2011: A new year, a new post

New years aren't actually that exciting to me. In fact, I may or may not have missed 12am, due to playing video games. This New Year's Day was going to be more interesting, since it was the official deadline for me to decide on whether or not to accept my offer from Google – the one I apparently didn't write about. I ended up deciding several weeks ago to accept the offer; most people who will read this probably already saw my Facebook status from the day I mailed my offer letter back. The decision didn't end up being easy (hurray life-altering choices), but I ended up making it based on the fact that I didn't progress to a point where I would be comfortable spending the next few years working on a thesis. Stopping at a Master's now makes the most sense, since I'll finish my requirements in May. At any rate, a new phase of life begins this year. I guess that phase is called "growing up." It should be...interesting.

In other news, my family went on a cruise for winter vacation this year. The respite from cold and snow was great and I think everyone had a good time. In hindsight, I think I really needed a break from the Internet and work. Despite taking a leisurely one class, toward the end of the semester, I think stress and frustration with various things/people were starting to take its toll on my well-being. The best ship entertainment was easily Second City. I didn't see them when they came to Purdue and now I regret it. Oh What a Night! was also a great act – a tribute to the music of The Four Seasons, interleaved with comedic banter. Eating cheesecake every night was also good entertainment. I made a Google Map to show where we went and put some details on the markers. Unfortunately, I didn't use my camera at all, so I have no pictures.

View Christmas 2010 Vacation Cruise in a larger map

More time, more problems

It's that time of year again; summer has just begun, so it's time to make a list of things that might be interesting to do so I don't get bored out of my mind (mostly a list so I don't forget things). My first year as a PhD student has gone by somewhat uneventfully. I think I've passed my qualifiers, but this semester's batch has yet to be seen. I've been getting this weird, nostalgic feeling with more friends graduating and leaving Purdue. It's like those sports movies when the coach at the end is being all emo when he's shutting off the stadium lights. Awesome, right?

The only definitive thing I'll be doing this summer so far is research. Not something terribly interesting at the moment, but I'll probably be getting paid as a summer RA (that's research, not resident). This probably means I'll be working towards a workshop paper, but who knows. Hopefully my partner will be around, because the stuff we're doing now is a drag. I'll be going to a week-long summer school in Oregon, as well. The topic is virtual machine/compiler implementation, so I'm looking forward to it.

Summer is when I get all of my recreational reading done. By recreational reading, I mean anything not school related, be it fiction or technical. I finished the Sword of Truth series last summer, and it was great, aside from the poor print quality of the books I got. Possible options:

1. A Song of Ice and Fire series by George R. R. Martin. Looks to be shorter than the Wheel of Time series. Plus, I already read the first WoT book, and would rather try something else before returning to it. I intend to read at least the first book in this series.
2. Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan. Probably won't get around to these, but I don't have much else on my list of fantasy fiction.
3. Real World Haskell. Enter nerd books. I've read a few chapters into it already, but it's a big book. It's interesting so far, but I certainly haven't reached the part where I would call my Haskell knowledge "real world."
4. Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid. I bought this book awhile ago and never got past the preface. Maybe I can get past it this summer.

I always want to do some recreational programming over the summer, but I end up getting lazy. Nevertheless, a possible list of things to work on:

1. Mercurial. Specifically, hgsubversion. I originally applied to do this for Google's Summer of Code, but got turned down. Still, this project is interesting to me, since many people have no interest in learning Mercurial, leaving us stuck with Subversion. Progress on this would let me avoid Subversion. I've already submitted some minor patches during the school year, but I'd like to contribute something significant if I could.
2. Luke's BookLi.st project. A fairly interesting Django application. Not sure what I would do; API functionality would be an idea to implement, but probably wouldn't be a very large project.
3. Personal website in Django. This is obligatory; I think I post this every summer. I always dream up designs in my head, but am not graphically-talented enough to really materialize them. I'd still like to get one up, someday. Maybe it would motivate me to blog more, somehow.
4. Miscellaneous billion-dollar web startup idea. Yeah.
5. Game programming. I've grown somewhat weary of the idea of game programming, but will nevertheless be revisiting it with a few others. Some of the others have experience in this area, so it may be less tedious. I wish I knew graphics people.
6. IRC client. Kind of a dead horse, but I'm not really satisfied with any Windows IRC clients. This would end up being a cross-platform (Python) engine with a Windows-only (WPF) GUI built on top of it. Yeah, I could easily use a cross-platform toolkit. No, I won't. This also adds the limitation that the engine has to run on IronPython as well as CPython, which means Twisted is out. Could be interesting if this got anywhere. Big if.

If I had more things on the list, I guess I've already forgotten them. Knowing me, I'm forgetting something big. Hopefully I'll get things done this summer (I say this every summer, don't I?) and have more to write about. It's kind of sad that the few people from Purdue CS I knew blogged have all stopped, myself included. I guess we've relegated our ideas to 140-character messages now.

Side note: If anyone wants to play Civilization IV, I'll be participating in a potentially slow-paced multiplayer game with a lot of newbies in it. If anyone is interested...

I am really lazy

This is not the next post I said I would write. It's more or less an update of my lazy life. I've mostly stopped playing games, but now I apparently still have no motivation to do anything productive. Great. There is really not much happening right now. Two weeks ago, I was on vacation with my family in Glacier National Park. Pictures will come eventually. Maybe.

Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog was "aired" on the Internet this week. Apparently it wasn't as widespread as I thought, since I assumed the people who were on top of their game (I'm looking at you, James) would know about it. It's Joss Whedon's latest creation (Buffy, Firefly, etc. fame), and I found it to be pretty amusing. So, if you liked his shows, you'll probably like this one as well. But you know, watch it anyway. The free viewing ends after tomorrow (or at midnight tonight, it's kind of ambiguous), so you should step on it, if you're interested.

The female actor, Felicia Day, in Dr. Horrible was new to me, though apparently not new to Joss Whedon fans. I stumbled upon a small web series written by her called The Guild, which was also pretty funny. I can relate to it a lot more than I can to superheroes, even though I don't play WoW.

On a less-fun-more-nerdy note, the newforms-admin branch of Django was merged to trunk last night. This is probably the one good result of me procrastinating so much—I don't have to convert any code to match the new admin module. I hope I can get motivation to start working with Django (and other projects) again soon, but I still have some other stuff for CS190M to finish up, and that's stealing all the motivation I can get.

Winter break plans

I've actually gotten all A's again so far, with only my cryptography final to go. Quite surprising to me, but I can't really complain. Unfortunately, I tend to get less productive instead of more productive during break (that's what it's called break, I guess?), even though I have no schoolwork to bog me down. In any event, my to-do list:

1. Sleep.
2. Study for the Western Civilization I CLEP exam. I need two more gened classes (6 credits), and this exam will satisfy the requirement. I only need a 50%, so I can't imagine myself studying very hard. Hope it doesn't come back to bite me.
3. Read The Little Book of Semaphores, or at least some of it. I'll probably be helping design a class on concurrent programming next semester, so I figure it's best to advance my knowledge as best I can so I'm not useless.
4. Sleep.
5. Look into more web programming. I got bored this week and started trying to scrape together a new template for a blog; you know things are going bad when I start writing HTML and CSS. My hope is to do some stuff with Django, a Python web framework. If no other ideas come to mind, I may end up replacing my blog with a Django site. I haven't completely ruled Pylons out yet, since I still subscribe to the mailing lists, but since the Django book was published recently, hopefully it will provide a better source of documentation. And hopefully the book will be released online during break, or I'll be sad.

I've unfortunately put language-related things behind me for now. If I'm looking for an industry job, it probably isn't very marketable.

The not-as-exciting Austin post

Not to insult Austin or anything, but I'm lazy, and most of the work was done for me already. James posted a fairly comprehensive summary of what went down in Austin.

The only thing I have to mention is that I'm noticing a trend when comparing Purdue's campus to others (such as MIT and UTA). I wonder if it's really just because I've seen Purdue for three years.

The super-exciting Boston post

Yeah, so this post took about 5 days more than it should have. Oh well.

All was quiet from my end of the Internet this past weekend, since I was at MIT visiting my so-very-dear friend, Julia. Of course, like the rest of this year, my airport experience was highly unpleasant at best. I decided to fly US Airways since it was cheap; apparently they were cheap enough that they canceled my flight out on Friday evening without citing a reason, forcing me to fly out at 6:20am on Saturday to be able to spend any significant amount of time in Boston. My flights were delayed a little bit anyway, and filled with crying babies, further adding to the flight fun.

After arriving in Boston, we went to a Vietnamese restaurant around Harvard where I had phở for the first time, along with some sort of beverage made of jackfruit. Phở is basically a beef noodle soup, though there were some ingredients within that I couldn't identify (and thinking back, would probably rather not); it was pretty good, especially since I hadn't had breakfast, despite being awake since 4am.

After lunch, it was pouring extremely hard, so we spent rest of the remainder of the day in the comfort of a dorm room. The dorm is a graduate dorm, and it provides a better environment than any dorm at Purdue ever has (or will); the dorm is replete with computing facilities, conference rooms, as well as apartment-like suites that include kitchens as well as bathrooms, never mind the fact that each room was bigger than a shared double in Hillenbrand. For dinner, I stood by idly and watched Julia cook we cooked chicken parmigiana, and since I'm alive, clearly it wasn't toxic. Too toxic, anyway.

After waking up at noon on Sunday, we had pancakes, eggs, and sausage (read: fat) for...for lunch, I guess. We took a mini-tour around MIT's campus, which was interesting; it's pretty different from Purdue's campus, which I would call boring at best (and smelly during select seasons). To begin, Purdue's campus is fairly confined to a smaller area, unlike MIT (and IU, for that matter); smaller areas aren't very exciting, but I guess it's nicer for walking to class. MIT's campus is a little more widespread and more "scenic," being that it doesn't reside in a town as tiny as West Lafayette. MIT also has some fairly interesting architecture, such as their CS building, which is probably the wackiest building I've ever seen in my life (photo shown below; not mine). More to the point, most of Purdue's buildings are pretty boring (new CS building, anyone?); maybe the architecture is just a novelty that would wear off on me if I saw it every day for four years, though.

MIT seems to have a more interesting history than Purdue does, as well. Maybe it's because of MIT's incredible nerdism that makes them measure bridges in terms of people, but as far as I know, Purdue feels pretty bland in comparison. Not that we don't have our own share of of urban legend to spice up our history, but it seems like our student population is confined typical college activities of partying and tipping cows studying hard. Of course, it's also quite likely that I'm left out of the loop, since I never leave my room.

MIT hacks are also a very interesting part of MIT culture. Putting fire trucks on top of buildings and putting blown up versions of a class ring on a stolen cannon seem to be above things that Purdue students (or administrators) could ever manage. Of course, I'm not exactly an expert of Purdue culture either, so I can't really make too many comparisons, but I think it's safe to say that Purdue is relatively normal; after all, we appear to be a relatively conservative campus.

Of course MIT has its downsides too, such as living through X years of torture, paying more money for one year than I pay for four years at Purdue, and so on. Paying so much more might entitle you to better living quarters among other things (being around generally smarter people, getting a job automatically, you know), but the the painted picture of the academic workload seems...well, crazy.

We walked around Boston for awhile; the weather was much nicer than it is in West Lafayette now. Even though it was overcast, it wasn't raining, and there was a nice breeze to keep the temperature nice. In West Lafayette, it's blistering hot, and I start sweating just walking back to my apartment from work. Lucky for me, I'm not playing tennis anymore, unlike two members of my family, or I'd probably be dead by now. Anyway, Boston was a pretty nice area; I certainly like it much more than I liked New York City when we visited for spring break (possibly because it was snowing and very wet). Boston didn't feel as congested as NYC always did (given that it was a Sunday), and I guess it just felt different (in a good sort of way?) walking around Boston; maybe I felt like I had a smaller chance of getting mugged.

It was kind of weird to see some university residences (MIT Greeks, BU dorms) sitting in the middle of a city, kind of like how Soochow University in Taiwan was right in the middle of a city. The buildings there were also unlike anything you'd ever see around Purdue, partly because some of them are very old compared to anything you would see in all of Indiana. I guess someone decided it would be fun to build housing vertically instead of horizontally to prevent people in Boston from getting fat; maybe I should move into one of those houses.

We ate at a Thai restaurant for dinner (I don't remember any names, I suppose I'm a bad tourist) and I had a yellow curry. I didn't realize they would just give you "extra" bowls of rice if you needed it, and there was an awful lot of curry sauce for just one bowl of rice, but it was still good. The rest of the night was spent watching South Park and failed attempts to get me to follow along with Japanese women doing aerobics and saying really odd things like, "I was robbed by two men" and, "take anything you want." I think their smiling faces indicated that they didn't know what they were saying.

We left for the airport basically right after waking up. My flight back was also delayed at each leg, and I ended up getting back home about two hours later than I should have. I don't know if I just pick terrible times to fly or what, since I don't think I've ever encountered this kind of luck before. At least I wasn't flying Northwest, who appears to be canceling flights like nobody's business, or I'd probably still be in Boston. Alone.

So all of this took way too long to think up and write, and I leave for Austin in a few days to visit James, a lazy bum who hasn't posted on his blog in awhile, all the while thinking he can bug me about my blogging!

Week in Taiwan: Day 6

Today was my last day in Taipei with the rest of the students. Breakfast was the usual with an added dragonfruit at the end, which I guess was interesting. After checking out of the hotel, we left to pick up some students from Soochow before heading to Hsinchu Science Park for the day. On the way, some of the Soochow students were teaching us [weird] games that I guess they play during long bus rides, including some odd variation of hot hands, and some game where you try not to guess a certain number in a range that narrows by each guess. It was kind of like the first day all over again, because all of the Asian students besides Nelson thought I could speak Mandarin. I ended up pulling out what little I knew for a few minutes and thankfully didn't make myself look [too] retarded. I also got a present, an Xbox360 pen, from Nelson. Hurray.

When we got to the park, we went through some video orientation (which I guess is common at these parks, since the park at Nankang also had one) and toured the administrative building. There were a lot of items out to provide examples of what companies at Hsinchu did, though I think it was mostly semiconductor business. We also got to tour the museum, which was supposed to be inaugurated tomorrow, so we're the first group to tour the building, which I guess is cool, but there isn't very much in there.

Lunch was fairly uneventful. We sat about half and half with Soochow students who didn't speak very good English (or just didn't want to speak English), with the American representatives being Sherry, Angela, Juliette, Matt C., and myself. There was a fairly large amount of food, and it was interesting to see that the native students couldn't identify everything. One of them, who was allergic to crab, tried a mystery meat, even though someone already had said it was some kind of seafood; I guess they just like a lot of risk, or something. I think the highlight of lunch was Jeff successfully throwing a grape into Jack's mouth twice, while being two table spans apart.

We visited AUO after lunch, one of the largest LCD manufacturers in the world. Their orientation was apparently extremely boring, since half of the adults fell asleep. The demo room was cool; we got to see an LCD TV with some sort of technology that made it so that you could view it at any angle while still retaining the same color. After leaving AUO, we went on a campus tour via bus, which nobody really paid attention to. When we got back to the administrative building, it was time to leave. I waved, got off the bus, waved some more.

At this point, the rest of the trip is no longer worth talking about, because the majority of the people around me are not English speakers. I'm currently at my aunt's house, and will be traveling most of tomorrow. Hopefully I'll have Internet again tomorrow night, but there likely won't be anything to post about. Back to the regularly scheduled not posting.

Week in Taiwan: Day 5

I woke up early again and was unable to fall back asleep, but oh well. I still seem to be more awake than the other students; I'm definitely more awake than the crazy people who went clubbing and didn't get back until 4:00am or whatever. They switched up breakfast on us this morning, which I suppose could be classified as "exciting," but not really. The fried rice was gone and there was fried noodles instead and the guava was gone too, which was disappointing.

We went to class today at Soochow University, which is a top-ranked, private university in an urban area in Taipei, unlike NCCU, which was closer to the mountain. I think I liked NCCU's setting more, unlike most comments I heard from Purdue students, but oh well. Professor Roan also commented that the girls at Soochow were more attractive, so maybe that was their driving reason. Unfortunately, they weren't attractive enough (or they were sitting behind me), because I still couldn't stay awake in class. That was especially bad since a) everyone around me noticed and pointed it out rather vocally and b) the professor has known my dad for a long time.

During intermission in class, I met a student named Nelson (and it took me forever to remember his name). He was an interesting character; he's currently an MBA student at Soochow, but he got his bachelor's in English "and a little bit of Japanese." We talked for a bit and we one-way-exchanged contact information.

For lunch, we went to a famous beef noodle restaurant with Nelson. I thought the food was really good and fairly "normal," but it seems the same people still didn't like the food, even without the spiciness. We ended up going to McDonald's afterwards and we got some food and ice cream cones, which are only like $0.30 in Taiwan (and apparently $0.15 in mainland China!).

Post-ice cream, we went to the Chiang Kai-Shek Memorial Hall. There was a Chinese opera rehearsal going on, so we watched that, which was pretty cool. Afterwards, we went up to the actual hall, where some soldiers in the honor guard were rotating shifts, ritual-style. It was kind of boring and everyone had to stay quiet, but I guess it was still something to see. After that, we got to go backstage on the opera set to see the area and actors, who were changing; some people got to take a picture with an actress that's apparently really famous.

They decided to be tricky afterwards, and didn't provide any transportation back, so we had to find our way back from the MRT. I'm proud to say that we aren't dead. I took a nap for an hour, even though some people went swimming, because I suddenly felt exhausted when I got in my room.

Tonight, my group consisted of both Matts, Juliette, and Brad. At first we were aiming to go to a cigar store, since Matt F. and Brad wanted to get some stuff, but what looked like a short walk turned out to be forever and a day, so we stopped when we got to the MRT station and split up. Matt and Brad went on to try and find it while the rest of us headed back to the Shilin night market to find dinner.

We ended up eating at the first place we saw, which was a hot pot restaurant. Our waiter was friendly and spoke [enough] English, so I think we did okay. The general consensus was that it was the ugliest hot pot ever, but it still tasted good. Matt and Brad joined us midway through; apparently they tried to get a taxi to take them to the cigar store, but simply got a point and primeval grunt, so they didn't end up finding it.

We saw pretty much everyone that wasn't in the hotel sleeping at the night market that night; I guess we all ran out of stuff to do. Juliette ended up buying a shirt and some magic cold/hot pack things, but that was it. We were out until around 11:00pm before we headed back to the hotel. I'm guessing everyone pretty much went straight to bed afterwards; I know I did.

Week in Taiwan: Day 4

Woke up today at 6:30am from a phone call that I presume was my dad. Since I didn't pick up until right after it stopped ringing, I guess it'll remain a mystery forever. Anyway, he came knocking on my door five minutes later, so I couldn't fall back asleep. Breakfast was the same as yesterday, with breakfast buffet. Not very exciting.

The morning class wasn't very exciting either; the professor seemed to know what he was talking about, but his English was broken and hard to pay attention to. I nearly fell asleep again, but I guess I found enough to keep my mind occupied for two hours. Lunch was short and small ("normal" sandwiches and some pastry for dessert), and then we went to visit a software park.

The software park was called Nankang Software Park (I guess Nankang is a district in Taipei); it was a series of buildings in close proximity, but the buildings were very nice. The interiors and exterior was well-decorated with various types of art, including some sculpture where you could view two faces from one side and two faces from another, or something.

The company we toured inside was Yaox, a company that worked in 4D and 5D cinematics. Apparently 4D is 3D with special effects, and 5D adds a layer of interaction. We got to watch two 4D videos, which were really cool; last time I watched a stereoscopic video, you could see the red and blue they used to project 3D images, but I guess technology has since changed, since I didn't see any traces of red and blue. The image quality was really awesome, but I was slightly tired, so my eyes couldn't focus too well.

There was also some interesting building engineering going on. The first thing we were told was that the floor tiles, which had floor sockets and A/C vents could actually move around, which allowed a tenant to organize their office however they wanted. The second was a section that had previously been an outdoors area between two buildings. Architects basically built a roof over the area and provided a pavilion area, which apparently is used for lots of things, such as demonstrating new cars, having banquets, etc.

For dinner, a small group of us went to a Korean-ish restaurant; there was me, Juliette, Matt, Tom, and Chris; representing the Taiwanese population we had Osiris, Bella, Kelly, and Candice/Candace. The food was really good, but I didn't feel so full when we were finished. The dish we had was lamb and I think I ate about half of it, since Matt and Juliette didn't seem to like the food much. The highlight at dinner was a perhaps slightly inebriated Tom trying to hit on six Asian girls sitting near us. They kept ignoring his "Americanly" loud attempts to talk to them, until Bella asked them to take a picture with him. Unfortunately, I don't have a camera, but they actually agreed. Matt and Chris got shots in too, so we have plenty of pictures of random girls now.

We also had an argument about the ordering of rock paper scissors. All [sane] Americans say rock paper scissors in that order, but the Taiwanese students insisted that it should be paper scissors rock, even though in Mandarin it's actually scissors rock paper; they are clearly mistaken and confused.

After dinner, Osiris took Juliette and subsequently Chris back on his scooter, where we sat for awhile before the girls left. I talked to Matt for awhile before another girl came (Kathy?) with a friend. We sat around and looked at some pictures for awhile, until the group left for Room 18, which is apparently some club run by a popular TV star. Even though I'm quite the party animal, I didn't feel like going, so I went back up and got back on the Internet. Dancing and smelling like smoke just ain't my thang. I tried (and think successfully) found Osiris on Facebook, who said he registered today, so hopefully I didn't get the wrong one. I figured there wouldn't be many Taiwanese people named Osiris so I took my chances even though I didn't know his last name.

It's almost midnight again, so time to sleep.

Week in Taiwan: Day 3

Thankfully, they provided more time between wake up and leaving to eat breakfast, so I did. Not thankfully, wake up was still at 7:30. The buffet was really busy, so I had to walk around for a bit before I found a seat with Matt F. I ran into kind of an awkward moment, because a waitress tried to take his "I'm sitting here, go away" card while he was up, and I tried to tell her that someone was sitting there in Mandarin. The awkward part was when she didn't know what the hell I was saying; I died a little on the inside.

The first class we had was pretty cool. We had to write papers about consumer behavior in Taiwan (which was 110% made up, in my humble opinion) and the lecture was tailored around stuff we wrote. We mostly had discussions about inane points that people made that were sometimes blatantly false, but it was still fun, because it was interactive (for them; I just sat there). It was also different in that in previous lectures, the MBA students from mainland China were asking all of the questions, but the discussions this morning actually fostered many more questions from the undergrads than MBAs. We also got to see one of our student guides, Bella, since she was a TA of some sort.

Lunch was funny today; we ate at the whitest restaurant they could find. Apparently they heard that some of our crowd couldn't stomach the local food, so we ate at a restaurant called Ken & ______, where the blank is another incredibly Caucasian name that I don't remember. Patricio ordered two filet mignons, two orders of fries, and two Cokes, and he was so happy. I think the only people that ordered Asian food were the Asians.

The afternoon lecture was mundane, but it was one I could understand (and therefore stay awake to), at least; the topic was SMEs (small- and medium-sized enterprises) in Taiwan, which is kind of interesting, but I guess my mind isn't entrepreneurial enough to care.

For dinner, we went up the local mountain (apparently they have classes up there!) to a tea shop. There were some Taiwanese students that rejoined us, which was cool. I sat at a table with Osiris, Raul, and a guy I'd never met; there were girls that sat at another table. The shop served us a ton of food and we probably didn't even finish half of it, but it was mostly good food. Post-dinner, we moved out to "tea tents" for tea, where we consumed vast amounts of tea over a span of probably two hours. I'm amazed that only one other person had to get up to go to the bathroom; I guess I'm just not man enough. It was a fun night, and we had some interesting conversation. We sat with three of the MBAs, so there were actually only two non-Asian people at the table. One of them, who calls himself Maverick, seems to really enjoy talking, but he comes off as being really, really smart, so he's fun to listen to, despite his insane accent.

After we got back from the tea shop, there was a group going back out to the Shilin market, but I decided against it. I never buy things and we'd just gone yesterday, so I decided to stay in and buy some Internet time and do some catching up (four fairly lengthy blog posts in one night--give me some props, here), and now that it's almost 1:00am, I should get to bed.

Week in Taiwan: Day 2

Waking up at 6:30am sucks. I haven't had to do this since CHEM115 as a freshman or ever during spring break. Whatever. I'm a man. I can tough it out, or something. Since we had to be on the bus at 7:30, and I like to shower, I skipped breakfast; I normally don't eat breakfast to begin with. We took the bus down to CNCCU for some opening ceremony, but then my dad and the Dean at Krannert got stuck in traffic, so we were waiting for awhile. After a few short speeches that aren't noteworthy, we went on a tour around the CNCCU building (CNCCU is the School of Commerce at NCCU, if you haven't figured that out), which was pretty cool, though it felt kind of old, like a lot of Taiwan does.

Unfortunately, in a study abroad program, one must study (and not just a broad). We had our first of several 2-hour classes to come at 10:00am, with a lecture that went completely over my head. Since this study abroad program is titled, "Emerging Asian Markets and Economies," and I'm a Computer Science major, I have nothing to do with, well, this entire trip. I sat through, pretending I was interested, but not learning much at all, since it all just zoomed over my head. Luckily, I'm not the only person on the engineering side, so I can safely feel like I'm not the only one feeling like an idiot.

Come lunch time, we had Taiwanese food. It was funny, because I was the only one at my table that ate a substantial amount, being accustomed to Chinese food. Everyone else thought everything was disgusting, so I merrily helped myself to whatever I wanted. I don't really know why they didn't like any of it, since it's relatively normal food (no tongues, brains, or intestines involved!), but I suppose I'm heavily biased, being Asian and all.

After lunch, we had a lecture that was even more boring, and I half-dozed off several times, so I really don't know what happened during this class. It didn't help that the room we were in all day was pretty much frozen solid, so my brain was in a comatose (read: whiny) state. Even if I was in Management, the class was taught by a guy with a pretty monotonic voice, and most of the people thought he was boring anyway.

We went back to the same place as lunch for dinner, and it was pretty much the same story. I heard Patricio, one of our students from Argentina, totally freaked out when he saw a whole fish being served, with head and tail both still attached. Other than that, it was pretty uneventful.

After dinner, we went to the night market in Shilin. We split up into groups, and I ended up with Jeff, my team leader, and Kelly, our Taiwanese friend that made sure we didn't get lost/killed/etc. Jeff kept trying to bargain down for some dress shirts, but he got turned down pretty instantly every time. We saw some interesting stuff; we made Jeff try on a velvet coat that looked incredibly snazzy, but I couldn't convince him to buy it. We tried out some food at Kelly's suggestion, like some breaded spicy chicken, dumplings, and bubble milk tea, all of which were pretty tasty. On our way back to the MRT ("Mass Rapid Transit"/subway system), some cops pulled into the market, so we got a video of all of the unlicensed vendors clearing house, which was pretty amusing.

After we got back, we found out that the students that were guiding us wouldn't be doing so any longer, since they had class (apparently taking us around was part of a class). Kind of sad, but oh well. They were very friendly and considerate, and had much better English than I expected. Oh well. Spent more time zoning out to Goo Goo Dolls before going to sleep.

Week in Taiwan: Day 1

I woke up early today, and it looks like I'll be waking up early every day, which sucks. Isn't spring break supposed to be time to catch up on sleep? Oh well. I had breakfast at the hotel with my dad, one of his old classmates who donated funding for this study abroad program, and the Dean of the School of Management at Purdue. The meal was pretty nice; I'd never eaten buffet for breakfast before, but they had a tasty assortment of foods.

After the meal, we went to the National Palace Museum, which is supposed to be one of the best museums in the world. We met up with some of the other study abroad students and our Taiwanese student hosts, but didn't stay at the museum very long (I arrived late). Unfortunately, I'm not much of a museum person, and it was jam-packed with people, so I can't really say the experience was very notable.

After we left, our hosts took us to a Japanese restaurant, which was pretty good. I didn't know what to order (and I never do), so I just let someone order for me, though I have no idea what her name is, or if she even ever said. It was interesting, though, to see some of the other students from Purdue coming to Taiwan, since some of them were vehemently against trying out foreign foods.

Post-lunch, we visited some department stores, since we had an assignment to "observe Taiwanese consumer behaviors." Needless to say, there wasn't that much to observe, but based off of the ones we visited, they're a lot nicer than the average store you see in America. It's interesting to see that their "mall" isn't actually one giant building. Instead, it's a network of buildings that go up several (e.g., five) floors. After visiting the department stores, we went to visit Taipei 101, a giant, high tech skyscraper with lots of overly expensive clothing outlets. It was quite nice inside, but some of us didn't feel like walking around, so we just sat down and talked.

Our last stop before dinner was at the RT-MART, which is, I suppose, the Taiwanese Wal-Mart. Here, we "observed" more consumer behaviors before buying a bunch of snacks and eating them all. Our hosts seemed really interested in finding out of what we thought about their food, which I thought was great, but I'd tasted it before. The crowd I was with seemed to react well to the snacks as well (there was some Chinese beef jerky, egg tart, that one squid snack).

For dinner, we went to a Korean restaurant (funny how we haven't had any Chinese food yet...are they hiding something?), where again, I had no idea what to order. I had another girl order some random stuff for me, which turned out to be some spicy soup with kimchi and some other random stuff. After I got over the scalding temperature, it was a pretty good meal, but the same people at lunch weren't having a very good time at dinner.

After dinner, we went back to the hotel, where I zoned out for awhile with Queen playing in the background. After sufficient time was spent zoning out, I showered and passed out.

Week in Taiwan: Day 0

I'm backlogging up until day 3 with fake timestamps so they appear in order, since I haven't had Internet access. Onwards...

Today was a long day, though it was technically quite a bit longer than a day. I stayed up all night on Friday, since I didn't feel like sleeping for some reason which was quite odd, since I'd been sleeping at 3:00am for the past week or two. Anyway, my mom drove me to the airport and dropped me off, and I flew out to Chicago without a hitch. Of course, the day was young.

After disembarking at O'Hare, I found out my connection to Tokyo was delayed for 30 minutes. Okay, no big deal. I sat down and read Design Patterns instead, and got a good bit of reading done. When it came time to board, I saw that the flight had been delayed another 2 hours. Well, crap, I thought to myself. My connection time to get on the plane to Taipei would be something like ten minutes. At 2:00pm, I finally got on the plane to Tokyo. Unfortunately, there's about a 13 hour gap in the story, because aside from meals, I slept all the way there.

When we were landing, they informed us that they automatically re-booked our flights until an hour later. Cool. We had to follow a Japanese guy around to get to another terminal and for some reason, every time he said, "sankyuu," I wanted to giggle, because fobby accents do that to me. I got on the plane at around 7:30pm Tokyo time, and got to the Taipei airport at like 10:30pm.

Customs/immigration was pretty boring; I was able to get through without filling out all of the fields on the "disembarkation card." It only took about five minutes to get my checked baggage, after which I headed out to find my ride. Of course, I had no idea who was picking me up when I left, which is just a recipe for disaster. There were tons of people standing around holding signs, and now that I think about it, one of them might have been my hotel. Of course, I didn't even remember what hotel I was staying in. Crap. I walked around, hoping I'd see someone I recognized; no dice.

Eventually, I figured I could get some money and call my dad. After I got some coins, I tried putting coins in a phone, and it wouldn't even fit. I figured it was a credit card slot, but I didn't see any coin phones around, which didn't make any freakin' sense, since the credit cards were disabled. Eventually I saw a WiFi advertisement and turned on my laptop to see if I could somehow get to my dad via e-mail; fortunately, I stole a connection from a cafe and eventually got to him. It took him an hour to pick me up and an hour to drive back, finally arriving at the Grand Hotel at 1:00am. The hotel is pretty awesome, but I was too tired to notice, so I showered and went straight to sleep in preparation for day one, starting at 6:00am.