My Thrilling New Life

What's new these days: ICLP is eating my life.  I try to make room for story-generating adventures, but an unfortunately large of my adventuring time is now occupied.  From Sunday evening until Friday afternoon I live in a Chinese haze, fueled more by coffee than sleep.  Napping on the hard wicker "couches" in ICLP is a common occurrence, and not just for me.  This says something about how tired we are, because those things are the least comfortable napping locations possible.  Fan Laoshi, our head teacher, assures me that this is intentional.

But I do occasionally do things that are not either learning or procrastination!  This past Saturday I went to Ximending (a night market) with some lovely ICLP ladies and we took crazy Japanese photo booth pictures and got them made into stickers!

I also am making progress in my quest to develop a more ridiculous wardrobe while living in Taiwan.  Taiwan has such an abundance of silly clothes, and I need to wear them before I have to have a real job or anything, so it is an urgent mission!  My best night market purchase this time around was a pair of black leggings with shiny silver nonsense words (like "theer" and "sbnug"!) written all over them.

Where will I wear these, and with what?  I still have yet to figure it out.

During the week, the one other thing I do besides schoolwork is choir!  I tried out for the TaiDa chorus a couple weeks back, and so far it has been pretty awesome.  Everybody seems to be a sightreading ninja, which is neato.  It's interesting on the language front as well, because I don't really know musical terms in Chinese.  For instance, the word for "measure" sounds an awful lot like the word for "miss" (as in young woman), and at first when the teacher kept saying it I thought it was because she wanted to address the girls.  "Now let's look at Miss 87!" she would say.  Needless to say, I am figuring things out from context.  Fun fact: although we mostly speak Chinese, everybody always refers to the voice parts in English: Bass, Tenor, Alto, and "Soap."  Another fun fact: we are performing, among other things, a medley of Japanese cartoon theme songs.  SO CUTE.  I can't wait until we start learning dance moves!

There are 4 other foreign students in the choir, and last week one of the student leaders called us all to meet with him, informing us that we technically couldn't be in the performance because they sell tickets and we don't have work visas.  He told the Asian-Americans that they could probably perform anyway without anyone noticing.  Then he told me that maybe they could dye my hair black and pretend that I was half-Taiwanese.  Mahaha...somehow I don't think that would be very plausible, no matter how black my hair was.  However, the director of ICLP assured me that this visa rule couldn't possibly apply to me, so I probably won't get deported for singing in the concert.  Here's hoping!

I'll leave you with the only other picture that I have taken so far, from a train bathroom on the High Speed Rail:

There are shavers in the can!!

(apologies to anyone who doesn't get the Uncle Brett reference)