Whew, I’m stuffed. In the Australian sense, that i…
Whew, I’m stuffed. In the Australian sense, that is, i.e. I’m really tired after running around Taipei all day, not a good idea when recovering from a cold. Still I got a lot done.
First of all, I made an appointment for the morning of January 4th to get my eyes zapped. That’s right, gentle readers, Poagao is going to trust his vision to some stranger operating a machine in the hopes that he can avoid wearing contacts or glasses any more. I’ve asked around and gotten good references for this guy, so hopefully things will go smoothly. Keep your collective fingers crossed, though.
Then I took my laundry to three different places before I found one that wasn’t planning to be closed until Thursday for the New Year’s holiday. I realize I could save a few hundred NT a month if I did my own laundry, but there’s really no place to hang it out to dry, and our apartment isn’t equipped with a dryer. It was a nice day today, albeit a bit cold, so I walked down to the Taipower Bldg MRT station and took it up to the Train Station, where there’s a huge new Fnac. I was looking for Return to Castle Wolfenstein, but I didn’t find it there. Instead I found nearly everything else, since the store is pretty large, but not that. I did find it in the smaller computer shop next door, though, at a whopping NT$1,344. Still, I gotsta have it. It’s one of those gotsta things.
I went over to Eslite (no, that’s no mispelled) to look for a calendar and ran into Larry Dong, who used to work at the newspaper. He’s studying in New York now and is only in town for a few weeks. As is not unusual with people who used to work at the newspaper, Larry looks much better now that he’s not working there any more. We talked a bit but he was meeting friends so I went on inside to have an elevator door close in my face while the girl inside screamed and failed utterly to locate the “Open Door” button. I’m pretty sure that she’s one of those people who, every time their cell phone rings, takes up to 15 minutes to locate the “answer” button, while the phone broadcasts the Garbage Truck Theme to roughly the entire Taipei basin. What I don’t get is, since everyone I know and many I don’t all know and complain about the cell phone problem, how can there still be so many people out there so oblivious to it that they are still caught like deer in the headlights whenever their cell phone rings? This, I must admit, confounds me. Otherwise intelligent people are reduced to complete morons at the first few notes of “Jingle Bells” on their phones. Maybe there is something to that study which said that the electromagnetic waves do actually affect the brain.
It struck me as I was walking around town today that Taipei looks magnitudes better than it did just a few years ago. Foreigners here like to knock Mayor Ma because most foreigners here are in love with the DPP and believe everything the Taipei Times tells them, i.e. hate Mayor Ma, the KMT and the PFP with uncompromising passion, but you have to admit that our mayor has done a bang-up job of improving this city. The new sidewalks look great, the streets are cleaner, traffic isn’t as bad as it used to be, and things just seem nicer all around. I hope Ma gets re-elected for another term as mayor. Barring that, I think he’d make a good vice president, too. Then again, Fozzie the Bear would seem like a good vice president after Annette Lu.
Rick returned my email. He commented on my excellent memory, but I’m pretty sure he has no idea who I am, which is just as well. I don’t think he’d appreciate exactly how I remember him so well.
