A few quick things

Just in case you didn't know, all these photos are reduced in size for my blog. If you actually view the picture full-size they're 1024x768 or something for the most part (which is in itself a reduction for the 'net).

Yesterday, being Monday, not much happened. In military training we studied, because I guess it was too wet outside or something. In music class we finished watching "The Pianist." Then in Chinese, we kept heckling our teacher until he started trying to teach us a really difficult, apparently non-useful, but commonly occuring word. It was irksome but interesting, though now I hear it all the time & grr...

Today, PE was not too bad, but I couldn't quite do the 15 pushups as fast as everyone else. As usual, I did one more lap than everyone in the warmup jog/run, just to lap all the girls. In Guowen (their Chinese poetry/idiom class) our teacher started making fun of how foreigners spoke Chinese just randomly. I thought that was in bad taste, 'cause I mean I find some things Taiwanese people say in English funny, but I don't mention them within earshot. It's funny how the word "foreigner" (外國人 waiguoren) sticks out to our ears.

In English Conversation, we talked about random things like, how Taiwan weddings are weird and all the cool places in Taiwan that our teacher has visited. I noticed she's developing the beginnings of a hardcore Chinglish accent, beginning to rephrase things and say certain words (such as "pretty") very differently. In math class our teacher showed us a cool thing about expressing repeating numbers as fractions, but after that I lost him. Scout wasn't bad, I spent most of it hacking though.

Missed art to travel to a meeting with the Xmas dinner planning committee. American Claire snuck up to me at Main Station and yelled waiguoren! at me, surprising me intensely. We checked out the venue, which is WAY up on the red line, past Beitou... it's a killer place, a nice, brand new art gallery owned by a Rotarian (which means no rental costs) but of course there's no kitchen, let alone a bigass oven. Now it's crazy logistics time. I might not be able to come to the event as the Catholic choir's performance is at the same time. On the subway home talked to Scott about 1984... gave him the postcards to mail (Brianna, Soobus, Grand'rents, Jessi)--if there's anyone else wants want, just drop me an email or post a comment w/ mailing address (can also do c/o). Also lost badly to my little brother at the Japanese baseball game. I've got his strategy figured out though, now I just need to be able to hit the pitches he throws.

If my mother is reading this, please SEND SOME DRIED MAPLE LEAVES (at your convenience) ... that would be so cool!