A pidgeon and a dog

by Sander Tams 3. May 2011 23:26

When I was on my way home today, a car drove right into a pidgeon, hurling it 5 meters through a trail of feathers and onto the bicycle track right in front of me.
So I stopped up and looked at him for a while. At first he seemed like he didn't see me, then he started trying to get away but he could only move his left wing, everything else seemed broken or at least not his to control anymore except for his head.
Then after some time, he just stopped fighting and died.
Actually I was quite relieved that he died all by himself. Otherwise I would have to do it. Then I carried him away from the track, onto some grass so that no-one would fall over him on their bikes or something.

And this man was heading right towards me, talking on his cellphone, with a dog on his leash. He didn't seem to have noticed even though there were feathers everywhere and me standing in the middle of the bicycle track. (Oh yeah, the man was walking on the bicycle track instead of the pedestrian side walk too.)
His dog probably would've eaten the pidgeon if I didn't warn him to pull a little away from it when he walked by. I wonder if he would have done anything to the pidgeon if I hadn't moved it away.
I'm not expecting people to cry over a stupid pidgeon getting himself killed, but at least you can help out putting it someplace where kids wont find it. Of course I did that already, so no one else would need to do that, but they could at least just try to look as if they cared instead of walking by, pretending that the pidgeon and I never existed. I felt like a crazy freak removing that carcass. Imagine if it hadn't died by itself and I would have to kill it too.

Yesterday I found a runaway dog, also on my way home, he was dead scared of me, so I couldn't get near him at all. He didn't have a neckband either, so I called the police, said where he was.
No one else had called them to say it was missing so they told me to leave it and they would come catch it in 30-60 minutes if the owner didn't call them.
He was running through peoples gardens and around near a really trafficked road when I found him. He seemed to have been running about for a while, totally disoriented. He had probably went out to find a lady friend but gotten lost on his way home. Probably scared by the traffic. (And hell, I wouldn't let him go back to that heavily traficked road. He could cause a real serious accident.)
I haven't heard from the police whether they have found the owner or captured the dog yet, but I'll assume it's fixed.

I wonder what strange thing will occur to me tomorrow when I head off from school again.

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Dagligdag

Microblogpost in danish

by Sander Tams 28. March 2010 14:30

Tog til sådan en slags rotary country fair for outbounds for at representere Danmark for nogle måneder siden og mødte mindst 3 outbounds der allerhelst ville til Danmark.
Nu viser det sig så at distriktet, der arrangerede det og i øvrigt ikke er det samme som mit, ikke har fået nogen "pladser" i Danmark, selvom Taiwan samlet næste år udveksler 5 i stedet for 3, som det har været førhen. Det er i hvert fald hvad jeg har fået fortalt.
Så føler man sig lidt dum over at have arbejdet så hårdt. Alt jeg har lavet, er jo bare knuste drømme.

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Pessimisme

Taiwan High Speed Rail Photos

by Sander Tams 26. February 2010 21:24

Drove high-speed train for the first time in my life on 24th of February and brought my DSLR Camera. Here's some of the pictures I took.

 IMG_1089

First picture taken while travelling the HSR from Taipei to Kaohsiung. Exposure time: 1/400 sec, ISO speed: 200, Aperture: f/2.8. Wtf was I doing?

 IMG_1090

Second try. ISO changed to 100. Of course it has to be 100, it's in the middle of the day! Exposure is still way too high, but the camera actually managed to capture a somewhat sensical photo. Shutter speed can still get higher. Train is still accelerating at this point.

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Shutter speed is now 1/1600 sec. Is damn bright today.

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Now at 1/2000 sec. Objects close to the railway are almost clear, so I'm satisfied with this setting. Exposure is still a notch too high, but hard to manage when moving so fast. My Canon 50D can shoot at speeds up to 1/8000 sec, but didn't want to set it that high as I would probably have to increase ISO and thus, make more digital noise. Not that it would be a problem of course.

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Photography | Taiwan

Beard, Jubeat, Danish Candy, Gundam. Why? Why not?

by Sander Tams 3. December 2009 17:46

Didn't finish the sequel to the Wulai trip just yet. It's a lot to cover, and I haven't a lot of time. I still need to get to some of the other stuff such as mountain climbing and stuffs, but I guess I can just write quickly what I did today.

7am - going to school, getting a few minutes late but gets ignored by the military there as they probably don't know (or dare) how to explain in english, that I they're unhappy about my lack of hardcore discipline.
Then: Sit in the class for two hours staring at a math teacher talking chinese, then going to a website-design class to draw stuff for a drawing competition by the MRT Amdministration. (I guess that's website design in some Taiwanese logic as you have to find the rules for the competition on the internet.) And I am not exactly good at using a chinese version adobe illustrator on a chinese version MAC. (Ever only found out how paint works on my Windows, that's my graphics experience.)

Okay, that's a standard school day for me now more or less, the more interesting part comes here:

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Wow, what's that? About 1pm I was sitting at Starbucks eating danish candy.

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While talking danish with some Irish looking beard man. His name is Ciarán Knakkegaard McLoughlin and he currently lives in Taoyuan.

Well, you should be able to tell the outline of our day in the title. Sadly, he's not in Taipei City too much as there's a bit long to there for him and also because he goes to Taiwanese school all day. Apparently he has a problem with people telling him he looks like Leonardo DiCaprio too, which is even more ridiculous than telling me, as you should be able to figure from his picture above.

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Actually I just knew Gundam was some robot stuff before we bumped into this place just outside Taipei Main Station. Now I also know that Gundam is based off of some old anime series and immensely popular. Maybe even bigger than those warhammer figures you can paint by yourselve I'd say. They're quite cool, and honestly, I wouldn't mind having one standing in a glass box in my room. I doubt that it's inexpensive though, both money and timewise.

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But what's Mikuru doing here? Took a break from that dominant god somewhere in the future without us knowing?

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Gundam Base Taipei, eh? Well, now you can find it yourself with some Google skills I guess. I have to be carefull about going there again though. Already got a serious addiction to that arcade game Jubeat. If I start to look out for figures like this, it might very well hurt my pocket a bit more than just a few percent of my expenses.

So well.. Didn't take so many pictures except for a lot of the figures there (we were just there shortly, went to buy shoes and chinese versions of the lucky star manga and other japanese stuff. (Yeah, I might not write a lot about it, but I do mostly do taiwanese stuff around here.) By the way, I also peed in a urinal with an advertisement LCD screen ontop today. Wicked.

It's cooler now. And isolation is not really good around these parts, but I'm ok. It's not THAT cool, just somewhere down about 13 degreees celcius outside when it's really extreme.

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Travel | Taiwan

Country Fair

by Sander Tams 22. November 2009 16:16

 DSC04543

Okay, what am I doing in front of this table with danish flags all around it in some basement during the Saturday evening?
I'll tell you: I was preparing for the country fair that went on today. Another district was lacking a danish guy so they called into my network and made me use half of my week for preparation. (Well, actually I was sick for some days too, so they shouldn't all count as working-hard-on-a-project-days. I'm more effective than that, you know.

 DSC04567

So this morning, I was up quite early. The thing started at 8 am, so I tried to get up at 6 so that I could get there in time. (Joni's car lost it's radio this saturday day because it wasn't parked within a security cameras angle so we couldn't use that one to carry the heavy stuff around. May the thief loose his right arm in a terrible accident just by the way.).
In the above picture, I'm digesting a sammich after arriving a half hour late. I went to take a shower yet still my hair looks terrible.

 DSC04569

These Brazilian noisemakers made sure that everyone who had a lot to say ended up with loss of speaking ability this evening. They were entertaining though.

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Travel | Taiwan

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About Me

My name is Sander Tams.
I am an exchange student from Denmark in Taipei, Taiwan.
I'm mainly focusing this blog on how it is to try and live a life as the locals here as a foreigner, commenting on the differences in culture and whatever I find amusing or interesting.
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