Tom Is A Blog Neglector This is a great site, it's not like I'll update it or anything.

Mall

So it was raining pretty heavily today and I noticed that my cell phone lost it's digital signal (I couldn't send or receive text messages and the like.)  The rain stopped and the digital signal returned.  Coincidence? Hmmm.  Could it be that the rain affects the quality of their cell signal? Or is it just because I'm a foreigner with a foreign phone connected to their network? (My phone says "Yes Optus" on the screen where it usually says "Cingular")

The clock has been wrong on my phone since I got here.  It has California time.  So in order to find out what time it is here, I add three hours to the time on my phone (to make it eastern standard time) then I add 14 hours to that (just add two hours and flip the am to pm or vice versa, since I'm here and I know if it's day or night).  So I guess I could just add 5 hours and flip the am/pm.  it's essentially what I'm actually doing, I'm just making it long and tedious.  I could just go buy a cheap watch.  Or not worry about it.  I mean, where do I have to be? What do I care what time it is?

Yesterday I took a walk in the opposite direction than I usually go.  I usually walk towards the harbor and the city, but I'm sick of all the asian stores and restaurants etc. (When I say 'asian' I mean Chinese, Japanese, Thai, Korean, all those languages where you draw pictures instead of letters). I live a few blocks from Chinatown so all the closest stores are in Chinatown, and to get to anything I want to see, I have to walk through Chinatown.  It's fine and I have no problem with that, but I'm just sick of looking at it.  All the stores are either a "Sparkly" store (full of sparkly things like necklaces or gold trinkets or cut glass etc), or a convenience store (selling cold drinks and international phone cards), or an internet cafe, or an over-stocked clothing or shoe store, or a cd/dvd store (with bands and movies I never heard of, and cd and movie covers that I can't read), or some flavor of asian restaurant or take out place with whole ducks with their heads still attached in the windows.  That's all I ever see. Lol.  So I wanted to know what was in the OTHER direction, AWAY from Chinatown.

So anyway, I walked down a few blocks and I found a big mall! With movie theaters, and a food court with food I will eat!  And none of the food had a head still attached! And there were stores I would go into! And they have a Kmart!  A freakin' real live Kmart!  They are getting a Target there too! (I don't know how well that will go having a Kmart and a Target in the same mall).  This mall was the closest thing to being at a mall at home.  Most of the "malls" I have seen so far have been small and full of crappy stores (see my store descriptions above) and kinda dingy.  They are kind of like the old Bizarre was at home. The malls have had terrible food courts too.  All asian food and fish. Terrible. Gag. So I was really excited and happy to find this mall.