i had a leftover slice of pizza for breakfast, then for lunch i went across the street to zoe's to get some chinese food, not ready to cook anything just yet. i ordered the general gao's chicken, a staple of chinese takeout cuisine. the waitress, whom i've seen before on many occasions, didn't recognize me for some reason, and asked where i was from, and said i looked japanese before i could even answer. "no," i answered, "i live across the street, i'm from taiwan, but i've lived in the US for a long time." funny, back at home, and i'm still answering the most commonly question people ask me in southeast asia. i went home then came back 10 minutes to pick up my order. my lunch cost only $5.50 but it seemed incredibly expensive. that's 88,000 dong, or 5500 kyat, i would've never paid that much for food.

woke up sneezing and with a runny nose, must've caught something on the way back, a 40 hour long plane trip will do that to you sometimes. it's not that bad, i have the time to slowly nurse myself back to health, and better to get sick now that my trip is over than fight the cold while still traveling. the only other time i've been sick since february was when i was in japan during the winter, but the symptoms quickly disappeared once i arrived in the tropical warmth of taipei.

in the middle of the afternoon i went with julie into boston city hall for the annual scooper bowl, where for $7 you can sample the latest offerings from various local ice cream vendors. most of the stuff was new flavors, a lot of baseball-themed ice creams (e.g. "green monster"), but i found them to be sort of gimmicky. i'm more of a traditionalist, give me just vanilla, or just coffee, or maybe sometimes chocolate. i don't need the peanut butter swirl with the bits of chocolate crunch and cookie dough fudge. there were a lot of children there, natch, with sticky fingers and face full of ice cream, but through some miracle i escaped without getting any ice cream on me.

julie and i wandered the waterfront a little bit on this gorgeous day, before leaving the city for the impromptu former screen house employee gathering that was taking place this evening. there was some confusion as to where it was being held: eric told me john harvard, but told julie it was at the cambridge brewery in kendall square. we decided to go to john harvard, which turned out to be the right venue when we met elias and dan at the train platform, going to the same place. we found eric already waiting for us at john harvard, and jared and newly-moved-back-into-boston tim showed up soon afterwards as well. the story that gets told everytime and that nobody seems to be tired of hearing is that of christine the transgender programmer. i ordered a root beer and a chicken pot pie ($15 after taxes and tip), and when it came time to go home, i went with tim who also gave rides to julie and dan, all living around the same area in the somerville-cambridge line.

i watched television in my bedroom and promptly fell asleep. i woke up hours later, disoriented, once again having problems remembering where i was. i got up to turn off the television, and flipping through the channels, i was surprised to hear so many english-speaking programs, and then saw a "boston WLVI" logo at the corner of the screen. "boy, that's weird, this place gets channels from boston?" that's when i realized i was actually at home.