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It’s been two weeks now since Chinese New Year—I suppose it’s about time to write up the final adventures of my New Year break. My friend Andy from college who is Taiwanese-American came back to Taiwan to celebrate the New Year and invited me to tag along.

Day 1: New Year’s Eve

The adventure began now three Wednesdays ago, when I took the high speed rail down to Kaohsiung (高雄). Andy showed me around the city a little bit (including the nearby temple with the European-looking knight) and we had the traditional New Year’s Eve dinner, which is one of the most important parts of the New Year. We all stayed up watching TV (and the adults playing Mahjong), then Andy and I then set off some fire crackers at midnight.

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Yesterday Steve Jobs introduced, among other things, iTunes movie rentals. Rent a movie and download it over broadband. You then have 30 days to start the film, and then 24 hours to finish it before it turns into a pumpkin. A lot of people are complaining about the 24 hours, including some with good reason and apparently many who have kids.

So why rental? Thus spoke Steve: “Your favorite movie… most of us watch movies once… maybe a few times.”¹ Currently number eight on the top rentals is one of Paul Sally’s favorites, The Usual Suspects. From the iTunes Store description:

There are a handful of movies that demand a second viewing—because they’re so good, or because a surprise ending gives every scene a new meaning when it’s watched a second time. The Usual Suspects is both.

This Saturday Jeannie and I went to Taipei to take the paper-based GRE.¹ We took it at National Taipei University (台大)—the gorgeous weather complemented the beautiful campus. (The last photo in the bunch here is Jeannie, post GRE.)

I walked around and successfully found 台灣e店 (Tâi-ûan ê Tiàm), the bookstore with everything Taiwanese. If you ever want to learn Taiwanese, learn any of the other languages of Taiwan, or learn about her native peoples, this is the place to go. Edith Aldridge recommended the store to me for finding some Atayal resources, and I picked up a Beginning Atayal book and a reference grammar both by Lillian Huang (黃美金). The dialect described is Mayrinax, a subdialect of C’ioli, rather than the Squliq that I’m studying, but it should still be a useful reference and starting point for studying the morphosyntax.

Afterwards, we met up with some other girls (Katie, Kate, and Meg) and walked around Taipei 101. I also checked out the local Muji, but quickly realized that what was borderline expensive in Japan wasn’t getting any cheaper with my Taiwanese sense of money. In the same vein, there’s Katie saddened by the roughly-equal-to-the-U.S. Coldstone ice cream prices. As consolation, though, we got some gelato gently and carefully served as perfect pyramids on our cones, thanks to a perfectionist gelato stand owner.

Here’s a poster I saw for the new Hero movie coming out in Taiwan in November! I’m there!

We then checked out the (relatively) new Sogo department store, built across the street from an older Sogo.² I’d heard about this huge new Sogo from a couple Taipei friends, but had yet to check it out. The whole building is in a gorgeous blue glass. While the inside is like any glamorous Sogo (Fendi bedsheets? Why, yes!) the top floors house an open courtyard area, complete with Japanese zen garden and tea house. We spent some time taking pictures, especially looking down at the intersection.

We walked around and found a nice little faux-Western restaurant to eat at and got some desert. Afterwards we went to a bar decked out in Halloween decor, as many of the bars seemed to be.

It was an altogether great (albeit long) day!