New Update

It's been a while so I thought I'd update.

On Friday Katy, Rachel, and I started a morning run together. I was really proud of myself because we ran for 20 minutes or so straight without stopping. I was sore the rest of the day, but it felt really good. It was still pretty warm on Friday, too, which makes me feel even better about it all.

Denise arrived Friday morning, too! Yay! She told me to put on my tourist hat because she was going to make me do touristy things. We went down to see Ground Zero, which has been fenced off and there's not much to see. There's a little path nearby which shows pictures and models of what they're building and is higher up so you can see the construction. There's nothing really formed yet, from what we could make out. We saw a little strip of sidewalk with plaques and such, which were emotional to see. No protesters, though. If we had walked by the "mosque" we probably would have seen them, though. We went out for dinner really late with Katy at a little bar nearby that really tasty veggie burgers. It wouldn't stay together, but it was still super tasty!

We got up early again today to go running; this time we ran from about 20 blocks straight! According to Katy, that's about 1.5-1.7 miles? AWESOME! I'm already picking things up! Though I did push myself to the brink on that one. If I'd had gone any further it would have been bad. I love running in that little dog park! Makes me want to get a dog.

Denise and I headed down to Central Park today to do one of their many free walking tours. We ended up arriving 2 hours early, and since the Natural History Museum is right there in the park, we decided to make a "short" detour to the museum. We ended up getting so interested in the museum that we decided to completely skip the park tour and pick up a tour of the museum. haha. Guess what we found out?? A lot of the animal specimens were hand-picked and killed just to be stuffed and put in the museum!!!! A whole herd of African elephants! Though, this did happen in the 1800s... still sad. The tour guide was cute, she said, "You may think it's cruel, and yes, it is." haha. The guided tour took us through the African mammals, Ocean Life, North East Native American, the Sequoia tree ring specimen, and the Dinosaur exhibits. I think she was a paleontology student because she was most excited and most knowledgeable when talking about the dinosaurs. One of the fossils she showed us was of a fish that had drowned because the other fish it was eating was too big for its mouth. haha. So it was a fossil of a fish eating a fish. It also houses the first T-Rex skeleton ever found. I don't know if it's just the first complete one or the first one ever found, though. Still cool.

I insisted we see the Human Origins exhibit, too. haha. We spent the most amount of time there. Then we headed for the Central and South American Peoples and Asian Peoples exhibits. We had to pretty much run through the Asian Peoples because we only had 20 minutes left before the museum closed.

Sorry there are no pictures of any of this. I completely forgot my camera and then the batteries died in Denise's camera before she could even snap a shot of a panda.

Tomorrow we're definitely doing the walking tour of Central Park's castle. We're not skipping it tomorrow! And hopefully we can squeeze in a trip to the Statue of Liberty. If not, we're doing it first thing Monday morning before she leaves. I have never seen the Statue of Liberty, except from a plane or driving into the city.

So that's my update. I still don't have classes scheduled because I have a conflict with some of my required courses and my Hebrew course. I'm waiting for a reply from the Rabbi on whether I can skip one of my 4-day-a-week Hebrew classes to take my 1-day-a-week Biblical Grammar course. *crosses fingers*

********Stuart in Japan Update

Stuart is really loving Japan! Since he got his alien registration and Japanese bank account, he's on a mission to get a REAL Tokyo apartment! haha. He started training yesterday with a bunch of other new English-teaching employees, which is about 9hours long for 3 days. ugh. But then I think Monday he starts teaching! He's not at a school. He'd be working one-on-one with employees from the business who want to learn English to improve their ranks, I guess. He has to wear a business suite and everything! haha. He's looking forward to starting, but the heat is intense, he says. At least HE has air conditioning!