It's Not Just Class

[We've been sick for the last week, like nasty sick, so sorry for the lack of posts]

In my last post, I indicated that our teachers, etc. left a little to be desired. Well, truth be told, they're not the only ones to blame. Pretty much all the resources available are… less than helpful. 

See for yourself:

This is an entry from the best dictionary available for the computer. I guess they couldn't decide which way to go on this one...

November in Review

Here's November in review.

Not much video this month.  Features a "holy walk" around the town, and Thanksgiving/Hanukkah.  Also, there's about 30 seconds of just a black screen.  Sorry.  This video was about to become a November and December in review, since it's already the middle of December, so I just wanted to post it.

Class Notes

Class is not my most favorite thing these days. Our teachers aren't particularly good, which means most of the burden of learning falls on us, the students. Maybe that sounds like the way it should be, but it's pretty ridiculous here.

The teachers pretty much just read through the book line by line, and if you want anything more than a recitation, you're going to have to make it happen yourself.

As a result, I spend a lot of time in my book, trying to make sense of 12th century classics and odd parables. See for yourself:

What The Anniversary Was *Really* Like

We recently celebrated our 5 year anniversary (you may have heard). As with all momentous events in our lives, here's how Stacy and I want you to think that it went down:

All smiles and bow ties and fancy-dressed-up-stuff.

But in reality, it was a lot less of that and a lot more of this:

Ice cream (in the usual absence of ice cream) will do that to a person. Even the most romantic of people.

Things Got Weird, Part 2

First of all, apologies for the low quality of this picture. I have a really nice camera, but it is generally frowned-upon here to take pictures in stores, so I was trying to be covert.

Last week, I featured a shot from Hong Kong of the drink selection at a convenience store. It was "dodgy" at best, as my Commonwealth friends say.

Well, when Stacy and I went out for our anniversary (there would normally be a link to the blog post about our anniversary, but Stacy seems to have forgotten that we have a blog and is leaving our readers woefully unaware of all the real things happening in our life…), we went for ice cream. At a place called "Dairy Fairy" - a subtle ripoff of Dairy Queen.

The menu sported a handful of fairly normal-sounding options, but the milk tea section of the menu decided to take a detour into stranger waters. See for yourself:

The top two choices are just an off-putting mix of ingredients: Mandarin ducks, grass jelly, milk tea.

As you descend the list, it gets slightly less weird (red bean? pudding?) but it's not till you get to the last item - chocolate milk tea - that you have anything remotely worth working with.

The drink selection over here is almost criminal.

5 years and 6 thanksgivings.

We've been married for 5 years and 6 thanksgivings.

Our first Thanksgiving together was on our honeymoon at McDonald's in Crete, Greece.  I'm not ashamed to go McDonald's in foreign countries.  I support and perpetuate that stereotype of Americans overseas going to McDonald's after only being in a foreign country for a couple of days. (To be fair, when we went to Crete it was the off season for tourists, so lit-erally nothing was open).

Anyway, enough about our first Thanksgiving and on to details about our 5th anniversary.  We decided this year to put all our vacation savings (actually for the last two years) towards a big anniversary trip in January (we're going to Oz and the land of the silver fern).  So on the day, we didn't go big, but we did have fun.  What we did summed up in 4 points:

1) Lunch at a restaurant we've always been intrigued by (not sure if we'll go back)
2) 100 minute foot massage (no picture)
3) Dinner at a new Thai restaurant (decent, will go back)
4) Aaron got his anniversary gift a little late.  (It arrived 6 days too late)

@ lunch
I had a friend cut bangs for me.  Shorter than I like, and I haven't quite figured out
how to make them look good, but hey, they'll grow back eventually.

Dinner at the Thai restaurant.
Oh, what's that?  an anniversary scarf?  Yeah it is.
He knows what I like.

His package finally made it from Greece.

We've got quite the collection of starbucks mugs from cities that we love.

Happy Thanksgivukkah Everybody. L'chaim!

Today is Thanksgiving Day.  It is also the first full day of Hanukkah.  This won't happen again for 70,000 years.  So I hope you're prepared.  We are.

Aaron spent all morning Wednesday morning prepping the chicken (no turkeys on the roof of the world) for Thanksgivukkah.  

Mazel Tov!

But This One Goes To 11...

I've been using the same microwave for over a year. It's a shared microwave in our dorm's community room, pretty standard stuff. And by "standard," I mean junky.

Or so I thought until recently.

While defrosting some chicken last week, I noticed something special about our microwave:

Oh, what's that? A setting higher than High? Called "Light Wave"? 

Yep, that's right - we're on the cutting edge of technological innovation over here. Just wait, soon all the microwaves in the US will have a "Light Wave" feature, and will revert to using dials rather than buttons to select the mode...

Sometimes you've just gotta ride the lightning, know what I mean?

5*

Five years ago today, this happened:

Oh my. You can call me the luckiest man alive.

New Friends (2013 Edition)

Recently, Stacy and I made some new friends. My friend's name is M, Stacy's friend is named Fred Chan.

Fred and Stacy.

"They have a thin candy shell. Surprised you didn't know that." - Tommy Callahan

Keeping it real with the locals. No big deal.