Archive for February, 2009

Big Fish, Small Taiwan

Last night was our weekly Wednesday Night Bowling.  While we were there we ran into one of the local moviestars from Taiwan (馬念先).  He had just done a main role in the 2nd most successful movie in Taiwan history, Cape No. 7 (Here is the movie trailer with english subtitles).  We did bother him and [...]

Personal, Taiwan

Uncommon common sense

I watched this video today and loved it.  It’s from a recent TED conference, and the speaker offers a slightly different understanding of what happened in the American financial institutions.  From there, he talks about how we as a nation are dealing with the problems today and what our politicians are doing.  In America we [...]

Current Affairs, Economy

Chinese Measure Words

So this is one of the first things that you start to learn after getting into chinese – “measure words.”  It’s basically a classifier that you should add onto a lot of nouns. Image courtesy of this article on chinese medicine Personally, one of the main things I’ve noticed in 8 months of studying is [...]

China, Learning Chinese, Taiwan

Ping Hsi / Ping Xi Lantern Festival 2009

Last Saturday I visited Ping Xi for their annual Lantern Festival, which comes every year right after the Chinese New Year.  For 1 day, this old coal mining town in the mountains turns into a tourist trap, and everyone is lighting off lanterns with new years wishes written on them.  There is also a ton [...]

Taiwan, Travel

Hiroshima after the Atomic Bomb

This is a picture from the museum in Hiroshima, dedicated to the atomic bomb that dropped in 1945.  The red ball in the air is the bomb explosion, the rest is what was left after it left its mark.

Travel