Now with more sodium (sweet jesus!)

Just thought I'd include that picture for kicks, it's me on my first day in Taiwan at CKS International Airport. I found it by accident on a Chinese-language Rotary site. Hurrah!

In other news, I am a consumer whore (and how). I just bought a Jay live CD, Avril's "Under my skin," and an ABBA collection with DVD. Yay. Now I have good Chinese music to listen to, and ABBA tunes aside from Super Trouper (not that it's not an excellent song), plus the Canadian stuff so I will not be confused at the concert. Some of the songs were pretty good, but as I say, wait for the live effect.

Lately I have been finding it difficult [read: not possible] to post comments to blogs. I don't know if this problem will ever be resolved, but in the meantime rest assured I am reading every single one as displayed in the list of links on the side. I will attempt to continue with fresh content so y'all are up on everything that's going on.

Today, I woke up to discover the water flow in our house mysteriously nonexistant. This means that not only was my laundry undone, but the toilet wouldn't flush, I couldn't wash my hands or clean dishes. Moreover, the shower was not functioning. This may not seem like such a big tragedy, but keep in mind on Friday it was like 25 degrees. I had PE and then went to work out & jog on the field at lunch, so I was a bit of a smelly boy when I woke up. It's not like there was cold water or anything, but no water at all. Eventually my host dad was like "oh, I'll just go upstairs and fix that."

So I had a shower, which was somehow warm the whole time, and then was off to school. This made me a bit late for choir, but people were still dicking around when I got there, and arrived before Liu Jing-yu (劉靜瑜, our director). I mean, sectional practise is all well and good, but the tenors are not that good & instruction from our awesome teacher is better. Boy can she sing.

Anyway, practise was all right but she was kind of choked at us (tenors in places of Messiah No.26 for slowness, and basses at the end of that part for flatness on an octave leap upwards). So we have another practise tomorrow morning, after which I am going to the Hyatt for lunch with Alice & her daughter (w00t, girls my age). I think it might be bad form to hit on my de facto counselor's daughter, but the children of other Rotarians are fair game. We'll see how it goes.

After choir I went to Ximen and roamed around for like an hour. Eventually I could only find the one music store I'd seen before. I bought the aforementioned CDs, though I was tempted by "Joe Hisiashi Piano Solos" (he wrote the soundtrack to Miyazaki films like Mononoke Hime & Sen to Chihiro no Kamekakushii). I got kind of pissed because the low price posted on the CDs is actually some secret member's price so it all ended up costing me like CDN $60 instead of $40. W/e... this Jay stuff is really good, as is the ABBA, not to mention it comes with DVDs/VCDs & I needed the Chinese music. I am also really happy because I have found explanations of Taiwan gov't structure on Wikipedia, so now I can match up English to Chinese names, maybe discuss more news and better understand "Three Principles" class. w00t

Afterwards I came home. Somewhere in there I watched "Mystic River" with my host mother. I liked it a lot, the way it kind of ended without real resolution, leaving people to deal with what happened seemed really true to life to me. I want to read the book now though. Also, I missed the dialogue in some parts, because Taiwanese people watching subbed stuff don't care about the foreign-language audio too much... sigh.

Also, read a kind of interesting thing called the Matsuyama Declaration about haiku. If I were tired due to parties, mother, I wouldn't exactly be complaining. :p My exercise program (i.e. exercise a lot, eat a lot) seems to be working as I currently stand at around 133 lbs. I've now regained the weight I lost. Just goes to show you should take the Rotary anecdotes about massive weight gain on the YEP with a grain of salt. Sure, thin asian girls going to the US could gain 20 lbs or 20 kilos, but not I. rock on