hi there

I know it's been a while since my last post, and I realize I lied about “elaborating” on some of the happenings I mentioned in it. However, I've been pretty busy lately, and the free time I get, I try to spend with friends, or just catching up on my Bible reading, or any other book I happen to be reading at the moment.

As I type this, I am on a flight to California due to work. I am hoping this will be the last trip I make in a minute, since I've been flying out pretty much every week this year, and for the most part of late last year. Don't get me wrong – I really like California, but I think I'm about ready to call it a day, and stay in Dallas. All this travel has had me miss out on church during the week, and I'm very much behind in my Vietnamese class, which I think I may end up taking in the summer if this keeps up.

On the positive side, I'm usually back in Dallas in time for my salsa class with the kids on Fridays, and I'm also able to go to church, and to teach English on Sundays. AND I get to hang out with friends, if only for a couple hours. Another positive, which I thank God for, is that I still have a job.

The bad part about not posting in a long while is that I have much to tell, so posts end up being really long. For that I apologize.

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I spent the Christmas holidays with my family in Atlanta. It was good to see my family - especially my mom - again. It was also pretty awesome to eat Puerto Rican food again, especially without having to cook it myself, or pay for it. I failed to go to church while I was in Atlanta, but I was glad that my family prepared a little Christmas program on “Noche Buena” (December 24^th). We sang some Puerto Rican Christmas carols, had prayer and even some Bible reading. It was great. I don't think I'd had such an experience with my family since I became Christian.

More recently, I attended dragon dance performances for the Chinese/Vietnamese Lunar New Year celebrations. They were pretty cool, although I don't understand the symbolism/story behind it. The one that threw me off was one where there were firecrackers exploding, and it seemed like the dragons were kinda following the firecrackers as they went. I also don't understand the boy with the monkey face with the staff, or the little dude with the fan. I guess I should look it up. -_-

Anyway, if you remember from my last post, I participated in a fashion show late last year for the Vietnamese community. Well, they had another one, but this time it was for their Lunar New Year celebrations. It went great. There were more people participating this time around (five guys as opposed to three, and what seemed like a lot more girls too). The father of a now friend of mine was taking pictures, and happened to take a pretty good one of me (in my opinion anyway). Check it out:

In addition to the fashion show, I was asked to put together a salsa performance for that day. I was to teach two girls and a guy how to dance. With two weeks notice. Needless to say, it was hard, but we pulled through. I taught them some basic steps/moves, and we simply repeated some of them at the same time (so it looked like we were doing the same thing). Had this been in Puerto Rico, I would have really freaked out, since even though not everyone knows how to salsa dance, we have all been exposed to it at least at some point. On this one, I really banked on the thought that the Vietnamese people in attendance had not been exposed to it at all, and so they wouldn't know if we did good or not. ;-) However, I later learned that I was wrong, and some people there did know how to salsa dance. Oh well. Anyway, my friends were there to cheer us on (you guys are awesome), and they managed to record the performance on camera. It's up on YouTube somewhere now, haha.

I mentioned that I am typing this on an airplane on my way to California, which means that I now have a laptop (netbook, to be exact). I got the Asus EEE PC 1000H. It's pretty sweet. It's red, and has little flower drawings on it. You might be making fun of me as you read this, but the first reaction I got out of a girl as I showed it to her was “oh, that's cute!”, which was totally awesome. I figure it might make for a good conversation starter at Starbucks or wherever. ;-) Before getting this laptop though, I tried Sylvania's gOS netbook, which I found online for $240. It's pretty light, with decent battery life and whatnot. However, I could not get the video drivers properly installed/configured on any of the operating systems I tried, and YouTube was really choppy. Also, the wireless NIC had very bad reception, at least in my room. I read the computer is decent if you install Windows XP on it, but that kind of defeats the purpose of buying such a cheap computer (might as well pay extra for a better computer with XP already on it). To make a long story short: I returned it and got the Asus.

Even though I teach it, I find that I'm still learning English with every passing day. That said, I have a story that I think you will find interesting, regarding English muffins. Stay tuned. I promise my next post won't be eleven months from now.

busy bee

I realize I haven't posted in a while, sorry. I've been real busy these past few months, and even though I've had time to post, I just dreaded the act of doing it out of fear of posting a 10-page long entry. What I'll do instead is give a quick summary of the happenings in my life since I last posted, and over the next few days I'll be posting an entry for events I think would be interesting for you to read more about (unless I talk about them enough on this post).

Let's see. I was baptized (by immersion) in October. I felt great doing it - people would ask my WHY I hadn't done it before, but better late than never I guess. It was a pretty fun weekend too - my mom came to visit (to witness the baptism), and I was able to treat her to a nice hotel room and take her to pretty decent restaurants. I could tell she is happy to see I'm doing well over here, which in turn makes me glad. I give full credit to God on that one though (thank you).

So my friends and I dressed up for Halloween. It was fun - my first time actually dressing up since I was a kid. Influenced, I dressed up as a stereotypical, country-side Vietnamese guy. It was funny to me and my friends, but we didn't go to where Vietnamese people were, so not very many people got the joke. Oh well. We ended up going salsa dancing by the end of the night, which was cool because we got to dance all dressed up. I never thought dancing with a witch would be fun.

I again thank God for all the good times. Aside from teaching salsa dancing to my 3rd and 4th grade students, I am now also an English as a Second Language (ESL) teacher in the Vietnamese Community Center nearby work. I teach mostly older people, and I really enjoy it. They are very nice, and they work hard to improve their English. The weekend following Thanksgiving Day, they even set up a potluck for the class. It was awesome to get to hang out with them. Some of my students are really good cooks, too. :-)

What else. Oh, I was part of a fashion show. Yes. For a fundraiser organized by the Vietnamese community. Yes. It was definitely a new experience. I was all sorts of nervous, but ended up doing good. I got to hang out with the girls from the fashion show backstage - and also with two well-known Vietnamese artists (singers). Also, I should mention that I also participated in the opening ceremony, which involved singing the Vietnamese anthem. Yes.

More recently, we made a trip down to San Antonio, TX to go to this year's Puerto Rican festival. It was pretty fun. We ate lots of food and danced a lot. They put on some shows displaying old school Puerto Rican dances like bomba, plena, danzon, and others. It was cool. Long drive though~

Even more recently, I started teaching salsa dancing to more people. One of which won the Miss Teen pageant some time ago (Yes, I had to mention it. Ahem.). It's pretty fun. I'm not advanced at salsa dancing by any means, but I figure if I can teach people enough so that they can go out and have fun, and maybe even continue learning elsewhere, then why not.


That's all I remember for now. Some more events are coming up as the year comes to an end, so I'll try not being as lazy this time, and keep you posted. God bless.