Random thoughts..

Not much new to report these last couple of days, but at the moment I'm excited about studying.  All yesterday and the day before was off of school because of Zhong Qiu Chie, which was a little long--for some reason I was absolutely exhausted, but still had two days of nothing but lounging and playing Ultimate, which is a long time.  (The holiday itself was very nice: my host family and I had a wonderful dinner of jiaozi [dumplings--I ate ~20], and then went for a walk in the moonlight and talked about our families and how we missed them.  This is a holiday that's supposed to be spent with/thinking about family, and their son is far away as well.  So we had very nice reciprocity and tried to fill each other's voids. Then we came back home and ate round things: apples, pears, oranges, walnuts, and mooncakes.  Pleasant).

So today I started on my new and final schedule, with 4 hours of class this morning.  Then after lunch I took a nap and studied on my own for a while: I'm going to learn this!!! Hopefully. So far I've been depressed/impressed by how slow it's going--hard, different language--so I'm trying to focus a little more.  That was a good feeling, sort of reminded me of Swat.   And then I went to this Chinese club (or rather they appeared where I was sitting) and got some nice practice talking, which made me happy.  Also got a language exchange out of it, so now on Fridays I'm going to talk in English for one hour and Chinese for another.  That was kind of funny: the girl I was talking to said "you know, this is good, but Chinese club is hard because it's different people every time. You should maybe set up a language exchange with somebody, so they can prepare for you." Hinthinthinthinthint.  So I asked her how, and miraculously she was free!  Still, this is good: I still don't have enough of a vocabulary to practice with people who don't speak some English, so the best thing is people who have studied lots of English, so know words, but don't speak it fluently enough that we automatically revert to it.  AND on my way home I went by a bakery and they had stuff made out of the mochi rice flour chewy substance that I very much like.  So I'm in a good mood.

Unrelated thing: some people know of The Superest, which is a high-powered version of Kill the Platypus (if anyone knows of that, you should tell me).  I was looking at them today and they mentioned Zumbro Falls as a city in danger of being destroyed by Wee Kong.  That's 30 min from my house!  It has one gas station and a bridge and five other buildings! I've canoed through there.  And driven through the Christmas lights thing.  Weird.. 

Anyway, this has been very scattered and not particularly informative.  I hopefully have more serious stuff coming sometime...