Well I've moved into the "Young Lion" hotel down the street from Sandy's apartment. It's in the Yong Hu District -- if I get even one vowel correctly in that name, I'm improving on my spelling skills. The room had this strange deal where you had to insert your room-card and leave it in to turn on their AC and the lights. So if you want the lights out to sleep, you have to turn off the AC as well. F' that. I unscrewed the light-bulb and enjoyed all-night air conditioning.

As my hotel room does not have an internet connection I'm posing this from Nova, four stories of wall to wall computer shops. It's the technological hub of Taipei. You can find some cheap-ass deals on system components, and also some notebook computers not releasted in the states.

No pictures today, I don't know where they hide the computer tower attached to this thing. Forget about a USB port to upload my pics through. I haven't taken any today anyway.

We met Orson (Sheena's father) and Jane (works for YJ Malaysia) yesterday and went out to celebrate Sandy's birthday. It's kind of confusing in that it's set to the lunar calendar, so her birthday shifts within a month area. All the nice restraunts are inside hotels, what a change that is. We had an amazingly tasty dinner, the high-light of which was the peking duck. Wow, it changed my opinion about that dish.

Today I've been on my own as everyone else has gone down to central Taiwan to see Sheena's grandmother's grave, apparently it was transported to a new location. So I've been wandering around Taipei by myself today.

Starting to get a little bit of a learning curve down on this place. Today's Sunday, so all the banks are closed, that means no money exchanges. And I only had the equivalent of two USD in my pocket. I spent a good hour and a half trying to track down an ATM that accepted foreign cards. Finally found one in Central Taipei Station and got some cash. Despite knowing no Mandarin, it's really easy to get around. I have mastered the subway system, not that it was difficult. They serve up a Mandarin/English combo on all the signs and annoucements, so it ain't no thang. And the bottom line is, all roads lead to Central Taipei Station.

I went to the Zoo. In retrospect, I have no idea why. It was just like any zoo, but with more monkies. Whee. I went through half the zoo, then asked msyelf what the hell I was doing and got out of there. Watching uncle bare-ass the monkey fling poo? I'll see enough monkies when I visit in Lankawi anyway.

Left on the agenda today... I'm starving, gonna grab some grub. The trick is I can't go to restraunts too nice by myself (even though they're affordable) because those restraunts don't: A. Have bigass pictures of their food for me to point at or B: Have life-size plastic models of food for me to point at or C: Don't have the actual food sitting out for me to point at. I've dubbed this the "gimme gimme" system of sustenance. It seems to be effective.


I also need to buy the watch in the worst way. You can get some decent "Unicorn" brand watches for $30. You can get some dead-ho cheapass watches for like $5. I don't wanna sound like a queer or nothin, but I think unicorns are pretty cool.

There's a boy-band/idol singer or something setting up outside of Nova, so maybe I'll check that out. I'm posting from a free internet terminal and I got some guy breathing down my neck so I'll wrap things up. Tomorrow is one more day of hanging out in Taipei, then Tuesday morning we head to Hong Kong. We'll over-night there so I'll have a little bit of a chance to check things out, then next day it's over to YJ China.

Christ my hands hurt typing from this angle, catch ya later.