seek and ye shall find

you may wonder why i haven't been posting. simply because there was nothing of consequence to post about. now there is. look for an adventure and you will find one.

today two friends and i decided to walk to a nearby bus stop and get on the first bus that came by. so we did. we rode the bus past any place we have ridden it before and kept going until the end of the line (not really all that far). then upon looking at the board at that bus stop, realized that all the busses were unfamiliar numbers, so we just got on the next one that came along. (at that point i realized i dropped my bus card somewhere and lost it. boo.) the next bus we got on went a way we'd never been before and we saw some more new things, but it ended up at the train station downtown, which is a very familiar place. here is where the real adventure starts though.

i'd decided to go back in the direction we came to a dvd store that i'd been to before, so we got off the bus at the end of the line (at the train station), and as we were doing so i realized i needed to just get back on the same bus, so i went back on, but i went in the back door, which you're not exactly supposed to do. i thought it wouldn't matter since i'd been on the bus the whole time already. i was wrong. soon several people on the bus were talking loudly and i realized they were trying to talk to me, and pretty much everyone on the bus is looking at me and i realized they were calling for the american. and i realized the bus driver wanted me to pay again. so i had to walk to the front of the bus with everyone staring at me and pay...haha...now...but at the tiem i was thinking, she [the bus driver] knows i was on the bus the whole time and she's making me pay again... it did make sense though, just seemed silly. she definitely remembered me too...who wouldn't remember 3 americans who'd gotten on the bus 25 minutes earlier? and i was the one who didn't pay when i first got on because i couldn't find my bus card because i'd lost it.

anyway, that's the part where i was annoyed. when i got off the bus where i wanted to be, there was lots and lots of construction where there normally would've been a road that went straight to the store i wanted to go to. so i walked down a much narrower road until i found it entirely blocked off by construction. i could see across some more construction the exact store i wanted to go to, but no way to get to it. so i started walking one way, but could see no way to get across from there. so i went back the other way, and followed the people that seemed to be going around the construction. and it worked. but the way over there was across this makeshift bridge made by planks nailed together, and some of these planks were bouncing as scooters drove across. yes, scooters. so i walked across as quickly as possible, perhaps the scariest bridge that i've ever been on in the sense that i was worried that a plank might actually fall out from under me! then on the other side i had to walk across a bunch of mud to get the store, but there it was.

so when i went in the story, i apologized to the owner for the mud on my shoes, but she didn't really seem to care. she was probably glad someone still made the effort to come to her store! so i happily bought 5 seasons of monk for 4 USD and a couple other movies for fun (ironman and gattaca). and during this process, she (the owner) started to ask me things, most of which i couldn't understand, even though i really really listened... finally i just imagined what she was asking and told her why i live here and where i work, and i *did* actually figure out (i think) that she was also asking me how long i'd lived here, so i told her that. somehow the fact that i pretended to understand what she was saying and actually could say something to her really impressed her and she told me several times that my chinese was good (i think). and i think she was also telling me that i understood the dialect of my city really well, which she was apparently speaking. now that is pretty hilarious because my chinese lessons are in the common language, not the dialect of my city, and we are always saying how difficult it is to understand older people who have grown up in our city their whole life (which apparently this lady had). and there she was telling me i understood it well, when actually i entirely guessed at what she was talking to me about. but don't worry, i felt good about myself anyway. =)