asahi-savory savior

hey all,

even though no work was accomplished today, this second day in taipei, it's not at all a loss. brian and i met up with shao-yi (one of yue-gau's students) at noon to go for lunch. afterward we wandered the campus here a little bit. after that, brian and i took off on our own to explore a bit, working our way north from ntu up to the chiang-kai-sheck memorial and the 2-28 peace park. after hitting the park we wandered over to the taipei central station and caught the mrt red/green line metro back to ntu. i make it sound like this all took 20 minutes, but in truth this was about a 5 hour ordeal... and i am thoroughly pooped. tonight, after getting my blanket and pillow from "my dorm" (a place i am desperately attempting to extricate myself from) and returning to the office here, i spent a while online checking out the taipei-craigslist postings for sublets. i found one that looks particularly enticing, and emailed those folks right away. hopefully that pans out soon and i wont need to spend too many more nights here on the floor of the office... an alternative which believe it or not is infinitely more appealing to me that spending any more time at all in the dorm. last night in fact, i went to this dorm with illusions of deep-sleep in my head. i laid down in the bed (literally a 20"wide bamboo mat... quite a harsh difference from my premium name-brand queen-size-pillow-top mattress at home) to find that i touched the ends of the bed (two walls) with my head and feet simultaneously. a mere two hours later, my roomate showed up and proceeded to clickety-click-click check email, surf the web and play video-games on his computer until finally, around 4 am, i got up and left. i cited "jet-lag" as the reason i was wide awake, and stated i was going to the office to get some work done. instead, i went to the office and passed out on the couch... though a couple hours later i woke up freezing my ass off because i was just wearing my leather jacket, and there's no central heat in this building... which as a side note is about as well sealed against the elements as an open-sided straw hut.

ok.


with that off my chest, im confident that i'll be able to find a perfectly agreeable place to live for several months very soon, and that should utterly change my outlook on life here. in the meantime, im late to meet up with brian to find a bar to pass some time on this lovely (raining, cold, wet and windy) evening... hence the asahi reference.

till the next time...
~t