Saturday, July 30, 2005

room 18 revisited

the last time i was at room 18 was about four years ago, i think. at the time, it was situated at warner village and it was a pretty nice place, if a little expensive. now, it's moved down one block to the neo19 building rite next to warner village. the set up is still good, a big dancefloor for hip-hop/r&b in one room, surrounded by tables and a long bar, and then a loungier area in another room where mostly techno and remixed pop are played while people sit around the tables there, which surround the bar in that room.

since i had gotten pretty wasted the nite before, i wasn't sure if i wanted to go out again, but after a little rest, i was feeling restless once again.

i met up with a bunch of classmates there and partied the nite away. the cover was pretty unreasonable at 700 nt, but then we got a punchcard type thing with 800 nt worth of drinks on it. a beer, shot or well drink is 200 nt, with some cocktails and stuff getting up to 350 nt ($10 drinks, are we in new york or what?), so if one were to want to get trashed, one would probably just get 4 shots. i ended up getting a well drink first and finding out that it was weak-ass, so i used it as a chaser for the shots i took.

it was a really fun nite, even tho afterwards, when i went home, my cousin had deadbolted the door to our apartment, cuz he thot i was in taoyuan, so after explaining to the security guard that i really did live there, i laid down on the couch in the community room to nap until my cousin woke up... in the heat and the humidity (yes, it gets really hot at 7 am).

well, i guess it gave me time to chuckle about how i knocked a guy in the head on the subway with my own head when i dozed off on the way home. whoops!

Friday, July 29, 2005

like a sophomore for the very first time

i hadn't gotten that drunk on a school nite since 2002, i think. the dorms sure were fun, weren't they?

last nite, after hitting a bar (roxy jr. cafe on shida road. don't be fooled by the name; it ain't a cafe) with my classmates to do homework (oh yes, the best place to do homework is where there's plenty of drink...), i went to another classmate's hotel room (his family owns it, so he lives there. spiffy, huh?) with a bunch of other classmates and got trashed playing drinking games. i think it's the perfect icebreaker to get drunk with people. i don't think i can really be great friends with someone until we all get trashed, reveal our innermost secrets and then embarrass ourselves in front of each other. that didn't happen last nite, but it was still fun... mebbe because i ended up in bed with a cute boy. not that anything happened.

today, we only had two people in the class, including me, excluding the teacher. there are a total of five students in that class; two of them went off on a school-sponsored field trip to the beaches of kenting; and then one of them skipped to go shopping with her mom. class with only one other person besides the teacher, hungover and exhausted is not fun, but i think we struggled thru it nicely. i still can't believe the teacher didn't just cancel class tho.

Sunday, July 24, 2005

snow or never

well, what would you do, if you had a chance to see snow in taipei? yesterday, i went with a few classmates to nokia's totally board event, cuz we were promised snow and pop stars. the snow was a little disappointing, but the pop stars were alrite.

i met up with people from my class at the chiang kai-shek memorial hall in the afternoon to check out what was going on during the day, and when we got there, we saw a ski ramp and a little snow slide where people (mostly kids) could slide down on an innertube. that was it for the snow.

as for the music, the person we saw in the afternoon was zhang zhenyue, tho i didn't kno his name at the time. i called him "that guy with the beard" and no one believed me that he was actually taiwanese. after his set, nothing much was going on, so we left to get something to drink.

after much trouble finding a coffee shop with any room, and after meeting up with yet more people, we headed back into the memorial hall to see if there was something else going on. we watched the skate competition for a bit, and then they had some music. it started off with an unknown called alan kuo, who no one really cared about. i personally didn't like him cuz he was unattractive and couldn't sing well. his album was supposed to come out later or something. i dunno, i tried not to listen. after him, it was huang yida, whose songs off his newer cd weren't quite as bad as i might have imagined, having listened to his entire first cd. then, the man we all came to see, lee-hom. he performed a few songs and then left to a crowd of screaming teenage girls.

i think this was the first time i'd actually attended a c-pop concert, and it was a lot of fun. hopefully, in the months to come there will be more... and hopefully jay will come back and perform too.

Saturday, July 16, 2005

please die, taiwanese news media

this morning, i woke up and turned on the news. a news report on harry potter! great! i can see if they said it sold out yet or what... first headline printed on the screen: *note: harry potter semi-spoiler follows* "harry potter hits the market! _____ dies!" WHAT!?! WHAT THE FUCK!?! WHAT KIND OF RESPONSIBLE NEWS MEDIA ORGANIZATION WOULD GIVE AWAY THE CONTENTS OF A BOOK NO ONE'S READ YET!?! the answer is no responsible news media organization. taiwan's news media sucks! i hate it! but wait, there's more! second headline: "_____ dies! killed by _____!" OH MY GOD WHAT THE FUCK!?! i can't believe it. i absolutely can't believe it. it's just too stupid! i was almost okay with knoing who died before i read the book, cuz, you kno, i don't kno who killed him, but no, the taiwanese news took even that from me. i'm absolutely disgusted! DISGUSTED! i'm warning any tv reporters over here, that if i see them on the street, i'll punch them in the mouth.

and now, i'm off to secure a copy before the typhoon hits so that i can sit inside and read all day. not that i'll enjoy as much as i could have, stupid news.

Tuesday, July 05, 2005

stupid buses, stupid school, stupid me

i'm not the most aware person when i'm running on less than 4 hours of sleep after an entire day of walking, sweating and using my brain. i make excuses, but i'm sure a smarter person wouldn't have made the same mistakes. two days in a row, i've taken the wrong fucking bus and had to get off cross the street and take it back to somewhere familiar.

yesterday, i mistakenly got on the 624 instead of the 642. already, pretty stupid of me, but it wasn't until 4 stops on the wrong route before i realized that i was on the wrong bus. then, after i got off the bus to cross the road to wait for a bus to go into the other direction (back to where i knew where i was), there was no way for me to cross the god damn road! it was y-shaped, where one road turned to two, and i had to cross at the point of diversion, except the traffic light alternated between allowing each direction of the road to go, which meant that where i was, there was a constant flow of cars. i don't kno why they bothered putting a fucking crosswalk where people couldn't really cross safely! i stood by trying to frogger my way across the 4 lanes and watched bus after bus after bus go by, buses i could have taken. when i finally made my way across, no more buses came for what must have been at least 30 minutes. i think they're just making trouble for people with two buses 624 and 642 that stop at the same place, daring people to not pay attention or read the number wrong, or remember the number wrong. fucking bus!

because i had learned from my lack of awareness the day previous, the public transportation system decided to show me that i had a hold of nothing, that they still owned me. seeing a 642 bus come, i waved my hand for it to stop and got on it. i made sure that it was going on the rite route by seeing where it was going, since, while i thot 642 was the rite number, i'd been wrong before when i thot i'd been rite. after a few stops that were familiar, i spaced out and started thinking about how much trouble my whole day had been. after a few more stops, i looked outside and didn't recognize the surroundings. i went to look at the posted bus route and noticed that it had made a turn i hadn't wanted to take, and that i had to get off the bus, cross the road, and take another bus back. what the fuck is up with that!? well, i'm not exactly sure what went wrong tonite, but i think it was that there's a green 642 and a red 642, and while most of the route is the same, it's different exactly from where i get on that bus. fucking bus! fucking bus system!

i'm sure anyone who is already familiar with the system knos to pay attention to these sorts of things, but i had no idea. at least now i kno, rite? no! wrong! now, they're just going to throw something else at me, like green 642s that you pay-as-you-enter go a different route from the ones that you pay-as-you-leave, or i dunno, a green 642 with an odd number of passengers goes one way, and one with an even number of passengers goes another way, and it changes as people get on and off the bus. hopefully, i have a good grasp of taipei public transportation and won't have to suffer thru more frustration.

speaking of frustration, taiwan normal university has a horrible method of putting people in the rite sections, and an even worse method of switching classes. first of all, after a proficiency test that didn't test my proficiency, i was placed in a class that was way too easy for me and at a time i didn't select. in order to change classes, you need to wait until the 3rd day of the quarter. except, when the third day of the quarter came, there were no open spaces in any of the classes i wanted to get into. in fact, i was not the only one with this problem. dozens of other students also had trouble getting into a class they wanted. the only solution, it turned out, was to commandeer an already-existing class and make the teacher teach the material we wanted to learn. well, whatever works.

as a result of the shitty system, i spent a better part of the day on the campus. i woke up at 6 to make it there by 8 in the morning to see if i could switch classes and/or attend the class i was signed up for at the time. then at 10, i sat in on a class that might or might not have had an open space... for 10 minutes before the teacher told me that i probably wouldn't get into that class. then i ran into this other girl looking for another class, and we spent the next 20 minutes trying to find a class that had open spaces. whose idea was it to make each class 10-person maximum? at 12, i went to the fun cooking class, and then at 2, i had a 3 hour class. exhausting, i tell you, and then i have a lot of homework to do. actually, i should prob get started on that.

Monday, July 04, 2005

another fourth away from home

it's still hot. really, really hot. i cannot express just how hot it is; you just have to come and experience it for yourself.

taipei is a consumer whore's paradise. there are malls and department stores everywhere. in some places there are 3 or 4 of them rite next to each other, like near the city hall. there's the old warner village and new york new york that's been around there for a bit, but there's also a new multi-building shin kong mitsukoshi, and of course the new taipei 101 (the tallest building in the world!), all of which is connected to each other with a network of bridges to assure that you won't be tempted to leave the area without having loaded up on the latest fashions from around the world. as if the prices for designer labels weren't already way out of my price range, the fact that the exchange rate is about 30 new taiwan dollars to the american dollar so the numbers go up into the 10000s frightened me so much i yelped and fainted.