My map!

So the most exciting news of today is that I put my map up.  It came earlier this week via DHL, but I couldn't pick it up until yesterday after work, and just got it up on the wall.  It's enormous - 4'x6' - and I expect to spend many hours staring at it while I'm here.  Hopefully my geography will improve as a result.  Now I just need a map of my surrounding area. I've been trying to find one that would show a better close up of the South China Sea and all the islands surrounding us, but no luck yet.

This morning I received an email from my coworker, Chris, who came with us to see the laser show last night.  He shared some photos from the show with us and I thought I'd include them a day late since my video did not turn out as well as I'd hoped.  The top shot is his, the bottom is mine.

So today I slept in, and then Beth and I got lunch together and worked on lesson plans, then I ran a few errands and went to mass.  This time the regular priest was back and he's Irish, with a pretty strong accent.  Enough so that I had trouble understanding him a few times.  Made me wonder if the Chinese parishioners have trouble.  Same crazy folky music that was great and yet somehow surreal.  I wish I could think of a good way to describe it.  Maybe someday I'll try to secretly tape some.  :)  At 7, our neighbor and officemate, Amanda, came over and basically cooked dinner for us.  We were supposed to be helping, but that mostly amounted to chopping stuff up and watching her.  We had chicken, potatoes, fish, rice and spinach.  Miranda joined us as well and she brought ice cream and dragon eye fruit for dessert.  Thanks ladies!

The preparations

The steamed fish - see how the eyeballs popped out!

And speaking of eyeballs - Beth modeling the dragon eye fruit.