Tuesday thoughts

Well, I don't have a super-coherent line of thought for this post, but here goes.


We're flying out of Hong Kong to Xiamen tomorrow afternoon.  I'm pretty excited to be back at a college taking classes; this has been a very cool week, but I haven't changed that much since orientation week of freshman year -- I'm ready for school to start!


Tonight some of the others and I are going to the Mid-October Festival.  Becky and I want to see the sky lanterns... especially after watching Tangled.  :)  


We also have our first quiz tomorrow.  I always get nervous about first quizzes (since you don't really know what the professor considers "a quiz" until that point) but I think it will be okay.  Today we had a class on reading pinyin -- that was enough to leave my head spinning and to decide that if I ever become Supreme Dictator of the World (or am put in a position to make these kinds of decisions), all languages are going to use IPA.  It's not especially beautiful for handwriting, but it is consistent and can be applied to all languages, and I am too much of a linguistics-freak to not appreciate that.  


Tim protested, but Dr. Jay agreed.  We also want to convert the US to using Celsius and metric systems.  


(I would probably even let languages keep another mode of writing!  But IPA would have to be learned by everyone... and commonly used... it would make sense with computers, too.  *sigh*)


It's way less humid today than it was when we first got here a week ago, which is lovely... although it's still quite warm.  Apparently the weather suddenly gets very pleasant around the first week of October -- good by me!


It has been interesting to be a lot of places where I am in a minority as a caucasian; it happens all the time when I'm on the MTR.  It doesn't really freak me out... I guess I have just always wondered how it would feel, and now I find out that (in Hong Kong at least) it really doesn't feel any different than anywhere else.


One of the biggest pains of being in a foreign country:  being perpetually paranoid about having my passport where I feel it at any given moment.  Life would be so much simpler if pickpockets weren't a concern.


I can't remember if I've mentioned it here before or not, but we have a pretty awesome group of students this semester.  It feels small to me (maybe because the Israel trip was double this size) but I like it.


I also like cargo shorts.  ^_^


My tan is fading rapidly.  That is a note irrelevant to pretty much everything, I just keep noticing it, because it is not fading all that evenly and so my fingers and the edges of my hands are now much whiter than the tops of my hands and arms, and it looks weird.  Oh well.


I have Plain White T's 1,2,3,4 stuck in my head.  


So, the advantage of coming outside to get the internet during the middle of the day is that there are not mosquitoes.  The disadvantages are that no one is online to talk to, except friends in Japan, and that it is much warmer.


Annnd... I think that is about all the randomness that I have to write about.  


*crash* [that was a branch falling off a small palm tree across the road]


Adios!


Or... as I really should say... Zai jian!