Went to this IBM party thing today. It was crazy.
Dresscode said: Either you should dress up in traditional dress, school uniform or formal work clothes. And look at the outcome. Perhaps I should stock up on some of those dresses if I have any spare space when I get home. I bet they'll be popular. (Yeah, could make a good business importing those perhaps? :D)

As you can see, a lot of women work at IBM, and yeah, they're probably overly overrepresented in my pictures since it was Maxine, my host sister, who brought me here, and so, I had to met all of her friends. As you can see, the school uniform is not a bad choice for dressing up either. Now, can you guess the age of this girl next to me?

That's on october the third on the western worlds calendar, which means yesterday.

In the Mid Autumn Festival, a lot of Taiwanese will get together with their relatives and perhaps friends to do some clutural activities together, like having a taiwanese barbeque, eating mooncake or sending up a sky-lantern. Also, there's sometimes some festives around, like this parade in Shi Fen:

But this was not actually what we came for. A quite famous tradition is sending up the sky lanterns, and that's exactly why we went to Shi Fen, but first:

Actually, some days ago already, it was agon's 70 year birthday, so we celebrated today. Notice: This was not a birthday party as in lots-of-old-men-drinks-themselves-hammered-and-starts-dancing-on-the-tables like Fredrik witnessed, this was a birthday party for the close family.

This reminds me of the danish easter where my mother always cooked eggs and let us kids paint stuff on them.

I know that the yellow character on one of the middle eggs is a pictograph of the sun, is "Ri" in pinyin but actually pronounced more like "ghi" (the G is soft), and usually means day or sun. The signs together probably means birthday or something related.

There's always a lot of stuff on the table at David's place. I have yet to see a day where more than half of it actually gets eaten. (I think Joni too, because her refrigerator looks really like she stuffs I don't know how much into it everyday.)

Since this is a birthday, we have to eat a very special thing: Pig legs.

However, they actually do have birthday cake and even a birthday song in mandarin. However, the cake is actually a cheesecake because, as I already told you, taiwanese people arent big fans of sugar.

So now you know what you're missing if you're not going to befriend a taiwanese family some day in your life. And may you have a nice afternoon. Wan an!

Sadly, I don't get to be in a school festival like lucky Nathalie, but I get a singing contest. Of course that's nothng at all really - we just went and dressed up in stupid looking dresses and sang a 5 minute song and it was over. But the preparations still looks funny so here you are:

These kept talking about chocolate in a very strange context, and I didn't have a clue what they were trying to tell me. Then I realised that they actually meant the flowers. Crazy taiwanese. 

Everyone got hearts painted onto their faces and paper hearts glued onto their hair and arms. Some even got some letters taped onto their uniforms so that they could form the word "LOVE" by standing next to each other.

Unfortunately we had P.E. today - so everyone wears the same uniform. No pictures with girls in skirts for you yet. You know... Actually you should come here and see it for yourselve instead. This place is great, after all.