Two milestones in one

Well wouldn't you know it, but this is my 150th post. And, from consulting my archives I've found it's the one-year anniversary of the first post on this blog. One week remains until my takeoff.

"Holy crap it's next friday" as I said to someone on MSN.

Well, I am kind of stoked for getting back now, and there's not much of anything really keeping me here. Lately I have been hating how the weather is freaking hot. Well, not hating it really, rather eating two meals a day because I don't expend energy, because if you move you start sweating. If you exist outside of a/c, you start sweating.

Monday was the last Rotary meeting in Taiwan I will ever attend. No more Taiwanese Rotary for me (if this was MSN I would make a :D smiley right now). Unfortunately they didn't give me allowance for July (I do still have transportation needs, you know), but I did get my ticket, passport & money back. Now I need to put it in the bank, because I am not going to spend $300 US in seven days, no sir.

Happily, there was actually a Rotarian's daughter at the meeting (my club never brings their children). Bonus part 1: she was hot & interesting to talk to. Bonus part 2: of course she wanted to go play pool with me and my friends. So we busted a move on over to Wanfang, and met up with Scott & a girl from his school. Neither of the girls had played before so we explained the rules and taught them how to play. It worked out well & she got good fast, but Team Scott still beat us both games.

Later on, met up with Kaylee & Haoyun (another of Scott's classmates) at the MRT, then took a bus to Gongguan. Had dinner at the Bing place (they don't sell tangyuan in the summer) and then watched a movie. It was all in all quite good times. If more Taiwanese people I'd met were interesting like Hongi and Haoyun, and the majority of my exchange year was filled with such enjoyable hanging out, I would have a more positive view of it overall. But it wasn't. At least I learned some Chinese.

Tuesday I would say involved watching a lot of Trigun with Scott. Pretty much.

Wednesday Trigun, then the start of Escaflowne. Escawflowne is really really good, but Scott has a low-quality version. And it's realplayer format. He had to download the program so we could watch it and he was like "I feel so... dirty" and it's just so awful to do something like that to your computer. He also discovered the goodness of beverages from that bubble tea place by his house.

Today involved a whole lot of nothing, piano, w/e... I got tired and had a 2+ hour sleep in the afternoon, then American Alex called. The long-awaited match of pool!

So I headed over to Jingmei, bearing the Wilco CD I'd borrowed from him so man months ago. We got fried squash & deep-fried chicked, and great bubble tea, then headed to the pool hall. There was Taiwanese pop music in the background and I was MUCH too familiar with the songs, haha. We talked about stuff and played various games for a long time. When we bought the bill it came to 500 NT ($20 CDN) so we must have played for at least 5 hours.

Good times indeed. American Alex is awesome, and still owns me at pool. I look forward to hopefully seeing him again in 2006. Perhaps my game will match his then.

But now, promised pictures:



Rock on. See you in a week.