Ian and I had a great night out last night. We had dinner at the vegetarian Buddhist place we love with Matt, an expat and new friend who lives in the same complex as we do (but up the hill, the complex is huge) and then we went over to Hulu Bar to celebrate Kathryn's birthday (one of our new friends from the Dubious Movie nights). There was a small group of us there (many of the same people that attend the movie nights). We played a couple of games (namely, "Jungle Speed" and "Celebrity") that I'd never played before and it was a fantastic time.
I've been asking Ian to write about this interesting expat we met at Starbucks a few days ago. He hasn't, so I'll give you an abridged version. His name is Eddie (from Atlanta, originally). He walked up to us and asked us where we're from and when we told him "Portland," his response was that there's a lovely truck stop there. There is a nice one, actually, but it's not what I would call out about our fair city. Turns out, he owned a trucking business, but sold everything, put his money in various off-shore accounts and bailed when "Obama became president." He now runs an English school in an adjacent city. We spent about an hour with him and his wife, who happens to be Chinese, at a table and the conversation weaved from me defending our TEFL certificates (our TEFLs are not your average TEFL), to politics (Eddie, a self-proclaimed Southern Democrat who is extremely fiscally conservative but also says he is socially liberal, believes the states should stop "fucking the rich" and turn to a national sales tax instead and that Obama hasn't done enough for "brothers" and has, instead "fucked them over." It's worth noting that Eddie is a white man.) He was very friendly, but, as you can imagine, it was tough to get a word in edge-wise. The most interesting thing that's ever happened to me at a Starbucks, by far.
Today is low key. The air is terrible and it's my first day off after a week of early (-ish, next week is earlier) morning classes, so I allowed myself to sleep until 10. That's quite late for me, so it was great. I am really enjoying my classes. Especially New Parade, which I have again right now. I wish all my classes were New Parades (to refresh your memory, New Parade classes are smaller and I get to set the curriculum [based upon the outline from the book, of course] much more than I do in Sticker or Interchange classes). Here are a couple of photos from the end of Fall and beginning of Winter classes