A day that end in a totally different place than it started

by Sander Tams 9. January 2010 19:24

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I went to shop cameras today. It's not that I bought any, but perhaps I have a better idea of what's out there now.

Went to Guanghua again, as they have not only computers, but a lot of camera stores too. Now, I am not very good with cameras, actually. I can look at a photo and tell if it's good or not, or if it's just too damn blurry to see a thing, but I don't really know much about why it's so important to stick a wide array of overly expensive lenses into those DSLR's to make them take the best photo for the occasions.

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Outside of the Guanhua New Digital Plaza, robots were rampaging the streets. A bunch of kids were running around and hitting the robotic baloons so that they almost fell over and the people who keep an eye over them had to ask the kids to behave.

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Appareantly, Intel had some promotional going on about you being able to win a trip to russia, to fly military airplanes and fire missiles at poor farmers, should you decide to buy a computer with an Intel processor inside during these promotional days.

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Inside, people are, of course, playing world of warcraft to promote some 'gaming' stationaries with lots of colored lights inside.

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Like this. I mean... It's really cool and all that it looks like some spaceship or whatever on the inside, but how is this going to be usefull to anyone? Oh, and that brick in the middle with cooler master written on it has a processor inside that outputs 2.74 gHz according to the screen to the left.

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Well, there's not much camera shopping over this, but that tauren druid totally just shapeshifted. Fuck I miss this game.

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Of course they had girls dressed up. Even some of the food courts have that kind of thing around here. A lot of guys with expensive cameras kept taking pictures of them over and over, so I decided to take pictures of those guys taking pictures instead.

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Look at that. Perhaps I should've just asked them what they use of cameras and I could've finished the day having a 90k NT$ camera in my hand smiling.

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If you walk a little off from all that digital craze, you can get to an arts exhibit with cat women and stuffs. I just walked past.

Right next to that place there's a spot where you can walk along the highways on grass. Nothing's currently build there, and even though you are almost in the absolute middle of Taipei City, there's actually space for you. It's a lovely place that I'd love to get back to soon.

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Right under this spot, theres a highspeed railway line for one of those trains that goes up to 400km/h. Amazing.

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There's also these old tracks for normal trains, but it's closed now. And here's some very rare exposure to Taiwanese graffiti. You know it already: I am in the land of video games and there's nothing you can do about that jealousy growing in you.

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After taking those pictures, I headed to another house in the rotary/rotaract-network. Maxine had some friends there, and of course, those friends were also members of rotaract and had parents that were members of rotary.

Well, I'll about how many people are, are related to, or know someone in rotary in another article. Ending up here was because some of the people there had tasted my rice pudding I made for The Christmas Party that was held at my house the 24th December. They wanted to learn how to make it and, obviously, craved it.

To make long stories short, the rice pudding didn't go well, partly because of wrong ingredients, mostly because of bad cooking. Not that we tried hard though. We played monopoly so much, that we decided to just do it another time.

Now, that was a day of events that went completely unforeseeable, eh?

I love this place.

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Computers | Travel | Taiwan

My Taiwanese makeshift Christmas

by Sander Tams 30. December 2009 10:43

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Obviously, Christmas is celebrated in Taiwan too. By every single department store that you can find that is. In the homes, some Taiwanese seem to like decorating a little during the last few days of December, but it's not like they would take off from work or school a single day before new year.

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Now, I did manage to get just one day off from school on the 24th, so that I could prepare for a Christmas party on that day. The idea was of course to give my family and a few friends. My family ended up inviting so many that over 20 people showed up to the party.
Luckily IKEA had Swedish Glögg. And obviously people were surprised when tasting hot white wine with strange spices, almonds and raisins added.

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Of course I am making ris a la mande. Risengrød too. And the people loved it.

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... But only so much that they'd eat it in way too small bowls and with chopsticks.

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Thing is, my host mother prepared most of the stuff to eat already. This was just the welcome table, later came even more stuff to eat. Oh, and I put those swedish biscuits there, but no seemed to dare eat them except for one of the guests who had previously been on an exchange trip to Sweden.

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Tiffany brought her Spanish boyfriend. I really miss european-looking people already. Everyone around here are Asian. Only rarely I spot an American, and I must say that even I have a few times caught myself in staring at other westerners walking past me on the street as the Taiwanese seem to do a lot. In Spain they eat lobster and Paeilla for Christmas apparently.

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I have danish butter cookies too! But people think they're too sweet, so I'm still probably the only one who can empy the remaining 2/3rds of cookies.

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Joni brought some pudding too. They were also very sweet and mainly composed of cream, so of course I liked very much.

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It should be pretty obvious to anyone with eyes that children are the most vile creatures in this world. These two just killed the reindeers.

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Actually, even though there's pretty much nothing to find around Taiwan that just resembles Danish christmas a bit, the smell of warm Glögg should be able to help just a little.

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There were even Christmas gifts. I was given two traditional Chinese dolls. Gave away some Circeline videos translated into Chinese aswell as the Chinese version of The Girl With The Dragon Tatoo to my family. Thank god that everyone didn't bring gifts.

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Obviously, I had made way too much stuff as people would only eat a tenth of what you usually eat of the dishes I made, but luckily in Taiwan they'll split up any unfinished food, and so, usually people will carry home a number of bags with various foods every time they've eaten outside. Whether it's in a restaurant, at a big come-together or just any other normal dinner at home, Taiwanese people make more food than they can finish.

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So, that was my Christmas eve. Christmas day I still went to school, and after all, it's not really different from any other day in Denmark, so I'm just happy I got the 24th off.

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Travel | Taiwan

Busyness

by Sander Tams 25. December 2009 15:42

Hello again. I'm sorry I didn't write recently. Had other things to deal with. Some of which I might still need to work a bit on.

As I am writing, I am upping my recently taken 354 pictures that I didn't manage to load into the computer since wednesday last week, as I couldn't find my connector. As always, I am tired while writing this, so I'll just post a few pictures to summarize my recent activities. Hopefully I can use this post as an against myself to write blogposts about the stuff.

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This fruit is awesome. Taiwan has many many fruits, more than just a few of them even unique to Taiwan. After all, Taiwan has been isolated from other landmasses for a long time, and has therefore evolved a number of distinctively taiwanese (or formosan) plant and animal species. I'll have to get an English name on this one before I can write about it, so I guess I better stop being so lazy and ask someone soon. So far, all I can say is that is has an awesome and creamy texture, and it's very sweet. I mean, so sweet that when I am halfway through it, I start to find it a little too much. And I like sweet very much just by the way.

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That's me and, I guess... my third host family brother. He's the brother of my third host family sister. I should blog more about hanging out with the older young people here. They're very good memories.

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Especially because of stuff like this.

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I also went to this Buddhist retreat at Ling Jiou Mountain on the northeastern coast of Taiwan with the most amazing view I've seen in my life. Let's see if I'll be satisfied enough with the trip myself to write about it. I can promise you that it's a really great place, and I have plenty of material to make a big post.

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Also held a makeshift christmas party just yesterday which I should definitely write about soon.

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General | 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.
Have fun with the info about my life here. 

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