here is my new and exciting language school. i was pretty geeked to go to class today so of course i was ten minutes late. Once i got to the class room it was just me and two older Korean women. We started opening doors until we found our class. It is about 15 people 2 of which are French, 2-3 of which are American and the rest are Korean. Except for the one guy who is from an Asian country but not one having a language that anyone in the room could communicate with. The guess is that he is from Mongolia.

the teacher seems to be good. She speaks pretty fluent English but only if you really have no idea what is going on. Today was mostly sounds and tones, not too many words. It is a pretty full two hours though. i actually feel like i might have a least a three year old level after a couple months of this. We will see. There was only one point where i had absolutely no idea what was going on but neither did the French woman sitting next to me so i did not feel that mad.

random picture from the subway station by my school. It is pretty easy to get there and back from work. It is also fun to get out of the office when it is light out.

tonight i had the rather peculiar experience of people cleaning my apartment while i sat around and watched hard boiled. i managed to get by without having to call anyone to translate until the end. Basically i just pointed at different areas and made cleaning motions. The apartment is a lot less dusty though.

also i tried the new restaurant down the street. It is a sichuan place which is good because that seems to be my favorite sort of chinese food thus far. The menu has no English though so it is kind of a guess as to what sort of food you are getting. i ended up getting fish. i have a love / hate relationship with chinese fish. It tastes really good but is a pain to eat because it has so many bones in it. There are types of fish that have more bones (river fish) than others so what i really need to do is learn to ask for the other kind of fish.

music recommendation, morcheeba - who do you trust? - indochina. In the words of vipat, ambient spank music at its best. morcheeba became popular at the end of the whole trip hop movement. They are much warmer and more organic than tricky or portishead though. Also the man behind the band plays an amazing slide guitar so the instrumentals are arguably the best part of the album.