"air quotes"

i ate chow mein in my room and now it smells pretty gross in here.

you will not believeeee what happened today. well, hold on. i'll start at the beginning.
this morning keith took me to the immigration office to apply for my ARC (alien resident card) and i was #79 and when we got there they were on #55 so keith and i went down the street to this little coffee shop called Dante which was like a taiwan-fabulous version of starbucks. i ordered some kind of cranberry drink and it had bits of dried cranberry in it and it was so refreshing on such a humid day. today it was as hot as it is in texas, but with like 90% humidity. you can't imagine how swampy it feels. it's disgusting. but it was cool inside the cafe and the drinks were good and we killed a good 45 minutes in there instead of sitting in the government building which was nice.
he had to go to class, so i waited by myself for like 10 minutes before it was my turn. the woman helping me was very abrupt. she said my passport photos were unacceptable because they were on a "gray" background, so i had to go take new ones down the street. but that was the only hitch. i get my ARC on sept. 5th! woo!

went to latini's for a quick lunch. bobo, leila and steve were there finishing their lunch. i'm going to start taking chinese classes with bobo next week. she's this pretty taiwanese woman who teaches a lot of the foreign teachers. she's joyce's mom, the cute little girl i colored with at the party a week ago. i'm looking forward to it because i get to play with joyce

my first class was OK but my second class, my awful WOW class that only speaks chinese, was actually fun today! who would have thought. contributing factors: a) my coteacher was in a good mood and was speaking mostly english, b) i told this kid scott, whose favorite English word is 'shit' that every time he spoke chinese, i was going to eat one of his chips. i ended up only eating a couple but i think it made the class feel a little more like i was on their side or something. (side note: he commented on how i even eat chips gracefully which i thought was uncharacteristically nice) c) we were all just being silly and it was a lot of fun. i used air quotes at one point and the class came to a screeching halt and they all looked at me and did air quotes back and were like 'what is that?' and i tried to explain.. but it's just a hard thing to explain. you have to explain sarcasm.. or that it's what someone said before.. and you use them like quotes..

and we read all of the shirts with english words on them in the class. it amazes me that people who know english would still buy/wear shirts that don't make sense. we read one kids shirt that was really wrong and i asked him if he had read it and he said no and it's like helloooo! you can read english! why walk around with a shirt that doesn't make any sense.

picture of the day: chow mein from corner guy. chow-fried mein-noodle

the standard to go container is a white cardboard box that they secure with a rubber band and put inside a colored plastic bag.