A Massive Update from the Land of Typhoons, Palm Trees, and Stinky Tofu

Haha hello everyone!!
What has been going on lately?
Well I think what comes foremost to mind is that I was randomly on the news a week ago, so here's a link to that.
http://tv.sohu.com/20101015/n275773503.shtml
What else what else?
Well, I got a scooter and have been zipping around on it! Its so much fun! I've carried people on the back with me and stuff too. It's really handy for when I need to go up the mountain to school on Wednesday, or go to the other side of the mountain for language partner meetings!

It is black with red highlights and a blue floormat. Very patriotic! You can open the seat and put stuff underneath there, but it's not really conducive to carting large amounts of things around. 

What else has happened lately? I've been bothering the 7 11 guy downstairs to come hang out with us, so I think that will actually happen tonight, yay! His motorcycle is way cooler than mine. 

I've also been teaching. I took some pictures of the outside of my school. It's very nice looking, but there's no air conditioning, and its still hot here (almost November...? ) like 88 degrees every day so I wish we had it. 

Apart from this, a few weekends ago we were invited to a diplomatic party on National Day. There were so many people there! I never knew there were so many important people in Taiwan haha. I saw the president of Taiwan (he walked right past me, along with a retinue of bodyguards) and fireworks and met some interesting ambassadors and government workers and American lobbyists and their Taiwanese counterparts... I enjoyed the ice sculptures and the live music... It was a nice night, although I felt much too unimportant to have been invited haha. 

 Ice sculptures at the Taipei Guest House, an old Japanese building used for entertaining important guests... Now used by the Taiwanese government

 Fireworks (kind of, they were prettier and more obvious in real life haha)

 More ice sculptures! This was the 99th birthday of Taiwan so it was pretty important. In Chinese, the word 99 sounds like "forever" so it's very auspicious.

 The outside of the guest house.

A pretty arch thing outside.

Yep so that was some of the highlights of my last few weeks! I also went to a TON of concerts, but I think I will leave that update to the next blog... I will do a special post just on concerts, and introduce some of the more famous ones. As always, I miss everyone, come visit me soon!! :) 

^-^

Christine