My First Day of School (Sort of)

I love Jerry's mom. She is really on the ball. She had told me she would give me a ride to school at 9:00, and when we got in the car to leave, it was exactly 9:00. Coincidence? I think not. She doesn't have a job, so she has just perfected the art of being a mother. Both of her children can function on their own, but I (hopefully only temporarily) cannot. So she has stepped up to the plate.

Anyway, she dropped me off at school at about 9:30, and the oral exam didn't start until 10:00 so I went inside to loiter for a bit. At 10:00, they called me in. There was one woman sitting at a desk immediately in front of me. Her desk was covered in papers, and a small machine which I think was a timer. Behind her, on her right side sat another woman behind another desk covered with papers. The first woman told me that I was to repeat after her. She said the first sentence, and as soon as I began speaking the second woman began writing furiously. They kept having me repeat sentences for a while. I usually forgot the second half, making the second woman write more, and the first woman repeat the sentence so I could remember.

After they stopped making me repeat sentances we just talked for a while and that went a lot better. There were a couple more parts to the oral exam. I think I did mediocre overall. After the exam I had a couple hour break so I went around to explore the campus and vicinity. I also wanted to buy a dictionary, because I'm pretty much naked without one. I asked the teachers where I could get one, and they gave me a good store. I kind of got lost on the way there, and ended up taking the long way. On the way I passed a bookstore, and thought about stopping, but decided to go on to the store my teacher had recommended. I got there, and found their selection of dictionaries. Alas all of their dictionaries were directed towards chinese people wanting to learn english, not english speaking people wanting to learn chinese. After staring at their dictionaires for an eternity, I decided not to buy one because I wouldn't be able to look up Chinese characters in it. I looked around the bookstore a little more, vaguely looking for the book Dune. I didn't find it, but I did find "2001 A Space Odessey", and some of the Narnia books (all in Chinese). I decided not to buy any of those either and started to leave.

I ended up staring at their dictionaries for a while longer, rehashing my decision not to buy one. I ended up sticking with it, and decided to go back to the other bookstore I had passed to look for a dictionary there. This necessitated another huge circle, because the cross walk was a good distance away. (I have since found out that they put some cross walks underground in high traffic areas, and that indeed there is one there.) After I got to the other bookstore, I encountered the same problem. It was deeply distressing to me, and I ended up standing by their dictionaries for a good ten minutes looking at different ones, and thinking about whether or not to buy. This proved to be a poor decision because all of their dictionaries were on one of those tables that bookstores put out in the isles to attract books to you attention, so I was basically taking up the hole isle. I finally decided just to go get lunch.

After ordering I asked how much it was. The server held out four fingers, so I gave him four hundred dollar bills. He laughed, and took one, then gave me sixty dollars change. I laughed, felt like an idiot and left. I think I have learned my lesson though. Food is cheap.

I went back to school to eat, and wait for my afternoon exam. I think I did worse on the afternoon exam than any other exam I've ever taken. They told us not to guess if we didn't know the answer and so I left over half of the test blank. It was mostly just demoralizing. Jerry's mom picked me up (right on time), and we went home.

Sometimes I like to adopt the decision making strategy of "It will sort itself out". I think it works pretty well, but here a more accurate description of events would be "Jerry and his family (mostly his family, because he is working now), will sort it out for me". I try to help, but it dosen't happen. On Wednsday Jerry's mom basically did everything I just tagged along and filled out a form every-so-often. I really couldn't even do that because I only understood bits of the form, or if I did understand it, I didn't have the information they were asking for.

Now that I am need to find a place to live, Jerry's mother and his little brother (Kuan), have taken over the operation. I was tired again (I think I'm still a little jet-lagged), and was going to go to bed early. Then Kuan and his mother started looking on the internet for places for me to live. I felt like I should at least be there even if I couldn't add anything constructive, but after I told Kuan what I wanted, he insisted I go to bed. So I did.