Bits and bobs

I haven't posted in a while because I've been writing every weekday as part of my language class. 1-2 local-language pages on a cultural element assigned to me. The topics have been, for the most part, interesting enough but they often take me an hour a page not because the language is too tough but because the ideas are. So by the time I do that, translate my reading text for the day and interview a neighbor or two to be able to write my essay and spend time with my family, I am spent.

But today I am in a hotel in Rambuncious College City, also to be referred to as Han, with free internet and a sick boy. Amanda trying to find children's Tylenol and if our favorite Italian restaurant does carry out.

This week's random observations:

Women here don't smoke in public, ever. They also don't drive or work on the mini busses. Unlike the men, they also won't ride on the outside of the minis and stand on the running boards when the bus is too crowded to sit. (It's a rush but I don't recommend admitting that you do it from time to time....when there's a need...and the driver is very cautious...and you're wearing football pads...)

I can buy Diet Coke in glass bottles only at restaurants, and then only at some. I have never seen it for sale in any warung or store.

One of my everyday joys is seeing Muslim schoolgirls play Dance Dance Revolution. In a life otherwise oppressed, there is still freedom at the arcade.

I thought I had a new posse of Muslim college guys who wanted to practice their English. They came by for about a week but haven't seen them since the American next door set up the antenna with me. I think they may have been insulted that I didn't ask them to help us in the thunder and rain.

Dengue is a bad disease. It's like Mono only you don't have to kiss someone to get it. I think I'd rather not enjoy this cultural experience.

Evaluations and tests make me more not less nervous than they used to when I was younger.

One of the commonalities of all the people who I care to keep up with is that I'm proud of them. I'm proud how they've grown up. I proud that they are doing quiet great things like raising families and taking care of people they're not related to. I proud that they are good people where such a trait isn't always rewarded.

Some of my Eureka College kids, I still wonder and worry about. Especially the ones who married people I thought weren't good enough for them - like the girl who was proposed to just minutes after I talked with her boyfriend about how the act of plagiarism he committed would result in his failure of my class. Or the honor student who I found out later was having his mother write most of his papers for him because of a learning disability.

I try not to think about my African students much. It hurts to think of their lives now. I recently heard that no one under the age of 40 is allowed out of the country for any reason. So much for studying abroad...or teaching abroad, in the case of my African colleagues.

I'm so thankful that hotels are cheaper here than in the States. For the price we're paying tonight, we couldn't get a two star hotel in Peoria. Sometimes we just need to visit a different city.

I was sad today because the big bookstore here only had two novels in English (Love in a Time of Cholera and something you've never heard of). I would have been more sad if there had only been two novels in the local language. Books were available in at least five languages, not counting dictionaries or language learning texts. Can you find that in any downstate Illinois bookstore.

Does Pizza Hut in the US offer mayo sauce or sausage stuffed crust?

Does anyone have a couple of old baseball gloves they could send this direction?

Just wondering...