After a week in Taiwan

• I hate heat and humidity. It's hot and humid here.


• I do like food. They keep giving me food.


• The whole time difference thing with the US keeps throwing me off.


• I miss my fiber connection into my house. You never think you notice the speed between DSL, cable, and fiber until you're on the really fast connection and you suddenly go back to a slower connection. The DSL connection here is a bit painful. I'm currently "borrowing" someone's wireless network right now and it's at 36Mbps right now. Compare with the 100Mbps I get at home and you tell me why I'm feeling pain.


• I feel the need to do some quilting and making patchwork bags. I have a book too. Of course, it's in Japanese, like all of the beading and knitting books/magazines I've bought. They like the patchwork here and I really want to do it. Just checked out G Street Fabric's class schedule. Mostly, it's straight quilting there. I think I'm going to have to buy any bag books I want here. And it doesn't look like I'll have to wait until after the new year to take an intro class on quilting. I've done it before on my own, but my technique is very amateurish. Wow, it's not often I can say that I have the words I want to use in Chinese but not in English.


• I wish they sold tampons with applicators here. I guess I'm lucky they even sell the few boxes of tampons that they have on the shelves.


• I bought a 2gb memory card for my camera here for the equivalent of about $30. Note that to buy that in the US, it'd cost me around $70. Memory cards are manufactured in Taiwan. The factories make them for the large companies and sell some under generic names. Generics work just as good for half the price.


• After years of hearing about what it is my dad does, now I finally get it. He makes the chips that control the LCD lights on the LCD screens, be it hand helds or tvs. So yes, me buying my phone does help make dad happy cuz it increases the revenue in a really indirect way. I'm also supposed to yell at him if there's a line of dead LCDs cuz that's due to a faulty connection to the chip...and that may be his fault.


• Sometimes I still feel like I'm 4.


• Had dinner with some of my dad's high school friends yesterday. My parents got married the day after they graduated from college and had me right away so they were always the ones with the oldest child. Of the ones present yesterday, I'm still the oldest. There's one who has an 18 year old daughter and a daughter who's just finishing...middle school? There's another who has a 12 year old daughter who was born in the US. They lived near us in MA so I was there from pregnancy to see her born and everything. At that time, I thought the age difference was pretty big. Well, one of his friends just had his first child 5 months ago. Ya...4 friends from high school. Largest age gap among the kids is 27 years.


• Went to visit mom yesterday too. I need to make some new flowers for her next time I come back. Maybe some orchids.


• I also hate how my family thinks I'm a weakling. I'm sorry, but someone who has just complete a marathon is in no shape or form a weakling. All those muscles have to work together to get one through the 26.2 miles. I think this goes with the see above comment of, "I feel like I'm 4."


• I'll be uploading pictures into Flickr into its own set with descriptions there. There are a good deal of pictures between what I've taken and what's on my dad's camera. Picutres thus far can be found here