The Welcome

The grocery store I shop at is called Welcome. I've been there everyday this week (since Sunday) looking for egg coated peanuts. They are another one of the things I have tried that have turned out to be delicious. I was a little dubious at first, but they make regular peanuts the tinniest bit sweeter, and I think they add a bit of protein too. I still haven't been able to find them, and so I've gotten a couple of replacement snacks. The first is watermelon seeds. I usually spit them out when I eat actual watermelon, but I thought the processing might make them better. I thought right, the processing does make them better. They are licorice flavored, and they actually taste pretty good. The only downside is that they are just as hard to chew after the processing as the are straight out of the melon. To some extent this makes them a good snack for studying because you don't have to be constantly putting something in your mouth. The other snack I've gotten is a couple packs of what could be the most delicious peanuts I've ever eaten. They are pretty oily, and so the salt really sticks on them. In addition to the salt, there is just a hint of garlic, and an occasional big fatty piece of it (the first one I ate I was a little concerned about, because I thought it might be the appendage of a small animal. I thought about taking it back out of my mouth, but I pressed on and got a big taste of delicious garlic.) In my wandering around the Welcome, I've also found a couple different kinds of milk. I had been drinking good old-fashioned cows milk, but now I've found almond milk, and another kind which is either soy or rice milk. I'm still not sure.

On another bright note, I bought "Dune" yesterday. I've never had a favorite book before, but I'm starting to think that it is my favorite. It almost makes me want to change my goals for my Chinese from "be able to function in a professional work environment", to "be able to read and understand Dune at a reasonable speed". I had been looking, in a vague and not very dedicated way, for the book, since I got here but I hadn't been able to find it. I don't know why I didn't think of this earlier, but I finally realized I ought to just look up the word for 'dune' in my dictionary, then search for it on a library computer. So I did that, and it came up with a few results. After going to the appropriate section of shelves and looking thoroughly for a few minutes, I was unable to find it. I realized it might have been checked out (In my excitement to find the book, I hadn't payed very close attention to anything but the call number.) I looked at the computer again, but I got confused, then I got scared, so I left, and went to a bookstore. I found it right away in the bookstore, so I bought it and took it home to peruse. I wasn't able to get a whole lot from it, and this morning in my individual class I got my teacher to go through and underline all of the names in pencil so I don't go through with a dictionary and waste hours trying to figure out what the word for button, the word appointment mean together (they mean New York, just so you know. It is the pronunciation that is important, not the meaning.) Even if knowing which characters are names won't help me that much, but I get a real kick out of the names, because they are all switched over phonetically. It's kind of a fun guessing game to, because my teacher would say the Chinese pronunciation of the name, and I have to guess which person or place it is.

I almost forgot to say this but the title isn't completely literally translated. There is the word for Dune, and then 'magic castle'. So the new name for one of the most masterful works of fiction in the past 50 years is "Dune: Magic Castle".