First Taiwanese Wedding

Today Cala and I went to our former Chinese teacher's wedding reception here in Taipei. Cala and I had her for our first year Chinese class at the University of Iowa and at the time (I don't know about now) she was the only Chinese teacher from Taiwan. It was exciting to go to her wedding reception, to actually witness a real, Taiwanese wedding, and to share a happy day with her.

Although we didn't get a chance to actually talk to her for long, we did see her, her husband, and parents as they greeted each table. Cala and I also recorded our wishes to the new couple. We were nervous at first since we didn't know what to say and it was in front of everyone at the table but we prepared a nice, funny speech just like when we had to do daily conversations for Chinese class. The food was great, the decor was beautiful, and she changed her dress three times, each dress being extremely pretty. The wedding reception was a nice, fancy area and the room was great with lots of slideshow pictures (some from Iowa) and music.

Cala doesn't eat pork so I was sort of eating for two since the food was good and she didn't want to eat her portions. I was so stuffed after the wedding reception (it lasted for 3 hours) that I took a nap lol Then after that Cala, her two friends, and I ate pizza and watched "Eat, Pray, Love" at home. I wasn't fond of it but it wasn't a terrible movie. Then I went to my coworker's place and played mahjong with my other coworkers.

I didn't think today was going to be so busy but it turned out to be an eventful day! Above are the pictures from the wedding reception: me and Cala, the flowers, first entre consisting of seafood, and my teacher and her husband.

-Chihchat

Rappin'

I was exhausted all day at work mainly because I haven't been having a good sleep and because I think I still haven't recovered from my trip. Anyway after work Drew and I got some food for dinner and I just totally pigged out and was about to sleep but my roommate Cala and her friend was over and me, Cala, and Drew started singing songs on youtube lol It first began with just watching stupid videos to actually singing fast, ridiculous songs like "Baby Got back," "Ice, Ice Baby" to Snoop Dogg and Eminem. I haven't rapped to Eminem forever and there's this song called "My Dad's Gone Crazy" that I used to rap all the time to. I love that song although it's bad but what Eminem song isn't?

A nice surprise tonight was while we were singing, my two coworkers passed by a flower shop and bought some flowers and saw a purple one that reminded them of me and bought it for me. They stopped by my place since one of them lives near me and dropped off the flower. It's really pretty and pictures above are of the flower I got from her. It is really thoughtful and nice of her to do!

-Chihchat

Ugh! AirAsia...

My friend and I are planning a trip in the last week of May, early of week of June travelling to Hong Kong, Thailand, and Taiwan. My roommate is going with us too for the Hong Kong part. My friend and I tried booking the tickets last night at AirAsia but the server wouldn't work and the other reason was partly due to using our credit cards and it was thought to be a fradulent purchase.

We got up early to Skype and wanted to book the tickets but again we still couldn't. We had to choose another flight and then we realized that the promotion ticket that we wanted was currently invalid and it disappeared. But we still tried to book another ticket but it wouldn't let us. I even had to call AirAsia located in China since the number in Taiwan didn't work to figure out why we couldn't book the tickets. She was speaking in Chinese but I got the gist of it that there is no promotional deal for that flight. AirAsia has great, cheap tickets travelling around Asia but it's extremely frustrating just to purchase a ticket. And yes, we didn't book our tickets yet. We're still early since we're not leaving for another 5 months but it's just nice to get it out of the way. Since the ticket prices raised up, we're still going to look around for cheaper deals.

-Chihchat

Another Chinese project

This afternoon my coworker randomnly said, "Oh Lilly, here's something you might like." Then she gave me a magazine of Leonardo DiCaprio on the cover although it wasn't a regular magazine since it was all green, the magazine was hard stiff paper, and on the front there was just a side of his face. She was walking from the MRT and there was this guy passing out magazines to sell and he eventually started to pass them out for free and she saw on the cover was Leonardo DiCaprio! She said she knew immediately that I would appreciate it. I don't know what kind of magazine it is but he's the main story and there's a 3-4 page spread out of his filmography including pictures. It's awesome since I started to read it and they even quoted him of course all in Chinese. It's another project that I can add to my list which is reading and translating the article! :)

-Chihchat

Hard to sleep in

Since there has been construction going on from below my apartment the past week, I haven't had a good sleep, or more like I can't sleep in. Kenny is meowing much louder again but he just gets noisy when Drew wakes up since he is hungry. What really keeps me up though is the endless, nerve-wracking torture that occurs every morning starting around 8:30am. I just want to continue sleeping but the noise is so overbearing that you actually just want to get out of the apartment as quickly as possible. I don't know how long the remodeling will last but I hope soon because it's to a point where I can't even think and all I want to do is leave lol At least it gives me more motivation to get to work early!

-Chihchat

Leonardo DiCaprio composition

I meet with my coworker once a week for an hour to work on my Chinese. Besides book work, the past 5-6 weeks I've been working on my Chinese composition about... yes, Leonardo DiCaprio. I've been writing a paragraph each week, a total of 5 paragraphs and finally I'm done. I really owe a lot to my coworker since she still kept most of my main ideals and sentences but still had to untangle my sentences with my awful Chinese grammar. I will post the composition on my blog in Traditional and Simplified Chinese.

My next project is to translate a Chinese magazine about Jay Chou (a popular Taiwanese singer) that my coworker gave me a couple of months ago when I was sick :)

-Chihchat

Happy Birthday/New Year Taiwan

I had a fun-filled New Year's weekend and the pictures above are from the weekend. First picture is Taipei 101 for New Years, second picture is most of us at a park in Taichong, and last picture is me pretending to be flying on a boat on Sun Moon Lake lol

Friday night I went with my coworkers to Taipei 101 to see the firework display. It was crazy getting there since there were so many people that were traveling downtown. It took us a couple of hours when we finally sat down at Neo 19's parking lot which is close to Taipei 101. The firework show was awesome and it was even special this year because it was Taiwan's birthday of being 100 years old. My coworkers and I were even more excited since there was a 3-D dragon in the show. After the show it took forever to get out since so many people were trying to go home. Drew and I went out to the bars and stay up until 5am. We were just dancing and what not but the problem was that our alarm clock didn't go off and we overslept the next day.

We always work Sats. and we even didn't get Christmas off. But we got New Year's off and since it was a Sat. and we don't work Sun., my coworker planned a trip to go to Taichong and Sun Moon Lake. We left Sat. morning and she texted us just telling us about how excited she's getting for the trip and that was our wakeup call lol Since we overslept we hurriedly packed in about 10 mins. We took a bus to Taichong and we ate lunch, went to a park, got some bubble tea, and went to the night markets. Taichong is where bubble tea was where it was originated so we went to the restaurant that had the best "bubble tea." It cost $120NT when usually it would cost $30NT. It was extremely delicious though. Then we went to Fengjia night market which is 10x bigger than Shilin night market. It was so crowded and packed since we went on a Sat. night but they had such great food and it was huge. There were so many streets to look at and they had more food stands than clothing stores. It was so crowded that we could barely move and sometimes we had to hold hands lol

The next morning we went to Sun Moon Lake and first we went on a boat tour around the lake, rented bikes, saw a temple,went on a bike scenic route (which we first went on the road which was really tough and the second route was much easier), rode the cable cars, had dinner, and lastly took the high speed rail to get home. The high speed rail is newly built and it's really fast as it only took us 1 hr to get from Taichong to Taipei. It took us 3 hrs by bus when we left Taipei to Taichong Sat. morning.

It was a busy fun weekend and I'm extremely tired and a little sore from the bike ride and walking. It was definitely a great start to the new year!

-Chihchat