Platypi, among other things

Disclaimer: This article actually has surprisingly little to do with platypi; however, if you are actually interested in them, Wikipedia has a good article.

It has come to my attention that my mother has made a habit of reading my blog out loud to my grandparents on Sunday evenings. As a rather entertaining consequence, she encountered difficulty upon crossing a certain quote from Alleah pertaining to human ejaculate & eternal devotion... as a duller consequence, further Sunday Evening Posts will probably be more grandparent-friendly. But to pick up where I left off...

Sunday (Part the Second)

I met up with Alice & her mother, and we headed to Genki Sushi (if you just read the Chinese, it sounds completely different...silly Japanese) for lunch. It is one of those places where you sit kind of like at a bar on really high barstools, and little plates of Japanese food (mostly sushi) scroll by you, and you take the ones you want. It was fun and the stuff was for the most part very good. All-you-can-eat wasabi & pickled ginger + green tea at no extra charge too.

That was at Ximen ("Teenager's Heaven" of many clothing & good food stores/ other fun stuff), where I somehow have only been twice, with middle-aged Rotarian women, w00t. We then went to a department store (I think 12 stories) outside Taipei Main Station. I found some shoes that I liked--not too uncoventional and very comfy, not to mention ideal for hacking and running--in a short while. Rotary, happily enough, was paying for it, which means my parents don't need to buy me new shoes this year; lucky them. We had to wait for a while afterwards as Alice's mother insisted on trying on many an article of clothing before deciding she wanted to buy nothing. Here are the shoes, by the way:

Following that, we had tea. It was even around 4:30... not quite a proper British tea, but I had some sort of cheescake with cherry glaze & waffles with cream/syrup. Had "Royal Tea" (a weird milk tea) and Earl Grey. I was pleased to discover bag & leaf Earl Grey tea for the purchasing. Alice bought me some, out of the kindness of her heart, and what's more it was Twining's of London, my preferred brand. Were I a snap pea, I would say I was "a very contented snap pea;" however, as this is not the case I shall refrain.

That evening I read several chapters of "The Voyage Out." I think I'm now at 16. Being fairly sick, even though a typhoon holiday was declared for Monday, I went to bed around 10.

Monday (Typhoon Holiday 3)

No school for me, which was very nice. For most of the day I was quite happy, eating chocolate, drinking tea & reading on the internet. Played the piano a bit and for the most part had a very nice day. I think there was exercising in there somewhere as well. Partway through the day I wasn't feeling too well, because it was really hot. The typhoon kind of wussed out and headed towards Japan, so it was a little rainy and windy outside, but not cool at all. I wanted to buy more postcards but the bookstore was closed.

Tuesday

Tuesday was an interesting day. Once again, I was part of the Taiwan government's mass medical testing in my school. Instead of P.E. we all had chest x-rays, yay. So I learned the word for X-ray, but other than that it was dumb. Choir was good as always, we just keep adding more subtleties and interpretation & dynamic insanity to all the pieces. And she keeps training everyone's voice and demanding everything be perfect. Somewhere in there Ivan knocked over her teapot & kind of broke it; I don't know why he was in the music room though as he's not in choir. Scout was random as well, the first half we did flag games, and the second half nothing at all.

I heard about some karaoke competition or something in the middle of the day. I was interested, so they asked me if I knew any Chinese songs. I thought I didn't, then I realized I can sing the end theme from "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon..." though I don't know the Mandarin lyrics (as of yet). In Art class, we just had a really dull lecture in the library so I talked to a girl about music (she "likes very much punk music").

When I got home I had a headache (should have slept through the lecture like Alex). I was also feeling pretty sick. So, like a dumbass, when I got home I ate chocolate until dinner. Then I had a few bites of dinner, drank water, and headed to the bathroom to vomit up all that chocolate. Subsequently, I ate dinner. Went to bed at 8:40 PM...

Wednesday

...and got up at 7:25 AM. That was a good sleep. I noticed something really hilarious on my chocolate sauce package while I was eating breakfast too:

Headed off to Zhong-Lun, this time the bus was unusually crowded... both Tuesday & Wednesday the subway at Dingxi involved me being jam-packed against a bunch of people (fortunately fairly good-looking women, not men yay). Gong Fu was again good, we spent a lot of time on different counter techniques and they showed us a bunch of weapons. Also, some ways to counter holds, someone grabbing your shirt, or the master guy had his students attack him with a sword and a knife and used bare hands to beat them. I finally caught a pic of Wil & Alex wrestling (unlike Kyle, Alex was smart enough to tap out):

Language class was o.k., I was really frustrated 'cause I was having problems with tones. Plus Alex & Yu Gyeong pwn a significant amount. I don't think I will be able to catch up with their pace under any circumstances. When I came home though I managed to talk to my mom in Chinese a bit, convinced her that I was a little sick, had already taken medicine and didn't want to go to choir that evening. So I didn't and went to bed early.

I am also going to bed now, so I will get back to you all with today & Friday's happenings at a later date... Hallowe'en related activities tomorrow.