they got me!! those bastards, can’t a guy just go out for a night ?

(more…)

It just said

“HELO localhost
250 sether.pair.com
mailto: asadba….
221 Error: I can break rules, too. Goodbye.
Connection closed by foreign host.”
There’s just no cause for that, I am trying out writing my own email by hand, I remember back in 97 computers were a lot more friendly and trusting.  A few more years and as soon as they see me coming they are going to kick/ban me.  bastards.

One of the things I love about Taiwan is the random conversations you end up having with people. Take for example last Saturday, I had brunch with my Greek friend N and T who is Taiwanese. As N and I argued back and forth over who got their ass kicked more often in ancient times T pointed out that the Mongols kicked both of our asses. Me and N responded with that might be true but the Chinese were really too busy inventing characters to attack anyone else. We then went on to talk about 300 for an hour which I am sure bored T to tears.

In the course of our discussion we also found out some interesting things about tea and what people put in them. T likes to put milk in her tea while N adds orange juice, I sticking to the proud ancient Persian way of drinking tea refuse to add anything to my tea except sugar. N claims that is because I come from an inflexible culture where we are set in our ways and refuse to adopt. The next day when we had dinner with our French classmate he was adamant about not wanting to add a piece of sweet and sour pork to his tea which puts the French right up there with us Persians in terms of not wanting to experiment with the tea.

So who are the most advanced tea drinkers in the world ? You would never guess it but it’s another ancient civilization, the Tibetans who add butter to it. You heard me right, butter. I ordered the butter tea thinking no this is just a mis-translation there’s no way they would put actual butter in there. But sure enough it was butter and tea, I am sure it’s great when there are huge snow drifts outside but on a sunny day in Taipei it’s just too much.

Or as they call it mid-autum festival.

So we had our first big test, this was on what we call Book One. In its 500 pages there are about 1000 characters and 50-60 grammar patterns. Thankfully our teacher only made us memorize the last 200 characters. Of course we still had to know what the rest of the characters meant since we wouldn’t be able to read any of the sentences otherwise. After a week of studying this is how the test turned out.

90, all 3 Korean girls got the same exact grade.

86, the French guy was of course not happy about this.

79, yours truly argued for some extra points and was told that just because random Taiwanese people spoke bad Chinese I couldn’t get away with writing the wrong measure words.

78, the Greek guy. He found an extra mistake on my test and now threatens to go to the teacher to lower my score by a point.

Japanese model girl and Thai girl both did badly, I don’t know what grade they got but they both seem to be cruising now.

The writing has gotten a bit easier, this is a story I had to write for class. I thought you guys would get a kick out of it. Also it turns out no matter what alphabet I use my handwriting is still going to be horrible.