hilarity

http://tw.youtube.com/watch?v=EhCPEI9zwtY&feature=related
i live with that fool. he's actually a pretty cool guy. his name is Emil and he's been traveling around the world for the last 5 years and living out of a backpack. go to www.youtube.com/monkeetime to see his bio and various travel videos. i think it's pretty entertaining, but maybe it's only because i know him. anyway he's fun and i admire his ability to travel alone for so long.
tonight dena and i were talking about a dream i had last night in which i owned a little dog and it turned into a kid who i was putting into a car seat and how i don't want it right nowww, but when i do have a family, i'll be ready for it. i think my traveling right now is making me more comfortable with the idea of having roots somewhere later. it's making me realize exactly how much i love austin and going to central market every weekend and eating food that i looove and being able to drive 15 minutes to see my family. i'm happy i'm here, but i'll appreciate everything when i get back.

i had a fantastic day today. i found a stamp guy who can make me a stamp with my name in english. we have to sign all kinds of papers and books all day long so i had been using my new hello kitty stamp but i really wanted my name done. there are all of these little shops around town with big keys made out of poster board hanging from their awnings and some of them also make stamps. so i found a guy who is going to make me one. it's supposed to be ready tomorrow. i'm excited.
today i taught 2 classes that both went pretty well. i think my kids are starting to get a better handle on my personality and i'm remembering all of their names which is nice. we played some really fun relay games that they got excited about which is exciting for me.

there were 2 vehicle-related adventures:
1) the bus to dar chu takes you a different way every time, but eventually i get somewhere where i can see the school, so i just get off the bus. sometimes its on the right side of the street, sometimes not, but always close. todayyy, i see the school and then the bus turns down this road that i didn't know existed and starts off toward the middle of nowhere. i knew i should have pushed the button when i knew how to get back to the school, but for some reason i just waited and stayed on the bus. at that point i had 40 minutes until i had to be at the school so i wasn't worried. but it just kept going further and further (is it farther or further?) away from the main road and we were passing these big fields of sunflowers and orange flowers and little houses and fields. it was actually very pretty if i hadn't been completely lost. eventually i did get back to the school but i was within 10 minutes of the time i needed to be there which is cutting it a little close for my liking.

2) so i'm sitting in front of a bank, waiting for the bus after class when an SUV parks in front of the bank. an elderly woman gets out and says 'hi there' which set off the bells in my mind because it's so colloquial that no one who only knows a bit of english would ever say it. so i say 'hi!' and then she goes to use the ATM and when she comes back out, she starts to ask me the typical questions.. 'are you an english teacher? how long have you been here? where do you live? how long do you plan to stay? what do you think about taiwan?' so in the course of answering the questions, we figure out that i teach her grandson in one of my classes on wednesday nights. his name is harrison and he's a pretty good kid but he's in my 21-kid class so i don't know him very well. anyway they offer me a ride home which is AMAZING because the bus would have taken me at least an hour and a half. so on the way home we talk about the food and how it freaks me out and they invited me to their house to have dinner one night which i'm totally going to do. they also told me not to take random taxi's and corrected my pronunciation of 'tung an' (the street i live on). it's more like tong an than tung an. they said tung an is a street in taipei.
anyway they were obviously super nice and i can't wait to see them again. klaus and julie huang.
klaus is her son and he studied german so when i told them my last name was klein, he got all excited.

i know this is getting long so i'll gloss over the last part of my night.. we went to this bar/pub called Rodeo and there was a band playing american songs. the first one was Maria by Carlos Santana. i almost died laughing. the guy clearly 'learned' the words by listening to the song, so there were some words he sang that were not words at all but did sound like the words in the song. it was the funniest thing in the whole world. i ordered nachos that weren't too bad but i have super heartburn now.

ok time for bed! no class until 5 tomorrow woooo!