the ills.

Oh man. I've been really careful with what I eat and drink here. You know there's always that fear when visiting another country that you might get terribly sick from eating bad fish, drinking bad water, or coming in contact with some bad germs... Right now, my stomach is feeling tore up. It's doing that rumbling thing and that tightening thing. Must've been something I ingested.

Today was a tough day for me. I was just so doggone tired. (sidetrip: I've never used the phrase "doggone" in my life until just now.) My first class of the day was at 11am. I woke up at about 7am, but I was barely able to lift my head off the pillow. I went back to sleep. Luckily for me, I woke up at 9:40am. this gave me an hour and 20 minutes to get to class on time. (sidetrip: being on time is pretty important at our school. Too many tardies and you might find yourself failing the class. They even have a bell system here (sidetrip within a sidetrip: their bell system is no ordinary bell system. The first bell is some classical song... i forget which. But the second bell is 20 seconds of the star wars theme).) I showered, downed a pb&j, some juice and headed out the door to catch a jeep. I got to school on time.

In class, I was dead tired. This is my fourth week of school now and today was the first time I laid my head on my desk. Now in High School I actually had a reputation for sleeping in class... most of that is because Dr. Roland pretty much told all his classes about me. I wasn't going to keep that reputation in college... but today was just so hard. The desk was calling. The room was so hot. I had to. Besides, it's only algebra. psh. that stuff is cake. We're doing synthetic division. Wow. It's pretty much a repeater class. 90% of the students in there have failed algebra at least once already. So it's going ssslllooowww. (for mom: I didn't sleep in class though. I just laid my head down.)

It pretty much continued like that for the rest of the day. My classes just seemed to breeze by. My marketing class was ok. The teacher got pretty mad because most of the students didn't have a copy of the next lesson. Me included. (sidetrip: It's not customary for students to buy textbooks. They can and it's preferred, but pretty much all of the textbooks are availible for copying) After class, some of my groupmates and I went around campus looking for a projector that we could reserve for our presentation that was supposed to be this Thursday. But by the grace of God, all the projectors were already reserved so we had to postpone our presentation to next Tuesday. Score.

After that class I took another jeep and headed to National Bookstore located in Gaisano Mall (one of many malls in Davao) to buy a book on Entrepreneurship (that is one of the most interestingly spelled words). Thinking that this place was called National Bookstore, I expected there to be a lot of books like Barnes and Noble. I was surprised to find that they sold more calculators, stationary, school supplies, and photo albums than they did books. They did have the newest edition of Harry Potter though. I'm not a big fan of the series, but while I was there I had the strangest desire to actually read one of the books. I asked if they had a copy of the first one Harry Potter and the Sorcerrer's Stone, but they did not. I don't know if that was an unfortunate or fortunate thing for me. I don't know if I want to be caught up in the Harry Potter hype.

I took a taxi back to school because I had no clue how to get back by jeep. I arrived just in time for my Entrepreneurship class... which is one of my favorite classes. My classmates are pretty darn hillarious. The teacher is also very interesting and also funny at times... We were coming up with some business ideas and some were pretty funny. Computers, drug trafficing, restaurants, day care centers, prostitution, and many more came up. We laugh alot in that class.

Now I'm back at Kaloi's internet cafe... which will here on out be referred to as KIC. It's raining pretty hardcore. Rain in tagalog is "Ulan". Remember. Think of spanish vowels. Ah Ey Ee Oh Oo. Phonetically, rain in tagalog is "oolahn".

Alrighty, well there's not much more to talk about today. This blog is already pretty darn long. As I sit here and sip my ice tea (which is pretty much the most popular drink here), I bid you all adieu.

That's French.
Cy