Well, there are lots of other people in this apartment building, but all of them have apartments that look kind of like Karen's. In one apartment there's an old woman tending a windowsill garden. There are lots of businesses around, which are not very pretty, and some restaurants, which are sometimes more pretty than most places, and several streets away there's a little park with trees and flowers.

The park is okay. He will spy through the eyes of people at the park. With practice he gets better at deciphering their conversations. 

When it's lunchtime, Connor hands Maitimo the bag that says "Maitimo" on the grounds that this is the only name he doesn't recognize. It has a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, string cheese, and an apple.

Connor then starts repeatedly poking his sister in an effort to wake her up.

He will temporarily stop singing to eat the food with his eyes still shut.

Such a weird kid.

"Zanaaaaa, it's time for lunch."

There is some conflict over whether lunchtime is actually a reason to wake up, but eventually Zana is dragged out of bed and decides that if she has to be up ANYWAY then she might as well eat lunch.

"SO. What do you want to do today?"

"I want to go to church but Connor does not but he said we can go to the library."

"Libraries are better. I can teach you how to read."

"I guess that sounds good but Karen said the library would not be as pretty as the church."

"Church isn't even that pretty."

"If it were at home people would have lots of suggestions but they would - go in and look around and come up with their suggestions - which is better than any other place here."

"I guess it's hard to tell because I don't care about buildings. But I think the library is good."

"Okay. We can go to the library. I would like to learn to read your language."

"OK!"

When everyone's done eating, Connor holds Zana's hand in one hand and Maitimo's in the other and leads them both to the library. 

The library is full of very tall wooden shelves and desks with computers on them. There's a wall mural and a big globe in the entryway. Connor takes them to the children's area, which has brightly colored mats, a wall mural of a tree with books instead of fruit, and a lot of books with various kinds of illustrations.

It is not pretty but it does not hurt to look at. 

"Okay, what are your letters?"

Zana can find an alphabet book and show him all the letters! And explain all the sounds that all the letters usually make, because English letters are all trying to do way too many things at once.

"That's really weird. In our alphabet every letter makes one sound. This seems like it'd make it really hard to guess how words are written!"

"Japanese is like that! English isn't because it has way more sounds than most of the other languages, and England stole its letters from Rome and Rome didn't have enough letters for all of our sounds."

"I think probably you should sit down and start over and have one letter for every sound."

"Then everybody'd have to learn the new way, and everybody already knows this way."

"Yes but the new way would be so much easier to learn!"

"It does seem kind of weird that nobody's tried it yet, I guess."

"I don't understand how you learn how all the words are written. Do you just memorize every one individually?"

"Soooort of. There are rules, they're just complicated and have to do with which language a word comes from. English's mostly made of words from other languages."