I'll go back and fill in the holes later

but for now, I wanted to blog what I'm feeling.
Which is sort of overwhelmed by the number of Chinese characters that I don't know, all the time. There are some that I see everywhere and I can just never remember which they are. If I could have a talking machine to follow me around and read me signs, I'd learn Chinese much faster. I wonder if I could con some unsuspecting Taiwanese person to do that for me...
But on the bright side, I do learn more every day. And I can read more and more signs, which is super exciting.
There was the whole vegetarian debacle...though:
So my friend is vegetarian, so I'm always on the look out to find places that can feed her, so that she will not starve. The character for vegetarian is 素 (or a swastika, but that's a different story). And I'm used to simple characters in Chinese 118, so I basically and wrongly assume that characters with the same shape are the same. So I saw a place that looked vegetarian and I was like Oh we should totally eat there. So we walked up to the menu, and there was an awful lot of categories of food that said meat (a character I actually know). Hmm...interesting.
And then I saw the other vegetarian place near it, called Vegetarian good eats. And realized that the 2 characters were in fact not the same. I had mistaken 泰 for 素. The former happens to mean Thai. Oh good. So I accidentally took us to a Thai restaurant instead of a vegetarian one.
The struggles of a remedial Chinese student...
And in other news, I bought a lot of stuff again. Oops.