Poisson d'Avril

魚人節快樂! If you think that says "Happy April Fool's Day" in Chinese, you'd be, well... wrong! Kind of. 

That phrase above is pronounced the same way as 愚人節快樂, which is the correct version. The first one said "Happy Fish Person Day." I feel quite clever for making the connection, since April Fool's is actually April Fish in a lot of other languages, including Italian, German, Danish, etc... the title of this blog post is French. 

So anyway, that's why there's a photo of a fish for today. It's the fish in one of the aquariums at the Taipei Main MRT station. Hard to see how huge the fish is in this photo, but take my word for it, it's pretty big.

In addition to being April Fool's Day today, it also marks the end of my "sucky blog" experiment. The funny thing is that the blog wasn't the issue at all. It turns out that the wedding photos were responsible for my utter lack of motivation for pretty much everything else. Now that they're done, I do feel a lot more motivated to work on blog posts. 

I have a huge pile of ideas and photos for posts that I'm looking forward to sharing with you, but I think it's a good idea not to put so much pressure on myself. So rather than posting 5 times a week, I'm going to aim for 3-4. Even though it'll take longer to blog about everything I'm thinking of (and I'm not exactly super patient), I want more time to work on and edit the posts. It kind of annoys me that that I can't post more regularly, but I've decided it's a price I'm willing to pay for more beauty sleep. :P

Although since I get four-day weekend due to 清明節 (Tomb Sweeping Day, so people can sweep their ancestors' tombs) and 兒童節 (Children's Day, and yes, it is an official holiday, and children get to go to all sorts of places for free), maybe I can catch up on sleep and create a ton of blog posts! (Great, now I'm starting to sound like an optimist.)

Have a great day, all of you, and be nice with your pranks! Hope you survive the day unscathed. :)

with love,

linda

Knights Without Knives

{In which there is a mini Team K reunion in Taipei}

I found out last night that Daniel Hsu, E-camp mentor and NTHU FHL fellowship president, was in a motorcycle accident last week. He wasn't wearing a helmet; his injuries include internal bleeding and subdural hematoma (hemorrhage in the skull). He underwent brain surgery last Friday, and the doctors are keeping him under sedation in ICU. Please pray for him!!
As promised, here are the photos from last Sunday (2/13), when I had dinner with the Team K. Over summer, I participated in E-camp at NTHU, a leadership and English-learning camp for incoming freshmen. I Our team's name was Knights Without Knives (aka Team K, before we came up with the name) and — to be completely objective and honest — our team was the BEST TEAM EVER. I mean, we placed or tied for first in every competition, from camp-wide contests such as the scavenger hunt, tower building, and superlatives game, to the mini-games we had in our classroom (er, not to brag or anything. 'Tis the truth).

But the important thing is that we all enjoyed hanging out together and bonded as a team. Those two weeks were certainly very memorable ones for me. We had way too much fun, what with playing Killer (the card game) all the time, the group nap at Mr. Donut, watching the meteor shower, our long talks... and they are so sweet! I was incredibly touched by the presents and cards they surprised Dennis and me with on the last night of the camp. I'm glad that we can still keep in touch, and that they still hang out together. Sadly, not everyone was able to make the gathering — we missed you, Aaron, Anna, Janet, and Joe! — but I'm really grateful for the chance to catch up with everyone who was there. Dennis was visiting from China, Jerry and Michael came to Taipei from Taichung and Taoyuan (respectively), and Sandy, William, and Willie live in Taipei. It was also good to see Alex and Irene again (they weren't in Team K but hang out with my students a lot).

Cousin

This is my cousin! Isn't she pretty? (Yes, her skin really is that good.) She's a year older than me and also lives at my grandpa's for school and studying when she's not in Taoyuan with her parents. She's currently preparing for her CPA licensing test. I took this shot on the MRT on Chinese New Year's Day en route to Danshui with her and her parents (my aunt and uncle) and Grandpa. It was super crowded when we got there, so we walked around a bit, decided the crowd was just too much, bought some food, and then went elsewhere for dinner. I was a bit disappointed that I didn't take tons of cool photos at Danshui, but I really like this one of my cousin. :)

How I Get to Work

One thing I love about living in Taipei is that it's so easy to get around everywhere, even without a car (or scooter). Taxis can be found almost everywhere and the bus system is cheap and extensive. But the MRT (the Taipei subway/sky train rail system) is my go-to form of transportation. It helps that I live really close to an MRT station (and a transfer one, at that), since that's how I commute to and from work every weekday. I get to miss the vehicular rush hour traffic, but that doesn't mean no waiting time:



This is a photo of people waiting to get onto the platform. The entrance is on the opposite platform, so people are coming down the stairs in order to be going the right direction. There are long lines stretching across the platform, which is so packed that the rest of the commuters are forced to wait on the stairs until a train comes to relieve the crush of people (the exit stairs are at the opposite end of the platform). I guess it's kind of hard to see from this photo how many people there are. Ah well, I'll try to see if I can get better ones.

Unfortunately for you (but fortunately for my sanity), I don't see this every day. I usually miss the worst of the traffic since I don't arrive at work until around 9:30am, so I only see this when there's a holdup due to some sort of issue, like a malfunction or accident. They tend to get resolved pretty quickly though, since a lot of people depend on the MRT as their work transportation.

When something happens to cause a delay, MRT employees will hand out tardy slips as you exit. Like, "Hey this person was late not because he or she didn't want to get out of bed on time because it was too cold; no, it was entirely the fault of the MRT system as there was an unforeseen delay of [however many] minutes, so please go easy on the bearer of this notice!" Or something like that.

Although there were two such delays this week (already!), I managed to make it to work around 9:30ish, so I didn't bother with the slips. But I still took one to photograph and show you:



So yeah, the MRT is wonderful and convenient and all that, but I'm not a huge fan of taking it in the mornings because everyone is packed like sardines (well, just for a few stops, thankfully). Plus most of the commuters are middle-aged office workers. Not enough eye candy. :P