Sunday, November 30, 2008
Tutor Joy
This week I got an email out of the blue. It was from my old Chinese tutor from my time in Beijing. She wanted me to help her correct a personal statement she was making for her applications to U.S. grad schools. I jumped at the chance. For me it is pretty cool, first since she is applying to ND and second since she helped me so much for 3 months in Beijing that this is sort of my chance to give back to her. She is going to have a killer statement if I can help it. I just haven’t decided how much of my voice should come through (I mean it is sort of unfair if it becomes my personal statement and her voice is lost—unfair to her and to any future school that she tried to apply to since they are getting something totally different from the essay the receive).
Almost 6 Months
I’ll write more about this later, but in 10 days I will have lived in Taiwan for 6 months. That is the longest I have ever been away from home (my home is STILL Oregon and always will be). It is crazy to think how fast it has flown by. I work so much it just flies by. At the same time it has been a real amazing experience and the job I have will definitely prepare me for whatever I do in the future.
I’ve defiantly become independent and come to appreciate a lot of things that I don’t always have over here. At the same time my Chinese is slowly getting better—which makes me really happy when I can pick up more in meetings and conversations.
For me the thing that I think is cool about being over here has been that this is my first real experience living on my own (ND doesn’t count since that was all living in dorms) is in a foreign country where I go for days without seeing other white people. I guess I like being unique.
I’ve defiantly become independent and come to appreciate a lot of things that I don’t always have over here. At the same time my Chinese is slowly getting better—which makes me really happy when I can pick up more in meetings and conversations.
For me the thing that I think is cool about being over here has been that this is my first real experience living on my own (ND doesn’t count since that was all living in dorms) is in a foreign country where I go for days without seeing other white people. I guess I like being unique.
Mint
My weekends tend to go like this. Friday: off work, dinner, listen to music, do some activity, sleep until the afternoon the next day. Saturday: up in afternoon, hang out, go out and do something, dinner, go to bar/club, get home at 5AM, and sleep to afternoon. Sunday: wake up, go out for coffee, dinner, and get ready to go back to work.
Friday I went out to the Taipei Tavern sports bar. It was a cool place and it was cool to see a replay of the Dallas-San Francisco game. But the crew there was more than a few years my senior. Not even the Heineken beer girl, who is paid to flirt with customers, would talk to me.
Saturday I met a friend and went to a club called Mint where my friend’s friend was a DJ. But she kinda sucked as a DJ and I was glad when she was done since the music got better and she got us free drinks (a can of Coors was about $6, so without her the place was a real ball-buster). There were not a whole lot of people there but strangely there was a glut of very tall American models there for some reason. But I was happy since I got the number of a non-model there.
When the place got out at 4AM I did not want to take a cab back home since that would have meant having the dude who took me there crash on my floor. And given that I really had not had much to drink, by my standards, I was not about to fall asleep. So I grabbed a coffee and ended up waling around the Sun Yat Sen Memorial Hall for over an hour until the subway started up.
I am already pumped for next weekend since my friends Calvin and Kara are taking me to what is supposed to be a cool club in town. We shall see how that goes.
Friday I went out to the Taipei Tavern sports bar. It was a cool place and it was cool to see a replay of the Dallas-San Francisco game. But the crew there was more than a few years my senior. Not even the Heineken beer girl, who is paid to flirt with customers, would talk to me.
Saturday I met a friend and went to a club called Mint where my friend’s friend was a DJ. But she kinda sucked as a DJ and I was glad when she was done since the music got better and she got us free drinks (a can of Coors was about $6, so without her the place was a real ball-buster). There were not a whole lot of people there but strangely there was a glut of very tall American models there for some reason. But I was happy since I got the number of a non-model there.
When the place got out at 4AM I did not want to take a cab back home since that would have meant having the dude who took me there crash on my floor. And given that I really had not had much to drink, by my standards, I was not about to fall asleep. So I grabbed a coffee and ended up waling around the Sun Yat Sen Memorial Hall for over an hour until the subway started up.
I am already pumped for next weekend since my friends Calvin and Kara are taking me to what is supposed to be a cool club in town. We shall see how that goes.
ND Football Year End Post
I haven’t written much about ND football recently. I don’t like to watch the games if I know that they lose and they have done plenty of that recently. It’s sad to say but I think the days of Charlie Weis are numbered. I personally like the guy and think he is a good dude. Hell, I raised a few thousand bucks for his charity this year. However, he is not that good of a football coach. So will ND fire him? If they do then who will they be able to pull in to take over the job (Gruden on line 1)? Either way it will not be pretty and will cost a lot of money.
That said; if he had not lost to Syracuse I thought he would have 1 more year. But after that loss all bets are now off. If he does stay, they need to follow the advice I drunkenly screamed at games last year, “Fire (the OL coach) John Latina!” The OL has been atrocious for too long and you will never win without a great OL.
That said; if he had not lost to Syracuse I thought he would have 1 more year. But after that loss all bets are now off. If he does stay, they need to follow the advice I drunkenly screamed at games last year, “Fire (the OL coach) John Latina!” The OL has been atrocious for too long and you will never win without a great OL.
Expat Thanksgiving
For me Thanksgiving was just another day. It was the day after the aborted trip to Thailand. So I was at the office late, yes I worked on Thanksgiving. Then I went home and treated myself to a good meal at one of my favorite restaurants—Le Rouge (http://www.lerouge.com.tw/en/).I some absolutely kick ass bruschetta (or however you spell it), salad, and some good pizza. This was the only time I ever had pizza on Thanksgiving and believe me it didn’t hold a candle to a turkey dinner. But unfortunately better get used to it since I am going to have to work on Christmas too.
I was pretty bummed the next day when it was Thanksgiving in the U.S. I talked to my whole family on my lunch break via Skype. My aunt had more than 30 people over to her house and I sure as hell talked to each of them. It was cool to talk to and see my grandparents and relatives. But at the same time it made me a little homesick that I couldn’t be there. My grandma made 11 pies and 3 turkeys—my family eats big. Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday since my whole extended family gets together and just has an awesome time stuffing ourselves, telling jokes, bullshitting, and just having a rocking ass time and I miss that over here.
At the same time I have a lot to be thankful for. Not the least of which is having a job.
Thank God I'm Not in Bangkok
This week I was planning a trip to Bangkok, Thailand with my boss. It was going to be an intense one. Travel there via a stop-over for a meeting in Hong Kong. Then two days of meetings in Thailand were we were going to get nailed for our lack of progress on new the QC process for a new product. Then back to Hong Kong for another meeting. The plus side is that our customer was having a vendor year-end party at a bar. The downside was that I had to give a performance and I did not want to do the Asian-style karaoke song and dance. I’ll try and post a video of what I was planning to do—I thought it would be cool.
Well the night before I left there were some serious anti-government protests picking up in Thailand so I checked BBC and they were saying no way these dudes go to the airport and things would still run smoothly. Well wouldn’t you know it but the next time I saw the news, when I was in Hong Kong, they had taken over the airport. My boss and I had no idea who serious it was since we were headed to a meeting. But when we got internet access and saw all the flights were cancelled and our customer called and told us not to come we knew it was bad. So we were lucky that we chose not to go to Thailand earlier (we would still be stuck in Bangkok) and were able to get back to Taiwan. Although it would be pretty cool to say I was stuck in Bangkok during all of this.
Well after I got back to Taiwan we had to deal with a ton of stuff from Thailand, it gives me an excuse to read more news (as if I need an excuse) at work. You see, we normally ship things to Thailand via air freight but now that’s out of the question so we have been working with the customer to re-organize everything and given that things are changing fast it has been interesting.
I must say it is really cool to read about something like in the news and then have it impact people you know and have a direct impact on my job. Not something that happens very often.
Well the night before I left there were some serious anti-government protests picking up in Thailand so I checked BBC and they were saying no way these dudes go to the airport and things would still run smoothly. Well wouldn’t you know it but the next time I saw the news, when I was in Hong Kong, they had taken over the airport. My boss and I had no idea who serious it was since we were headed to a meeting. But when we got internet access and saw all the flights were cancelled and our customer called and told us not to come we knew it was bad. So we were lucky that we chose not to go to Thailand earlier (we would still be stuck in Bangkok) and were able to get back to Taiwan. Although it would be pretty cool to say I was stuck in Bangkok during all of this.
Well after I got back to Taiwan we had to deal with a ton of stuff from Thailand, it gives me an excuse to read more news (as if I need an excuse) at work. You see, we normally ship things to Thailand via air freight but now that’s out of the question so we have been working with the customer to re-organize everything and given that things are changing fast it has been interesting.
I must say it is really cool to read about something like in the news and then have it impact people you know and have a direct impact on my job. Not something that happens very often.
A Weekend of Contrasts
So I haven’t updated this thing for a long time now so it’s about time that I get back to the grindstone. Yes, I’ve been busy but I’ve been lazy too. Last weekend was interesting. I went to be “best” club in Taipei and therefore all of Taiwan. The place is called Luxy (http://www.luxy-taipei.com/ or just Google "Luxy Taipei" and eat your little heart out http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_6X0sGz36HQ&eurl=http://www.luxy-taipei.com/en/main.php) It was a nice place, there was a cool fire-show, there was a trance section and a hip-hop section, but I was under-impressed. The people just seemed fake to me.
The highlight of the night was to watch a French dude that I was with and was drunk off his ass try and grind up on chicks or do rather uncouth things only to scare them away. I even tried to apologize to some of these poor girls but they were even more scared of me since I knew the Frenchie. The best part of the night was getting a lift home from two pretty cool girls who spoke sick English.
The fake people at Luxy (I call them flower vases, they look pretty on the outside but inside is nothing) were a real contrast to the other days of the week were I was with cool people. Friday night I went out to dinner and coffee with my friend Melissa. She’s a real cool girl and whenever I talk to her over coffee it ends up being a 3 hour conversation. The downside is that she’s busy with school so I hardly ever see her, which is too bad. The other non-fake experience I had was to go out to Yanming Mountain for lunch with my friends Calvin and Kara—and it was SO good it was all fresh stuff grown there at the restaurant on the mountain (sweet potato leaves are amazing when they are fixed right). We then went and chilled Taipei city with Kara’s cousin, Min, who is a baller. They were able to get me to eat this Taiwanese treat—it’s made of rice, peanut powder, but mostly made of pig blood. They told me it was all rice but unfortunately for them I can read enough Chinese to see pig blood. It really wasn’t bad but I don’t think I’ll have one again.
The highlight of the night was to watch a French dude that I was with and was drunk off his ass try and grind up on chicks or do rather uncouth things only to scare them away. I even tried to apologize to some of these poor girls but they were even more scared of me since I knew the Frenchie. The best part of the night was getting a lift home from two pretty cool girls who spoke sick English.
The fake people at Luxy (I call them flower vases, they look pretty on the outside but inside is nothing) were a real contrast to the other days of the week were I was with cool people. Friday night I went out to dinner and coffee with my friend Melissa. She’s a real cool girl and whenever I talk to her over coffee it ends up being a 3 hour conversation. The downside is that she’s busy with school so I hardly ever see her, which is too bad. The other non-fake experience I had was to go out to Yanming Mountain for lunch with my friends Calvin and Kara—and it was SO good it was all fresh stuff grown there at the restaurant on the mountain (sweet potato leaves are amazing when they are fixed right). We then went and chilled Taipei city with Kara’s cousin, Min, who is a baller. They were able to get me to eat this Taiwanese treat—it’s made of rice, peanut powder, but mostly made of pig blood. They told me it was all rice but unfortunately for them I can read enough Chinese to see pig blood. It really wasn’t bad but I don’t think I’ll have one again.
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