le fin de semaine

Well let me say I actually had a pretty enjoyable weekend. If every week were to like this I might be forced to revise my general opinion of the fun-ness of life & mood. lol

Taking care of business: To answer the question you guessed, I am going on the choir trip. Turns out the events are pretty close to the same time & choir is 3 days in Yilan, somewhere I have never been... I will also get to hit Gaoxiong with the host family for two days later on. But I am not one to pass up once-in-a-lifetime opportunities to travel (it's not like I'm ever competing in a high school choir comp again, let alone a national final).

Last week's last few days were relatively uneventful. There were exams at school & I elected on Friday to go to Chinese class instead of the school's 'fake cheerleading' event. By "fake" cheerleading, I mean, it is just a competition to whose class/school can cheer loudest or best. There was no sport event of note though it may have marked the start of an unremarkable municipal event. Now, I'm all for "real" cheerleading--viz. throwing people about in the air--but I would decline to participate in an event involving such because I do not feel I have adequate strength to ensure the safety of the ladies going airborne.

In the Future: Turns out there was a Rotary event opening a centennial park on Sunday, at which Ma Ying-Jiu (mayor of Taipei) was in attendance, but of course I wasn't invited to that. I'll get back to what I actually did that day in a moment. On Wednesday we are supposedly, according to the schedule, going to said park for some activity; however, we've been told that we're practising the dance class again. The purpose of this is to prepare for yet another event on Thursday (as well as yet again on the tour, another thing I'm glad to miss)... did I mention my choir is performing at a Rotary event Thursday as well? I will laugh very, very hard if it's not the same event. But if (as likely) it is, I'll need to do some clothes-changing. On Friday I have another event going on, but I'll get to that later.

Saturday, I got up pretty early to go to choir practise. This was pretty good, though right near the end I ran out of voice, probably because fewer people than normal came, & the tenors were sucking. I thought I could make them all hear how to do it at least halfways right, but I do not have Brianna-calibre loudness of course. Returning home I talked to Scott online for a while & discovered he was to go to an event at the Taipei Sheraton hotel. Since a Rotarian invited him, there was naturally no address & he was having trouble finding it. I busted out a Chinese google search & then enlisted the help of my host little brother to navigate unnecessary flash-animated menus to find it. But we convinced ourselves he couldn't find it by himself, so I was to accompany him, and though he didn't "invite" me, he "didn't have any objections if I came along," and was sure, "I could probably just show up & get dinner out of the deal." And I did.

What Scott's club has that mine doesn't is young people, or at least the college & young-adult tagalongs of adult rotarians. Whom we met. There were a good 6 or 7 girls right in my favourite 18-25 college demographic & we met lots of cool guys too. Youth socializing & networking--this is my kind of Rotary activity. Also on Friday, Ivonne told/invited me to perform at an event on Sunday evening.

[ok on the halftime show of basketball game my host family is watching, there is a country band playing... but like a countrified rock type song, with a rap break in the middle, and a pimped out midget with a pink tophat & cane just chilling on stage & lots of girls in bikinis & cowboy hats dancing nearby... in fact the genre is very hard to classify]

On to Sunday, where in the day I didn't do much of anything. I found the place (an 'overseas youth hostel' where there had been events before) and Kenta & I performed no problem. He played an original piece on his traditional instrument, which I thought was fucking awesome, but he disagreed. I've always held a soft-spot for extremely good original compositions though. For my act I talked a little in Chinese (of course with Japanese introduction) which was then translated into Japanese. Considering the Taiwan-Japan relations theme, I cut the Canadian folk songs from my program, performing the love theme from "Princess Mononoke" (with corrected romaji lyrics I wrote from memory corrected by Kenta, but sung from memory) & a Chinese classical piece set to music. As always, speeches improvised on the spot.

Afterwards, we got to what I've been wanted to do all year, which is talk to Japanese girls, again from 18-29... I had some trouble telling who was Japanese vs. who was Taiwanese, as everyone could speak Japanese at the event (with the exception of me, darn Rotary... *fistshake*) & it was interesting. Scored a nice invite to Kenta's club and another to a goodbye party on Friday evening. Yes!!

Today I went to school. We finally did pushups again in army class, but the newly negotiated calligraphy lessons are still forthcoming. Some music/army collaboration is making a "schoolwide patriotism competition" for 1st years. You have to sing the school song, and then march in formation & sing another song. I don't know if I'm doing it or not, we've got something going on for music though, which involved picking songs. Chinese was ok, got our essays back. I had a little bit of red, which is not bad considering I never get people to check stuff (unless I am writing in English of course), I think I may get to learn some things about sentence order/structuring by making corrections. More Chinese lessons coming up tomorrow, yay.

Rock on, y'all. [1 hr] K out