t-10

Man, time flies. I've got less than a week and a half left to go before my flight back to the States, which is a weird thought. Plenty of things to do between now and then, though.

The past week has been pretty much the usual routine: class in the morning, lunch, language partner, internet/Everytime/nap, study, dinner, study, sleep. Luckily, the lesson topics have stayed reasonably interesting, and outside of class there's just enough variation and distraction to keep me happy.

Today I would like to introduce one of those distractions. Meet 泡泡:

(泡泡 is the fish.)

泡泡 is the protagonist of basically the best cartoon ever, 小鲤鱼历险记. Seriously. A friend and I spotted the series on DVD while out shopping a few weeks ago and bought it on a whim. The animation looked really good, and it was relatively cheap, so we bought it, despite it being entirely in Chinese. SO glad we did. It's as cute/awesome as it originally looked, and best of all -- I UNDERSTAND IT! Sure, there are things that go over my head, but I understand substantial portions of the dialogue, all the significant plot points, and even some of the more subtle jokes. It feels really good to be reaching that level of fluency.

Brief character rundown, using English transliterations because I'm lazy:

Paopao (the fish): the main character, who is ADORABLE. Recently obtained super bad-ass powers that let him turn invisible and things like that. Really loves bubbles (his name literally means 'bubbles').
Aku (the blue seahorse): a magician, who was kind of hot-headed and standoff-ish intially but has been getting more friendly over time. Also has bad-ass powers. His name loosely translates to "Mr. Cool".
Meimei (the jellyfish): a singer, who's generally very feminine and cute and helpless but also has a bit of a bitch streak when provoked. Her name is more-or-less "Miss Beautiful".
Shuang-mian-gui (the turtle): clumsy in an endearing way. He originally worked for the bad guys, but then fell in love with Meimei and switched sides. His name is actually a play on that fact: it literally means "two-sided (two-faced) turtle".

The bad guys are awesome too, and the whole show is /damn/ good for a children's cartoon, but I've given you more than enough boring info for now :P If you've got a spare minute, though, go take a quick look yourself -- it's well worth it. (I'm assuming that link will work outside of China. If not, well, dang.)

I've still got a lot of work to finish up tonight, so I think that'll have do for this post. I will leave you with this tidbit: I just checked, and I currently have 16 stickies (computerized post-it notes) on my computer monitor. I am becoming one of those people oh no