Happy Father's Day!

In Chinese, they call their moms "mama" and their dads "baba." When you count in Chinese, "ba" means "eight" so, the eighth day of the eighth month is "ba ba day" or "baba day," Father's Day. So, since today is August 8th, Happy Father's Day!

Today is also the first day of the Olympics, and I was really excited for it, but I haven't watched any of it yet. If I try to find a channel on the tv it will be in Chinese, and I know that I can watch it online, but I haven't fiddled with that yet. My day has been pretty jam packed actually.

I went to bed early last night and so I woke up early this morning. I woke up around 5am, turned over and went back to sleep. Woke up again at 5:45am, turned over and went back to sleep. My alarm was set for 6:30am and I intended to sleep until then. It turns out that last night when I thought I was turning my alarm on, I actually turned it off. I ended up sleeping until 7:40am. That wouldn't have been so bad on any other day, but today I was meeting June at 9am to go swimming and I wanted to get a workout in before hand. Well, the workout that I do on days I don't run go pretty quickly so I had enough time to workout, eat breakfast, get changed, and take care of the recycling all before it was time to meet June. June's teacher didn't show up this morning, but I think that there was a heads up on that because no one else from class came. So June and I swam around, aqua jogged, and practice the frog swim for about 2 hours. There are two pools at this place. One is inside and one is outside. The inside one was so crowded and there was absolutely no one in the outside one. June told me I could go outside if I thought it was too crowded, but that she would stay inside because she didn't want to get tan. I figured that's why the outside one was empty. Nope, turns out that the outside pool was closed. I didn't find out until 10-15 minutes after I had been in, so I got some good laps in before I was called out. It was fun, and it's close, and it's cheap. It was only 25NT$, which is less then an American dollar.

Oh yeah. June picked me up this morning on her scooter. It's an older scooter and I guess it's been acting up lately. If you go too slow, the engine will cut out. It happen to us twice. The second time it happened we were pulling into the parking lot of the pool and we decided just to push it up the hill and into a spot. I got off the back of the scooter and as June was getting off I saw one of those large spiders crawling on her scooter. Luckily it was a small spider, relative to how large I know they can get, but it was still kind of creepy. It ran all over her scooter, underneath, in the steering column, on the seat, and on the foot rest.

After swimming we went out to eat. June asked me what I wanted and I told her I wanted to try something new so it was up to her. I'm such a brat. I hate when people say "I don't know" or "I don't care" when I ask them what to do or what to eat, but I most definitely did it to her. We tried some wanton soup stuff. I really liked it and I'm going to show Beth and Natalie the place sometime because the people there were so friendly. They were asking June if I was an exchange student and lots of questions about me. They told her that they wanted to try to speak to my in English, but that they didn't know much. The guy told me "sorry" and asked "what is your name?" I appreciate effort, and so I want to see how excited he gets when there are 3 Americans to try to talk to! We took the food back to her house to eat it. When we were just about done her parents came home. June had to run some errands and I had to get back to talk to Steffanie and so after eating she took me back. Her dad is so cute. He made her take the car and he told me that I should come back whenever I have free time. I told June that he shouldn't have told me that because I'm probably going to spend way too much time over there if I'm really invited because I have a lot of free time. She told me it was okay.

I came back and showered and then went downstairs to have Steffanie help me book a train ticket for Taipei and to call and see if I could stay at the church hostel Friday night. My flight comes in too late on Friday and so I won't be allowed to stay at the church hostel so I went ahead and booked a different one. I don't know exactly what it was, but it took a long time to get everything organized. I went back upstairs to put away the notes I'd written and to grab my money. I headed out to the train station and picked up my tickets to Taipei. Instead of going straight back I went downtown to see if there was a flower shop so that I could get some flowers for Steffanie as a little thank you. She's been so helpful with this Hong Kong trip. There was a little flower stand that I pulled up to. I pointed at some flowers, the lady said something in Chinese that I didn't understand. I smiled and nodded, then she told me how much they were and I handed over the money. I wanted her to put them into a bag with water, but instead she walked over to my bike and stuck the flowers in. I went back and had to improvise. I wrapped a wet paper towel around the stem and then found the smallest plastic bag we had and wrapped that around the paper towel and put a runner band around it. I walked downstairs and handed it to Steffanie. I think she was a little confused, but I think she appreciated it.

After all that, I went back upstairs and checked my e-mail. I got an e-mail from the travel agent telling me that all of the hotels he had contacted were full and that I could change my date or cancel. Go figure. Once I actually get all the plans settled out (the train tickets and hostel for Friday) the guy lets me know that I can't go. Well, there's no way that I'm not going. So.... I looked up plane ticket prices and looked to see if there were any hostel rooms available. It turns out that if I booked everything myself, I could save some money. So right before I had to run off to tutoring, I booked a hostel, and I bought a plane ticket. After tutoring I sent the travel agent an e-mail telling him to please refund my money. Holy moley. I hate to admit this because I have a very protective family who reads this blog, but as I was biking over to tutoring I realized how brave I'm being. It's basically the same thing that I was already doing, flying over by myself and staying by myself, but there's something more independent about it when you do everything for yourself, and when you know you're staying in a crappier place then you would have if you went through an agency. So this is definitely going to be a grand adventure. But honestly, I'd already set my heart on going to Disneyland, so if I have to stay in a tiny room in a hostel, so be it, I'm going to Disneyland!

Tutoring went well today. Abby actually behaved for me. I was so glad. She is so adorable, but I don't really know how to handle her when she acts up and refuses to read. I just had to box all her reading with games. We went over the picture vocabulary on the page first, then we read the page (it's only a small paragraph), then we played a game using the vocabulary words. That seemed to work out okay, but I don't know if it will work the same way next time. There was no wii tonight, but I'm okay with that. The baby was fussing and I think that it wouldn't have been helpful if I had staid. I still got dinner though, and it was so good, like always, and they sent me home with some organic grapes.

Like I said, when I got back from tutoring I sent the travel agent an e-mail saying I need my money back, and I looked again at my confirmation e-mail for the plane ticket. It's really happening. I'm really going. Now I need to take the time to figure out where in the heck my hostel is, how I'm going to get there from the airport (there are directions on the confirmation e-mail), and figure out how to get to the things I want to do from the hostel.