Right now I
am in the process of relocation, and there was a 24-hour gap between checking
out of Motel 6 and having a guy from Cox coming over to install the Internet in
my new apartment. (The Motel 6 in Oklahoma City has fantastic and free
Internet, by the way; it’s far superior to the one in San Jose whose paid
Internet service is painfully crappy.) Not having Internet access this long was
a challenge to me no doubt, but Challenge Accepted!!!
When facing
some hardship, of course the first thing to do is to lament about it. So I
stared at my laptop screen and realized how sad Life was without the Internet.
More than half of the icons are Internet-based programs. I could care less of
what people said on Facebook for 24 hours, but giving up Internet entirely was
not fun. I needed to read the news and check emails; I wanted to look at YouTube;
I wanted to play video games. They all required Internet connections. Oh how
about going out to explore the new city? Let me see what places they have on
Google Map… oh wait.
So I read
the Bible my today’s portion. I was following the Bible reading plan I found
(previously!) online of going through the whole Bible in a year. The first 3
chapters in the book of Ezra were fine, just a lot of names but I’m sure
they’re important. Then I jumped to James and read about how humility was
important. Being humble is such a tricky topic and maybe I’ll write about it
some time.
I prepared
lunch, and it wasn’t anything fancy at all. Since I just moved in, I wasn’t
really in the mood to cook so it was only something out of a box. But when
Arwen asked me what I had, I said, “steak, smashed potatoes, and corns”. Trust
me, it wasn’t as good as it sounds.
Luckily, I
had input the addresses of a Barnes & Noble in town and a Vietnamese
supermarket in my GPS, so I could actually go outside and check those two out.
I love bookstores, and if Borders were still around I would go there all the
time. Barnes & Noble is larger and even more fun. So I went there and did
whatever snow does in the summer… I mean, whatever a nerd does in a bookstore:
staring at book titles and feeling happy.
Another
place I went to was a Vietnamese supermarket called Super Cao Nguyen. I found
it online, and it’s supposed to be the biggest Asian market in town (how cool
is that?). It was really fun going in there. They have a large variety of food
and spices. They have good meat buns, “xôi” (sticky rice with chicken or pork),
“bánh chưng” (Vietnamese new year cake) and many other things! Here are some
pictures of what I got:
"Bánh bao" (meat bun)
Xôi gà (sticky rice with grilled chicken thigh)
Bánh chưng (Vietnamese rice cake)
Because this
is a Vietnamese store so besides Japanese, Korean, and Chinese stuff, they have
many Made-in-Vietnam goods to choose from. Here comes my patriotism! : ) Oh and
right next to the supermarket was a pho restaurant called Mr. Phở’s. It is one
of the most popular pho restaurants in Oklahoma City! (I didn’t go in because
of my habit not to go to a restaurant alone. Maybe I’d go when Arwen comes
visit and make a review on that.) But anyway, I got out of Super Cao Nguyen
with a lot of froze food and felt super excited (no pun intended!). So I went
home.
At one point
I watched The Hobbit: The Desolation of
Smaug on my laptop. (Luckily I didn’t need to use Internet for this.) I am
still amazed how Hollywood could muster 3 long movies out of a tiny little
children’s book. If J. R. R. Tolkien could see this he’d laugh so bad.
And of
course there was another thing that I did during this 24-hour period: I wrote
this blog post! Now I needed that Internet guy to come and install the thing so
that I can post this entry, didn’t I? Hopefully with this new life in Oklahoma
City, I would find many things to share and have the time to share them. Please
pray for me so that I’d live.
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