Wo wohen sie? Sie seid aus Cambodia

Yesterday, I borrowed Larry's truck and my new, one subject, community college ruled spiral notebook and drove down to my first day of German class.

There are a lot of great things about this class. It's cheap, for one. The timing and location tend to work against it however. The class is taught in south Ahwatukee, which is pretty much as far south you can go and still be in the Sunsprawl. And the class starts at six. Since traffic pretty much advances south on the 17 at a walking pace, I tried to be clever and take the back road into Ahwatukee. Apparently, some other people have also figured out this trick.

Anyway, got there on time, parked, and found my classroom. The class has about ten people enrolled, of a fairly wide age range. One guy looks like he's still in high school (why aren't you taking German there?) and one guy is in his late 50s early 60s. Most of the rest skews older although there are a few people there my age. The class is mostly white men. Interestingly, two of the students are going on the same Rhine river cruise (coincidently). Some people are taking the course to reconnect with a childhood language, some for travel.

The teacher is nice, a native German speaker. The first thing she did was to speak slowly and clearly an introductory paragraph to get an idea for the level we were all speaking at. I was amazed to realized that I basically understood nearly everything she said. I wasn't understanding every word, but I understood what the sentences was trying to convey. I said I understood 9 out of 10, and actually, there were a few other people who did too. The average seemed to be about 5, with some people only understanding at a 3 or 4 level. I was a little worried that with my practice with DuoLingo I might be too advanced actually for a beginner beginner course. It seemed like everyone had at least a passing familiarity or some kind of tenuous connection to German.

The class moved pretty well, we got a thick sheaf of handouts and learned about basics of introductions and some questions. Wo wohen Sie? Ich bin aus Arizona. That kind of thing. Feels like it should be a good class.

Today was busy, I shipped out a bunch of eBay packages. It is actually quite handy and convenient to print off USPS shipping labels here. Ebay has folded in a postage payment system in so you simply say "print shipping postage" and tell it how big your box is, and it fills in the label, charges your Paypal account, and prints off a label. I slap it on the package, and then I just drop it off at the post office without having to wait in line.

Swung by the new donut shop on the way back. The donuts were not bad. Pretty par for the course for what I was expecting. Not as good as Rainbow Donuts on McDowell, but better than the standard Dunkin' Donuts. If you make the donut rounds (get it?) around this city, you will be quickly confronted by the fact that the donut shops here, especially the non-Dunkin' ones, are all run by southeast Asians. I was guessing Thai or Vietnamese, because many of them also sell boba tea, but actually, it turns out that they are all Cambodians.

I can kind of understand- one family makes a toehold in the market, gets to understand the supply chain, logistics, business, and paves the way for others in the same ethnic minority (especially one which is a very small, and consequently, more tightly knit) to get into the same business. Donut shops have a low barrier to entry- you need about 50K in start up equipment (not including the space), but you can run them with one or two people and the profits per donut are actually pretty good.

Anyway. Took the bus downtown to Cartel Coffee, the coffee shop which is way too sophisticated for you, although they take pity on us Frapp-heads and try to be nice. Took some photos of the old Matador building and did some more sketching before heading back uptown to another incubator meeting.

Today's speaker gave a presentation on form code and signage code in particular, and then gave us critiques on our designs. People oohed and ahhed at my quick and dirty sketches hit with a bit of photoshop. Shouldn't let it get to my head. It was a good working session too to sit down with Rhonda and get her to answer my questions about the site and the project and the strategy for pushing forward.

Bus and bike back to the house pretty quick. If you can bike to the bus and not change anywhere, you can actually get around Phoenix relatively quickly. For a bus system.