Squid on a Stick

I'm trying to gather my thoughts after a whirlwind weekend. On Friday night, I met up with Nicole DeBoom, Kelly's boss. Nicole was in Taipei for the week on business. We had the pleasure of visiting the Shilin Night Market. This is one of the bigger night markets in Taipei. It felt a lot like the boardwalk in Atlantic City. They sold everything you could possibly imagine for under like $3. Well maybe not that cheap, but it had the feeling of being cheap. Nicole had to buy a bag and she decided to go to the place that had the motto "The Best Place to Buy Trendy Bags." How could you beat that? I saw one T-shirt that I found extremely strange but I really regret not buying it. On it was a cartoon baby with multiple piercings and tattoos, and a bunch of graffiti in the background. Oh, and it also had a mohawk. There was a funny part in the night where the vendors who had blankets out in the middle of street suddenly packed up all of their belongings and ran off. I think the police were on the way because something seemed fishy. Speaking of fishy, there were plenty of stalls where you could fish for crawfish and little guppies. It looked cute. You could also buy puppies, kittens, piglets, and bunnies. This was by far the most inhumane pet store I'd ever seen. All of the animals looked very unhappy. I guess it's legal but it seemed sketchy. Apparently the reason why there are so many stray dogs in Taiwan is because lots of people like to buy puppies but once they get too big, they let the dogs go. Since most people live in apartments, they can't fit them. Food-wise, I saw much more of the usual but Nicole was quite impressed because she's not quite the Taiwan-native like I am. This was actually the first time I saw fried squid on a stick for sale. Needless to say, we did not order that.

On Saturday, I woke up at 1 PM trying to recover from my week and late Friday night. I went into Taipei with my friend Chris at around 3 and we went and played drums at a studio for 3 hours. It was a lot of fun! We only had one kit to share between us so we started messing around with sharing the drums at the same time. I played the bass drum, snare, high hat, and crash cymbal while he played the other drums. This was awesome and something I'd never done before. Unfortunately, as I type now I notice the 4 blisters that formed on my hand. One started bleeding. I have to post a picture because I'm very proud of myself and how hard we were rockin'. After that, we met Kelly (Chris' GF) and Jade (co-worker) at a concert venue nearby. We saw a guy named Bob Log III. This guy was quite the character. He came out on stage wearing a fighter pilot's helmet and a suit. The helmet had a phone glued onto the front of it that worked as a microphone for him. After the first song or two, he stripped off the suit, revealing a one piece, shiny gold jumpsuit beneath. He played blues guitar, combined with a drum and cymbal that he played with his feet. He really was a one-man band. The highlight of the night was probably when he got into a life raft and the crowd carried him around as he played guitar and sang in his one-piece jumpsuit.

Yesterday, I went on another hash run in Guanxi. This was a gorgeous run that unfortunately took about 2.5 hours each way to drive to. The day turned out to be much longer than I wanted it to be but that's ok. The run was gorgeous! It was a very remote area south of Taiwan, and we hardly saw any houses or people. I brought my friend Tony. He is a guy I met in my building last week who's a doctor at Chang Gung hospital in Linkou. He's a really nice guy and his significant other is in Australia for one year so we're both going to share each other's pain together. He was a little nervous about the whole hash run so I ended up staying with him most of the time. Perhaps he was nervous because I told him about how people get lost and taken to the hospital after the run. Oh well, he said he wanted to go again. He said he might even bring his friends. But yeah, the run was awesome. We did some river tracing through the most pristine jungle rivers I've seen yet. I saw large shrubs with huge white flowers on them, like orchids. The hillsides were also covered with trees with what looked like large white, cherry blossoms on them. We also ran through an aqueduct that crossed a river.

It was a long weekend and I am feeling it now. This week is already off to a big start though...I'm going golfing with my doorman Mr. Pong on Wednesday so that should be interesting. It's his second time ever playing golf. And I learned some more names at school today...Spark (boy), Hanson (boy), and Waynnie (boy). At this point, if a kid named Wildcat walked into class one day, I would not be surprised at all.