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There's nothing so satisfying as a well-aimed, well-landed Superjester. Please feel free to offer contentions, but the lack of knee-straining damaging from improper technique & the added bonus of a small-sized posse of Taiwanese schoolgirls complimenting my "fierceness" (li hai) made it especially enjoyable.

And by that I mean, I got that package in the mail from the 'rents. Which included not one, but TWO hackey-sacks. And even though I'm 'out of practise' and it's none too stall-friendly, the little cloth ball of plastic beads known as the hack still brings me much joy. Plus, I'm actually still good because I am in much better shape now than I was before. And some of the boys in my class shall be my disciples, and they shall call me "Kevin." Unfortunately, since I packed up all my stuff in boxes like they said, M & G were seemingly unable to find CTHD or Mononoke-Hime on DVD, but I can live with that. Now down to business...

Lundi

Language class was o.k. I'm learning some words I didn't know how to write and we keep picking up little grammatical gems and useful things that are alluded to but not explained in our text (which might be where Scott (張禾力) is missing out)... also I've been doing much better since I started like actually reviewing a bit for tests/practising the characters deliberately. And by that I mean top mark, even though Alex & Yu Jing pwn a lot, you'll be hard-pressed to out-write me. Except in calligraphy.

In military training, we were shooting paintball guns at these targets. It was cool, except you got to shoot for like 60 seconds, and the rest of the hour we just sat and watched the other guys. The second block it was the girls' turn, so in the 20 minutes the teacher took to explain stuff to them, the guys just got to do the standing-at-attention thing, except facing the other way. So I just got to look at Alex's head for a long time and do nothing. Then we sat & watched the ladies... they're not so good of shots.

I found out partway though Monday that Tenors & Sopranos had an extra practise at 5:00... So after language Scott (張禾力), Kaylee (凱麗) & I went up to the field to exercise. We couldn't jog because people were doing archery at hardcore long range, so we hid and did pushups & things. When they went to retrieve arrows we did pull-ups, but other than that, pushups, and some other tricep thing, and lots of stretching.

Practise was pretty good. I was a little tired & hungry, but we went through the Chinese song word by word, putting the individual sounds of BPM on different notes & fractions of notes to get the perfect sound she wanted. It was a lot of work, but very neat. Unfortunately, near the end, I deliberately shook/over-vibratoed the last held A above middle C. After that I found out we were doing the Handel songs still, so I didn't sound so good there. Finished practise 6:30, so I got home at 7:10 PM & having left at 6:40 AM had a good 12.5 hours of time at school/in transit already. Needless to say I was a little tired by dinner-time.

Mardi

What to say about Tuesday? 'Twas a fairly unremarkable day. In PE we had "basketball," so after the usual hullabaloo of shouting unintelligible things, military drill, stretching in formation, pushups and the likes, there was a little dribbling of basketballs. Not much, but a little. Art wasn't too bad, got to chat and draw with some of the girls. Scout was highly inane though--I don't know what this has to do with ANYTHING at all, but we're doing hip-hop dancing. I should actually call it "remarkably ridiculous hip-hop shenanigans" plus doing nothing for a long time. But my group has this terrible dance, it's just a bunch of silliness. At the end there is a move that's kind of funny, I think Tougie showed it to me one time, it's these guys doing a little dance to combine their powers & from some anime I've never seen.

Oh, and somewhere in there was English class, where we discovered our teacher can sing English R&B love songs. It was like karaoke, because the music was playing & she had lyrics, and sung into the mic over the class speakers. Random, but neat.

Mecredi

Went with Scott to Zhong-Lun for culture. Despite what the Americans all said about not coming to watch the election, they were all there. And we did calligraphy, which was ridiculously hard. I spent a long time doing the same character over and over, and trying to make it look like the one our teacher did. you could see what it was, but it wasn't all that cool-looking. Afterwards we did this painting stuff where it's supposed to look like bamboo. The technique with different shades of black paint isn't too tough. But have you ever tried to paint bamboo? Right near the end I figured out why mine looked weird, when the teacher said "we're painting bamboo, not trees" because all the angles on my little braches going to the leaves were wrong. I have a better idea of it now though.

Language class was again pretty good, always learning more things of silliness. Now I can count up to ridiculously large numbers in Chinese, yay. As for evening choir, it was also good, so to speak. We did a couple of old "Motetta a Quattro Voci" in Latin which are really good; Italians get mad props for rocking at four-part arrangement. After that we worked on "Praise His Holy Name," another gospel number with cool-sounding chords. There were actually more than two tenors/basses there as well.

Afterwards, I figured out I could save $0.24 CDN by walking instead of taking a bus back to the MRT station, so I did. It was neat because it's all along National Taiwan Normal University (師大)... though I saw this random neo-Nazi. He had an arm patch that DEFINITELY was a swastika: black in white circle on a field of red. It was a refreshing 15 minute brisk walk, and all in all good fun. Stayed up late reading Maclean's & the Globe though.

Jeudi

Today was a very satisfying day overall. On the subway/bus to school I studied a song we're doing in music class. It's Taiwanese pop (of the sentimental, nice sounding variety--there are lots of songs like it) and I know the melody, but the words are still escaping me... working on it though. Living technology was kind of random: when I got there, there was like no-one there except this one kid reading a Chinese newspaper. I noticed a big headline in bold, black letters: 布希贏了, and I was like, 'hey I can read this and I know what it means.' But then I was like "damn," because it reads "buxi ing le" whichs is literally "Bush wins." And that's about as political as I get when it comes to the yanks around here.

For most of the class we just kneaded clay, or something. We weren't sure what the purpose was, so it was dull, but one of the guys who is tenor in choir made a gigantic penis out of his clay. And Ivan made a nice sculpture of a hand, so it was kind of interesting. Just don't forget that it was random and pointless.

The next two classes were academics, in English I tried to grab a word or two, but other than that I just studied & looked up some things I wanted to know how to say or write. In the break I went outside and did some hacking. Unfortunately, this is a novelty here -- unlike in Spain where the guy I hacked with even knew it was called hackey-sack, people are like "what is this?" (or sometimes "這是什麼?" but usually they speak English). I am still recognized for my middling skill though. Fortunately, chicks here dig hackey-sack (unlike some people I know).

At lunch I just roamed around randomly, then had some lunch. Subsequently went to choir... it was pretty good but today's accompanist was kind of sucking, getting all slow even when we were playing to metronome. So our teacher just held the click up to her mic to make it extra loud.

Afterwards was domestic science, but this time we were actually cooking. Teachers here never take questions really, but to compensate they spend like 20-30 minutes explaining stuff before you can begin (classes are 50 minutes long). So we sat around for a while. It was made ridiculously easy, as not only was everything explained, but everything came in little baggies or containers, so you couldn't add the wrong amount of something and didn't measure anything. And there were detailed flowcharts/diagrams on the board plus a recipe. All this to make a 3-layer blueberry & mousse cake of the kind that you do not cook at all.

It was fun though, working together with my classmates, including our class leader who is a really nice girl, but I like never get to talk to her ever as I must always sit at the back. We whipped this cream and mixed it with stuff to make the white part, but there was a little bit extra... so people got juvenile like the repressed grade 10s they are and starting putting it on each other's faces/in their hair. The funny part was our class leader girl (though she didn't get the worst of it) ... a lot of people targeted her, also tagging with blueberry goo, so she would wash her face and then someone would just get up and get her sticky/dirty again. Fun times and good food at the end.

PE was running again, another 15 pushups (so fast they seem easy) or of course 12 for the girls, and the ab thing -- which my classmates seem to have a lot of trouble with -- followed by a little bit of basketball, which was fun. I was in a really good mood, so I followed our activities leader's orders promptly (I like her, but when she has to lead the class for our sometime bitchy PE teacher, that's a troublesome situation) relished the exercise, and the teacher didn't seem too bitchy. Went straight to the bus stop afterwards, hacked while waiting. Also hacked in the MRT at Gongguan, and started writing Barbara's postcard at Guting. On the trip to Dingxi I saw one of the girls from the other district; we talked a little, though it turns out her district isn't doing the Tea Tour trip.

Speaking of which, don't expect any posts until about Monday at the earliest, as I will be down-Island living it up for a couple days. Hope this tides you over. As for postcards, if anyone wants one, just post or email me your mailing address incl. postal code & I'll send you one. I've got Barbara's on the go but I have like 14 other postcards with no names on them...

To top the day off, dinner includes prawns, the sausages that I like that I have only found here, and potatoes (you know about me & potatoes). I think I may have an Earl Grey and then hit the sack early. Also in other news, Laura posted again. And we had all taken her off 'the lists.'