Happy Birthday!

A big happy birthday to Dad!  I hope you had an awesome time with family eating lots of delicious home cooking from Grandma.  Mmmm jealous.

I got skewered by a chuan stick yesterday.  “Chuan” is the Chinese word for putting food onto a skewer stick.  It’s great because you can go to BBQ (xiao kao) places on the street.  They are mini, portable  BBQ places and the food is cheap and delicious.  One stick of meat is usually 1 kuai, or about 1/6th of a dollar.   The bad thing is that when people are done eating, they usually throw these used sticks onto the ground.

The other morning, I was wearing flip flops and somehow got a stick buried deep in the bottom of my foot as I was waiting for a cab.  I had to pull it out with force and that incident successfully ruined my morning.  I cleaned it out thoroughly and used neosporin and a band-aid on it, so hopefully I don’t get an infection.  It’s much better now, although still a bit tender.

My contact teacher has a friend whose daughter will be going to Canada to study at one of their universities.  She asked if I wanted to tutor her for 8 hours a week.  I agreed to meet with her yesterday so we could discuss our goals and see if it would be a good fit.

We decided to meet at the Starbucks at a mall off of a metro stop.  She called me and said that she couldn’t find it.  I told her to ask someone or to look at a mall directory.  Then she called me back 10 minutes later and said that nobody knew where it was.  I told her to ask how to go to the metro stop because it’s right next to the metro exit.  She insisted that nobody knew where it was. Uggghhhh.

After about 30 minutes of her saying that nobody knew where it was, I asked her where she was.  I took things into my own hands and decided to go find her.  She said she didn’t know any of the stores by her when I asked what she saw around her.  I asked what floor she was on.  She replied the 2nd (middle).  I walked around the whole floor and couldn’t find her, so I told her to go to the Pizza Hut (it’s a huge restaurant there and it’s very popular).  She said that she couldn’t find it and nobody knows where it is.  Ahhhhhhhhh.

So then I resorted to suggesting that we meet at the Carrefour, which is the two storey grocery store in the mall.  Everyone knows that store.  It’s huge.  Again, she said that nobody knew where it was and she couldn’t find it.  Then she said she wanted to meet at another mall.  I told her not to move and to just come to the bottom floor of the mall.  If she walked for 2 minutes in any direction (it’s circular shaped) then she would see it.  To this, she responded, “I am going out now”.  Then she left.

I had to go meet her at another location finally.  By this time, I was frustrated, hot, and tired (my backpack was super heavy).  If she wasn’t a friend of my contact teacher’s, I would have just left and told her to forget about it.

Eventually, about an hour later, we met up at a KFC and decided that we would have our first trial lesson this evening.  I will be tutoring her for six hours a week, three two-hour sessions.  It’ll be interesting because this is my first time tutoring one-on-one and her English is not anywhere near where it should be if she’s going to college in Canada.  Yikes!