Tuesday

Nothing super exciting today. I did forget to write the other day how I tried a yellow kiwi. It was sweeter then a regular kiwi, and so less good because I like kiwi for the tart/sour taste. It's kind of funny. People here love their fruit to be super sweet, the first thing they tell you about a fruit they think is good is that it's sweet. But, they don't eat a whole bunch of desserts, just really sweet fruit.

I went for my run today with Nancy and Kaylene. I decided to start my run with them, but when we reached the normal turn around spot, I went 3 minutes past and then would meet them on the trail. Well, on the extra 3 minute run, I met a killer dog. Luckily it decided to bark at me right in front of a house with an open door and a man inside who yelled at the dog long enough for me to run away. It's sad, but I did notice that the barking dog did have a hurt leg, and I figured if worse came to worse, I could get the courage to take out its other leg so that it couldn't chase me. Terrible, I know, but it's not like that dog wasn't thinking about taking out my legs too. So, I made it back to the turn around spot in like 6 minutes and 10 seconds, so the dog didn't slow me down for too long. And I did catch up with Nancy and Kaylene, but it was not too far from the beginning of the trail (so, where the run ends). But I got a much better workout then usual because I got to go my own pace and didn't have to slow down to go theirs. I just didn't get the conversation and companionship- I got the killer dog!

My lessons went well today, I taught about buildings, the question mark, and Rapunzel. They loved the lesson on buildings because I had them build with blocks. Then it went slightly down hill from there. For the Rapunzel lesson I had them color a tower and then had them braid string to glue to the tower window to be like Rapunzel's hair. I figured it would be a good way to kill some of the time in a 45 minute class. It only killed time because the kids had to wait in line for me to braid the hair. Nancy told me that Josh had taught them how to braid before. Apparently he didn't teach them very well!

There was something new at lunch today. I had the quail eggs again, along with ground pork, noodles, and some vegetables. But, today in the soup they had these balls of meat paste (I'm not sure that's what they really were, but that's what Nancy guessed they were). It was pretty good. The lunch break was nothing special, I was cutting out towers and tying string together for the kids to braid (which, like I said, I then spent all afternoon braiding for them). I squeezed in a 20 minute nap, but was so sad when I had to wake up to go and teach.

After school I had one tutoring class from 5-6:30 and then Nancy and I headed out to dinner. We had to go to the train station first to pick up our train tickets for next weekend when we go to Green Island. After the train station we decided to wind through the streets until we could find the down town market. Surprisingly enough, we found it almost right away. It looks like we're pretty good at guessing the right streets to turn down. So we ate dinner at the market. We ended up going to the dumpling place right next to the famous dumpling place because the famous place was closed. Lame! But, the place next door wasn't pretty good too. When we finished dinner we walked around and looked at the stores. Usually we make the same one loop, but tonight we just kept walking. We walked pretty far and saw a bunch of different stores, but we didn't really go into very many. We found the alley with the more ritzy stores, and we saw some really fancy jewelry stores in like the darkest alley possible. Weird. But, again, we wondered back and it didn't take us that long to find out exactly where we were and how to get back. Tonight was a good night for navigation.

Nancy wanted juice, so we rode to our night market to chat it up with the juice boy. We ended up talking with him for at least a half hour. In the process, we found out his name is Ronald (that's his English name, obviously), that his day off is tomorrow, and that if we wanted to go to Taichung with him, he'd be all for it. I did mention that tomorrow is my day off as well and asked what time to meet him. He told me 1:40am, but then checked to make sure, "you sure? I'm so scared" OUCH! blow to the ego! Nancy tried to heal the wound by telling me that he would just be scared because he'd be nervous about talking to an incredibly hot American on the train for a few hours and introducing me to his friends. I new I liked Nancy.

So, after talking with Ronald, we decided to hit up the fruit stand to visit Nancy's boyfriend. Unfortunately Nancy's boy was gone. So, we didn't stay long. Oh, and the guy who usually lets me sample stuff tried to over charge me, and I put him in his place. "Oh, I am sorry, I am sorry, my mistake." Although, he did try to get us to by a flat of Asian pears to share with him. I told him if he paid, we'd eat, but we weren't paying.

Yeah, it was pretty fun night.