wo dao le!

When I was in the airport I had a conversation with a lady in Chinese. It was really encouraging; I could understand her perfectly and we had a remarkably fluent and content-filled discussion. I think it was her really clear pronounciation in comparison to my family.

The flight was fun; this really nice flight attendant was being my friend. I sat next to a PhD student at UPenn who was fun to talk to, and who helped me as I got off the plane (although I didn't end up needing much help). Also, I saw a bunch of movies on the plane. However, the majority of what I did was this:Yes, review characters, because my recollection is atrocious. What I've noticed is that when I remember characters it's sort of like me looking upon an open book. After not using characters for a while (winter break, spring break, now, etc), the book has a lot of dust on it. When I go through a list of characters and write them all once (or a few times) it's like I'm blowing the dust off the book and they're all readily available once again. A lot of people sitting near me on the plane actually took notice of me writing characters and said that they looked nice. Well, whatever.

I'm now in my uncle's apartment. I had originally thought for some reason that he lived in a house, not an apartment; the last time I was in Taiwan I stayed in another relative's house in Tainan so my image of this place was a rural-ish house. No, it's a nice apartment ...here's about half of it.... and my room...
...and the view.I had one of those "holy shit i'm in a foreign country" moments earlier when my uncle, picking me up from the bus stop, turned onto a street with all the advertisement/street signs on it, all lit up bright as day. It was cool.. I'll try to get a picture sometime.

Also, does anyone know how to change the Language Bar so that it doesn't switch input schemes when I press Shift or Shift+Space? It's really annoying, seeing as how I use Shift for, you know, capitalizing letters.

Anyway, greetings from Taichung!