New Year's a time for work

In the west the beginning of January is a time for people to adopt new practices for the coming year, whether losing some weight or doing something new. Here in Taiwan the new year is a time for work. Chinese New Year's is coming up in a few weeks and people are scrambling to finish things in time for the holidays. I haven't been working as much as I'd like but I'm rather busy nonetheless, applying for grad schools is going to be a little tight for this year, I'm thinking of doing some more work on my chinese and maybe some mark upgrades here or there. I've been playing board games on weekends and practicing my Chinese here and there it's time I went to the gym tho' so here's a pic to tide things over.

What ESL Teaching can be like

A little moment of Zen from the advertising folks at Berlitz. Courtesy of Youtube.

the lame blog/diary post

So this weekend I didn't do much of anything besides right some fairly mundane and time consuming reports. How's that for a Sunday night?! Saturday I met up with my old roommate and his girlfriend


I'm also in the process of applying for gradschools, I still want to learn more Chinese so I'm looking at another year in maybe PRC! Taiwan is beautiful but its too westernized an there is a strong dicincentive to learn Chinese, besides the foreigners I've met are all just modestly committed. The hardcore ones some of them have been here for years, if I went to China the money would be less but I could study more. Too many distractions here.


I started doing some volunteer work for Gigavox media hopefully I can spin it into an internship or reference of some kind. I'll also be studying more chinese so this already infrequent blog may drop off the Radar for a while. But I'm still alive so don't be worried.

As for things outside travel I really enjoyed this week's big ideas segment, check them out both are carrying some 'conservative' baggage but I'd say from different ranges of the field. Check it out. Click the link audio to listen.

Christopher Hitchins

Roger Scruton

Getting Lost in Taipei

So I got lost one weekend and found a park in the northern half of Tapei.
Here's the YouTube embed