oh the exciting life i lead.

So, working in retail for this amount of time has been a very interesting experience. It has also been the longest I've had a job! go me.

Anyway, in the past 3-4 years, I haven't been in Texas for longer than 3 weeks. Now that I've been here for 5 months and talk to hundreds of people a day, I've noticed quite a few things I hadn't noticed before. Here are just a couple:

Besides the obvious Southern drawl and slang found in every-day communications, I've noticed a ton of people call a shopping cart a "Buggy." This is new to me. I've never in my life heard it called a buggy... I thought buggies were old baby strollers... Anyone else encounter/call it this?

The other is the number of people who belong to the Johnson Space Center Credit Union. I see a LOT of credit cards, and I was really surprised to see that JSC far outweighs the other banks and southwest credit cards. I guess this makes sense because I live like 10 minutes away from NASA, but still, NASA employs THAT MANY people?! crazy.

Also, working at the Hob Lob has allowed me to become an avid coin collector. I have only four more of the state quarters to collect, and three of the US Territories. According to my dad the DC and US Territories quarters are pretty collectible because the US mint never announced that they were going to make them and very few were actually made. I have District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and Guam, and I am on the lookout for American Samoa, the Virgin Islands, and the Northern Mariana Islands. I have also found so many wheat-back pennies. Among others I have a 1919 penny (the year my grandma was born), and a 1911 penny!

Due to my recent enjoyment of coin collecting, I decided to pull out this old box I have with my name written in my grandmother's handwriting. It is filled with all kinds of goodies from her travels to Europe and Africa in the 60s, and I pull it out every once in a while to look through all of the little treasures. I had forgotten about all of the stuff in there! Among postcards, slides, really rough toilet paper and old bills from Germany, Italy (Pre-Euro), England and Norway I found some $3 bills from the Republic of Texas and a few $100 Confederate States of America bills. Given they are authentic, in pretty good condition, and earn 2 cents interest every day, they are worth about $500! Thanks Granny! I don't know if they are authentic or not, since most of the bills in that time were hand-written, so I am anxiously awaiting to see if I receive tickets to the Antiques Roadshow in Biloxi, MS. Wish me luck!

bowling

last week, we went bowling for family time! and our school IDs that MaLaoshi scored for us got us in for ... wait for it... FREE. awesome!

it was all-in-all a great time. and even though i've been bowling for a long time, and have been to more than my share of rock-n-bowls, i still can't get it right. i probably averaged something like a 70.
i will blame it on the fact that the lanes appear to not have been waxed in the last 2 decades, the machine kept ignoring my spares, and we had to switch lanes at some point because the pin-monster kept trying to eat my upright pins.

anyway, you would think that bowling in another country would translate well. and for the most part it does. but then, you go to enter your name into the keyboard and it looks like this:

goodbyes and hellos

I write this as a very sad lady. This week is our last week of class. I can’t believe the end is coming so fast. I feel like I have gotten to know our teachers so well and have grown to really love them and enjoy class with them. Learning the language is so much fun, now that we can learn more complex things and we graduated to only reading our text in characters this semester. It is truly amazing how far we have come in less than one year, and we only have ChuLaoshi and MaLaoshi to thank (and dad). But I don’t know where we would be if it wasn’t for all of their help: MaLaoshi telling us what they really say, not just what the book says; the look of happiness on their faces when we make a good sentence; their deep concern for us when we have problems (missing my train and our power that sporadically turns off); and the fact that ChuLaoshi LOVES teaching us.

Us with MaLaoshi back in March

I don’t know how to begin to thank them. For putting up with our tardiness, for our asking to not have class because we want to visit our friends, for being so so so very patient with us and for sharing their lives with us. I will really really miss them. Gah now I am crying again.

Anyway, the next few months will be so hectic for me. This is our last week of class, next week is our week to say goodbye to friends on campus. Then we go to another city to visit friends for a birthday party. The day we come back, a friend from the states arrives to stay with us for a few days and help us to prepare to come back to the states. Aubrey goes home on the 28th. On the 29th, laura!!!! Comes to my city, and we get to travel around EA for a while :D then, on the 15th?of july, I leave for a month-long trip to C. Asia. Will return to E. Asia on August 15th? And then head back to the states shortly after. Crazy whirlwind of coming and going, goodbyes and hellos.

Even though it is about 2 months away, I am already to get pretty nervous about my re-entry to the western world. I have lived so long out of touch with so many things. Movies, music, tv-shows, fashion! Back in February, we wanted to go see a movie in the theater, so we called the theatre to hear the movies playing. Everything was in ‘East Asian,’ but we heard “Au da li ya” (Australia), so we thought there was movie from Australia playing. So we went to the theatre to find out that the movie was called ‘Australia’ and apparently had been out for a while. Oops. The other day I started seeing facebook status’ saying “haha at the hangover!” by like 246178 of my friends. I thought it was pretty strange that they were talking about their hangovers on fbook, until I realized it was a movie. :/ also, the other day I went shoe shopping, a pair caught my eye, and I thought, “OH that is cute! Oh wait, is that cute? I don’t know what to think anymore!?!” I don’t know if my fashion sense has been greatly impaired by the number of sock-and-sandal wearing bra-less wonders of this land.

All this to say: I’m pretty much going to be a mess when I come back. My English sucks, I have no fashion sense, and I don’t know what music you’ve been listening to for the last year. So please, bear with me as I readjust to proper table manners, driving, and speaking English on a regular basis.

tiao

note #3.

this will be useful the next time i want to run away from home. :)

adventures in language learning.

lesson one.

超市 chāo shì = super market

超人 chāo rén = super man.