Today's Independence Day!

108 years ago today, Gen. Emilio Aguinaldo waved the Philippine flag on his balcony in Kawit, Cavite to mark the end of the Spanish occupation. I just thought I'd remind everyone since I almost forgot myself. And I still haven't finished reading El Filibusterismo. Is it just me or is Noli really more interesting?

It turns out that my foreign expert certificate will expire on the 26th, not the 29th. Thus, I have only two more weeks before my independence. My headmaster has been trying to convince me to renew my contract, or at least work parttime in his school. I would be very likely to say no but it's nice to have options.

My friend Troy who lives in Beijing has very generously offered the spare room in his house while I look for a job. *cartwheels. I won't be homeless! I won't be homeless! Independence from the fear of being homeless! I took it too far, right? Anyway, let's hope that I won't be jobless for long. Never mind that I've never met Troy in person. Sometimes, you just have to trust people. Uh, Nuna, can you leave that piece of information out if you plan to tell Akoh about this?

My laptop, which is still nameless by the way (we can take a poll here), still cannot connect to the internet. I have at least three people trying to solve it, none of them successful yet. After they've made dozens of phonecalls, these are their solutions: 

1. Andy1 wants us to go back to Shenyang and have the people there fix it. I think he feels personally responsible for it because he was with me when I bought it and he was the one making the negotiations and whatnots. Plus he also assured me that it would be easy to download MSOffice in English, assuming of course that we have an internet connection.

2. Edward wants me to take it to his house, try to use his internet connection and then from there he'll try to figure out what's wrong with it. He has tried fixing it in my house but failed.  Oops, he just called. Said he'll be here in about an hour. Him and a solution for this, I hope.(Which reminds me, there should be more stories about Edward.)

3. Lynn wants me to remember or try to find out a number used to connect to the internet from this house. This is a long and complicated story. Nobody knows this number. Nobody remembers this number. She said then maybe I can ask Edward if he knows anyone from the internet company so we can find out the number because that's the only way they'll start moving. This is one reason why I have to improve my Chinese. So I can start yelling at stupid and lazy people working at internet companies who refuse to cooperate in making my life better. (Not complaining here. My life's good but it could always get better.)

4. Piao, my student, wants to come to my house and install a software that can translate Chinese into English. That would be interesting. Except that I can't bring myself to be excited about it yet because there's a bigger problem to be solved.

If more people know about my new computer, I suspect more people would come up with what they think I should do with it. Who would've thought owning a laptop in China would be so complicated?