The Chicken

Today one of our older girls came back to the orphanage from her home province with her two sisters. She's maybe 19 or so. I saw that she was carrying a black chicken in her hand, so I called her over to ask about it.

"Where did you get that chicken?"

"I brought him from my province, of course!"

[P.S.: That means that she was holding the chicken in her hands while in a shared taxi with herself, her two sisters, and probably 7 other people, in the car the size of a Toyota Camry, for three to six hours]

"Can I touch him? Will he bite?"

"Mmhm, he's very nice, you can touch him. Don't you know that all chickens don't bite? Unless you try to take their babies."

So I touched him for a little while and he was nice and soft and didn't bite.

"What do you want to do with him?"

"I want to eat him."

Peace out.

Roam, See, Buy

HEY DUDES.

Want to see/listen to my favorite Khmer song? Click here.

Peace out.

Mondulkiri (Part A)

//

I just took the first hot shower that I've had in almost three months. Man. What a luxury. And while it was pretty nice, the water pressure was almost non-existent, so it was still kind of terrible. As in, it took minutes to actually make my hair wet at all.

Speaking of which, my hair is long again, just so you all know.

Dinner turned into a karaoke night. The videos are all extremely melodramatic. I need to learn one Khmae song for situations like this (which occur strangely often).

If you want some more fun stuff to look up before I write about it, there's an ethnic group here in Mondulkiri called Khmer Junjiet that isn't found anywhere else in the world. They look a little different, but hard to describe. Like a mixed chinese+white baby but with darker skin. And, apparently, all very poor farmers.

Peace out.
Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

Aup Sauk

We're in the middle of a holiday right now that sounds kind of like "Pyome Ben," and since it's one of the biggest holidays of the year (probably the 3rd most important), almost everyone goes to visit family. For most people in the city, that means going back out to the countryside to visit where most of their family still probably lives. For example, almost all factory girls are 16-26 year old girls whose families still live in the countryside as farmers, so you could see trucks full of factory girls heading out of the city for the past few days after shifts let out. For the kids in orphanage, that usually means going back to the town that they grew up in, whether it's to see an aunt and uncle, step-mom or step-dad, grandparents, or sometimes even a living parent.

So, most of the kids in our orphanage are gone - about half, and more are leaving pretty much all the time. I can hardly keep track of who is here and who's not - I even thought Mike had left even when he hadn't - but I think the count was 27 today at lunch time, and tomorrow I think at least one more will be leaving. All classes and official activities are stopped. There's no school at the orphanage, no school for the public schools, no classes at the universities, no Khmae dance in the morning, nothing. For the kids that are left here, there's nothing to do at all, so a lot of times I hear them complaining about being bored - "aup sauk."

Some of the boys handle it by screaming and goofing off and fighting with each other playfully, some of the boys and girls cope with it by sleeping, some of the girls put on make-up and talk on the phone with boys or family or whoever they can. But a few people are like me and just want to hang out, which is very lucky for me. And more fortunately, a few of them speak really good English, too. One of them is the one girl that I teach piano to every day (this is the same girl in 11th grade who's going to my calculus class). I was sitting on one of the tables on the girl's side after lunch today when she walked by complaining about there being nothing to do, and ended up talking to her (and other people who came and went) for pretty much the rest of the day. And her story was pretty fascinating.

I can't remember the sequence in which I learned it, so I'll just tell you what I can remember.

She was born in a small village somewhere near Battambang, which you can see right here, close to Siem Reap and the Thai border. She had one sister who was born before her, by maybe three or four years. Her father was more or less a farmer, and her mom - like most farmer's wives - stayed at home to cook, take care of the house, raise the kids, and things like that. After her, her mom gave birth to another sister, and then another sister, and then another brother, and then another sister - so there were six of them all together. (The one born right after her is the giggly one that all the boys love. All six of them are extremely cute by western standards of beauty, though. Anyway.)

When she was very young, she went to school. Her family didn't have very many kids, so they had enough money to send their older ones to school and not worry about looking out for all the younger ones. When she studied first grade, she did really really well, and might have been number one in her class, though I forget that detail. In second grade she was doing really well too, but in one of the first weeks of class she couldn't do the math that her teacher asked her to do, and so he hit her, and she felt really embarrassed. So she went home and told her dad, and he said that he would teach her math every night from then on. Each day, after he was done work around 5:30 when the sun goes down and they had finished eating dinner, he would teach her math in the dark or with a candle, since they didn't have electricity in her village back then. Her teacher never yelled at her or hit her again and I think she ended up getting number one in her class that year as well.

That year, her youngest sister was born and her mom got really sick afterwards. In addition, the dad took a job in another province even closer to Thailand to fell trees and then help build houses with them. He could only come home at most twice per month, and even then sometimes he wouldn't be able to make it that often. Sometimes he would just send money with a friend. Since her mom was sick and there was no father around to help watch and take care of the children, the mom asked the older kids to stop going to school so that they could help with all of the housework and the kids. So after second grade, she stopped going to school. Her mom couldn't work the farm all by herself, either, so she became a cook instead.

After a while, her dad stopped coming back so often. Sometimes he wouldn't send money with a friend, either. After it had happened too many times, the mom demanded that his friend tell her what's going on. He said that he had another girlfriend now, and might move to Thailand with her. That made the mom extremely sad and frustrated. The girl who I was talking to remembers being sad about it too, and being sad to see her mother so upset and alone all the time. And once her mom knew that her dad wasn't coming back or sending money any more, there was no way that the kids could go to school, or else they'd never have any money to pay for food and clothes and other necessary things. So I think at that point all of the kids stopped going to school, and anyone who could do work did work, and also helped to look after the youngest ones.

Her mom knew that she was really smart and she wanted her to find some way out of her village, and so she started talking to other family members to see if there was anything she could do. For a short time she lived with her uncle, but she couldn't stay there for some reason, and so she left there. Then she went to live with her grandmother for a while, but she couldn't stay there either. So she went back home for a while. At this point, it had been about two years since she had gone to school.

By then, her grandmother had found a job at this orphanage as a cook. She talked to the director of the orphanage and asked if she could still come, even though she had a living mother. The family was extremely poor, with six kids, a poor school, a sick mom and no father. He said that he would take her for the time being, but would have to check with the Japanese monk who was funding the orphanage before making a final decision.

So she got on a train to come to Phnom Penh with her grandmother. Even though it's only a few hundred miles, it was a 13-hour train ride. She remembers being impatient and feeling like it took forever. When she first came to the orphanage, no one talked to her. She was young and very skinny and looked like a farmer with dark skin, and she spoke very slowly with an accent and lots of words that people in Phnom Penh don't use, because that's how people talked in her village. She missed her mom a lot, but she didn't have her own cell phone and her mom didn't have one either, so they couldn't talk often and she cried most nights in bed. The only way she could talk to her mom was on planned phone calls from time to time with her grandmother's phone, who lived near her mom in the village. The first friend she made was a girl who had the same name as her, and so they were nice to each other. That was her only friend for a while. Soon, the funder of the orphanage came, and since she wasn't on the official list yet, the director here had to hide her from the funder. So she had to go live outside with a staff member and not come to school here. After he left, the director asked him if he could take in this girl even though she had a mom, and when he convinced him, she could finally come back and stay for good.

One time when she was talking to the director, he mentioned something about her being the only kid, and she didn't know what he was talking about. "I have five brothers and sisters," she said. Clearly he was missing something important, because that was part of the reasons that she was brought to the orphanage in the first place. So after some more convincing, the director convinced the funder to let all of her brothers and sisters come as well.

This girl, her older sister, and the sister just below her all study really hard. They were number one in their classes often throughout school. But the older sister had been out of school for so long that she was much too old for her classes and it made her feel extremely uncomfortable. She decided to go with our sister organization to learn hospitality skills and got a job at a restaurant and hotel in Siem Reap. This girl is also a little bit old for her classes, but she skipped one year of school, so it's better for her. She was always number one in her classes until then. She used to always study with her older sister, and so everything was easy. But one time she had to leave school for two weeks, which was the same year that she skipped a grade, and since then she's had more trouble with getting the top marks. Her sister just below her is the one who asked me to study math at night, and asked me to teach her English and singing, and who all the boys love. Her three youngest siblings, though, all seem to be very lazy students so far. And one of them is something of a bully, as well.

Her cousin came to visit today. She works as a maid in Phnom Penh and got some time off for the holiday so she came by. She's really proud of the girl here. She works really really hard all the time and will be the first one in her family to go to university starting next year. She was even allowed to start a pre-university program a year early, which is a pretty big deal because they almost never make exceptions for anyone like that.

Recently her dad came back to her mom from Thailand, but didn't tell me quite why he came back. Her mom called her and asked her what she thought she should do, and she said, "I don't know, I think you should decide." So her mom asked her grandmother and she said, "I think he can come back if he goes to the hospital and shows you he doesn't have HIV. If he does, he has to leave." So he went and got tested, and it turned out that he was negative, and so her mother let him back in. Even so, the girl here still does not like to talk to him. She feels angry at him. She wishes that he had been there to tell her what to do for her whole life and not made her mom so angry. She also said that she'd often wished for an older brother so that someone could look out for her and tell her what to do, or that her older sister could look out for her.

[possibly related: she also talked to me today about how she hopes to marry a boy a few years older than her once she is out of college and has a job. i asked her why, and she said because an older man could help her and know what the right thing to do is. i wondered if that was because she didn't have a dad or older brother, but she says no, it is very normal to marry an older man, especially if you have an education. she also told me that she started going to the kitchen every day to learn with our cook so that she could cook better when she's married. she really is a sweetheart]

//

Today, one of the girls cried because she missed her homeland so much. Her sister went home, but she couldn't go. She's very small and takes an injection of hormones every day to help her grow and the directors don't want her to miss a day, so she doesn't leave. I let her borrow my phone to call her sister at home, and when she talked to her, she cried.

//

I know that most of the other kids find the inactivity of Pyome Ben kind of boring, but I actually kind of like it. It lets me do one of the things that I think I do best but haven't had a chance to do here yet - chilling out. And now that I can speak some Khmae and actually make some jokes in Khmae, it's getting easier to know people and get their stories. I hope that sometime soon I won't have to rely on English at all.

Peace out.

Wednesday

This Wednesday was a pretty good day, so I think I'll use it to show you what a normal day here has been like me for the past month or so.

The first thing I did in the morning was teach a calculus class to about five or six of the oldest students here - most of them are going into 12th grade, but one of them graduated and just wants to study some more, and one is going to 11th grade and just wants to get an early start. They're usually a little bit late, which is kind of annoying and also kind of weird. The girl, the one going into 11th grade, sometimes yells at me when I come late to teach her piano, screaming, "JEFF! ON-TIME STUDY!!!" which I find both effective and hilarious. She usually doesn't scream that about calculus though, even though she's already been awake for two hours at that point doing Khmae dance, so it's not like it's too early or something like that. Oh well. Anyway, that class was pretty good - we pretty much started limits that day. As it turns out, that's a little bit harder to explain that I had imagined. I think maybe I don't have "the beginner's mindset" down as pat as I hoped it would - but more on that later, I think. It might also just be difficult to explain the idea of "infinitely close but not actually touching" to a non-native speaker of English. Oops. In either case, after the first few examples they seemed to get it pretty well. But then we worked on sin(x) and they didn't know what that looked like, and then I got very worried. But I tried to control my anxiety for the time being.

[Concerning the beginner's mindset: I think that I'm pretty good at explaining how things fit into a bigger system (at least in English?) and I feel like that should be an effective way to learn for most kids. Like, instead of memorizing the sine of every angle from 0 to 360 in the unit circle, just understand that the unit circle is the outcome of a single fact that sine() is the y-component of said argument... like I said, maybe it's best in English. But Mike also said that due to gaps in their math education and also a systematic lack of emphasis on understanding/critical thinking, my method might not fly so well]

After that, I went back to my room for a while to talk to some people back home, and then left at 10:00 to go teach music to the two girls who also come to my calculus class - the 11th grader and the one who already graduated. The one in 11th grade has been working on her favorite song, Arom Pel Bek Knea with me for about an hour a day for a week or two and is getting pretty fluid at it by now. She's played piano for a while but rarely has time to study due to the crazy schedule and location of all of her different schools. The older girl used to play a little bit of music a long time ago but says she's forgotten all of it, and I told her that I could teach her everything she needed to know in a few weeks if she could understand how it's a system, so we were working on that. Basically, trying to get her to understand chords and scales, how they work and how they are used. I've only had two hours to teach her so far, but she's done pretty okay at it. She said she wanted to play the same song as the other girl, and so she tried doing that, but her fingers weren't cooperating with her very much.

Later in the day I went back to the music room and just started playing Love, Selfish Love by Patrick Stump while that older student was watching and she just said, "I want to play that." The chords to that song were much easier - there were only three of them, and only one of them contained a black key - so she was able to pick it up a lot faster, and I think she liked that.

At lunch, I got more pineapple meat stuff, which I don't like too much, so I asked Mike if he thought I could trade it to the other kids and he was like, "Absolutely, are you kidding?" So I went to give it to them, and they all gathered around to ask for it, which made it a little bit difficult, so I just handed it to one of the slightly older students and asked them to please share, and then got some of their food in return, which was string beats and some spiced chicken, which was awesome, and in my opinion, much better than fruit meat.

Then I had some time to myself for a while, so I did some programming challenges from Project Euler, and I think finished a few of them in a short time, which is always a nice confidence booster.

I think the power was out, so I decided I would go to the post office and pick up some stuff that was delivered, specifically two packages from Emily U and her family. I didn't understand why, but they said that the charge total was "14500" and then wrote "14500" again so I'd have to pay "29000" and I thought they were trying to swindle me, but then I got there and realized that they had sent TWO huge packages. And yes, just so you know, you do have to pay to pick up mail in Cambodia. And that's in riel, so 29000 = $7.25. I came back home to open them and they were FULL of markers/crayons/colored pencils and more books than I thought could possibly fit into two boxes of that size. Like, well over a hundred books. So that was awesome. Most of the kids are on vacation to their hometowns/provinces right now, but they're going to be pumped when they get back - especially about the coloring stuff, they go crazy for that.

That also included some peppermint patties for me =)

After that I went to teach computer science, which used to have more kids, but then one moved away and some decided that it was too hard and/or that they'll never use it in real life, which I think is totally fine because honestly most people won't use computer science in their real life. But the two kids that still come to do it with me are interested in seeing if they could do it for a job/study it at university. Anyway, I was trying to get them to write a program that would 'translate' everything into a code, where the code was that each vowel would be turned into the vowel that comes next. So for example, "This is a code" would be turned into "Thos os e cudi." They got pretty close on their own and had most of the right ideas, but were kind of slipping on keeping their variables in track. Beyond that, they also made the mistake of not creating any temporary storage, which is incredibly important in computer science (and life!), and so I showed them a few examples of that real quick, and then it seemed like it made a lot more sense to them. Just as an example, I'll explain what happens and why it's important.

Say that you want to turn a -> e, e -> i, etc. Well, you can't do that all in one step in a computer, so just pretend that you'll change all of the "a" letters first. Let's say the code you want to translate starts out as AEIOU. Then after you're first step, you would get

EEIOU. Now you change all of the E letters to I. now you have

IIIOU. Now you change all the I letters to O.

OOOOU. Then O becomes U.

UUUUU. And finally, U becomes A.

AAAAA. Clearly something went wrong - we started with AEIOU, and instead of getting EIOUA like we wanted, we just turned everything into an A. What went wrong? Basically, we tried to do too much at one time without putting it off into a separate container first. Now imagine what would happen if you did this. Turn all the As into 1. Then the Es into 2. Keep doing that until U is 5. Then, change the 1s into E, 2s into I, 3s into O, etc. Then your progression would look like this:

AEIOU 1EIOU 12IOU 123OU 1234U 12345 E2345 EI345 EIO45 EIOU5 EIOUA

Then, before dinner, I installed some stuff on the older girl's computer that she asked about (Skype, etc.) and then went to play some basketball, which was fun, because it's an excuse to run around and I don't get to do that very often here. I guess I probably could run around more often, but the truth is that I only have so much patience for tag, especially when the kids don't play by the rules, which (to me) kills all the fun. I know I'm being a bit of a Scrooge or whatever, but oh well. The kids don't follow the rules in basketball either and I still like that.

At some point during the day I also went to go buy some water - I think that was right before playing basketball. Have I mentioned the water in Cambodia yet? First of all, I'm beginning to suspect that the sink water is clean. Secondly, it costs $1 for 20L of water. Could you imagine a deal like that in America? Also, that makes me even more incredulous that anyone would ever pay a dollar for a bottle of water. But maybe it's good that the price is so high and maybe then less people buy it in America. Anyway. I needed to change money because I only had a big bill, but the money changer's shop belong to the brother of our disciplinarian and kids hang out there all the time. When I stopped over, two of the girls who always hang out just outside my door were there, and so was Mike. They were trying to watch some music that they could dance to, but couldn't find any. The one girl - the one I wrote about first in my post about some of the kids - kept trying to get me to give her 500R to do Khmae dance for a minute, but I kept saying no, then she would dance and demand money, and she thought that was a lot of fun. It was pretty much the first time that she talked to me since I gave her a 0% on a homework in my math class for cheating, and I was kind of afraid she'd never talk to me again, so it was really nice to know that it wasn't going to be the case. The other girl that was there was the smartest student we have - and also the one that she cheated from - and she was also in a really giggly mood, which is kind of rare for her and was fun to see. Also, this weird guy who lives on our street walked by and touched my hand, which was a little weird, but I didn't mind. Then I went to pick up my water, and he scared the crap out of the first girl, who had walked onto the street to try to make me pay her again.

Later, when I came back to the orphanage, two of the kids who were in my math class asked me to teach them extra, which was awesome. We sat at the table right outside the door to my room and worked on simplifying algebra expression and then some easy equations where we solved for one variable, and they seemed to get it. The girl that was there is the one that I put up the picture of before (with the Ginzvi video) and is really bubbly and talkative. The boy is a bit more stoic but still a bit of a joker. At one point he made a joke to her along the lines of, "When I finish, I get to kiss you!" and that made her pretty mad at him. All the boys like her. She doesn't really like any of them.

When we were done, I went outside to the big whiteboard on the boy's side floor and saw that my oldest girl math student was teaching another one of the boys who used to go to math class with me, and also saw that he had bought a copy of the book for advanced students that I had given to that girl I mentioned above, the smartest girl who was in a rare giggly mood. I bought it for her because she is so smart and academic that I thought she might actually find it fun. The boy that bought it is not so serious of a student, from what I can tell, but I guess that he really wants to pass the 9th grade exam. I should mention - the book is written with Khmea letters but "English" numbers - the way that all math is done in Cambodia - and it's pretty damn hard. As in, it's more like the problems you'd see on a high school math contest than an end-of-year exam for a 9th grader.

I was really happy that the kids asked me to study and also that the boy had gone to get a copy of that book for himself, so I went and got all the kids ice cream. I wanted to get them the good ice cream from the woman on the north side of the road, but she had already closed for the day, so I went to the Chinese guy on the south side of the road, who doesn't sell anything quite as big or good as the woman does (but it's cheaper). I asked a question to the guy at the store when I was there, and a girl about my age who was standing there was caught off-guard and said something to the effect of, "Oh wow, you speak a lot of Khmae!" I told her what I usually tell people - I can speak much better than I can listen and all that - and I'm sure she could tell from my construction of that sentence exactly how not-good at Khmae I am. But anyway, we talked for a minute or so in Khmaeglish, and that was cool. I think she is a student somewhere around here, judging from the fact that she was in a school uniform, but I don't know where, and that also was strange because schools usually don't require a uniform for classes at night.

Finally, when I came back and was done talking to the kids who were doing math, I came back to the area right outside my room and saw that the two girls from the money-changer store earlier were playing a game, so I played with them. It's a not-so-interesting Khmae game where you put out a mat divided into six squares with a different animal in each (or a pot) and then you pick one or two. Then someone rolls three dice and you see if you picked anything that matches. Then, based on picking the animal that comes up or not, you can either hit or be hit up to four times on a turn. You're supposed to play for money. Anyway, there were only a few kids around so I got some peppermint patties to share with them all, and they seemed to really like them.

That was basically all. So yeah, that's what a normal day is kind of like here. Well, a nice normal day.

Peace out.

Entrance Exams

So a lot of people think that just because Cambodia is basically an impoverished third-world country with a pretty low literacy rate, its schools must be useless as well. Well, other than the fact that people cheat often, please allow me to completely disillusion you of that notion. Here's a problem from a college entrance exam that one of my students is taking this morning, which is similar to problems you find on the national high school exam, which you must pass to graduate:

Try to find the value of x without using WolframAlpha or some other CAS. Think you've got what it takes to get in to college in Cambodia?

Peace out.

Vann Nath

If you want to learn some more incredible stuff about Cambodia's modern culture, you should check out this article about Vann Nath.

[Click for full size]

Peace out.

EGBOK

Today I came to lunch a little bit late because I was teaching one kid music upstairs, and then I wanted to stay and play after they left, and ended up staying fifteen minutes past lunch started. By the time I got downstairs to eat, Mike was pretty much almost done, although he did talk a little bit about The Wire, which he started watching recently and has gotten really into. But he ate much much faster than usual because one of our students, a boy in maybe 9th or 10th grade, is leaving our orphanage to go to another branch of the organization. Basically, he decided that he doesn't want to go to high school and college, so instead he's going to a kind of brother-org of ours called EGBOK that teaches kids English and hospitality professions and helps them find jobs in hotels, restaurants, etc. Mike had to take him to the spot he was being picked up, and needed to leave at about 11:30.

I finished eating maybe five minutes after I sat down, and without Mike to talk to, there wasn't much reason to stay. So I gave my extra food and rice to the kids at the tables near me - I still can never eat everything I'm given here - and then went over to the sink to wash my spoon. While I was, I noticed a few kids standing near the kitchen door, and usually I just look and smile and say hello when I see people, so I turned my head to do that, but then saw that one of the girls was crying very obviously, and so was her best friend standing right near her. I had no idea what it was about. I wondered if it was because one of them did very well on a math test last night and the other one night quite as well, but I then I decided that was probably not it, and wondered if I could ask someone what was wrong.

Before going back to my room to put my spoon and water bottle away, I walked over to the boys' side of the orphanage, which is near the gate. I noticed that older boy who's leaving standing on the steps ready to leave with his bags, and he gave me a hug and said goodbye. I asked if he was excited, and he didn't answer. I asked again, he said, "Yes, very excited." I asked if he was sad, and he said, "Yes. But I am a boy." So you can't cry? "No."

He got on the back of Mike's moto, and I could smell the gasoline burning inside the engine. They put the bags on, too. I noticed the girl and her best friend in the background, watching, faces red. They didn't want to be seen anymore once Mike began to drive, and disappeared out of sight.

Peace out.

DAAAAAAAAAAANG!

Look at all this stuff I got!!!

Thanks, Mom and Dad!

Peace out.

Interwhat?

Sometimes things can be a little bit frustrating around here.

The internet is one of those things. Let me give a few examples.

Around the time of my mom's birthday, the internet had been down for a few days. Well, it turned out that it had been down for almost a week on the other side of the orphanage, but had only been useless on my side for about three days at this point. I was really hoping to use the internet so that the birthday gift for my mom wouldn't arrive over a week late, but, alas, I was out of luck.

I asked the tech guy here if could fix the internet. He said he would, he'd reset the routers, it should be fine, don't worry about it. The next day, the internet still didn't work. Mike tried resetting the router in the library himself to see if that did anything, but still nothing. I asked the tech guy the next day if anything was wrong, and he said no, but I heard through the grapevine that he suspected someone was stealing our internet wireless signals and thus might have changed the password. So I asked him if he changed the password, and he said no.

The next day, he told someone that the bill for the internet had not been paid yet, and that's why it wasn't working. But I noticed that the director of the orphanage was using the internet with no problem wired into his computer in the office, which makes absolutely no sense if you think you have a problem with the internet.

Finally fed up, I called the tech guy into the office and said, "Okay, he has internet there. We have internet. Reset this router." I pointed toward the router in the office. He unplugged it, plugged it in, repeated, reset, and then, magically, it worked.

If only he had done that days ago.

Once, later, in the library, we noticed that everyone's internet seemed to have uber-died. I mean, sometimes it dies, and leads you to the website of the router company, or the internet company, or something like that. But this time it was like giving us anti-internet. Anywho, I went to reset the router in the library just to see if that would fix the problem.

While there, I noticed that the ethernet slots on the back of the router were labelled as follows: 1, 2, 3, 4, and WAN. The ethernet cable was plugged into the port labelled "1." And I remembered that the most common error that I would get when using the internet was the router company website/splash page saying, "No ethernet cable connected to WAN port!" So I took the ethernet cable out of "1" and plugged it into "WAN." Everyone's internet worked again, and I haven't seen the "No ethernet cable connected to WAN port!" warning one time since then.

It's kind of funny that the person who did it wrong gets paid and the person who put it right has to pay just to live here. Oh well.

Peace out.

Ginzvi!

Okay, so we to Ginzvi on Sunday, and I knew it would be pretty cool so I made a video about it that night when I got back. It took me literally five days to upload it because the internet kept failing. That's another blog post to come shortly, I think. Anyway, if you want to see the video about Ginzvi, just click below:

[P.S.: This girl is one of my favorites. She's really funny and also super smart - she's skipping two grades this year because she's so out of the league of other kids in her grade. Also, she's totally adorable. THIS IS WHAT HUMAN BEINGS SHOULD LOOK LIKE. PLEASE TAKE NOTE, READERS.]

Peace out.