Lovely Day

43 degrees Fahrenheit, beautiful blue sky and bright sun, sitting on the warm mulch by a tree just outside of Strickland hall. It's very comfortable with a three-quarter length shirt on. If everyday could be like today, I'd be a very happy girl...

I ordered MooKure, Southern Thai Curry, from Ju. It was quite spicy, as the lowest it can be made is an 8/10 on the Thai scale. But I loved it, and the rice and fried egg helped take it down to a reasonable heat index.

It looked a bit like this, but with less liquid:


Ju is an amazing cook. I think I'm going to go into Thai withdrawal once she leaves... ;_;

Thai Thai Thai

Today I went over to Kanchana and Chaowalit's (called, inexplicably, Ju and Prite). They are really nice. :D

We made Pad Thai, which was delicious, and then we sat around and talked for a while. It turns out that, mostly through video games, Prite and I have a lot in common. They also tried to teach me a little bit of Thai.

I have no real idea why, but I've decided to eschew learning random phrases in favour of learning the bona fide basics of the language, which is usually a bad choice, because I'll end up knowing (theoretically) quite a bit about the grammar, history, etc of the language, without really being able to use hardly any of it. Which will make me frustrated, because people will assume I just know a few phrases, when really I know so much more that can't easily be expressed!

But I pick my own poison.

The first tricky thing is tones. I can feel that I'm about halfway (and it hasn't all been smiles and giggles, either) to understanding tones in a very basic, textbook sense. Once I get that, then I can start trying to put them in words. And then in sentences. Oh, god.

If someone says a word to me with a tone, I can parrot it back at them pretty well. But then, ask me to say a word they said earlier, and I've forgotten the tone. My brain just isn't hard wired to consider the tone as a fundamental element of the word meaning.

I guess the good news is that if I ever get the hang of this, it will be much easier to deal with other tone languages. Which is, of course, why I'm putting myself through this.

I like this website:

http://www.fonetiks.org/sou7th.html

Somehow having each tone said twice, with two different words, helps to reinforce it. Still, it's hard... and even just practicing the tones in isolation makes it's own difficulties.

For example, I am using 'maa' to work with. Maa with high tone means horse, with rising tone means dog. So not only do I have to recognize what someone says as (or produce) one of those two tones, I have to remember whether that tone is the rising or the high tone, and which one of those two corresponds with horse and which one corresponds with dog. If I falter at any one of these steps, I am wrong wrong wrong, as wrong as if I had failed at all three. (But terribly, not if I had failed at two. Let's not talk about that. ;))

Potluck

I was thinking about making cream cheese swirl brownies, but I didn't have a brownie pan, so I was just lazy and made some slice and bake cookies instead. My pan was still small, though, so I had to make one batch and then, right as I was about to put in the second, the British girls came down to bake a cake for the same event. That's fine, because they had a lot of organizing and stirring to do before they would need the oven, so I hurried and put in another pan of cookies. But around the same time that the timer would have gone off, they started using the blender... And a few minutes later I though, "What happened to the timer...?" Sure enough, the cookies were burnt. Not horribly burnt, mind you, but I didn't want to take them to the potluck, so I fed them to my friends at Laws, who loved them. And Tomomi was so sweet, she washed all of the dishes because she ate one of the cookies! :D

Later Pai picked me up and we left. I found out that Kanchana goes by Ju, and Chaowalit goes by Pai. XD It finally makes sense now! I knew I couldn't be pronouncing Kanchana THAT badly...

"Ju" made a delicious soup for the party. It was a Thai mushroom-chicken type soup. They warned me that it was spicy, but it was that kind of spicy that is warm and fine in your mouth, and then burns as you swallow. Which is actually the kind I prefer, because the flavour seems to be changing as you eat it. It's a really warm feeling soup. I kept getting more and more tiny bowls of it. The Serbian dessert (some sort of egg, cream, sugar concoction) was also really good.

I met a lot of people at the party, although I found out that most of them are a lot older than me. It's funny, how ordinary people walking down the street mistake me for being quite young, but at a party I always wind up talking to upperclassmen or graduate students. I met a senior here named Austin Coates who studies Journalism and spent the last semester 'at sea' - he's spent a pair of days almost everywhere, including South Africa and with a host family in India. So he's definitely got some cool stories. His plan for next year is to drive the Wienermobile... okay... XD

I met Mammajamma Jess Fischer at last. It turns out that it is her apartment where most of the parties are held. (Austin Coates lives there too) I also (finally) met the Danish girl. But more on that later. ;)