the kind applied to the typhoon heading my way right now! oh JOY! but yes, there is a category five typhoon heading in Taiwan's direction as we speak. It has already caused serious rain and flooding in the Phillipines, so I'm definitely not looking forward to it hitting us here. Even more that it's supposed to make landfall in southern Taiwan at ( Read more... )

So today I went to the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, which was ok, the OK rating mostly due to my rather blah reaction to modern art, so nothing against the musuem, i'm just not really a modern art kind of person. Before I went, i had a FANTASTIC lunch at the Taipei Story House Tea Room, which was the most expensive meal i've had here, but totally ( Read more... )

or, as it's known in english, harry potter. i am now the proud owner of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. In Chinese. It would be SO AWESOME if i could read this book. I want to. Some day ( Read more... )

also known as the national palace museum and houses, according to its pamphlet, the finest collection of chinese arts and antiquities in the world. i do not think they're lying. gugong bowuyuan inhereted is made up of the collection of the Qing Dynasty, who ruled up until the civil war that pitted the nationalists (the KMT) against the Communists ( Read more... )

so i'm in love with the bakeries. crazy, crazy bakeries, which sell things like "fried curry bread" (haven't tried that one yet) and green onion bread (i bought that one) and tuna french roll (not trying that one either). it's fresh and soft and interesting looking! not all sweet sugary rolls, but rather savory breads, which i find myself oddly ( Read more... )

so today i finally sucked it up and bought a new umbrella. not that there's anything wrong with the awesome bitsy umbrella my mom gave me, it works well in the rain. it just doesn't block out any sunlight, and people here (since they carry umbrellas all the time anyway, since it's most likely going to rain later that day) use them to block out ( Read more... )

So, they were awesome. I had to stand in line for a while to see them, but it was totally worth it. They were so cool. The rest of the museum (the national history museum, lishi bowuguan) was also fascinating, and was pretty much mostly art, pottery, stuff like that. I especially liked the tang pottery and the bronzes, because they're just so ( Read more... )

so i'm making good progress on my chinese. I'll have finished five chapters in two weeks, which is pretty cool. Now if only I was confident I could remember all of these characters ( Read more... )

I spent time talking to a hot dutch guy! at dinner! HAHA. Oh yeah. He spoke excellent english, but unfortunately all the people I meet only started Chinese, so it's not like I can practice on them. I really have to start learning the names of dishes so I can order properly in Chinese. What I'd really love is to sit down and copy out some of the ( Read more... )

ok, so the book said "subtropical monsoon climate". it said "it rains a lot" and i was doing ok. as the plane was landing, the chicky doing the annoucements said that it was raining the usual afternoon rain shower, and i was like "oh, nice, i've done that before, i like that!". and it did that the last few days, rained in the afternoon, which ( Read more... )