Chapter XIII

===EDIT=== So this post is like a 4 days one, since I wasn't able to finish the first part since I got carried away with packing and talking to friends before I left Wednesday.

Remembering back to being a High School freshman, I thought it would take forever to graduate HS. Walking into Freshman year of College... I thought it would be a miracle if I graduated college. Now, I'm sitting at home thinking I have 4 months of schooling in Taiwan and I'll be done. I guess it'll be a "New Chapter" of my life (or so they say). Hopefully, I'll be able to find a job once I come back to the States in a city that isn't boring or over populated. Maybe Organic Valley.. yeah I'll try my luck there after my trip. Even though it is in... Wisconsin...... I guess I'll just have to suck it up, but you never know I could find a crazy awesome job in the next 4 months so I'm not even going to worry about it.

BUT, I'm very disappointed in the Superbowl/Superbowl Ads/Superbowl Halftime/Christina Aguilera. What a terrible 3 hours. (alright not all of the commercials were bad... but most of them were) I missed the whole, I am a professional singer but yet I'll forget the National Anthem. That is just insane, but I'm sure America will forget about it in a couple of weeks. Moreover, the half-time show? WOW. It was probably the best show I've ever seen. They rocked it! [Sarcasm at it's finest] I'm not saying that I could set up and arrange a better half time show... but I honestly think I could. Even thinking back to last year's SuperBowl, I was watching it with a friend and I remember we looked at each other and said, "what is this?" I want to even say that her mom called her and said something about the halftime show. So I guess if next year's Super Bowl has a terrible half-time show, I might just never watch it again. With seeing all this fail happen for 3 hours, I just think to myself that I might have to start going towards advertising. Wasting millions for ad space and they throw out some below-par commercials? I just can't understand that they feel that the commercial is AWESOME! blows my mind.

Well tomorrow is when I start this epic and long journey (est. 26 hours). The crazy part of this trip will be the fact that I will totally miss a calendar day. February 10th will be totally inexistent to me. I leave late Wednesday night and will arrive at my destination early Friday morning. CRAZY! So does that mean I kind have time traveled ahead? or I don't know, I feel like I'm getting screwed over by not being able to part take in a Thirsty Thursday.

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So I wake up after a 12 hour slumber on this horrible thing they call a bed. It's a wooden plank and they gave me one small pad, one sheet, one pillow and one blanket to sleep on. Today I'm definitely going to have to buy a ton of blankets to make this "bed" some what comfortable. Other than that, the dorm isn't bad. I share a room with 2 other people. One I haven't met yet and one is a 31 yr old Japanese guy, who is actually really nice and I wouldn't have thought he was 31. The building I'm staying in is really old school. It feels like I took a jump back from civilization because everything feels like the 1980s or even before. Everyone is really nice that I've met. I haven't really spoken a lot since I've been here except when I met up with my Xiongdi, who gave me a tour of the campus and explained some differences about cultures. Other than that, its pretty much me with a puzzled look trying to figure out if the group I'm with is talking Japanese, Chinese, Korean, or Taiwanese. But once and a while, I think they pick up on the fact that I have no idea what they are saying and they try to include me by speaking English. I hope in about 3 weeks, I'll be able to pick up Chinese pretty well, since just after one night I started to remember a lot of what I have learned over the years.

Last night we went out to eat as a giant group. Pretty sweet place we went to, I have no idea the name of the restaurant... but I do know they had a sweet entrance. It was a normal entrance you'd expect to see with a motion detector but instead it had a push button. Which I pressed probably like 7 times. Anyways, this restaurant had several tables with each spot having a circular hole cut into the table. I found out that there was a coil underneath so when they brought out the bowl of water we would cook our food. Which was pretty sweet. So they brought out a platter of veggies and a mixture of tofu and meats to put into the boiling pot of water. Half way in I discovered a giant shrimp in the platter. It honestly looked like it just died 5 minutes before they brought it out to the table. The little guy was all there antennas and all. I guess I just have never seen a real shrimp in real life. I ended up trying so many things last night that I have no idea what everything was. Something tasted pretty good, some weren't the greatest, and some had a really weird texture to them. I only spent $7 on that meal and I think it's the most food I've ever ate for that much. I honestly couldn't move. Plus they had free ice cream! But I did learn something cool about oysters (which I've never had until that night). When you boil them and they open right up, they are fresh/ just died. If they are open a little before you cook them, they've already been dead for a while and if they don't open up when you cook them... well "they say", Stay Away! To me, those things just have a weird texture that I can see why people might not like eating them.

Anyways, It's surprising what you can learn from talking to someone for a short time. I'm reminded of this constantly since I have been meeting people from all around the world last night and I'm sure I'll meet many more in the days to come.

Until next time,

Cheerio

Alastar Swift


ps. I'll try to remember to flash my skills at photography so that I can make this blog less reading and more like a picture book. Oh and to those that know me.. All their menus have ZERO pictures...