I've got pro scooter status

The title of the blog will be explained later. So the day started with a run and some breakfast. Nancy and I decided to try a new place for breakfast and stopped off at one that we always see Tzu Chi college students at. We always scope out the places with lots of people because it means that that place is good. Unfortunately, a place with lots of people in it also means that it's hard to order, get your food, and pay. So we had to wait a while and it ended up being way more expensive then I wanted to pay for it. I pointed to a picture of a breakfast sandwich, not knowing what it was, but when I got it it was on flaky bread, it had lettuce, sprouts, and an egg. I could have sworn that the picture had meat in it, but whatever. It tasted good, just not stellar, and not worth what I paid for it.

I taught about tools in my morning class and that went well because we had a toy tool set, and the kids had fun learning about the tools. Even Teacher Jane liked my lesson (I saw her smiling and laughing when I was being silly with the kids). For the second class we practiced graduation, and we combined the afternoon classes to do one big rehearsal of the whole program.

After school I had tutoring from right after school to 6:20pm. The boy that I tutor for an hour on Friday's wanted to move his time up buy an hour. So, it means that right after school I'm pretty busy, but my Friday night is allowed to start sooner. Well, not really, seeing as Nancy doesn't finish tutoring until 9:30pm and I always wait for her to start my Friday nights. After tutoring I worked on evaluations and finished those up so I don't have to do them on Sunday. I also read my scriptures a little, tidy-ed up my room slightly, and borrowed Nancy's learning Chinese DVD so that I could practice some Chinese phrases. In the time I had to kill from 6:20-9:30, I also fell asleep. I'm not sure how long I slept, because I don't know what time I fell asleep. But, when Nancy came home I woke up and got ready because we were headed out to go bowling.

We were planning on having a really fun, really long night because graduation didn't start until 10am on Saturday, so we could come home late and sleep in with out a problem. Unfortunately one game of bowling when you only have 2 people doesn't last long. When we had finished up and we were putting our shoes back on, we met a white guy from Wyoming. He was visiting his girlfriend during summer break or something. We talked with him for just a little bit, but then we left. We had finished bowling at 10:30pm. Not exactly what I'd call an all-nighter!

I decided that we should go to the juice stand and ask Ronald if we could take his scooter and drive around. It worked. I asked if we could take his scooter and he said okay. Then he asked where we would go. We told him that we didn't know where to go, but we'd find somewhere and we'd be back before 2:30 am (when he closes up and would need his scooter back). I had to ride the scooter back to our house and grab a helmet for Nancy, but then we were off on an adventure. (This is where the title of the blog comes in, I'm super good at driving a scooter with all the practice I get from stealing other people's scooters.) I even got to practice some Chinese when we went riding. We pulled up to these guys and in English asked where they were going and if we could come. They said, "no, no." We happened to be turning the same way as them and they got scared and sped away. That was fine until we came to a red light and they were waiting too. They turned around and were worried that we were trying to follow them and so I told him "wo bu yao ni" ("I don't want you"). After I told him that I didn't want him, the light turned green and he sped away (almost knocking his friend off the back), but then stopped and waited for us. We just drove past them and laughed.

I wanted to see where Hualien University was and since it's a little farther away then is pleasant on a bike, I decided to use the scooter to go there. Yeah, it's not very exciting, but we had no where else to go. After that, we had no destination and so we just followed different roads and pulled off where we thought something interesting would be (there wasn't anything really interesting). We drove past a McDonald's and decided to get a little snack and so we locked our helmets in the storage area under the seat. Well, when we came back from eating, the seat wouldn't open. We struggled for a while and then I decided that we should drive down to another street. For one reason, the people at McDonald's had already seen us look stupid enough, it was time to move. And also, I was hoping that riding it for a tiny bit would jostle something around so that the latch would open. So we drove down two streets and pulled off under a street lamp. Still no luck. Nancy thought we should ask someone for help and so we rode up to some boys on the street. Nancy asked if they could help and motioned to open the seat. The boy reaches over, turns the key, opens the seat, and turns away all in like 5 seconds. It was so embarrassing. I have no idea what it was that he did differently, but even if we had to look like morons, I am glad that the seat got opened.

It was Nancy's turn to drive and she didn't do too much exploring. We did decided to take one road that we'd never gone down before, but it ended up connecting to really close to home and so we decided to just take the scooter back to Ronald. We started talking to Ronald once we got back and somehow we decided that Ronald should go get another scooter and all three of us would drive out to Chishingtan (the beach we went to with the other boys whose scooters we drove). Well actually, the plan was that he would get his Dad's car, but he couldn't find the keys so we had to take two scooters. We drove out to the beach and watched the waves. By the time we got out there, it was after 3am. By the time I looked at my watch again, it was around 4am. Ronald said something about the sun coming up and I figured that since sunrise was probably close to 4:30am and we might as well wait until then and watch the sunrise. We did wait until 4:30, but the sun didn't rise over the water, I'm pretty sure that it rises closer to the mountains and so we saw everything get lighter, but there were no fancy colors or anything. Oh well. After the disappointing non-sunrise, we headed back. We got back in around 5am. It was funny because Luke and Kaylene are going to the west side of Taiwan this weekend with Tzu Chi and to catch the train they needed to meet someone at the university around 5:40am. So, the time that Nancy and I were coming home was the same time that Luke and Kaylene were leaving to go to Tzu Chi. Luke asked if it was a long night and I just smiled and told him "yes." Nancy and I went straight to bed because graduation was at 10am, which means in order to get ready I'd have to wake up at 9am, which was only 4 hours from the time I got home.

And that's why this post is a little late, because I decided that after getting home at 5am, the best thing to do was just go to bed.