I'm currently doing some studying and it's been pretty impossible to find the motivation and get back into that whole groove. as my job has forced me to speak in dumbed down, ridiculous english for hours on end each day with sentences such as "bear, be quiet" and "giant, no chinese you", ive just felt myself getting dumber and dumber. so i decided to write the gmat, more out of the need to start thinking again than for any specific reason for education. ridiculous i know. anyways, things really took a turn for the worse when the light in my room burned out, and due to both apathy and confusion about chinese lightbulbs, it has not been replaced. so, i have been spending most of my time studying in the dark in my room or studying in mcdonald's, which has yielded a confused mental state centred around coloured spots in my eyes and the smell of big macs. an inauspicious ending to my time in old taiwan.

on that note, i was thinking of the things i will and won't miss about taiwan:
-I will miss looking in my bank account and seeing that I have $82000
-I won't miss realizing a millisecond later that it takes 28 taiwan dollars to get 1 canadian dollar
-I will miss the pasta place I eat at pretty much every day. I swear if they could speak English I would get a "Norm!" every time I walk in there, I'm such a regular. Instead of speaking English however, the proprietors have dedicated themselves to serving up hardcore gangster rap with delicious, cheap pasta. My personal favourite moment was NWA's "Gangster, Gangster" with the immortal line "To a kid lookin up to me, life aint nuthin but bitches 'n' money". ice cube spreadin the message, one asian restaurant at a time.
-I won't miss the same 6 commercials on a continuous loop on the English tv channels (speaking of that, the only Mandarin I've actually learned here is the McDonald's Chinese commercial..."li si piyi wa, Cama da Macdonnels, HEY... or something like that)
-I won't miss channel 67 playing every version of CSI and channel 71 constantly playing canada's biggest export to Taiwan. In case you're wondering, that would be CBC's Just For Laughs "Gags". Inexplicably, this shit is a HIT here. no joke, walk by 3 tv's and atleast 1 will be playing it. This may help to explain why little kids point at me and start laughing all the time, atleast that is what I like to tell myself.
-I will miss getting paid 600 dollars an hour.
-I definitely definitely won't miss stinky tofu. I guess Taiwanese people realized tofu sucks and doesnt taste like anything, so they decided to ferment tofu with what must be a dead cat to create that unexplainable, indelible, revolting smell. And since this is everyone's favourite food here, I think it is an excellent case study in proving that person can become used to, even like, just about anything. seriously, fermented dead cat soy soup.
-I won't miss the unbelievably annoying construction in our apartment building. I haven't had wall neighbours this disruptive since good ol Sanghoon and Eric in first year. we never confirmed exactly what was going on in their room, but given the 15 people who would be in their room at any time, and being woken up by what i usually first thought was someone using a battering ram to enter our permanently locked room, i can hazard a guess. actually, in retrospect, geoff probably didnt know about this because he couldn't hear at night. hey geoff, sanghoon and eric were doing some crazy shit in the room next to ours. sorry, i digress.
-I will miss mini golf in the apartment. When i finally decided to start studying, I spent 2 minutes reading the "So youve decided to write the gmat" section, when i came up with a brilliant idea for mini golf in our apartment. we have 2 holes, one starting in the shower and one in my room. they are both par 18, 2 yards tops, and they are fun as hell.
-I will miss knowing people who have accidentally named themselves after animals.
-I won't miss....Taiwan.

Dave has finally quit his job, and I was pretty jealous with the excuse he came up with. He told his boss that he unexpectedly got into grad school and had to go home. they astutely pointed out that he could easily stay until the end of their semester in July. He didn't expect them to so brightly catch him in his partial lie, so he told them his marks were really bad and his graduate school contacted him to tell him he had to take summer school before he started his master's degree....hahaha, headstart grad school for idiots, this is the only place where that excuse could possibly work.


If you haven't heard it, get Neil Young's "Live at Massey Hall 1971". Incredible.






My countries list by the end of the summer. go to this website to do it, pretty cool.


So my flights are booked. I will be in the Philippines at the end of the month for a few weeks. Incidentally, if you want to read something interesting, check out the Canadian Travel Advisory for the Philippines (except for you mom, do not under any circumstance read this). I'm hoping the writer recently took a creative writing class, otherwise I'm a bit nervous. I personally like the part about the kidnap-for-ransom of white people plots.

This is this city, Lucena, I will be in for a few weeks:


These are the Banaue Rice Paddies, often called the 8th Wonder of the Ancient World, that I'm hoping I get to visit:




If I make it out of there, it's to Hong Kong for a few days and then to Myanmar via Bangkok for a few days.


For some reason I just think this is so funny....