Sarah's favorite girl is no longer able to win American Idol... she was sad to see Kristy leave, but such is life and I told her to get over it.
My new annoyance wile being in Taiwan..... my usual webpages detect my location as "Taiwan" based on the IP address and therefore think I want Chinese Characters. Yahoo, Blogspot, YouTube.... all of them think I can read Chinese. So much for the computer and web being "smart"! Some are easier than others at forcing them to change back to english for us single-lingual folks of the world - but some can be a pain in the butt when you really don't know what you're looking for! Kind of like when certain idiots take your cell phone and put it all in Spanish for you to try to figure out how to switch back to English.
A breezy day in Taipei today. We had thunderstorms (probably related to Typhoon Neoguri that is hitting Hong Kong in the next couple of days). Weather predicts Thunderstorms for the next 5 days! Good news is that means temperatures won't go over 80 degrees (25 degrees C) which is FINE BY ME!!! As for the Typhoons..... I'm not scared! When you get snow, ice, thunder, and lightening all at once (like in Minnesota), nothing scares you!!!!
There are a few aspects to this metric system that are a requirement if I'm going to live here.... distance (as in "I'm 2 meters tall" instead of "6 foot 6 inches" - a common question over here!) or even kilometers instead of miles (just remember that a 5k race is 3.1 miles or so). Temperature is key since they have very little concept of "Fahrenheit". I just use the double, subtract 10%, add 32 rule. Same as multiplying by 9/5 then adding 32, but easier to do in your brain.... don't think too hard about what I just said;) The next one is volume - and since I can relate what a 2 liter of mountain dew looks like, or a liter - I'm ok with that one. Where I start getting into trouble is with weight - grams instead of pounds when ordering fruit, etc. I still haven't figured out if the price in the store is per kg or what.... I just know I can't read a whole lot at the stores here:( Kind of makes the food shopping difficult!
As for money, I just divide everything by 30 (or so) to get an idea of how much things are in US dollars. That should eventually get better as money is all relative isn't it? How do you know whether something is worth "$10" in US? It's comparitive to what else you can get for that same amount. Once I understand what I can get for $100 TW, I can compare.
Had a fun dinner tonight (Thursday night) at a Rock and Roll joint (a kind of Hard Rock... but not as snooty) that had good music (played a lot of Red Hot Chili Peppers Stadium Arcadium CD) and had a pretty darn good steak! Plus they had Captain Morgan which is always a good thing!
Anyway - enjoy your Spring Thursday!!
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you'll learn very quickly to ball park weights/vols/currency b/c its not worth trying to reset your thinking if you are only staying a year. it gets easier..... :) patience my young padawan learner
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