filler

missed an entry whoops, actually missed tonight’s too but i woke up in the middle of the night hooray nightmares.

it was actually pretty awesome as far as nightmares go, a good plot to it. me, joey, sven, and karen were at their house (serenity) and there was someone trying to get in. they had cut the phone lines, we had barricaded the doors and found weapons, it was like murder chess.

the bad guy had a hook hand and flicked acid on people out of a bottle. (how do you hold a bottle in a hook? how do you stick a hand in acid to flick it? who cares, he also had a chainsaw.) he never really had a good motivation but that just made him scarier.

joey died first, the bad guy got in through his room and we had to barricade joey out or we all would have died, sorry joey, it was sven’s idea. karen went next, she got too close to a wall and made noise, so hook shoved a chainsaw through it, clever. don’t know why he didn’t cut his way through actually.

then i woke up.

anyway it was terrifying and it woke me up so i’m writing about it. good times in taiwan.

kevin learning chinese update

i still stink at it.

 

but i’ve gotten farther in rosetta stone, and can say a lot more now. i’m just really really bad at the tones. i can try to say things correctly (also very slowly) but i can’t really hear the differences at all. chI chi CHI whatever it all sounds like eating. it’s cool though because i’ll hear snippets of words that i know when other people are talking. it’s like 1 word in every conversation, but that’s better than when i came here i guess.

i also am learning the really common words in writing, like up, down, zhong, big, little, mountain, etc. i can recognize exit but have no idea what the two characters that make it up are, except the first one is two mountains stacked on top of each other and the other one might be mouth. it’s a weird language.

so summary:

i still stink at it.

taipei nightlife

i went to a place called room18 yesterday. it wasn’t as nice as luxy, the place i went to see far east movement yet, but the guy who took the pictures doesn’t want to be my facebook friend so we’ll have to take other pictures.

it was pricey, like 15 bucks to get in, and that includes 2 drinks.  still though very nice place.

i went by myself and figured i’d just make friends with people that’s why people go out right? well it worked, and a big group of girls pulled me over to the bar and helped me figure out the drink tickets and talked to me and we all just had a grand old time. i explored the place which was amazing and had better music than gainesville (i remember a mix of respect by aretha and shots by that guy, that was a good one). it was a fun night. might go out again with the girls, i’m facebook friends with one of them now, so that’s serious business.

clearly all i care about here is pizza

oh man it turns out there’s a pizza place like a block away from where i live and it’s amazing and the meal pictured here only cost like $6.

wufenpu OR the gator nation is everywhere

i’ve been wanting shoes that fall in between the category of sneakers and dress shoes ever since i got here. i guess call them going out shoes. problem is, i haven’t really seen anything in my price range that i like (scratch that, i saw some last night, but everything was at least a size and a half too small).  so when i heard about wufenpu, a mecca for cheap clothes, where the people working at night markets selling cheap clothes go to buy stuff, i got excited. 

i read about how to get there, but the article i was reading straight out lied and took me 4 stops down the wrong metro line.  i found some wifi, went back to the mrt, got off at the RIGHT stop, and found the place. not very impressive looking, it’s like like 8 shops wide. like little stall shops, not like big shops. there aren’t even throngs of people all over the place. pretty disappointed.

but if there are shoes inside, i should still go look, i paid like 8 bucks just to get here between 3 mrt fares and the drink i had to buy to get access to wifi. so i walk inside, and within 30 second i’m completely lost, everything looks exactly the same, the corridors are twisty and turny and so long you can’t see the end of them. there are clothes stacked up 4 feet high in every stall and everything’s half as much as it is in the other stores i’ve seen.

the bad news is most things are ladies’ clothes, so i couldn’t buy them. or i could but people would look at me funny. either way not shoes.

it was a really interesting trip, i never found the shoes i was dreaming of, but i did buy a sweater so i don’t have to wear my brown jacket everyday. i love that thing but every day for 2 weeks gets a little repetitive. (ps aunt amy it’s the jacket you gave me, another thing to say thanks for =) this is just something else so i can end the parenthetical clause not on an emoticon, i just think it looks stupid and I’d rather add on more words)

the most exciting part of the trip was that there was not one but TWO gator shirts there, i didn’t see anything for any other u.s. college, but yeah, gators get two things. one of them was red. uf might not get money from that one.

little things that make me happy

there are a lot of things here that make me miss home. like the automatic opening doors that start just a little bit later than in the u.s., so you have to stop right in front on them for a second. i have a lifetime of expecting that door to open in time for me to get there, and i’ve walked into more than one door when i wasn’t paying attention.  but for every little thing like that, there are 3 that make me happy and think “why haven’t we done that?”  so below are some of the little things that have made my day while i’ve been  here.

 

they have AMAZING bakeries here, they’re where i eat breakfast most days. they sell everything from little weird donuts to rolls to sandwiches to stuff i have no idea what it is but it’s delicious. thing is i can’t read chinese so everyday i have no idea what i’m getting, and it’s like a big surprise if that roll i got is going to full of tapioca or something.

 

 

there are temples and crazy things every few blocks. i guess this would be where my roomie would work if he was a real monk. (side note he smells terrible and you can smell our room from down the hall, i have to open the window everyday when he’s gone) but yeah the temples and streets are really interesting.

 

 

they take pride in their fountains here. this one is a memorial to people from something, that’s all i could read. inside,there’s like a bottomless well that bubbles up water. there are hexagonal bricks in a little river to get to the middle of the fountain, the whole thing is just really cool. it was in a park that’s kinda near my hostel (like a 10 minute walk) i wanted to get a picture that didn’t have people in it, but this guy walked REALLY slowly and another big group was on it’s way to check out the inside, lesser of two evils.

 

 

 

i pass this dog every day and he just makes me happy. there are dogs all over the place. this is the only dog i see who isn’t wearing a sweater, i’ve seen wild dogs wearing little hoodies.

 

 

 

 

 

 

i went into some little restaurant because i got lost and needed wifi to find my way to this cheap clothing mecca called wufenpu (turns out the first place i got directions from just straight up LIED and told me to get off at a metro station on the other side of town). i ordered the cheapest thing on the menu, a bailey’s iced chocolate (it was like 4 USD, kinda pricey for things over here). it was art.

 

 

 

 

Cool statues all over the place, this was outside what i think is a library, maybe a something else.

scariest day ever

2 of my 3 best friends died for a while today.

my ipd and kindle both just turned off withing 15 minutes of each other, and nothing i did could turn them back on, it was horrifying. i was literally inconsolable. i just sat down and was depressed in a bookstore for 10 minutes, i don't know what i'm going to do without them, how will i get through the day?

then i started being proactive, maybe they can still be saved! maybe there's some cpr-like combination of buttons that hard-reset them and bring them back from the brink. so like an citizen resuscitating someone until the ambulance (in this metaphor the ambulance is the internet and the hospital is someone i have to actually pay to fix it) shows up, i started methodically holding all the combinations of buttons i could think of for like 20 seconds. the ipod came back first, and it was a close thing. it took 3 tense, adrenaline filled minutes to load up, but it still had my music and everything.  then the kindle. this was more straightforward because there are literally 2 buttons. so i managed to save them both, but it was a close thing.

so anyway, if anyone's ipod or kindle breaks, hold down the power and menu buttons for 10 seconds on the ipod, and hold the power switch for 15-20 seconds on the kindle to (hopefully) bring it back.

the ipod died in the middle of a song, i don't know if i can ever listen to fast cars by tracy chapman again.

the weirdest part is i didn't even do anything.  i don't think i've ever dropped the ipod and i've definitely never spilled anything on it, i treat the kindle like it's my only child, they just both decided to die at the same time. technology hates me.

on new roomies

so my facebook friends may already know about the new japanese monk living in my room, but for everyone else, here's the skinny.

he's a small korean man. he introduces himself as a japanese buddhist mendicant monk. so those are a few oddities already. he sits in this room sometimes and just reads in a loud voice droning on and on for as long as a half hour. he has a REALLY nice computer for a guy with a vow of chastity, and a $300 coat. he made me teach him how to do computer things for like half an hour, insisting on things in partly broken english. i'd say "i don't understand" to which he would reply WITH THE EXACT SAME PHASE OVER AND OVER AGAIN. "it keeps being nines." eventually i figured out he wanted me to delete one of his bookmarks. he's also getting ready to buy an ipad.

on the other hand, he's taken me out to eat three times, which is nice of him. he says monks prefer giving to receiving and that buddhism is the best religion, no enemies, no wars. then i remember that people gave him this money for standing on the street, and feel kinda bad that someone else isn't getting helped.  he's also brining back like 2000 dollars a day for like 5 hours of standing outside (this is what i hope my salary to be when i start working full time at a school). this seems insane, why isn't the temple taking more of this??

it's getting to the point where everyone here is thinking he's a fraud. why isn't he staying in the temple, and why is he complaining that no one speaks the right languages? he also has very strong opinions about other countries (including taiwan).  i've never met a racist monk before.

okay i'm over that rant.

i also have a new roommate named justin who i've been going out with to like a far east movement concert, some museums and a hot spring tomorrow. it's waaay better doing things with another person than by yourself, this is a nice change of pace.

update later or tomorrow about this concert, i need to facebook friend the guy who had taken the pictures. (spoiler alert - it was amazing)

lions and tigers and pandas oh my

I went to the zoo yesterday!

it was a really good zoo, they had tons of animals, really good decorations and set-up, the people were nice, it was great! the weather wasn’t really what one would hope it would be for a day at the zoo. it was pretty cold and lightly drizzling all day; silver lining – there was a really good deal on umbrellas, it was less than the stores by where I live, so that was nice and now I have an umbrella!

the whole day was like a big game of where’s waldo, like every trip to a zoo I guess. animals would hide in the tiniest most invisible corners of their cage and curl into a tiny ball.  there was a leopard that was in a tiny cubby on top of like a 12 foot sheer wall, I don’t even know how it did that it was crazy.

they also had a couple pandas they were REALLY proud of, they built like panda awareness buildings. see below.

finally, there was a giant cable car gondola thing that gave you an amazing view of the city and mountains, it was really nice. see below.

japan

okay, so i got super lucky and didn't get hit with any typhoons, earthquakes, or nuclear reactor partial meltdowns (yet), but japan did, and things suck over there right now. so if you were feeling charitable, it might not be a bad idea to head over to one of these websites and maybe donate a few dollars:

http://au.news.yahoo.com/japan-tsunami/a/-/article/8999354/donate-for-japan

also, things look worse for the nuclear reactors as of this morning, there was a third explosion which may have caused damage to the reactor #2, which increases risk of more radiation being released. nothing serious yet, but that's bad news. these were the best and most up to date articles i found:

http://www.newstimes.com/business/article/Japan-suspects-nuclear-reactor-container-damaged-1116714.php

http://www.theflindersnews.com.au/news/world/world/general/new-explosion-at-japanese-nuclear-reactor-as-battle-to-stop-meltdown-goes-on/2103106.aspx?storypage=0

so yeah, maybe a donation would be nice, no one deserves nuclear meltdown on top of a typhoon on top of the fourth largest earthquake since 1900.

101

wow.

		downtown taipei VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL

 

so you get off the metro and see all these big buildings, and then you see taipei 101 like 7 blocks away and you're like, it doesn't seem that big, these are big buildings right here, and then you walk over to it and you're like, yeah, ok, it's big. then you go to the top of it and look down, and the other tall buildings you were looking at just look like ants. it's ridiculously obscenely tall. it also has the fastest elevators in the world, so it can get you 90 floors up in 35 seconds. they go 60 miles an hour, it's crazy.

they also have a mall attached to it in case you want to do some light shopping while you're there, you can stop by prada, tiffany's, armani, pretty much any store you might want to go in and just spend a few bucks with the family, no big.

downtown is really pretty, there are trees and grass and lights and the big buildings are well decorated. very nice city.