. Our teacher said she would write it so I could figure out the sounds though. bah Taiwanese, it's all about the Chinese.

In domestic science we were randomly watching Shrek 2. In the middle Alex & I left for the school/parent/us meeting. I was pressed into speaking unexpectedly, so I said what I meant, which was: "I want someone to teach me Chinese & to play drums." I mean, I can be less terse & talk more about experiences or w/e with Scarlett (our homeroom teacher/english teacher) or Sandy, the school's main authority over us all, but that was random. P.E. was also highly random, but right at the beginning these visiting sports guys mistook me for a regular student of the school, so I just BSed with limited Chinese and told them what they wanted to know, viz. when class was supposed to start.

Also on the subway exchanged a few words with some guy, of course the start of the conversation was "Nanshijiao." *thumbs up* "Nanshijiao is very good? Speak Chinese. Speak Chinese." "I don't know how." [translated] ... but it was certainly random enough. Actually... I was trying to take the bus. But I waited two Green 2 buses that were going the other way (over 20 minutes) then I was just like, "fuck you, buses," and went to Gongguan then the good old MRT.

In the Future

Tomorrow is a day-long school trip, starting early. I still don't know whether to wear school or regular clothes. On Saturday night, I might get to go to a neat-o piano duet recital by an Italian husband & wife team. Sunday is a random choir excursion to Danshui, just for fun. No performing or anything, just goodness... I hope. Sometime in December, aside from the speaking contest, Xmas party & culture fair, & people's birthdays (not just mine, but *wink wink* anyway), there is some dumb thing where exchange students are supposed to give presentations/performances (always performing, grr...) about Christmas or something. Not too excited for that.