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.

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.

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?

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.

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

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.

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:

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

So tonight I'm eating "tarteletter med høns og asparges" (a Danish variant of patty shells), and that will be my last dinner in Denmark.
Rotarians! Ready your breakfast and eat hearty... For tomorrow night, we dine in Taiwan!

Seriously, sorry about that.

But I've been shopping more than I did the whole last 4-5 months the latest two days in my preparations. It's not because I've bought a lot: Why should I? But still some stuff like presents for my host family and maybe more were needed aswell as a suitcase and some clothes for surviving the 35~45 degrees celcius and high air humidity I was warned about.
Oh: And I also bought the new album with Mew: "No more stories Are told today I'm sorry They washed away No more stories The world is grey I'm tired Let's wash away". Yeah, it's the album name aswell as the lyrics for one of the songs on the album. It's nice. Can't beat "And the Glass Handed Kites", but who would be expecting that anyway?

This Sunday I were in copenhagen, Fisketorvet, to have a chat with Ida, a Danish exchange student who returned from a year in Taiwan earlier in the summer, so I guess that finally made me realise that I'm actually going to live on the other side of the globe for such a long time. (I'm really, really looking forward to put my teeth into some of their food now, even though we didn't talk so much about it.)