this was my day ...

8:00 AM: Wake up groaning.

9:00 AM: Meet some ladies close to home and walk out to the main street to catch a cab. Watch the first cab drive off because he refused to open his trunk for my friend with a stroller.  

9:30 AM: Arrive at Starbucks (YAY!). Place an order (in English!) for decaf java chip (no, I don't drink real coffee ...). Listen to some really cool stories told by co-workers.

11:10 AM: Flag down a cab to go to the Imperial Palace area.  Sit in traffic ...

11:45 AM: Get out of cab early because we'd been sitting there much too long. Ask for directions to the palace and understand enough to get us there!

12:00 PM: Make it to Cultural Street just outside the palace. Start looking at souvenir places while on a quest to find a scroll-making place.

12:20 PM: Find said scroll-making place and manage to tell him in Chinese what my friend wants, and get it for a good price.  WHEW! Considering she wanted one scroll with Chinese characters and another with Korean, and that, in Chinese, both languages are referred to using the same word but different tones ... this was quite the feat!

1:30 PM: Get directions to the di tia (subway), and slowly make it back to the stop closest to home.

2:00 PM: Arrive at MacDonald's and have a little mix-up with our order. The server randomly asks me if I speak French (!), and we proceed to resolve the situation that way.  His French was amazing!

3:00 PM: Jog up 6 flights of stairs to my apartment to change and grab dry cleaning. Head back down those same six flights, grab my bike and head over to the dry cleaner's. Drop off stuff, figure out how much it'll cost and when the pick-up time is.

3:10 PM:  Bike over to the university to get 4 keys cut.

3:30 PM: Drop keys off to a friend, stay and chat for a little bit.

4:30 PM: Realize I should probably go home and at least pretend to be productive.  But really, I end up blogging.

And now it's 5:00 PM, and I'm about to jog back down the stairs, up another six flights to pick up some chairs for this weekend, and then back up my stairs to have dinner .... and then back down to go to a friend's place to watch a little television.  

Needless to say, I'm already tired.  And I had Coke with my lunch (not by choice ...), so I'm a little wired.