i felt guilty for not taking pictures so i forced some today. The picture to the left is a mad scientist in front of the sigma building were i work. i am not quite sure what he was concocting but it had to be devious. There was a bubbling beaker involved.

i enrolled in a language school today. i start next week on Wednesday. It is not bad, about 50 us a month. Also they have a nice system where you basically buy days not a class. So if i travel or am otherwise not able to make it i can reschedule. i can also reschedule if the teacher is no good or if i need to move to a more advanced class (Like that will happen :).

this was the market that had been continously tempting me with street vendors every time i walk home. Every time i walk past one of the delicious smelling stands, the nurse from the travel clinic and Mitch Peterson pop into my head saying something about hep a. Their voices are getting fainter though and the food is smelling better. They even have crepes. How can something as delicious as a crepe have any sort of disease in it? i ask you that.

i also managed to order a ticket, have it delivered and pay for it on delivery today. The main system for purchasing things on the internet is pay on delivery here. You order something and then they send it to your office and you buy it. Now i am headed towards Shanghai next week.

tonight i decided to stick around the home front and cook myself. i made two different kinds of dumpling. One pork gyoza type and another that looked delicious at the store. They had red bean, chocolate and sesame (all in different buns). That one turned out to be the bread kind of dumpling though and dissolved in the boiling water. i think i am going to have to break down and buy a microwave so that i can make more types of food than my burner gives me.

here is the finished product. It was actually pretty good. The sauce i made was a Justin special. i grabbed things that looked good at the grocery store (soy sauce, sesame oil and some bottle with garlic cloves and hot peppers on it) and mixed up a pretty good sauce. Buying groceries based on the pictures on the packing is always exciting. Right now my yoghurt is either oak or maple flavored, i cannot remember which leaf is which. i also broke down and got some ripoff pringles and some ice cream for later tonight. The ice cream was half the cost of the grocery bill.

music recommendation, public enemy - it takes a nation of million to hold us back - def jam. i am still convinced that the bomb squad made some of the best beats ever. a great combination between strident political lyricism (black steel in the hour of chaos) and James brown influenced party beats that would make anyone want to dance. Chuck d and co. captured the minds of all the future cool suburban white middle schoolers with this album.