Novelty

My day pretty much started at gym time. Which is an unusual thing for me to say. The rest of my day was pretty good too: I wore the shirt that I did just because I wanted to, my literature teacher shortened the test, I talked about a hypothetical situation, and I had pizza for lunch. But to have my day start at gym...now that is quite something. Gym is....well, let's just say..."It was hard for me....with [gym]." (aaaaaaaaannnnnnnnndddddd, if you haven't seen the movie, you don't get it. Even if you have seen the movie, you still might not get it, because, this is a really random place to put this quote). Gym is usually my least favorite thing of the day. One can be having the greatest day ever, and then, one (me) has tended to feel deflated at least for a second when one realizes that gym comes next. First of all, it involves changing out of the cute Friday outfit you picked out and getting sweaty. Secondly, it involves running. As much as I wish I did, I don't really, deep down, like to run. d

Let me here inform you of another part of the Eagles' Wings gym experience: the girls (for the most part -- Leah always does awesome and a few others aren't so bad) are HORRIBLE at basketball (and pretty much every other sport we play). And when I say HORRIBLE, I say it consciously. None of these insipid phrases: "We're not the best at it" or "it's just not our thing" or "the basketball is too red to play with." No -- we stink. We stink to high heaven and we stink some more! While it may not produce an exempliary excercise nor a very athletic experience, it does often create at least some level of hilarity (and a certain kind of competitiveness). Case and point.
I think we got at least half of our excercise from laughing so hard. We have basically no concept of what a foul is: this results in a pulling fight over the ball every two minutes. If you don't know what a pulling fight is, imagine a ball that is about 7 inches across, being held by the hands of five girls who are either pulling on it with all of their weight or just trying to hold on for dear life so that maybe their team can get the ball. Oh! and then add in girls around the outside poking and tickling those holding onto the ball to try and get them to let go.

In this game, I had the experience of being crawled over by someone who in the holding-on-for-dear-life scenario and was being pulled by someone who was in the desperate pull-with-everything-I've-got scenario. Plus, there was another time when I ended up sitting on the floor with both my hands and my chin on the ball (yes, that picture of me with two hands on a ball that I am holding underneath my chin is true), trying to keep it from going into enemy hands. I do believe we succeeded for at least a few seconds that time.

Oh, plus, if you didn't notice, we are playing basketball with a football. Actually, the correct term for the game is "Speedball". You're supposed to dribble by throwing the ball up and catching it as you move along, instead of bouncing it on the ground. This worked well for Amy, who basically glided along the floor and you didn't even realize that she had the ball. I, on the other hand, looked more like a giraffe bouncing a ball on its nose while wearing a neck brace.

I laughed really hard.

Amy, Noemi, Mr. Pan and I had already planned to do something fun tonight. We had thought of going to the beach and having a picnic dinner and bringing a guitar, but it was going to rain and it was cold so we had to think of a new plan. While waiting for Noemi to finish work (aftercare at school), the rest of us entertained ourselves by shooting rubber-bands at one another...

I really like this picture...they thought it was strange, but I think it is wonderfully candid.

If you look closely, you can see that in the following picture, the rubber-band is in motion. Yay for fast shutter speeds!

Once Noemi came, we took a self-portrait:

We spent some time trying to decide what to do. I didn't want to come straight home just to hang out here: I am usually somewhere in the background (or in my brain...) piping up about having some sort of random adventure. That or going downtown. =) Amy was just trying to give some random example of a random thing to do and suggested Egyptian food. So, we looked a place up.

Once we got there, though, we weren't so sure. The place was EMPTY. Empty, except for the four wait-staff staring at us through the windows wondering if we were going to come in. When we finally did walk through the door, the lady wanted know if we were there just to eat or for hookah...we restrained ourselves and opted for the eating answer. It still all felt kinda weird, though, so we decided to just next door to "Big Pho". [I'm told it's pronounced with a long "u" instead of "o"]. Pho is soup, I guess -- it was a Korean place. Ha! Random adventures and spontaneity -- be careful what you wish for or you might just end up with some squid in your mouth

investigating the strangeness

Mr. Pan promptly placed a piece of squid in Amy's bowl

He was fine...not traumatized at all

The soup we got had squid, shrimp, fish balls, crab (even though it may have been fake), and a mussel. I tried squid - you have to chew it for a long time...it didn't really taste like much. I'm totally open to trying calamari now. I also tried the fake crab...I'm not sure whether I should be proud of it or not, since it was fake and all. Fish balls: they looked more like matzo balls or something -- I was kind of scared, even though Mr. Pan tried to assure me, "They're just fish balls. We eat them all the time." This was said in a very non-chalant voice, to which I responded: "You make it sound like it's normal. That's not normal for me" or something like that. It was probably the hardest thing there for me to eat. I had shrimp for the first time!!!! Amy and Mr. Pan have thought that it is kinda weird that I had never had shrimp. I like to say that I have had it unintentionally, such as accidentally in an egg roll, but I never actually wanted to have it. This time, though, I tried it (click).

Me eating squid:

It was Noemi's first time trying shrimp as well...she didn't like it:

I didn't like it so much either:

Here's Amy eating a weird squid.

So we finished off our weird-eating time (though it was SUPER fun) and went to my house and played Taboo, where I made everyone laugh with my assumption that the opposite of "single" is "married." Don't you agree???