summer in the city

wow, is it july already?

so it's been about eight weeks since last i wrote anything. the summer term started in june and basically the time has just flown by. the only thing special i remember about june has been watching the world cup. although nothing beats matches broadcast in spanish, chinese is not bad either. the matches have been on here at 10:30 at night and 2:30 in the morning. i stayed up to watch the final and skipped class the next day.

school is going well. i can sort of skim though a simple chinese article now. that's quite surprising. for our last test, one part was to read a small article in five minutes and then summarize it in our own words. i had time to read it twice and still had a minute left.

so really i haven't written because i haven't been excited to write anything. the reason i'm writing now is because i want to relate an interesting dream i had the other night. i dreamt i was in mongolia near a huge lake. how do i know i was in mongolia? because i was looking at a map marked "mongolia". also marked on this map was a huge area surrounded by a dotted line labeled "chicken cop here". maybe it was supposed to read "coop", but i took it to mean that the area was so desolate a single chicken was sufficient to police it. at first, the lake was incredibly still, so still it perfectly mirrored the sky. then i saw a little movement. it was a fishing line being reeled in, although i couldn't see anyone around with a fishing rod. then i got hungry and all of a sudden i had my own fishing rod, but no bait. nearby was a 7-11 so i went in to buy bait because it seemed a reasonable thing to do, but no one was in there. i left without buying or taking anything and then just cast the line into the lake without anything on the hook. then i woke up. something else special about this dream, it was in black and white, like an ansel adams photo.

i don't usually remember my dreams, but this one stuck with me so that i could write a few details down while i was in class. anyway, that's about it for now. just a few more weeks and then i'm back home. what comes next? who can say? fishing in mongolia maybe.

three more months

so it's been quite a while since i've left any news here. last time i wrote, the weather was beautiful, school was just getting started again, and it seemed like a lot of activities were going on.

right now, the weather is pretty unbearable and only going to get worse. i still have no working camera. on the very positive side though, i just finished my third term here and i have a week of vacation. lately i've been pretty busy with school and with kung fu. i went to hualian last weekend to see taroko gorge and some other very beautiful places with my kung fu club. we had some fun at the beach and in one of the national parks. the park had a nice section where a stream formed a cool pool and there were all these boulders around. i climbed barefoot through them in a big circle from one side of the stream to the other. besides that my club mates and i spent about an hour skipping these beautiful smooth marble stones across the little pool. our arms were sore the next day.



my chinese is slowly improving. my last report in class was to tell everyone what i would do if i were president of the united states. new words are starting to stick more easily now since the grammar is pretty much finished.

in kung fu i finished learning my third set and have started learning two new sets: 二路埋伏 and a set using a staff. i hope i can finish them before i leave in august.

almost one year now... since coming here i've been pretty clueless as to what's happening anywhere else. i've been following the news about the oil spill in the gulf of mexico. i hear that unemployment is still quite high back home. in any case, life goes on, and for the next three months at least, my life is here.

spring is here

i'm not sure when the official first day of spring is/was, but it seems to be here. i've seen plenty of rain here in taipei, but friday morning was the first time i could recall hearing thunder in a long time, perhaps the first time in taipei. this weekend was the azalea festival at ntu. a lot of color all over the campus. it's a shame my camera has broken recently.

what else? a couple of weeks ago i was fortunate enough to catch the sky lantern festival in pingxi. my classmates and i even flew one of our own sky lanterns. it was a great sight, if not quite dangerous. every thirty minutes or so, a big group of sky lanterns would be released into the night sky. meanwhile, people were flying theirs wherever they could find enough space and whenever they wanted. many people tied firecrackers to their lanterns and lit the fuse as it was taking off. i saw more than one lantern catch fire and float down into a crowd of people, but fortunately it doesn't seem like anything major happened.

today i was part of a performance to promote our kung fu club during the azalea festival. our demo was quite short and went well. i spent the rest of the afternoon checking out the other clubs, watching some other performances, and taking a long planned walk through the side gate area of ntu.

since coming back from vacation, every day seems to be longer. it's true i have more homework these days. the other thing is that i can see the end of this little adventure in sight. i don't want to waste any days sleeping in. how many spring days have i seen in my life? how many more will i get to see? this sort of thing i never really thought about before, but really you don't get any days back.

lately in kung fu we've started sparring (對打，literally "opposite hit"). i didn't think i would enjoy it but it's kind of fun. i guess the best part is that at the moment i don't have to worry about anyone hitting me, hahaha. all that i'm doing is practicing combination attacks.

i played squash for the first time the other day. it cost $50NT for one hour with a racket rental. it's a pretty fun game. i was playing with a japanese girl i had met through my classmates. she has a friend in houston. the more people i meet here the smaller this world seems to get.

a little rest (休息一下）

it's been quite a while since i've written. since last time, i've finished my semester, gone back to america, and come back to taiwan to start school again. i've found that i feel much better after the break. i've also found that i experienced something like reverse culture shock in america.

i think it started on the plane from san francisco to houston. i was suddenly able to understand the people around me and my first thought was how obnoxious some of them were. i don't know why. they're probably not obnoxious, but i had grown accustomed to not understanding people around me, so maybe i felt they were being intrusive by speaking in a language i could understand.

the next point was how far apart everything is in america, especially houston. i think the nearest grocery store was a ten minute drive away. not practical to walk to at all. it was one mile from where i was staying to the entrance of the neighborhood, about a twenty minute walk. being in houston without a car was quite a contrast from the life i became used to in taipei.

finally i was surprised by how empty everything felt. even in san francisco on a saturday night, i felt like the roads were pretty empty. in neighborhoods i saw cars parked everywhere but no people.

it's interesting that i've only lived in taipei for six months but coming back to a place that has been my home for so long has seemed so alien. i'm not trying to complain about it. it's just strange.

all those things aside, it was really nice to see the people and places i've missed. six months doesn't seem that long while you're living it but things are happening all the time.

no spring chicken

i spent the last few days cramming for my final exam. after the end of this term, i should have learned just about all the chinese grammar. from here on out, it's a matter of building a better vocabulary and learning a whole bunch of idioms from thousands of years of chinese history, i think.... i met some students who've studied here for a year already. after one year, they've finished with the textbooks and have moved on to reading newspapers and chinese literature. i'm halfway though my year and i hope i can be as far along as they are in another six months.

i did a quick estimate of my vocabulary base. for our final exam, our teacher gave us a vocabulary list with 13 pages, each page with 40 words, roughly 500 words. removing duplicates, maybe about 450. from last term, maybe about 350. in total, there are something like 800 words that i am supposed to be able to read, write, and say. my head hurts just thinking about that.

this evening i spent about three hours going through the vocabulary list, picking out the characters that i had no idea about at all. maybe about 10% of them i had to practice writing again. it reminded me of the time i was in fifth grade and spent two or three months memorizing words for the spelling bee. pure memorization was hard enough then. now, my head is already full of other junk, my eyes are far worse, my hands are more stiff... in other words, i'm goddamn old, hahaha.

having an engineering education hasn't been helpful for my memorization ability either. the lovely thing about engineering is that if you understand the idea, you can just forget everything, conjuring the equations at will. language doesn't work that way at all. for instance, if i start programming in a language i haven't used in a long time, i have to google syntax for almost every line of code until it comes back to me, yet if i see a sophomore year circuit analysis problem, i think i could still solve it without a textbook (maybe)...

but, being old and slow is compensated by being old and stubborn. as long as your stubbornness is directed to growing and not directed to opposing change, i think things turn out fine.

i've sort of been out of contact with my friends back home since i came here. i wonder if they're seeing the same thing. i've noticed a definite difference in the last half year. i don't know if it's because i've been out of work for a year, if it's because i'm throwing myself at a new language, if it's because i worked so hard before, or if this is simply the way things go. where's the textbook on growing old?

quick update

how time flies... this is the last week of my second term studying chinese here. my final is on thursday. friday we're going to make some dumplings. this week the weather has been extraordinarily lovely. i went to a park with my taiwanese friends to take some pictures, hear some music, see some performances, and do some language exchange.

i've played some more pool with my classmates. the wagers have increased from $10NT to $30NT. so far, i've earned enough for a few good dinners from playing. maybe now is a good time to quit while the wagers are still "friendly".

what else? i saw a great exhibition of van gogh's artwork last week and a nice exhibition of animamix art at the museum of contemporary art the week before.

lots of fun, but i have a busy week to look forward to.

training camp

today after class, i attended the first day of kung fu training camp. most university students have finished their classes, so they were able to start at 8:30 this morning. i had to arrive after lunch because i have class for the next two weeks. when i arrived, we spent most of the afternoon doing some serious stretching. there was a whole set of stretches which required a partner. one that i did had me standing with my back to a wall while my partner slowly lifted my straightened leg to about an inch above my shoulder. most of the stretches were for a count of thirty and each count was probably about five seconds. my friend and i were wondering what we had done to deserve such punishment. maybe an hour or more afterward, we started something like our normal set at ntu. i noticed i was able to kick much much higher.

i left around 6 with my friend henry. he gave me a ride home on his scooter. i'm still a little wary of the things after my last scooter riding experience. now henry is a pretty calm soft spoken guy, but i've been led to believe that anyone who regularly rides a scooter drives crazier than a bank robber in a getaway. i've also been led to believe that people from kaohsiung are especially crazy. henry is from kaohsiung.

within seconds of pulling onto the street, we were tailgating a bus, about three feet behind it. coming to the first red light, henry steered into the oncoming traffic lane, passed three slowing buses, and pulled back in to the right side of the road stopping at the box marked for scooters. another exciting maneuver was trying to beat a semi through a right turn with the semi to our left and parked cars to the right. henry decided to let the semi go first, but not before squeezing far enough ahead that i could spread my arms and touch both the semi and the parked car. another new experience on the ride was that my eyes teared up, maybe because my eyes were being blasted with air pollution.

well, all's well that ends well. i made it home, had some dinner, and finished my homework. tomorrow is day two of the training camp. looking forward to it.