23.09.11
> (TEST POST) Set up this page in advance, planning on picking up my Visa tomorrow. Will start consistently updating this page once I actually arrive in Taiwan.

2023.09.14-15
> Stayed up all night packing until the last minute, arrived at the airport at 4 AM. Got through TSA w/out much trouble and mostly slept through the first flight (3h to Dallas). Got a very overpriced but very yummy vegan breakfast burrito while waiting for my next flight (13h to Tokyo). Watched 'Kingdom of Gold, Kingdom of Water,' 'Across the Spiderverse,' and a couple episodes of LOTGH, tried to sleep, and ate all the food they gave me. Final flight (3h to Taipei), I mostly slept despite deciding I would stay awake.
> After a briefly stressful immigration/arrival process, I found my checked-in bag without struggle and exited to the welcome area, where my host family and the Rotary Club were waiting to greet me. After getting lots of photos taken of me with various people and various banners, getting very delicious pineapple tea and a couple other presents (including my name,
葉芷瑢), I left with my host family to drive home.
> They told me about upcoming plans and showed me around the apartment, I took a quick shower, and unpacked my carry-on. 晚安!

2023.09.16
> First full day! Had trouble sleeping so I ended up getting up ~6 AM, but my host mother (Elsie) made me a breakfast sandwich of a fried egg and ham (very traditional Taiwan breakfast, obviously). I went to the local street market to buy some fresh fruit and vegetables with her. After my host sister (Anna) and father (Kelvin) left for school and work, respectively, Elsie and I then figured out the bus schedule together to get to National Tsing Hua University, were my language program will be. She showed me around the various very delicious and inexpensive campus lunch options and I appreciated NTHU's very beautiful (and very flat, unlike Cornell's) campus. We listened in on the tour of the city's 300th anniversary exhibit, and I briefly talked to the AIT staff who were being given the tour.
> After a bit of a bus struggle we managed to beat Anna home, and we ordered Italian (?) food for lunch (my spicy fried vegetable spaghetti was very delicious and not very Italian). I was very politely told to take a rest, so I returned to my room to watch an episode of LOTGH and finish unpacking. At 3:30 PM, I went with Elsie to drop Anna off at her cram school. Once back home again, we peeled 柚子 (giant grapefruit? very yummy). My Chinese is clearly rather lacking so Elsie did her best to tutor me, and then I read a children's book about a dog finding a lost mitten in the snow while Kelvin laughed at us in the background.
> At dinner time, we picked up Anna and went to a hot pot restaurant, which I realized was a terrible first place to visit since I have no clue what properly cooked seafood looks like. The winter melon tea they had was very delicious though, and I think I managed to get away without food poisoning. We went on a walk past the city government building and to the one remaining historic city gate, which was the venue of a pride event. Anna and Kelvin answered some sort of questionnaire and both won bags with pamphlets, so I got the extra.

2023.09.17
> When I woke up this morning it was already light, so I was scared I slept in. Luckily, while it was a bit later than yesterday, I was still the first one up. I checked in with friends online while waiting for the rest of my family to wake up, and it was then I was met with the first negative culture shock. The Viz manga site won't let you read Chainsaw Man in Taiwan, and the site it redirects you to only offers Chapter 1.
> For breakfast, I had 蛋餅 (rolled egg crepe, very delicious) and honey water. Elsie and I then figured out the train schedule and traveled to the high school I'll be attending in the neighboring city, so I have a better chance at not getting lost when I have to start attending myself later this week. For lunch, we went out to get waffles. I ordered a cheese and vegetable one, which was very good, though my favorite part of the meal was the sweet potato balls we got on the side. I was very proud of myself for only getting to the point of being so full I felt like I was risking throwing up at the very end of the meal, until I remembered we were going out for ice cream as well. At Elsie's recommendation, since the ice cream store didn't have any English on the menu, I got soy milk and bean curd which was simply soy milk and very soft bean curd. The star of the show and the name of the place, the 包心, was very delicious though, even if I was very full.
> Once we got back from lunch, I was once again told to take a break, except I actually slept this time and ended up sleeping for nearly 4 hours. Once I got up, Elsie was making dinner, but she had previously wrote down in a notebook all the characters and words we had gone over, so I practiced writing them until it was time to eat. For dinner we had soup, 甜不辣 (fish cake), 空心菜 (water spinach), Taiwanese style kimchi, and some fried rice that Kelvin picked up on his way home from work. It was all very delicious :D
> We went on a short walk after dinner to buy bread, and I then watched TV and ate fruit w/ my family after taking a shower. Elsie was nice enough to offer me some hand-me-downs, since I definitely did not bring enough t-shirts for a country this hot. We also tried troubleshooting my LINE account since it won't let me send/receive friend requests, to no luck.

2023.09.18
> Because of my nap yesterday, and probably the heat too, I woke up around 3 AM. I read comics and practiced writing for a bit before going out to eat breakfast (garlic bread we bought from a convenience store, surprisingly good) around 6. Since Elsie works during the week and Anna has school, it was just me and Kelvin in the morning. Since his English is not as good as Elsie's but better than Anna's, he turns out to be the one who not only talks to me in Chinese the most but actually tells me the most useful sayings as well. We watched 看見台灣, a Taiwanese documentary and then I went back to practicing writing while Kelvin figured out the Alien Resident Certificate application. Once he was done, we went to my high school to pick up an official letter of acceptance and brought it to the city government building, only to realize they missed the J in my last name.
> We went to a mall food court for lunch (vegetable and pork udon, fried fish), did some quick shopping for a tooth brush and soap, and then went to finally get boba (dragon fruit, except it had some sort of clear jelly instead of tapioca pearls?) Elsie joined us on the trip back to the high school and then back to the city government office, which went well the second time. We apparently still needed to do more shopping, so we went to Decathlon (originally assumed this was a Taiwanese chain but nope, not only French but the biggest sporting goods retailer in the world) to buy sneakers for me, and ended up getting a hat, raincoat, and two pairs of sweatpants as well (eventually gave up on trying to say I didn't need whatever new item they found next).
> Final stop was Costco. Never been to a Costco before, so I don't know how well this store represents the chain, but my impression was evil Aldi (Items are still in the shipping boxes, except Costco is a giant warehouse-type place so not only are the items still in the boxes, but there are three more layers of palettes above the box you're looking at. And there are two floors of this. Also IRL ads via store attendants at the end of every aisle offering samples with long speeches about whatever product they're promoting. Nice place with yummy food but rather terrifying). Favorite find was the grapefruit/apple/green tea juice with coconut jelly.
> For dinner we got pizza, and then I practiced my self-introduction in Chinese. We also finished going through the First Night Questions so that I am completely prepared for the first day of classes tomorrow.

2023.09.19
> Woke up around 6 AM, breakfast of less-yummy garlic bread and milk. Packed my stuff for my first day of classes and left around 9 AM. Elsie went with me, took some photos once we arrived at the classroom, and then left me to fend for myself. While I had been worried about missing two classes, the teacher was still covering pronunciations, with the majority of the class only learning Pinyin instead of Zhuyin. Everyone greeted me nicely, though, even if I didn't get a chance to use my masterfully crafted and practiced self-introduction.
> I got to meet Yily, the French exchange student who I'll be swapping parents with eventually, and she seems very nice. Most of the exchange students were French or Brazilian, with one Finnish student (very cool + also wore a Moomin shirt), one Polish student (less cool, mostly played on his phone), and one other American (rich and a Genshin player). Overall, a fun group though. The teacher was also very nice.
> I ate the fruit box Elsie packed for me during our morning break, and then we all walked down to the main food court to get lunch. It seemed like everyone else was just going to get something from the 7/11, but if I was going to be presented the chance to get fresh cooked Taiwanese food for dirt cheap I was going to take it, so I figured out how to order a Taiwanese vegetable rice bento from one of the restaurants. We ate outside, since the lunch tables were packed, and then took the bus back up to the building for classes. Since I couldn't get a drink at the food court, I got one from one of the vending machines in the hall outside our classroom, though the one drink I wanted was in the one machine that didn't take credit cards, so I was about to give up after struggling to figure out how it worked for several minutes before one of the actual NTHU students showed me how it worked.
> After class was let out, I walked with Yily to the bus stop where we parted ways and realized I would have to wait nearly 30 minutes for the next bus in sweltering Taiwan heat. There was a boba shop across the street, though, so I figured I could get myself some tea to keep cool. The tea may have been nearly twice as expensive as my lunch (though both combined were still less than 5 USD) and I'm fairly certain my order was wrong (still good, but I wanted tea, not a smoothie), but it's definitely a place I have to try more stuff from. The bus ended up coming 10 minutes early, just as I had gotten back to the bus stop, so I successfully got home and worked through nearly the entire first chapter of my new textbook and workbook (the teacher assigned the first page, but I wanted to be sure).
> Me and Kelvin (Elsie was working late) ordered 滷肉飯 (Taiwanese braised pork rice bowl) for dinner and we watched a travel TV show.

2023.09.20
> First day attending high school complete! Had some sort of cream-filled bread from the convenience store for breakfast, and Elsie didn't want to take the train again so we drove to school. We were shown around by my host at the school, Claire, and the acapella teacher. The campus is obviously much larger than I'm used to, but I only go to one or two classes in each building, so it's not too confusing. The library is probably the fanciest building since it was most recently rennovated, and it has not only a rather impressive One Piece collection but also nearly all of the Warrior Cats books in Chinese, placed right next to the entrance. Parts of the campus are somewhat open to the public as well, so I was very greatful to find a children's books section too.
> I was spotted by the teacher of my class (though I'll really only eat lunch there since I'm only taking electives) while I was being tested on where my classrooms were, so I gave my self-introduction early to a very enthusiastic reception. Once I returned for lunch, I got a better chance to talk to my classmates, and, more importantly, apparently, exchange Instagrams. I later learned my class was one of the 'bilingual' classes, which explains the very high English level of most of them. I barely had a chance to finish half my lunch (a sandwhich, fruit, and salad, packed by Elsie since I won't be able to get school lunches until next week--My classmates claim the school lunches are disgusting, but I have a very hard time believing them on that one) even though I spent most of nap time (the last half of the lunch hour) eating as well.
> We then had an earthquake drill, which I was initially invited to skip and spend in the acapella teacher's office, but decided to stay with my new classmates instead. Then it was club time. The only classmate I had in the Manhua club was on the less skilled-in-English end of the spectrum, so after a couple attempts at conversation I was generally left to figure myself out. One of the students that was part of the club government was very enthusiastic about Loomis and David Bowie, though our conversations basically went Him: "Do you know this guy?" Me: "Yeah, I know that guy." I did end up becoming friends with one student named Ariel, who I exchanged Messenger accounts with, and had a nice and long conversation with.
> The first hour of the club was left to us to do what we wanted, but the club government put together a couple student led lessons for the second hour, which I couldn't entirely follow, though the pictures helped. After club time, my last period was back to the library and then it was time to go home. I only made one wrong turn and am still not entirely sure if the train card scanner actually scanned mine, but no one yelled at me so it's of no consequence, I suppose. While waiting for my transfer, I ate the entire very full container of salad in record time. There was at least one other student from my school who got off at the same stop as me, so I will aspire to talk to them at some point.
> We had mixed dishes for dinner, I read another kid's book, and I added two more sentences to my self-introduction for the fancy rich people party I'll be attending tomorrow. I once again tried and failed to get LINE to work for me, but had theree nice conversations over text with Ariel, one of the other exchange students, and one of the students from my class, the latter actually being in Chinese. We bought my school uniform during the tour, and it fits nicely!

2023.09.21
> First day going to NTHU by myself! While waiting for the cross-campus bus I ran into two of the other exchange students and we went to the Family Mart together, where I bought a bottle of green tea. I'm pretty sure I did well on the test, and I successfully ordered myself corn danbing and black tea in CHinese for lunch. The true test of my fluency was when some sort of street interviewer came up to me and one of the other exchange students and asked "你們會說中文嗎?" (Can you speak Chinese?) to which I expertly replied "不會" (I can't). So basically, I am fluent in less than a week. Was nice visiting!
> The afternoon class, however, was actually semi-difficult for once. Instead of learning how to speak Chinese, we were learning how to write it: calligraphy version! The very cheap brushes and ink they gave us probably didn't help our struggle, but the two and a half hours passed in a blink. I skipped out on homework to go get convenience store onigiri before I caught the bus, and also managed to correctly order my first boba with actual pearls. The tea itself was rather mediocre, but the boba was perfect! Somehow, though, I must have missed my bus despite being there over half an hour early, so I had to wait till the next one half an hour later, at which point normal school was let out, so I was crowded by a bunch of middle schoolers.
> Once home, I had just enough time for conversation practice with Elsie before we had to go to the fancy rich person party, which was nearly exactly how I imagined it to be. The food was good and I was told that the aunties liked me, so I'm pretty sure it was a success though. I even got through karaoke by singing "Country Roads," much to the delight of the others. There were a couple small children in attendance, but only one would wave back to me and the only thing he ever said to me was "watermelon" (very helpful).

2023.09.22
> Week 1: Done! Today was the first day I took the train to school by myself, and while I got through the first half of the journey perfectly fine, I ended up missing the second train because by the time I got to the other platform the train was already there, but the displayed destination obviously wasn't my destination, the next stop, and by the time I checked the train on my phone, the doors had already closed. Had to wait for the next one, and while I walked as fast as I could from the station to school, there were also plenty of other late students.
> First class is art, in which we were working on stop motion animation. I was still exhausted, so I made my film about a very hot day with the character sweating a lot. The assigned "little angel" (helper chosen by the school) was too awkward to talk to me in English, but one of the other classmates helped me figure out what we were doing. Second class was World Dance, which was thankfully much smaller, so I got a chance to talk to everyone. Then we had lunch and I nearly fell asleep this time during nap time. Because my gym class on Fridays isn't with my main class, there was a little confusion about where I was supposed to go, but I figured it out.
> While all the other classes were nice, swim is definitely the worst. The usual worst part of swimming (getting in) isn't a problem with how hot the weather is here, but none of the girls wanted to talk to me and I had trouble following what the teacher was telling us to do. The final class, was Computer Information, and went very nicely. I got my school email, and was able to follow the first lesson well, if not the second. I'm fairly certain it's a freshman class, and all the freshman girls are very nice!
> This time on the way home, I ran into people I actually knew. I hung out with some of my classmates from my main class on the first train, and then talked to my friend from the art class on the second. We were pleased to realize that we both got off at the same station, and despite my unhelpful incorrect attempts at identifying my apartment building, it turns out we actually both live in the same complex! I recorded my (Chinese) alphabet song homework for my Chinese class, and when Elsie got home she brought 粥 (rice congee, seafood flavor). It was delicious, and while it was more fun to eat than the congee I make at home because of the different ingredients, I was surprised by how well I previously nailed both the texture and taste.
> I really need to read American Psycho. If I don't see any of my classmates on the train tomorrow, I might download a PDF version.

2023.09.23
> I had school again even though it was Saturday, because today was a make-up day for the Monday we'll have off in two weeks. That meant going through my Monday schedule for the first time! Couldn't find anyone I knew on the morning train, so I did indeed download a PDF version of American Psycho, which is already very enjoyable to read, even if the narration style also makes me feel like I'm crazy.
> First period was Library, so I just talked to one of the teachers and read through one of the kids books. Second period was Phys Ed, which I tried to tell myself wouldn't be as bad as yesterday because it would be with my class this time, but it actually was even better because we didn't have swim. Instead, we were preparing for Sports Day (?) and practicing running relay races. Of course, not swimming means running in the hot Taiwanese sun, but I somehow survived.
> Next was Acapella, which started not great but ended well once my classmates warmed up to me (the power of doodling on your notes, apparently). I went back for lunch, and then had the mysterious "Zixin Ingenuity" class, which is actually Woodworking. When I walked in, I saw lots of wooden cubes and foolishly thought to myself, "I sure hope my first project isn't making 9 perfect cubes." This was a silly thing to think, because I actually had to make 10. The teacher only talked in Chinese, but since he could gesture and demonstrate what he was talking about directly, I was able to follow pretty well. In the two class periods, I managed to make all 10 in record time, but was told to make more as a reward.
> The last class was Music, which I was once again worried about, but we were just watching some movie about Acapella. I didn't pay too much attention, though, since several of the students in my row wanted to talk to me. On the train home I couldn't find anyone I knew either, but I waited outside the station and was able to walk to our apartment complex with the friend mentioned yesterday.
> For dinner, I got to cook for the first time: my favorite lemon-y king oyster mushroom scallops. We also had dumplings and soup. All delicious! Currently reviewing one of the kids books we have at home in preparation for Elsie's test for me :'D

2023.09.24
> Slept in late and spent a while chatting in English/Chinese on my phone before getting up. Breakfast of sweets. Visited the local supermarket with my host parents.
> Went back to work on copying down the kids book before I heard the TV show Kelvin was watching mention traditional glove puppetry, at which point I ran over to watch. When I told him I was very interested in the topic, we switched to watched one of the PILI shows, which Anna laughed about.
> Nice big lunch of stir-fried ramen, soup, greens, and tempura. Finished copying out the book and then began working on memorizing the unfamiliar vocabulary.
> Around 5 PM we left home to visit a national wetlands park known for their crabs. Got the best sweet tea I've ever had from a random vending machine and got to watch the sun sink into the ocean. After it set, we walked back to the car and drove to the local not-night market, where we got lots of fried things on sticks and very thin crispy pancakes filled with cabbage, corn, and crab meat. Drove back to our neighborhood to get the best shaved ice I've ever had.
> We ate the ice at home while watching a Taiwanese crime show, and then a gameshow, which I was able to follow surprisingly well. Started thinking about Rodrigo of Caledon again while blow drying my hair after my shower.

2023.09.25
> Monday, so time for my Monday schedule on an actual Monday. The librarian gave me some mooncakes and we talked for a bit, before I spent the rest of the period memorizing more characters from the kids book. I was right, swim was more enjoyable with my classmates, even if the teacher still worked us to the bone and I failed my frog-swimming test because not one but both of my feet were cramping terribly as I tried to swim.
> Acapella somehow became dance class, so we worked on trying to learn K-Pop choreography for the first half and then went back to recording the school anthem in the second half. Starting this week I get school lunch instead of bringing my own, but I apparently need to bring my own eating container, so I just went and got some chocolate bread and black tea from the school convenience store to eat with my fruit box.
> Luckily I was done with the cubes for Woodworking, and so I was now caught up with the class and got to do the current project: learning to use the chisel by making 15g worth of wood shavings. I didn't want to weigh my bag too soon, so when I finally did at the end of class I had actually made 18g. Music was just watching the movie again while talking with my classmates. Instead of reading, I doodled a bit with my finger in my Notes app on the way back home.
> I finally finished memorizing all the unfamiliar words, and for dinner we got fried dumplings and corn soup.

2023.09.26
> Woke up still very tired, even though I slept for over 9 hours. Did like 5 extra pages in my workbook for Chinese class while waiting for it to be time to leave. At the bus stop, one of the aunties decided to start talking to me, only stopping to think to ask "Can you understand Chinese?" (in Chinese, of course) two minutes in. I couldn't understand most of what she was saying, but I could understand and answer her questions, which is the important part I think.
> On the bus, another old lady sat with me and started talking to me. She said something about Taiwan, so I nodded, and then something about Chinese people, which I nodded to again but more confusedly, until the bus driver told her I was a foreigner and couldn't actually understand what she was saying (she had actually been asking me if I was Taiwanese or Chinese... not sure how she didn't see my obvious foreignness but at least she got a nice conversation with the bus driver out of it.
> Did decent on the Chinese test during the first class, ordered the fried vegetable rice bowl that I had last week again but somehow got it on a plate instead of in a to-go container. While waiting for the second class to start, I finally worked up the courage to ask the Genshin player if he played Genshin (yes, obviously) and found out he likes maining Cyro characters (lame choice).
> Decided to try ordering the "mango and jelly green tea" from the boba shop again while waiting for my bus, and while I was waiting for my order (which was the exact same as last time) that they hadn't gotten my order wrong last time at all, but that the English translation of the menu item was just really bad and misleading. Drank my second mango smoothie sadly and caught the bus back home (15 minutes early, which explains how I managed to miss it last time).
> I went with my host parents to a noodle restaurant in the neighboring city for dinner, which was very good except for the fact that I ended up throwing up right as we were about to leave. Not sure if it was from my lunch, dinner, or something entirely unrelated, but after I did I felt fine again so??? Watched more TV with Kelvin at home, including another PILI episode (the elaborate storyline I've constructed for these characters, since I can't actually keep up with the Chinese subtitles, is becoming more concrete in my head).

2023.09.27
> Last day of having new classes! First was Music again, but no one in this class wanted to talk to me and they were already finished watching the movie, so the teacher was showing examples of Acapella covers instead. The first one was "Never Gonna Give You Up," which I was surprised got absolutely no reaction from the class and initially assumed that rickrolling simply wasn't a thing in Taiwan, but after posting as much to my story I was corrected by several classmates.
> Swim was a bit better, and then I had Art again, but this class was working on pencil sketches of the campus instead of stop-motion animation, which was a good change of pace. The two girls I sat with were very nice, and the guys that came over to talk to me during the break were funny too. Still haven't figured out school lunch, but I brought snacks from home so it was fine.
> Because my classmates have a school exam coming up there was no club meeting, but my class instead held a welcome party for me! Apparently no Taiwanese party is complete without social humiliation though, because we had to play charades. The teacher was trying to get them to play it in English for me, but I could tell everyone wanted to do it in Chinese so I just had the student running it translate when it was my turn. My team didn't win, but we were only one point behind the winner so I guess I did alright! They also got boba, and I got very yummy litchi tea.
> After the party they had to go right back to studying, so I reviewed my vocabulary and drew in my sketchbook, not one, but three pages. Last period was Library, so I talked to my sponsor and one of the other librarians for a bit. I finished up my sketch on the train back and read more American Psycho, which is definitely a gamble to read in public, because most Taiwanese are significantly better at reading English than speaking it, but everyone generally minds their own business on the train and I keep my brightness low.
> I started reading another kids book at home. For dinner we got 便當 (Taiwanese bento), which had three sides (two vegetable and one noodle), rice, and my main course was fried fish. Very delicious! Watched another PILI episode afterwards.
> Wrote a bit more of my Rodrigo of Caledon fic and decided to post my progress so far on AO3.

2023.09.28
> It's Taiwan Teacher's Day, so we got the day off of Chinese classes. Instead, my host parents took me and one of the other exchange students, Ily, to Beipu for a daytrip. We left around 10 AM and first went through a museum dedicated to a semi-famous photographer from the town. The exhibits weren't super cool but the guy's photos were pretty neat. Will have to figure out his name again later.
> We then visited 老街 (Old Steet), went to a restaurant to try 板條 (traditional Hakka rice noodles), and a different restaurant to make DIY 板條 (traditional Hakka tea, made with seeds and cereals in addition to tea leaves). I suddenly recognized the taste of the tea to be the same as those instant soy beverage packets I got from the grocery sometime last year and never really liked. But aside from being fresh made, the puffed rice used as a topping made the drink a lot more enjoyable. We also had Hakka-style mochi with matcha powder and crushed peanuts.
> Next up, Beipu Cold Springs. I enjoyed jumping around on the rocks and trying to catch the minnows with the others. We visited the Visitor Center for the area right before it started raining, so we waited around for a while and pet the local cats before it lightened up and we could make the very short walk down the trail to the cave, which housed a (honestly rather awful looking) shrine (it was built of very modern looking white tiles, which if it could work anywhere, it definitely couldn't work in a cave).
> We returned to Hsinchu to visit a shopping mall, which housed the Tatsuya book store. Unable to find any LOTGH or Feintuch, so I got a high school shonen manga instead. We went to the fanciest sushi place for dinner, which instead of having a conveyer belt had electronic trays that would fly out from the kitchen to your table along a track after you ordered a menu item on your phone. Ate a lot of yummy sushi and had some very nice Thai Iced Tea.
> We brought Ily back home, having a very passionate debate about English accents in the car that turned into hating on the monarchy, and I ate some fruit while watching my daily PILI episode.

2023.09.29
> Today is the Mid-Autumn/Full Moon Festival, but I am really tired and didn't want to get up. First, we go to Taipei to visit grandparents. The first stop is Elsie's mother, where we eat some watermelon and watch TV, and then we go to Kelvin's parents, where we eat lunch. They live in an old-style apartment instead of one of the new complexes, so I was glad to finally get a chance to look inside one.
> It was super cool to watch A-Ma make all the different dishes, but other than the fried Taro that all got eaten up before lunch, most of the food wasn't actually that crazy delicious (probably didn't help that most of the dishes were some sort of meat, and that most were cold by the time they were all ready). My and Anna drew a bit in the living room, and then we all watched a Japanese movie ("I Want to Eat Your Pancreas," which was rather disappointing lacking in the cannibalism department and I felt that the frame story was rather stupid, though I also could only judge based on the images and what I could piece together of the Japanese audio and Chinese subtitles).
> After we said goodbye, we headed back to our city for the Rotary club barbeque, a classic Mid-Autumn tradition. That meant more mediocre meat, though the winter melon lemonade they had was delicious. Luckily, unlike the last fancy party, Ily was there, so I had someone to hang out with. I was only forced to sing one karaoke song, but I didn't know it beforehand so it went not the best. Me and Ily also had to give a short introduction and speech, but Ily talked so much that I got off easy. I traded a couple fist bumps with my favorite kid, and we also got our monthly stipend from the youth exchange officer.
> Once back home, it was time for my family's personal tradition: going to roof to moon watch with snacks (fruit, moon cake, and drinks). The moon was especially pretty, and you could make out a surprising amount of stars for the city. While a rather exhausting day (which is why I'm posting this on the next day instead of last night), it was very fun.

2023.09.30
> Even though I just wanted to sleep today, it was time to go on a day-trip to Taichung! Kelvin had work there, so he drove the rest of us there and dropped us off at the National Museum of Natural Science. Its made up of several different buildings and you have to pay a separate entrance fee for each one, but its pretty cheap either way.
> We started with the Science Center, which had a different exhibit on each floor. The first floor housed "the World of Semiconductors," which was super fancy and involved a lot of digital interactive stations (Got first place on the binary challenge hehe). The second and third floors, "Legends of the Universe" (space theme) and "Physical World" (hands-on physics demonstrations), were a lot closer to what the Sciencenter I'm used to.
> At 10:30 we watched on the 3-D movies in the Space Theater, "Ancient Caves," which was about using samples from underwater caves to learn more about rapid climate change. Unlike an IMAX theater, you didn't have to wear glasses. Instead, the screen was not only massive but curved, so it was able to look incredibly immersive without any extra effects.
> We went across the street for lunch to Laya Burger, a Taiwanese burger chain which I see pretty frequently but haven't been to yet. I ordered the Shrimp Cutlet Rice Burger, which I foolishly assumed meant that instead of a burger there would be like a rice paddy inside--instead, I got a very hard to eat sandwich in which the buns were just rice. Still delicious! My favorite thing about any fast food here though is that the go-to drink is always black tea. I enjoy :D
> After lunch, we went back to the museum and walked through the botanical gardens and aquarium. Me and Anna are getting better at communicating w/ each other, so I'm super happy about that! (communication = she points at a very long snake and goes "好可愛!"(how cute!) and i nod and point at a giant praying mantis and go "好可愛!" i am so good at this stuff) Kelvin picks us up around 4 PM and we visit the Taichung National Theater, which is very fancy but we don't actually have tickets for a show so we just look around.
> For dinner we went to the Fengjia Night Market, where I got bubble tea, fried sweet potato balls, Taiwanese fried chicken (not usually a big chicken fan but it was actually really good), finally tried stinky tofu (not actually that stinky. was good but kinda disappointed on the stinky factor), tanghulu, these Hakka fried balls of something topped with cheese and squid (so yummy, whatever it was), and fried water chestnuts. All super delicious!!!!!

2023.10.01
> Lazy day. Watched an episode of Legend of the Galactic Heroes and played around on my phone. Caught up on all the comics I haven't been reading. Redid my unused Twitter account so I can follow a bunch of LOTGH fanartists instead of having to manually check each of their pages.
> It is October though, and while I was going to originally follow the official prompt list I happened to see a "Sintober" prompt list for religious themes. First day was "Cross," so I ended up making a piece with two hands grasping a crucifix. Realized half-way in that making a hand-centric piece was probably a bad idea, but it somehow turned out as one of my favorite drawings ever. Step out of your comfort zone!
> Elsie found a bunch of children's newspapers with zhuyin I can read, but I was too lazy to make it past the first page. Lunch of Sukiya takeout (gyudon and chicken nuggets, since apparently you can't get miso soup for takeout even though every other Taiwanese restaurant seems to have no problem with takeout soup). Went to the food court for dinner (Deonjang Jjigae, the Korean soybean paste soup that my personal soup was originally based on. Good but very hot).

2023.10.02
> Back to school! Was super anxious for no apparent reason this morning, but Taiwanese Simon (friend of the guy from my art class who also has long hair and likes philosophy, like American Simon) actually returned my bro nod on the train instead of ignoring me so that was nice. It was health check day (nurse checked our weight, height, and eyesight) so no swimming too :D Mixed up my class order but luckily noticed only two stories up out of the six on my way to Woodworking Class two periods early.
> After eating lunch I drew a bit in my sketchbook (today's prompt was "rosary," which I unfortunately realized was also going to have to be pretty hand-centric again). Now that it was actually time for Woodworking Class, I made the dreadful climb and spent far too much effort trying to draw straight lines on wood that don't want to line up between pieces. One of my classmates, who I've been talking to on Instagram but had assumed was one of my Music classmates instead, bought boba for me (milk tea with jelly, so not boba by my standards, but still surpassingly good for milk tea). Got an 87 on the cube assignment, which was better than said classmate, who also had multiple days to work on it compared to my single one.
> We finished watching the movie during music and I ended up doing the final illustration for today's Inktober in the notes app. On the way to the train station I stopped at the Hi-Life convenience store, which had a depressingly small bread section but did have my second favorite, the Mexican chocolate bun (favorite is the chocolate mochi buns). Read some more American Psycho on the way home, which is getting easier to read and I'm not sure if its because the narration style is actually getting more normal, I'm simply getting used to it, or if I'm also going insane.
> Went out for ramen for dinner, chicken broth with shrimp, which I realized I don't actually like if its not fried. The fried dumplings were the best I've ever had, though, and this was the first restaurant I've been to that actually gave you a glass of water. Watched a PILI episode at home and got a some Chinese tutoring from Elsie before bed.

2023.10.03
> Chinese class day! I decided to try and take the early bus, at 8:30 instead of 9:00, so I wouldn't be one of the last ones there, but after waiting for 10 minutes at the bus stop, I realized I forgot to actually put my card in my wallet just as the bus arrived. Even if I didn't actually get there early, its a good thing I tried or else I would've had to miss my actual bus. (I did forget my fruit box though... Oh well.)
> We reviewed our textbook homework and then had a quiz which I think I did well on. For lunch I decided to be cool and unique and go to the third cafeteria instead of only ever going to the first like everyone else. Got a really good vegetable bento (or more like half of it was really good and the other half just didn't have any seasoning... girl I do not want to just eat raw lettuce I am not a snail) from the vegan place. The cool and unique thing did not actually work because I ran into half of my classmates on the way out, since they were meeting a Taiwanese rotex for lunch there.
> They were apparently thrown off by the change of cafeteria because they got on the wrong bus when returning and ended up in the other campus, making them over half an hour late to class, much to the teacher's chagrin. We reviewed some more characters I already knew and played the swatting game again, in which the teacher says a character/set of characters and two students have to turn around and swat them on the board. I got to do the final point (although my team had already won) but since I'd been paying attention to the layout of the characters on the others' turns, I was able to get all 6 characters instantly.
> The typhoon just started as I was leaving, so I struggled with my umbrella and got oolong boba while waiting in the rain for my bus. Once back home, I worked on today's Inktober (prompt was "wings," so I redrew an image of Archangel Michael that I think looks neat) and watched TV with Kelvin. We got what I think was Taiwanese style teriyaki for dinner, and my teriyaki (?) fish was delicious, but the rice to fish ratio was way too high so I had to spend way too long eating just mediocre rice at the end. Me and Elsie went through a couple more grammar lessons and I watched a LOTGH episode before bed.

2023.10.04
> So sleepy this morning, but it's an easy day because I don't have to go to classes! The normal students have a big test today and tomorrow, so I spent the day in the library. Foolishly, I believed I could just spend the whole day doing my own things, but the library teacher had other ideas.
> I knew I had to finish the article I was asked to write on my Mid-Autumn festival experience, so I did that and wrote yesterday's journal entry on one of the public use computers. Unfortunately, I was ambushed by two teachers when I tried to go back to my backpack to get my sketchbook, so I instead talked to them until the library teacher showed up and we talked even more. She had me write a thank-you note to my host parents, so we finished that and went to laminate it before lunch, except that the laminator sent the note to the shadow realm instead of spitting it out the other side.
> When I went up to my class for lunch they were still testing, so I figured it was finally time for the classic school experience of eating lunch in the bathroom. Unfortunately pit toilet bathrooms make this a lot harder, and I realized there were suddenly a lot more students moving around after the second bell so I tried my class again to great success (this was also good because the library teacher figured out the laminator issue and came in to give me it halfway through the lunch period).
> I left as soon as I finished my lunch to go back to the library, where I actually managed to fall asleep during the pre-ordained nap time for the first time. I drew for a bit (today's prompt: "snake;" Archangel Michael is still in my brain so I drew him standing over the serpent) talked more to one of the teachers from earlier, and read a bit of the childrens' newspaper I brought with me.
> The typhoon is getting heavier and I have yet to master the art of the umbrella. I decided to skip the Hi-Mart and just go to the convenience store at the train station, but their bread section, when I finally found it, sucked. Got winter melon tea instead. Read more American Psycho on the train and it seems like we're finally getting to mentioning the whole serial killing part (ooh what I would give to have been able to read this without knowing stuff beforehand... although I probably would not have made it this far if I thought it was just some annoying business man).
> Sea urchin risotto for dinner.

2023.10.05
> The typhoon is actually hitting today, so the government announced today a holiday. Was originally bummed out since I actually like Chinese class but then realized this means the school test will get pushed back another day and I get to do nothing in school again tomorrow.
> Spent the morning finishing the Chapter 1 characters from the textbook and then went through all of the Chapter 2 content as well. Read my new comic updates and then ended up rereading all of the British boarding school one for funsies.
> Lunch of the fanciest instant noodle I've ever had, followed up by working on today's prompt, "rose" (had to do Revolutionary Girl Utena fanart, obviously). Got most of the way done and then distracted myself by reading more American Psycho. Guy still hasn't actually murdered anyone on the page yet but I think we're actually getting closer this time. Dumplings for dinner.

2023.10.06
> Another day in the library, and while I foolishly thought I would actually have this day free since no one bothered me for the first half an hour, the old lady who talked to me last time came back to teach me Chinese herself. Today was actually the day I spoke the most Chinese since I've gotten here, I think, and we talked for a while. She gave me youzi and told me I had "good temperament, education, and grace," so I can't really begrudge her for taking up most of my morning.
> After lunch, I drew a bit and read more American Psycho (half way done now, and he's finally killing people. this actually makes him less enjoyable). Then she showed up again, and had me write a review for the library and draw family trees. I got picked up an hour early, since we're leaving for a long weekend trip to Tainan tonight. I don't think I'll be able to update this while away, so I'll be on a short hiatus until next Tuesday.

2023.10.07
> Last night we arrived at the house of one of Elsie's friends. I woke up first this morning, so I went down stairs and was given bread for breakfast. The family has two kids, a son of 8 and a son of 10, who at this point didn't want to talk to me, so I just silently watched them feed the fish until it was time to go. On the car ride to the leisure farm we were visiting, the younger son pulled out a pack of playing cards and we all played what I think was Old Maid.
> After a short walk to the top of the mountain, we got drinks and walked around the sitting area. They had a shallow pool for swimming, so me and the kids took our shoes off to dip our feet in, which shortly devolved into just splashing each other. Fed the fish in the pond and got to show off my epic grasshopper/frog catching skills. Went to a restaurant for lunch to get the famous beef noodle and really yummy side dishes.
> We then went to an astronomy museum and drove to Kaohsiung to have dinner with another one of Elsie's friends. Mediocre food but played very intense rock-paper-scissors-shoot hop-scotch with the kids and the view was nice. Played the Demon Slayer fighting game and Kirby with the kids at home, but they only have two controllers so we had to switch back and forth.

2023.10.08
> Woke up late today and met up with Ily and her host mother at the National Taiwan History Museum, which was very nice. Got lunch at a burger place, except I got rice congee instead of a burger. Sadly said goodbye to my favorite two people in Taiwan so far before visiting a historic shopping mall (which was a lot less vague with who exactly was doing the bombing at the end of WWII than the museum) full of expensive art and jewelry. .
> Got boba and then went to the Garden Night Market, where we got fried sweet potato balls, takoyaki (bland), blood tofu soup (only ate one and let Elsie have the rest), fresh watermelon juice, leek dumplings, and Taiwanese onigiri (very wide and fried). Drove to our hotel, watched Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close on the TV and an episode of LOTGH on my phone before bed.

2023.10.09
> Met up with yet another one of Elsie's friends, whose son was 21 and definitely not younger than me like Elsie claimed, who showed us around the An Ping area and then took us to lunch at a fancy Shang Hai cuisine restaurant. We got crab xiao long bao, two other types of steamed dumplings, very yummy scallion pancakes, the best spicy pork I've ever had, spicy chicken feet, delicious fried rice, noodles I didn't even get a chance to try, several vegetable side dishes, gua bao (steamed bun sandwich with pig belly inside, the only food I genuinely couldn't finish eating since I've got here. the bun was delicious though!) a giant pot of soup, and then just when I thought I had finally finished they brought out taro soup for dessert that was somehow so delicious I still managed to eat it all.
> Drove home, and had takeout dinner even though I was still full from lunch, which was an interesting mix of Chinese medicine style greens (too bitter) and fried things (too oily). Played Mario Kart with Anna afterwards (finally a game I know how to play, so I was finally able to show off my epic gaming skills. Got 1st place every time except the last).

2023.10.10
> It's Taiwan's National Day, so I get a day of rest before going back to school. Had a bunch of stuff I planned to do but instead mostly just read Kaze to Ki no Uta (I read 5 volumes a month ago, and then 10 more today. only 2 left for the future), which is very obviously the inspiration for Utena, except if Utena happened in France at an all-boys Catholic school and the whole sword dueling thing was a one off that happened off screen one time.
> Went to McDonalds for lunch, which seemed roughly the same as an American one based on the burger menu, but the flavor of the tea gave it away as Taiwanese. Got boba too (passion fruit with coconut jelly as well as pearls... favorite one so far, and it was only 2/3 the price of the usual mediocre stuff I get while waiting for my bus at Tsinghua). Did a little bit of work on my slideshow and kept reading throughout the afternoon.
> We went to a restaurant for night market-style steak (thin, served over noodles, a fried egg, and sauce), except my steak was a fish.

2023.10.11
> Back to school! Actually had an enjoyable time going to school for once because I made it into a race against Not-Simon. I beat him via strategy (on accident) at the flat parts but this guy runs both up and down stairs, and if there isn't a vertical change he'll make one himself. He won but he didn't know he won, so it doesn't count.
> Accidentally sat in the wrong seat for Art, but otherwise an uneventful for morning. Sports Day is coming up, so we got to run instead of having to swim. No club meetings again, since we're also getting ready for the Culture Festival. I'll be helping with drinks for my group, and I have to learn a Blackpink dance for the class performance. Talked to my favorite old lady during my library period, and somehow impressed her with my ability to read basic Chinese... girl you saw the notes I made for my homework, why would I be able to read those very specific words and not the most common/basic characters? Convenience store didn't have any Mexican Chocolate bread so I awkwardly walked out without buying anything.
> Finished reading the last two volumes of Kaze to Ki no Uta and immediately regretted it (at first it was cool to see them struggling to survive in the real world... but that was because I was under the impression they would indeed survive and that the author wouldn't get Gilbert addicted to opium and run over by a carriage in the last volume. uh. anyways. really good 10/10 if I pretend it ended at Volume 15).
> Watched A Thousand Times Good Night with my host dad (mediocre) after dinner and finished Episode 50 of Legend of the Galactic Heroes! Still not even half-way done though. :/

2023.10.12
> Woke up at 4 AM because of an awful stomach ache that wouldn't let me go back to sleep until 7 AM. Disappeared as soon as I left the house though, so I don't know what the problem was. I had already planned out my day to minimize suffering required though, so I still bought a cup of instant noodles along with my morning tea from the Family Mart at the college entrance.
> Boring class, but actually found a second path connected to the one I found on the side of the Information Sciences building that goes even deeper into the forest, so I used two cinderblocks at the side of the trail for a table until I realized there was actually a picnic table and bench a couple feet off the trail I could use after nearly finishing my food. Afternoon class was culture class, which meant the psychological torture of calligraphy but then the actually enjoyable book binding.
> Talked to the other American and the Polish dude all the way to my bus stop instead of going by myself like I usually do, but no boba since I forgot my wallet and the boba place doesn't take my card.

2023.10.13
> Won the race to school this morning by a hair, though I'm still unsure if my competitor knows we're racing. Finally had my Friday art class after three weeks and got to talk to my neighbor again. Because their Chinese class got rescheduled they only had one period of art instead of the usual two, so I was able to go with them instead! They were just going over a recent test so I didn't actually get to see a proper class, but it was still nice.
> I'm hoping to ask the library lady in charge of me if its possible to just have normal classes with my main class for the 2nd semester instead of switching around the way I do now.
> We just watched a circus performance in World Dance, and though I was once again late to PE because I couldn't figure out where it was, I got a chance to talk to some nice seniors and since the PE teacher had me actually introduce myself this time, my classmates actually talked to me a bit.
> It turned out the group of students from the other high school I was following to the train station weren't actually going to the station but instead turned into the abandoned parking lot, where a guy in a fancy suit was waiting. As curious as I was, I am not only incapable of looking inconspicuous but also had a train to catch.
> First Rotary meeting tonight, forgot to wear my jacket and nearly though Ily wasn't coming, but he showed up so we mostly just talked.

2023.10.14
> Drew all morning. Haven't been feeling Sintober and I've been seeing a lot of people do Cringetober instead, so switching to that. Managed to get the first 7 days done, I am unsure what possessed me but I appreciate it nonetheless.
> We got lunch from that waffle place we went to on my second day, and this was the first time I realized how much I've already adapted to life here; not only was I not completely full after the meal, I was still hungry for more.
> We went to a mall for dinner, where we went to what I assume was supposed to be a fancy Italian restaurant, but the service and the mushrooms were bad. The minestrone was good though, I missed tomato-based soups. When we finally got our drinks right before the end of the meal, the fruity black tea I got turned out to be British tea with a couple of apple pieces in it. I am becoming a tea snob, apparently.
> Then we went to the movie theater (fancy enough to have an escalator), and watched the new Studio Ghibli film. I was worried that with the high expectations attached to such a name I would be disappointed, but it hit the mark perfectly. The vibes were amazing, and though I feel like some things were definitely only for the spectacle, it effortlessly made me nostalgic for things I have never seen before. Only possible weak part was the music, didn't dig it as much as I wanted to.

2023.10.15
> Today we visited Taipei again. Listened in to the Discord call of the D&D group who weren't playing D&D on the way there, and ate lunch at A-Ma's house again. I enjoyed to meal a lot more this time, it was very good.
> We then went to the Taipei City Mall, which is underground and next to like five different stations for various forms of public transportation. Didn't actually buy anything other than a cup of winter melon tea, but it was cool. We took the MRT (which apparently doesn't have doors between the carriages, but is just wide open instead, giving a very strange effect) to visit the Flower Market and then the Jade Market, where my host father works.
> We went with him and his mother back to her apartment, where we ate dinner. Once back home, I played Mario Party with Anna.

2023.10.16
> Won the race this morning, but it was a hollow victory since he wasn't actually trying and was instead walking slowly to talk to his friends.
> Since my class had a fieldtrip to Hsinchu I got kicked out of the classroom halfway through lunch and sat on one of the benches outside the library until the next period. There's a bunch of sports students walking around since preparations for Sports Day later this week are beginning, and as one group of them walks past me into the library I swear I hear my name, and though they look back at me they don't stop. Later, two more walk by, and the guy with dreadlocks who I saw in the hall once is actually nice enough to say hi (unsure how the entire sports class knows my name, but there's probably a very obvious answer to this). His accent isn't the usual Taiwanese one, so for a second I hope this guy is actually fluent, but then he has to ask his friend how to ask me to take a picture with him, and they stand there for two minutes checking on their phones despite the fact that the friend correctly told him in the first place. When I see him again on my way to Music at the end of the day, I grace him with a wave back.
> On the way home, I think about getting boba from the shop outside the school, but it looks like there's no one in it, despite it still being open. The same is true for the convenience store, and the one in the station is full of students, so I end up stopping at the one outside the apartment complex, where I get a bottle of jasmine honey tea and a package of the instant noodle snacks I had once before. I draw four more pieces for Cringetober in the evening.

2023.10.17
> Had a Zoom meeting with my parents (very lovely talking to you <3) before going to class. Worried that I missed the bus because none of the regulars were at the stop but it showed up 12 minutes late instead. Bought my lunch at the Family Mart at the university entrance before walking to class.
> We had our first unit test today, which I aced (99.4, only got the tones on two characters wrong). Otherwise a pretty boring class since I knew all the content, but I drew a bunch of nice LOTGH doodles in my notebook to distract myself. Ate lunch in the woods again, except there were a million mosquitoes there for some reason, so I moved to an area slightly farther down the path where there were slightly less mosquitoes.
> Since I'm pretty sure the mosquitoes were a sign from the universe telling me to actually hang out with my classmates, I accepted Ily's (learned her name is spelt Eli but I'm too attached to my misspelling now to change it) invitation to go work on homework at her apartment, even though I'd already finished that day's homework last week.
> We got popsicles from the 7/11 next to her apartment complex, and sat in the downstairs lounge, where we mostly just talked. She made the terrible mistake of letting me talk about Rodrigo of Caledon and I ended up going passed the time I was supposed to catch the bus. I told my host father I'd take the next one, but after waiting 20 minutes I checked the app and it told me the next bus was actually coming in 30 minutes, so he came and picked me up on a motorcycle.
> I assume motorcycles are less scary if you're driving them or hugging the person driving them instead of simply gripping the handholds underneath the back of the seat for dear life. Got Japanese curry for dinner, which was average for Japanese curry, which I've never actually had a good version of, but the chicken that came with it was actually the best chicken I've ever had in my life.

2023.10.18
> No race this morning because I lost Taiwanese Simon during the train switch. Realized I don't have anything to read while standing on the train since I finished American Psycho, so I figured it was time to re-read The Still for a third time. Since I'm reading it via a Google Drive PDF, I can add annotations too (I use this power exclusively for good and never ever for making fun of Rodrigo.... what do you mean Rustin "already holds your soul" it's only page 32, slow down bro).
> Started a new project in Art, which I'm pretty sure is some type of painting analysis but we also have to redraw the painting. I chose Holbein's The Ambassadors because I think the stretched-out skull is so goofy but then realized I also had to draw the skull... Also currently doubting if we were supposed to only Van Gogh paintings or not, but the teacher said she liked mine so I'm probably fine.
> During club time we had the rehearsal for the opening of the school festival, which really just consists of each class walking up and then sitting down. Everyone was melting in the sun, but somehow Kelvin asked me if I was too cold today when I got home. > Since the first day of the school festival is tomorrow, I won't actually be running the 200m since I won't be going to school but luckily (?) I'll still be able to participate in the relay on Friday. Still need to learn the Blackpink dance, so I skipped out on staying after to practice with my classmates since I still need to learn the basic choreography. (Learning dances is really hard and a real pain).
> Went to Formosa Chang's for dinner with Anna and Kelvin. Drew only one Cringetober piece today.

2023.10.19
> Woke up early for some reason, but didn't do much. Ily didn't come to class today because he was sick, so I instead ended up talking the ears off Heta, the Finnish exchange student, who made the terrible mistake of asking me what I was reading (The Still, obviously).
> Was planning on eating in the forest again and had already poured the hot water into my cup of Shin ramen that I bought before class, but my classmates complained so I caved and went with them. Any chance I had at pretending I was at least slightly normal to Heta was squandered when I spent the entire bus ride back trying to explain the entirety Legend of the Galactic Heroes to her.
> The second half of class was incredibly boring, but I doodled a lot in my notebook and filled up an entire page instead of my usual half-page per day of class. Got green tea boba from the bubble tea place while waiting for my bus, but they were out of boba so they gave me some sort of jelly instead (it's too soft for my taste, but at least they didn't charge me more for it).
> Finished(ish) learning the dance for tomorrow and drew a little bit before dinner, which was a fish bento, but it was trying to be healthy which meant it tasted bad. Afterwards, me and Kelvin watched a rom-com movie entirely in Chinese that was actually pretty funny even if I didn't know exactly what they were saying at any point.

2023.10.20
> Sports day! Woke up at 5 since I needed to take the train two times earlier than my usual one, but I had enough time to watch a LOTGH episode after I finished waking up all the way.
> I was told to arrive by 7:20 but we didn't actually do anything until 8, when we lined up for the entrance we had practiced on Wednesday. It turns out I didn't actually need to know the entire dance, only the last part, which was the part I knew best, and that we weren't even preforming for the rest of the school, but just a video they were shooting for the school's anniversary.
> We had to wait another hour while a bunch of speeches were made, and then it was time for the sports team performances. The swim team was funny, since they obviously couldn't do their usual thing, and I found out the guy from the sports class that talks to me is on the track team, which is rather unfortunate given his resemblance to Devilman Crybaby's Koda. My favorite performance was by far the military drills team, who looked even cooler than when I've seen them practice because not only did they have cute uniforms, but the lead girl also got a sword instead of a musket. (I would be the #1 military supporter if all my taxes went to supporting cute girls twirling muskets).
> The whole class participated in the "fun race," which involved balancing three balls between two people and playing rock-paper-scissors with a teacher. For lunch, my classmates took me to the school convenience store to buy something since they weren't serving usual lunch (no one has noticed I never eat that, luckily). I got a thing of cold noodles, which were actually the best noodle I've had in my entire life and some barley tea.
> In the afternoon it was time for the class relay, which I also had to participate in. Running while racing against other people is a completely different feeling than just running in PE. I wasn't winded at all by the time I finished, so I felt like I ran rather slow even though I had been running as fast as my legs would take me. Our team was in last when I got the baton, and though I didn't actually pass the girl in front of me, I got us back to the point where my next teammate easily could.
> After another boring ceremony which I think was for awards, it was time to go back home on the later train. Ran into my neighbor and his friend, who can apparently speak perfectly fine English, he just doesn't want to speak it to me. Did accidentally end up recommending The Still to my neighbor (I also recommended it to a girl who talked to me during lunch... At least I figured she would never read it, while this guy seems worryingly committed to it).
> Anna was staying late at cram school, so the rest of us went out to dinner, where I ate 10 dumplings (they ordered 20 because I always forget how big Taiwanese dumplings are compared to gyoza) and very delicious 酸辣汤 (Taiwanese hot and sour soup). Took a cold shower and went to bed early after my LOTGH episode for the night.

2023.10.21
> It's Saturday, but to school again I go for the school festival. Only taking the train once earlier than my usual, but I get up at 5 again. I started reading Golden Kamuy instead of watching LOTGH, which makes the time disappear much faster.
> My class is selling instant noodle cooked in a spicy sauce, fried corn with cheese, and tea. I never actually got a chance to try the noodles or corn because I waited too long to order and everything ran out by the second shift. I got half a cup of tea, at least, only because there wasn't enough tea left to finish the cup when that ran out (I did well on drink duty). I got some tteokbokki earlier in the morning, and managed to find another stand that still had a cup of instant noodles in stock around lunch time. The next stand over was selling bubble tea, which looked delicious but tasted awful.
> After we put away all our stuff, we rested in the classroom for a while (I read more Rodrigo of Caledon), then went back out to the field for another speech, and then I was able to take the early train home instead. A very nice family asked me where the train was heading because I had my head down reading so they weren't instantly able to tell I was a foreigner. When I apologized for not understanding what they were asking, they asked one of the other students, though it seemed like he also didn't know.
> We ate at home, table barbeque, which I was glad for after reading Golden Kamuy most of the afternoon, which is really a cooking manga thinly disguised with the treasure map prisoners and war veteran thing. After dinner me and Anna played Wii Sports, Mario Party, and Mario Kart.

2023.10.22
> Simple day. Delicious homecooked meals for once, and though I originally planned to draw more today, I find myself mostly just reading Golden Kamuy.
> After lunch, Anna has an English test, so me and Elsie go hiking on a beautiful mountain trail after we pick her up.

2023.10.23
> Because I had school on Saturday, I get today off. My host parents take me and Ily to Yeliu, where we visit the Queen's Head Park, filled with Korean tourists, have a very nice hike on the hill reaching out into the ocean, and eat delicious sashimi and vegetable dishes from a seaside restaurant, where one of the employees calls out "Bye Bye Harry Potter" to Ily as we leave.
> We drive to Fenjiu next and walk down Fenjiu Old Street, which I imagine could have been very cozy if there were not somehow even more tourists here. We get taro ball soup, and its just as delicious as I had imagined.

2023.10.24
> A usual day of Chinese class. I get a wintermelon bubble tea from the fruit seller in the cafeteria, and get a spicy chicken cutlet burger from McDonalds. Though I had planned to try and visit the Qinghua book store during lunch, by the time I've finished eating its time to go already.
> After class, I hang out with Ily again, though several other students join us this time. The other Americans continues to try to convince us that he is a normal, middle-class American, and the only reason he has the excessive number of digital devices he has is because he only spends his allowance on that, not clothes or other things... The fact he not only gets an allowance, but enough to afford expensive Apple products on a regular basis with causes me to doubt such a claim, though.
> I successfully catch the bus back this time, and after a dinner of luroufan with too many side dishes, the Rotary Youth Exchange officers visit our house to see how things are going.

2023.10.25
> In Art, I finish my colored pencil recreation of Holbein's The Ambassadors, and manage to translate simple sentences into Chinese well enough to count as an analysis of the piece.
> It's finally club time again, which I mostly spend talking to the friend from the first meeting, but I successfully pay my club fee this time and drink the extremely large cup of wintermelon tea from the club order.
> Once home, I finally finish Golden Kamuy (very good, though definitely not what I was expecting), meaning I finally have time to draw again for a bit.

2023.10.26
> Finally got around to catching up on the daily entries. From now on, I'll be removing the images from ones I do at a later date so I can distinguish them.
> Another day of Chinese class. Got my wintermelon boba and McDonalds again, except I somehow didn't communicate that I just wanted the burger well enough, and somehow adding a Cola and fries which I gave away to friends doubled the price of my meager lunch.
> Culture Class was papercutting, which was relatively fun. I had a terrible suspicion that the other American's taste in anime was isekai, which was proved right, and I patiently waited until he made the fatal mistake of admitting to being a Re:Zero fan, after which point I continued to wait patiently because I didn't actually have anything to say. Again, he claims to watch bad isekai like you watch B-grade movies, but a movie takes up 2 hours max of your time, while a one season isekai will take up at least 4 hours of your time, and this guy was complaining about running OUT of bad isekai to watch, a genre that probably gets the most new titles in a given season and entirely because the majority of them are so utterly mindless.
> Instead of drawing more when I got home, I decided it was finally time to actually read Banana Fish, which at this point should be an incredibly normal story given the last manga I read. Dinner was a seaweed wrapped rice sandwich with fried shrimp (?), super delicious!

2023.10.27
> I almost never see my neighbor on the morning train, but by some odd stroke of luck I ran into him as I stepped out of the elevator, so we walked to the station together. One of his friends from another school came over to talk to us so I chatted in English with her for a bit, but our string of luck ran out because the doors on the train we needed to transfer to closed as soon as she stepped in ahead of us, so me, my neighbor, and Taiwanese Simon all had to wait for the next one. We managed not to be too terribly late, and it didn't matter anyway since our art teacher was even later.
> I finally started filming my stop motion film and managed to finish it in the same class, which was good because it was due that day. World Dance was a pain because my usual partner was out so I got matched with one of the other boys who entirely objected to even brushing hands during the jig we were learning. Got luckily and saw my neighbor again as I was leaving school, so we were able to take the train home together as well (and through the power of funny photos, Taiwanese Simon finally said something to me).
> I experienced one of my first genuine culture shocks that I couldn't pretend was just a family/regional difference while watching TV with Kelvin: in Taiwan, tomatoes are considered a fruit. Obviously everyone knows that they technically are fruits, and I should've seen this coming based on their common presence on the after-dinner fruit platters at fancy restaurants and even the tanghulu I got at a night market once, but the fact that they are simply considered 100% fruit was still shocking.
> We walked to a nearby restaurant for dinner where I was promised a "small small small hot pot," which was delicious but still far too big for me to finish. Found out that I can indeed stand eating pigs blood if its cooked in a spicy soup, though.

2023.10.28
> A relaxing day, I spent most of the morning finishing Banana Fish (ending wasn't as sad as I was expecting, but perhaps that's because Kaze to Ki no Uta has made my standards incredibly low) and working on my presentation about American high schools.
> Elsie, Anna, and I went out to lunch where we met several of Elsie's old friends from high school at the world's fanciest buffet place. It was incredibly confusing to navigate and the stir-fried vegetables tasted awful, but once I found the sushi bar I was happy, and the dessert soup was delicious!
> Anna and I played the Olympic Games 2020 on the Switch, and I was able to beat her at everything except gymnastics and surfing. Speedran writing my essay for the National Merit Scholarship application and went to bed after listening to some music instead of my usual LOTGH episode.

2023.10.29
> I don't actually remember what I did on this day. Like, at all.
> Only thing I do know is that I drew five more pieces for Cringetober. Falling behind, but I really wanted to finish it.

2023.10.30
> Uneventful Monday. Went to my classes, realized I have to go back to Rodrigo of Caledon now that I don't have any more manga to read on the train.
> Only drew two of the five pieces I planned to draw today, but I am slowly perfecting the art of drawing Rustin dying.

2023.10.31
> Managed to catch up on yesterday with three pieces finished in the morning before heading to class. It's Halloween, so I dressed up a little fancier than usual and put my hair in that one anime hairstyle where you have low pigtails but they rest in front instead of in the back.
> I think I did pretty good on the unit test except that I forgot how to write 'd' in Zhuyin and what I made up was definitely not right, so I'll probably lose points for that. Didn't want to walk down to the cafeteria in my dress because I already get stared at enough as it is, so I was planning to buy ramen from the vending machine, except I couldn't find it on the digital menu so I got cold noodles instead (of course, as soon as it gave my my noodles I realized I had been on the menu for the wrong side of the machine, but it was too late at that point). Ate on the roof, which was very pretty but very windy.
> Afternoon class was boring so I ended up drawing the very dramatic love story of the textbook characters in the margins of the dialogue and found out that the Polish guy is also a Genshin player. Since me, the other American, and the Polish guy all don't like to take the cross-campus bus, we end up talking a lot these days.
> Finished the final five Cringetober pieces, making this the first time I've finished an October art challenge in at least 4 years? Proud of my work.

2023.11.01
> Wednesday classes. Realized that thankfully the pain I was feeling in my forearms yesterday wasn't actually due to early onset arthritis but actually because of the bruising from the volleyballs we're using in gym class.
> No manhua club because of the school basketball game. I had been told about it ahead of time, but I foolishly assumed "the school basketball game" meant we would watch the basketball team play basketball. Instead, this meant actually participating in the tournament. Playing competitively against people I don't know is a lot less fun than playing with my classmates, but it wasn't awful. We (thankfully) lost, but I got two baskets in myself so I feel like I contributed a bit (my usual height advantage wasn't much help since the other team also had a tall girl, except she was actually good at the game and not just tall like me). Kelvin bought drinks for my class so I got to drink winter melon boba during my library period.
> It's November, which means NaNoWriMo time! Got to my daily goal, using a three word prompt to write a short story about Iliou, which I think turned out pretty well.

2023.11.02
> Only got half way through my NaNoWriMo goal, trying to write a piece of that medieval story I started with my sister before I left. Can't decide how insane I actually want either of the guys to be though so progress is slower than I'd like.
> Teacher told me and three other students that we're being moved to the new advanced Chinese class! She gave us a textbook printout to review and a notebook to practice writing vocab in before our first class next Tuesday morning (we'll stay in the usual class at the other times).
> Finish reading The Still for the third time, still (haha) as good as always.

2023.11.03
> In Art we watched and reviewed everyone's stop motion animation films, which ranged from incredibly well made to LEGO 9/11. We had a quiz at the end of computer class, which I feel like I did rather impressive on given the fact I was using Google translate to read the questions and that the entire lecture and powerpoint we were given before hand was given in Chinese.
> Getting lazy with NaNoWriMo, did the bare minimum to keep my streak.

2023.11.04
> Today is our first Rotary Culture Trip! I got up at my usual time since I just needed to take my usual train, though I got off one stop later to transfer onto the train to Zhongli. From the station there we took a bus to the Taoyuan City Confucius Temple.
> I got lucky with my instrument, the 敔, since its a pretty simple percussion instrument, but half of the students had to learn how to play flutes for the first time for the ceremony. After we learned our parts (easy for me, I just hit the golden lion on the head three times and then stroke its back three times after the conductor calls for everyone else to stop), we ate lunch (Taiwanese bento take-out and unsweetened green tea boba). Then we got to put on the outfits! I looked very cute but soon realized wearing a full length robe while standing in the sun for multiple hours is not very fun. We rehearsed a couple of time, took a quick break in which I managed to obtain another cup of boba from one of my classmates, preformed, and then it was time to go home after obtaining boba number three.

2023.11.05
> Spent the early morning going the Khan Academy courses for AP Calc, Art History, and Computer Science because I miss learning stuff school.
> We visited Taipei again today. Me and Elsie visited the oldest street to buy preserved fruits before eating lunch with Kelvin's parents. I finished my homework and then we went to the Taipei City Mall again because Elsie wanted to look for Christmas decorations, and I learned that just like bubble tea does not inherently have bubbles in it here, grass jelly tea doesn't necessarily have grass jelly.
> We met up with Kelvin at the jade market and then went to Elsie's mother's house for dinner, except instead of cooking for us, we went to Formosa Chang's, which is my favorite Taiwanese fast food restaurant but felt a little silly since there's also one down the street from our apartment back home.

2023.11.06
> Back to school. During lunch was another basketball game, except it was the guys in our class playing this time. Felt a bit better about my basketball skills since the girls managed to stay at around half the points of the opposing team, while the boys only managed to get their first points at the very end, while the other team was already into the late 30s. To be fair to them, they were playing against the sports class, which I only realized after the track guy who waves to me got off the bench.
> This Wednesday is the due date for submitting pieces for the manhua club semesterly art book, which I was told about several weeks ago but put off until now, so I pulled off a quick drawing of Koharu, since I figured she could fit the theme of "monster girl," which is honestly one of my best drawings I've ever done despite only taking slightly over an hour. ( the piece in question )

2023.11.07
> First advanced class was pretty fun, and we were able to do a lot more speaking practice since there were only four of us. Instant noodles again for lunch because they're yummy and easy to get. Thought we would get out of the test since we weren't there for the morning class, but our normal teacher was nice enough to wait until the afternoon to give the test.
> Redrew one of my favorite Kazeki panels with Reinhard and Kircheis at home, learned that pig liver has the worst texture known to man at dinner. Started and got to Unit 2 in Duolingo German, which I decided to start for reasons beyond me (it is very funny how half the vocab I know so far just sounds like pronouncing English words in a comedically German accent).

2023.11.08
> We're finally starting to paint in my Wednesday art class, which I'm very excited for. The variety in the example painting from past years that the teacher showed us was very funny, from beautifully rendered landscapes to anime girls with big boobs to strange, abstract pieces. I thought about doing either something Rodrigo of Caledon or LOTGH related, but decided to choose the almost normal choice of painting the Braschi Antonius sculpture, because doing something with one base color is easy and Antonious is basically Kircheis anyway.
> Unfortunately I was only able to stay in Art for one period, since I had to go present my US Highschool Life presentation during 4th period. My English definitely went over their heads despite my best efforts to talk slowly and with simple vocabulary, but I enjoyed the Q and A segment at the end, mostly because this is the only class that wasn't incredibly shy to talk to me. After one guy's question was "Do you have a boyfriend?" the next guy asked "Do you have a girlfriend?", so at least they're inclusive? The guy whose question was "Why are you so pretty?" was incredibly smooth and I feel really bad for the guy who asked "What's your type?" because I said I didn't know, to which the teacher asked if the guy was my type, so I said no, which the rest of the class enjoyed at his expense.
> Club time was pretty boring, and I hopefully convinced to my friend there who was also in the class I presented to that I didn't think the guy who asked my type was ugly, just that he wasn't my type.
> I stayed for the 8th period to give the presentation again to a different class, which I somehow got more anxious about than the first time because now I knew all the problems with my presentation but couldn't fix it. Luckily, since this class was the bilingual class, they understood me a lot better (and some of them definitely had better English than my bilingual class, despite being a grade lower). It was a girl this time who asked me if I had a boyfriend, but my favorite question was one I saw written down on a piece of paper since the asker had the good sense to make up a different question: "How did you learn English?"
> The teacher offered to drive me home, which I probably foolishly accepted on the basis that she is a middle aged lady half my height and probably wouldn't succeed in kidnapping me (this is exactly how you get kidnapped), but luckily all she did was buy me bubble tea, teach me some new vocabulary, and got me home before my host father got back from picking up Anna. We ate dinner at a very yummy Taiwanese fast-ish food place, where I managed to eat all 10 dumplings and still be hungry, even after drinking an entire bowl of the best seaweed soup I've ever had.

2023.11.09
> Pretty typical Chinese class day. Bus driver talked to me a lot on the bus and I mostly followed everything he was saying. For culture class in the afternoon we listened to and sang a bunch of different Taiwanese pop songs.
> Seafood soup served over rice for dinner! Actually managed to eat all of both, unlike the curry from the other day which I ran out of rice for.

2023.11.10
> We made recycled paper in Art (I kept forgetting to put the flowers I brought on the paper before I pressed it off the screen so they'll probably fall off once it dries, oh well) and learned Spanish dancing in World Dance.
> Found my PE class successfully, relearning Python in Computer Science. Went to the mall for dinner (udon with tofu skin, very yummy, but the tempura breading on the fish wasn't very appealing) and then went shopping for food for tomorrow's party.

2023.11.11
> Today's the culture fair, so we left pretty early in the morning to go there, picking Eli up on the way. Forgot my blazer again so we went back for that, and we were far from the last ones there anyway. Set up our American stand pretty fast. The plans the others had for cooking all didn't work out, so we just had a lot of candy. I now get the evil witch grindset though, since it is actually very enjoyable to try and lure children over to eat candy while their older siblings are getting the most boring presentation they've had in their life.
> Enjoyed trying the foods from the other tables (Hungarians had better crepes than the French). They gave us pizza for lunch which I would've been with if I didn't realize the Rotex's got normal Taiwanese lunch takeout instead, which I definitely would have preferred. Impromptu folk dancing near the end was fun.
> We had about an hour to rest at home, so I finished up my art present for Anna, gave it to her, and then it was time to set up for the party (half her birthday party, half a welcome party for me and Eli). Talked to Moms, convinced small children to rock-paper-scissors with me, and ate a decent amount of sushi. Impressed everyone by mentioning I'm going to Cornell in my self introduction.
> After the party everyone except one family just came up to our apartment to keep talking, but I was banished (politely asked if I wanted) to take a shower and go to bed.

2023.11.12
> Finally, a day I can just stay home! I do my advanced class homework in the morning and finish up the Chapter 4 homework for the normal Chinese class soon after. I work back and forth on my NaNoWriMo drabbles to little avail.
> Individually packaged spaghetti for lunch which actually tastes quite nice (would kill for pasta fazool though). In the afternoon we walk to a nearby stationary store because Anna needs to buy some new pens. Dumplings and the leftover pizza from last night for dinner.

2023.11.13
> Made a to-do list for the first time in ages this morning. Finished my AP Art History unit on the way to school. Thought I'd be able to listen in to DnD while finishing my Astronomy unit as well during first period, but instead I was roped into learning how to weave a bottle holder from twine.
> Woodworking teacher wasn't here today, so it was back to the library to finish my bottle holder after lunch. Again, foolishly thought I'd be able to do my own thing but instead had to talk to two women (teachers? I don't know) who were actually very nice, so that was fine.
> Once back home, I managed to get out 1K words in one sitting. After dinner (was mildly offended that my box was marked at the lowest spice level but that fish was so spicy I don't think I could have even comprehended the higher spice levels, even Kelvin was struggling to eat it), I did a study of the L1 Bargue plate in pen because my pencil ran out of lead. Got my other 1K words done and wrote out some notes for the Christmas animatic I'm planning.

2023.11.14
> Wrote 1K in the morning and started on today's Bargue plate. Pretty usual day of Chinese class, tried a new instant noodle flavor from the vending machine but it wasn't good so I'm gonna stick with the Shin Kimchi Ramen.
> Wrote my other 1K in the evening, making this my longest NaNoWriMo streak of meeting my daily goal yet, two days. In a classic me move, I dressed in a thick long-sleeved shirt because it was actually chilly yesterday, only for it to be barely windy today. Glad I can finally start wearing half the clothes I brought now that the weather is finally cooling down, though.
> Kelvin ordered dinner from the healthy restaurant again, which is the exact opposite end of the spectrum from the fish I had yesterday: no flavor at all, but he asked me if I wanted to try the squid this time instead of fish, which actually came with a really yummy wasabi sauce, so at least my main dish had flavor.
> When Kelvin accidentally dropped the bag of bags while cleaning up, he was nice enough to translate his swearing into English for me :)

2023.11.15
> Got to continue my painting in Art today, and finished it too. I should've stopped 5 minutes before I actually did stop, though, because I went in too heavy with the black for the deep shadows and ruined the painterly look I was going for still. Still, given that I only spent an hour and a half on it, it looks pretty good.
> No club, because we had to attend a school-wide presentation on Healthy Relationships (I think? It was in Chinese, so I kept reading The King instead, though on the occasion I could understand what was being said, I thought about how Rodrigo and Rustin are absolutely failing every single part of the healthy relationship checklist.)
> For my last period at the library, I did the next Bargue plate. On the way out, some of the boys from the sports class (the one I already talk to not included) actually talked to me for once instead of just saying my name and then pretending I don't exist. It was a funny cycle of [One asks something in Chinese too fast] -> [I give him a puzzled look] -> [They discuss amongst themselves and then give me the English translation] -> [I respond in Chinese because its a topic I can talk about, they just asked too fast] -> [Repeat]

2023.11.16
> Did my Bargue plate and Khan Academy lectures in the morning. I left my room around 7:00 to get breakfast, and Elsie seemed surprised I was up so early, so I didn't tell her I'd been up since 5:30.
> Did well on the daily test (I think), ate more than just ramen for lunch since I was told there was a water bottle machine with hot water (like all Taiwanese water bottle machines) in the cafeteria, but it was actually in the Seven-Eleven, so I bought a salmon onigiri and pudding so I could ask if I could use it for my ramen (I could).
> Forgot my wallet so no boba, since neither boba place takes my card. Ended up reading a comic instead of doing my NaNoWriMo for the day, but I guess inspiration is important too.
> Japanese curry for dinner. Was going to ask Kelvin to not give me any of the beef when he was serving my soup, but I didn't even have to because he'd already done it :D

2023.11.17
> Got caught up reading another comic this morning, but I nearly finished my daily Bargue plate. Did my Khan Academy lectures on the train.
> More recycled paper making in Art, and we just watched a documentary about Michael Jackson in World Dance because it was cold(?). I actually wore both the school sweatpants and jacket today, and since long sleeves/pants are my normal go-to in a country with normal temperatures, today was perfect for me. Half the other students brought winter coats and hats too though, so I'm glad to know my New York temperature standards haven't been altered too much.
> NaNoWriMo forum scandal happened, so in solidarity I deleted my account on the site after downloading all my previous work. Looking at a couple of other writing challenge platforms instead.
> Easy Computer class again. Took a new train with my neighbor classmate on the way home, though it turned out to be the same one that just switches directions at the next stop up. Getting on it the first time it goes by means you can actually get a seat, but actually getting a seat means that you risk not being able to get through the people to the door when it is your stop, as we very nearly learned.
> Went with Elsie and Kelvin to a nearby semi-fancy Taiwanese restaurant. Ordered niutangmian (literally 'beef soup noodles'), which is better than niuroumian (literally 'beef meat noodles') because it doesn't actually have any meat in it, just a beef broth, except I ordered the tomato niutangmian because the picture looked better. The soup was basically just tomato soup, which was very good and felt rather nostalgic, although I think the noodles would have been better in the normal beef broth.

2023.11.18
> Went to the Hsinchu City Zoo this morning with Elsie. Not terribly big but pretty cool, animal highlights included the ostriches, hippo, and three different types of monkey. The only other animals they had were some deer, ponies, guinea pigs, another large bird, and some raccoons.
> We went to the next-door glass museum (not a museum about glasses, as I was mislead into believing). It was a lot smaller than the one in Corning that I'm used to, but it had a bunch of really cool work in it. Because it's Hsinchu, the city of engineering, one of the four exhibits was entirely about the logistics of glass recycling, but it also turns out that before Hsinchu was the city of engineers, it was the city of glassmaking. An old guy with Charlie Brown hair and suspiciously pointy ears talked to us in Chinese for a while.
> We returned home for lunch, and I then spent my afternoon rereading "My Son in Probably Gay" while slowly working on my Bargue plate of the day. We had hotpot at home for dinner and I read the first three volumes of Scott Pilgrim, since I want to watch the anime soon now that it's out.

2023.11.19
> Spent the morning talking to my American friends in voice chat while finishing up Scott Pilgrim.
> Went out for lunch with Elsie and Anna, got a rice bowl with salmon sashimi and roe which was very yummy :D The way the rice was cooked/seasoned and the specific flavor of the miso soup reminded me a lot of the homecooked Japanese food I used to eat back home.
> In the afternoon, I did my Khan Academy lessons, my daily Bargue plate, and my Chinese class homework (or what I assume will be our homework next week, finished the entire workbook lol). Fried rice with side dishes for dinner!
> Watched the first two episodes of the Scott Pilgrim anime, it's pretty good! I like the style of the animation, it does a good job of adapting the comic style to the new medium. It obviously has to skip some stuff, but it also does a good job of slightly changing things to the point where even though I read the comic, I'm still left wondering what will happen next in some scenes. I'd heard the English dub wasn't as good as the Japanese, but the very legal version I found only had the English, but it sounds pretty fine to me.

2023.11.20
> Watched two Scott Pilgrim episodes this morning before going to school. Today's reading material for the train ride was Louis Antoine de Saint-Just's Wikipedia page. He's such a funny little guy who was probably nicknamed the Archangel of Terror for a reason :D Really don't want my French Revolution phase to come back right now though since I have to dedicate all my energy to hating on France to get back at Eli.
> Did my Khan Academy lectures at school and my Bargue plate once I got back home, along with finishing the "Draw the LOTGH OVA characters" template that I started yesterday. I think my shading turned out uncharacteristically well! Couldn't finish the delicious wide noodles for dinner but I drank all my soup, which had an equivalent volume to my usual dinner alone.
> I still have 3 episodes of Scott Pilgrim Takes Off left, but I want to talk about it a little. Apparently it was advertised as being a pretty true-to-source adaptation, which I didn't have the benefit of seeing beforehand, and a lot of people are giving it bad reviews because of that lol. Personally I appreciate an adaptation that changes things up, and I also think most of the people saying "I would've been fine with the changes if they'd just told us before!" are liars and they would just complain about Ramona being the main character instead. I do think the decision to make Ramona the lead is a little iffy, just because a lot of her appeal is in her mysterious cool girl thing, which lets you and Scott project what you want to see onto her. They don't even give her much of a personality either way, but it still was a choice I probably wouldn't have made. It also feels weird for her to be going through so much trouble for Scott, who she'd only known for two days. If the situations were reversed, I could totally see Scott doing it because he's delusional, but I don't think it would've been a good plot that way. In conclusion, I think they could've fleshed out the Evil Exs and let Ramona reach peace with them without completely getting rid of Scott, but I like the animation a lot and appreciate all the Wallace content.

2023.11.21
> Watched two more episodes of Scott Pilgrim before heading to class, listened to lectures on the bus. Disappointed but not particularly surprised that the unit on Christian art in the AP Art History didn't mention anything from Ethiopia or Western Asia (technically there was one mention of Dura Europos but they didn't even show any of the mosaics).
> Uneventful classes, but the Polish guy noticed my DnD shirt (which I have certainly worn at least three times before), and so somehow him, the other American, and my favorite Brazilian are going to try doing a campaign together. Going to try and see if I can rope in my neighbor classmate too since I know he also likes DnD!
> Did my Bargue plate for the day at home and finished the last episode of Scott Pilgrim. I was a little worried the ending would let me down, but honestly I think it wrapped up everything well, I even appreciated Ramona more in the last couple episodes. I still think I prefer the comic just because it feels more grounded and "realistic," but I think the anime works as a good adaptation :D

2023.11.22
> Talked to my neighbor's friend on the way to school this morning, uneventful morning classes. No club again because of another school assembly, but the teacher let me skip it and hang out in the library instead.
> Spent my three library periods doing my daily Bargue plate and then reading The King (got to ****'s resurrection!)
> Worked a little bit on my Christmas animatic, watched two episodes of LOTGH, and had niutangmian (no tomato this time) for dinner.

2023.11.23
> Today is Dusty Attenborough's birthday, so I drew a quick piece up this morning before heading to class.
> There were a bunch of old ladies at the bus stop this morning, though the only interaction we had was one of them randomly asking me my height as we were getting on the bus. It's our Chinese class midterm today, so we spent the morning reviewing (read: I spent the morning doodling on the backs of my past tests).
> The Hungarian exchange student is going home tomorrow (Visa problem or something), so we had a pizza party for lunch. Realized I can stand Taiwanese milk tea too, since that was the only boba option they gave us.
> Continued planning the DnD campaign with the guys. Test went well, I finished first by a mile and only helped the Polish guy cheat a little bit and then he realized he didn't actually need help in that section anyway.
> The rest of the students had already left while I was waiting for Xie An, my favorite Brazilian, so we started walking to the station together. I don't get to walk through small neighborhoods much because my house and both schools are so close to the bus/train station, so it was really nice to finally be able to do so. We ended up running into the rest of the group outside one of the high schools, so we sat outside the gate and talked while they waited for one of their friends to get out of class.
> Walked the rest of the way to the station by myself, ate a convenient store dinner in the park, and then went home. Going to do a Zoom meeting with my family later since it's Thanksgiving back in the States!

2023.11.24
> Our next project in art is ink printing, so we worked on planning out and transferring our print pattern to the block we'll carve.
> After school, Xiake (American), Xie An (Brazilian), and Yangjie (Polish) came over to my house to play DnD, except we did very little except for deciding what classes we'd be at the very end. I was prepared to branch out from barbarian to learn to play monk since I heard Xie An wanted to play barbarian, but he had already decided to play monk himself by the time he arrived, so I got to keep barbarian. Xiake got forced into playing a wizard.

2023.11.25
> Today was the Rotary Charity fair in my city, so all the Rotary Youth Exchange students who live in the city had to attend and run a RYE booth. I got a bunch of free food from Rotary people and the club at the stand next to us had a bunch of cute kids we got to talk to, even if one of them was picking up rude gestures from Eli.

2023.11.26
> Tomorrow is the start of the first Culture Tour that Rotary offers, so I packed today. I also reread and caught up with Witch Hat Atelier!

2023.11.27
> I only had to wake up at my usual time so my host father could drop me off at the train station where the Rotary bus was waiting for us. We're traveling to the east side of Taiwan, so we drove up to Taipei and then down the other side of the island, since you can't drive through the mountains.
> Our first stop was at the Lanyang Museum, which looked really cool but we only had 20 minutes there before we had to leave for lunch. Lunch was grilled fish, served inside a giant block of salt. All the food was really good, but I didn't have enough time to eat it all. Next we went to the beach to ride four-wheelers. I didn't want to drive, so I was happy to partner with Yangjie until I realized I would probably actually be safer driving myself. Somehow we both survived and it was still decently fun, even if I had to learn that singing the national anthem does a surprisingly good job of calming me down in near death situations.
> We ate dinner at the hotel, which was decent for hotel food. Somehow, we ended recruiting four more students from the other part of the district to join DnD, so we helped them make their characters and had an actually enjoyable first session. Despite the fact that this is Yanjie's first time DMing and the size of the party, we somehow got more done then we usually do in my American DnD group.

2023.11.28
> Hotel breakfast was okay even if the congee was mediocre. We visited a lake, which I walked around nearly half way with Xie An before we had to head back. We visited a clam farm next, which isn't nearly as fun as crayfish catching because the clams just sit there and don't even try to pinch you. We ate lunch there too, which was once again good but too much food to be able to eat a decent amount of.
> We visited a mochi store which was way too big and evil for my tastes, but the black sesame mochi I got was pretty good, as well as the giant bag of candied sweet potato. Dinner at another seafood place, with the same problems as every restaurant here although at least my dedication to eating (which is not shared by any of the other RYE students) was finally recognized by the Rotary people.
> We were given the choice between visiting the local night market or going back to the hotel, and since I was still full, I went back to the hotel with the original DnD group, although no one was particularly interested in playing DnD so I decided to try and walk to the ocean on my own. There's a harbor directly in front of the hotel, so to get to the actual ocean you have to walk around it, which makes what would have been a 10 or so minute walk one way take at least half an hour. I made it all the way to the other side of the harbor, but at that point there stopped being street lights, the bike path I was walking on was lined with very dense trees, and the beach dunes featured a lot of barking wild dogs, so I decided to call it quits and go back to the hotel. At least I got to walk by a bunch of cool big ships in the harbor.

2023.11.29
> This morning we visited a very stony beach, so me and Xie An tried to skip rocks and mostly failed. I got my pants completely soaked and honestly uncharacteristically wished we could've gone swimming since the ocean here is so warm!
> We got dropped off at a train station to take a scenic train, which was very nice. Lunch at a roasted chicken place, which I ate none of but enjoyed the side dishes a lot while arguing with Xia Ke about how Apple devices peaked in 1979 and that no good video game needs a resolution of greater than 280x192.
> Then it was finally time to go home, so I listened to Mercy by Sir Chloe and Love Me by Plenka on repeat for six hours straight while thinking about my medieval characters. Figured out a bunch of new ideas and realized I could set them in the hypothetical fantasy Utah empire I had been thinking about last summer. Was planning to rework their character designs when I got home but instead I decided to reinstall Fear and Hunger 1 and 2.
> Clam soup and noodles for dinner, but somehow all my progress on being able to eat large amounts was reset by the trip. Finally got back to watching LOTGH before bed!

2023.11.30
> Back to Chinese class! We're finally on the new textbook (though I still already know it all). Decided to actually order kimchi fried noodles from one of the cafeteria restaurants instead of just eating kimchi instant noodles, but for twice the price they not only didn't taste as good but were probably actually had more oil than my cup noodles.
> Thought about walking to the train station again, but my legs are still tired so I just walked the long way through the university to my bus stop.
> Onto the final battle before ***'s assassination so I'm keeping up with LOTGH...

2023.12.01
> It's another big test for my school again, so Kelvin took Eli and I to the Imperial Palace Museum in Taipei instead. The museum is nearly entirely Chinese artifacts the KMT took on their way out of China instead of Taiwanese artifacts, but it was pretty cool either way. The word 'almost' is there because there was one exhibit on the Roccocco period with European artifacts? They had free sticker pamphlets so that was cool at least.
> Me and Eli talked at least 70% in Chinese, which was extra funny with the amount of foreigners visiting the museum. After, we visited the oldest Confucist temple in Taipei before visiting a night market. I got my favorite winter melon boba and fried sweet potato balls, but I also finally got to try the famous Taiwanese clam omelet (delicious), peanut soup douhua, and some really nice and crunchy strawberry tanghulu.

2023.12.02
> Today I went on a daytrip with Elsie and Anna to Emei Lake, though I had no idea of what to expect, so I was already decently impressed when we walked down the little path to the bridge to see the first giant building on the island in the middle of a pretty small country town. There was an old man playing really good trumpet at the foot of the bridge, which added to the atmosphere. It took me a moment to notice the other even bigger building on the island.
> We could only visit the temple, which was a single 10 story tall room with what felt like a comparatively small Buddha statue but his earlobes were nonetheless the size of my head. After we prayed, we got to pull fortunes (mine told me that I'll never be this young again and I need to do some self reflection... less fun to hear than my last fortune I got on the Rotary trip which told me it was the perfect time for me to study abroad and learn a new language lol). We also got little prayer sachets so I chose the Lord Guan one.
> As we left the building, however, my dreams of an actually giant Buddha statue were fulfilled when I saw that the island did in fact have one even taller than both of the buildings that I somehow didn't see on the way in. We walked around the island a bit (couldn't go into the other building because we didn't have a reservation) before walking back across the bridge to get some really yummy pomelo ice cream! Drew in my sketchbook while Elsie talked to one of her friends who owned the ice cream shop.
> We got lunch at a nearby restaurant and then went home. We went out again for dinner at this fancy Japanese natural living restaurant which had a robot server and really good congee. We walked around the block afterwards, which used to be housing for military personnel but now is filled with cute shops and startups. There was one artists' cafe where you can paint and drink coffee which I'll definitely have to visit once I switch host families since my next host family lives just a block away!

2023.12.03
> We went along to Taipei with Kelvin today to see the Astronomical Museum while he was at work. Saw two different 3-D movies in the museum theater before we left to go eat lunch, but I got really light headed halfway to the 7/11. I barely made it, though I dutifully drank the entire bottle of water Elsie bought me and ate all of the egg and chicken donburi she bought, minus the chicken, before sleeping for two hours, still in the 7/11. I finally felt better, but we went to Kelvin's parents apartment so I could rest in a proper bed while everyone else waited for Kelvin to get back from work so we could eat.

2023.12.04
> Back to school :( It was actually pretty fine, we played what I assume must be the Taiwanese version of Mafia, called Werewolf, except after each turn everyone has to say what they are but they don't have to do it truthfully, so everyone just said they were civilians (I actually was, which was good because I wouldn't have known what to do if I actually had to do anything). We practiced our song a bit and then did nothing for the rest of class, so I was American and faxed my senators.
> Started reading two different new comics at home and finished redrawing the thumbnails for my Christmas animatic digitally.

2023.12.05
> Finished my third reread of the Rodrigo of Caledon saga today at lunch while still switching wildly back and forth between the stance I've held for months on Rodrigo's feelings for Rustin and actually just trusting his narration. Talked to the German girl about it, who seemed very interested although she made it pretty clear she'll never read it unless I make it into a webcomic.
> Yangjie has decided he's had enough of being a DM after one session, so I once again enthusiastically offered my services and was finally accepted this time. A little sad that I won't get a chance to play my half-elf barbarian but I already have a couple decent plot ideas.
> After dinner I finally sat down and watched the LOTGH episode where **** gets assassinated, which I knew was coming so I wasn't terribly upset over that. Instead, I was terribly upset over the fact that one of my favorite side characters got killed off with him :( And now there's still 28 episodes left. So. Back on the grind...

2023.12.06
> This week we're playing badminton in Gym, which I find I actually really love. With the possible exception of swim, I've been genuinely enjoying all my Gym classes here even if I'm often only mediocre at the sports we play, but badminton is not only very fun but I (like to think) am very good at it. I don't think I was this good back in the States, but everyone puts more effort into it here and that energizes me more in return, so even though my arms feel like they're getting close to muscle failure by the end of the hour, its a very good time.
> I skimmed through the Dungeon Master's Guide and brainstormed for the new DnD campaign. Found out there is a musical about my one of my favorite LOGH side characters, so I started watching that. Definitely missing out on a decent amount of the meaning since there's no English subtitles, but from the little Japanese I can understand and the overexaggerated actions of the actors I can decently follow it.

2023.12.07
> For Culture Class we tried ink painting, and after class Xie An and I went with Yang Jie to his house to play DnD.
> It was on the upper floor of a clinic instead of in a normal residential area, so I let my guard down and forgot the prior information that his family literally has a maid, and was subsequently blown away by how fancy it was. We bought McDonalds on the way, as to not overwhelm said maid, which I was only a little sad about.
> I didn't write myself many notes for the scenes I had planned out, and Yang Jie was very determined to mess up my plans as much as possible, but I managed decently. Next time I'll have to prepare the dungeon ahead of time (I had not intended for them to visit a dungeon this session, but they did nonetheless) and work harder on remembering the differences between Investigation, Perception, and Insight. The vague storyline I have thus far is a combination of the Castle Country story I'm working on and Fear & Hunger, though at this point I'm mostly making it up on the fly.
> Starting ready Gary Gygax's Living Fantasy as well.

2023.12.08
> Finally Friday! Working on carving the printing block for my print in art, and the dance teacher wasn't there so we got two free periods. Realized that Living Fantasy isn't a very enjoyable book to read for long stretches at a time, so I finally caved and checked out the ebook of Midshipman's Hope, the first book of David Feintuch's other series, which is sci-fi christian military fiction instead of medieval fantasy fiction.
> I tried setting my expectations low because its his earlier work, but as per usual he met and exceeded even my high expectations. It wouldn't be a Feintuch book without the weird corporal punishment thing and the main character having a gay best friend, and though the main character is very Rodrigo, he is significantly more well-adjusted because he wasn't raised as a prince. Thus far the Rustin-equivalent is not actually the gay best friend who was mentioned a singular time, but another midshipman who hates Nick (the Rodrigo-equivalent) because they aren't childhood best friends, so they mutually beat each other up (at least until Nick gets promoted) and therefore get to be declared more normal than Rodrigo and Rustin. If you can't tell, I'm enjoying it a lot. Only problem I have thus far is that the unified space Christianity is just kind of there as a background element and we haven't really gotten into any theology.
> Working on a comic for a LOTGH Secret Santa event. Today I finished digitally redrawing my thumbnails, did all the panel outlines and one full test panel to make sure I like the brushes I'm using. Watched a little more of the Poplan Musical and another episode of LOTGH before bed.

2023.12.09
> Relaxing weekend, Day 1. Did my Chinese advanced class homework and translated the chorus and first verse of Country Roads into Chinese for the upcoming talent show, while rewording some lines to be more about my own home town.
> Did the lineart for a few more comic panels and spent a while playing a typing game that was just the first chapter of Moby Dick. Ended up thinking too much about the irresistible nature of the ocean and got back into my monthly "I want to work on a cargo ship" phase, which haunted my brain so much I actually finished my entire hot pot at the restaurant at dinner because I was trying so hard to convince myself that I don't need to attend a maritime academy, with limited success.

2023.12.10
> Host family went to Taipei, and since my DnD group was technically thinking about playing today I got to stay home, even if I perhaps already knew we weren't going to meet up.
> Finished the panel quote I set for myself, left the apartment to buy bubble tea and ramen, but mostly spent the day reading Midshipman's Hope. It was pretty nice to finally have some time alone though.
> Finished the book after dinner, and I can confidently say I really enjoyed it. Not Rodrigo of Caledon level of ruin my life, but I look forward to reading the rest of the series. It's nice to get a bigger perspective of Feintuch's work, even if it's incredibly uncanny to see the character who is essentially proto-Rodrigo not only sleep with a woman but get married to one, something Rodrigo couldn't manage in two whole books. Proto-Rustin also remained very good and gets my favorite scene (immediately after this the main character court martials Vax and tells him he would hang him if he could for disobeying his orders because god forbid a man love his captain).

2023.12.11
> Started reading the second book of the Seafort Saga, Challenger's Hope, on the way to school. Finally finished the tic-tac-toe board shaped wood thing we've been working on in Woodworking Class for weeks. The badminton gods apparently didn't appreciate my arrogance last week so I did terribly today.
> Ended up finishing Challenger's Hope before bed too, because 530 pages in 3 days was a decent pace for the last book but 530 pages in 1 day seems far more reasonable (uh huh). I may still have been in shock over proto-Roddy marrying a woman and now having a child, but dear old Feintuch wouldn't do something as silly as let his main character actually be happy so that doesn't last long. Most of the supporting cast get removed from the narrative except my favorite late-book 1 addition, pretty boy, who I was very glad to see get a proper redemption arc. There actually is one really good theological conversation in this one, even if its with a computer who just wanted to play chess with its captain. Only complaint this time around is that Feintuch should've made up a silly sci-fi slur instead of just using a pre-existing one for a completely different group of people because I'm fairly certain he isn't transgender.
> Got my plank time up to over 2 minutes again, meaning I'm roughly where I was at my previous peak physical condition. At this point it's still more willpower than actual core strength, so I think I can keep improving my time at the pace for a bit.

2023.12.12
> Chinese class continues at its usual snail's pace, and my favorite person to talk to Xie An, isn't even there today. At first I worry he was killed by Rodrigo of Caledon, since he happily informed me he actually started reading the PDF I sent him at his request, making him the first of the 20+ people that I've talked about RoC to do so. I later find he had a school trip, so my guilt is alleviated.
> I make it to the bus stop before finally caving and checking out the third Seafort Saga novel, with an unspoken promise to try and pace myself this time, at least a bit. > I do a bit more work on my Secret Santa comic once home and watch an episode of LoTGH while treating myself to a very slow dinner of Japanese curry with chicken and a can of Sprite, since I'm eating alone tonight.

2023.12.13
> I continue reading Prisoner's Hope, in which Nicholas Seafort's second wife is also driven to hysteria, the least offensive midshipman gets the Anavar treatment (although he only suffers from amnesia and not Anavar level brain damage), and Vax, the proto-Rustin, remains secure in his hatred of Seafort after his actions in the last book.
> I do slightly better in badminton, and since I'm done with my painting for my art class the teacher has me make something with perler beads.
> Before bed, I watch the first hour of Saltburn, but I'll save my comments until I finish it.

2023.12.14
> Before heading to class I watch a bit more Saltburn, but am unable to finish it before I have to leave to catch the bus.
> In the afternoon class we get free time to practice for the talent show, and despite my magnificent plan to skip DnD because I have something more important to do (aka finish Saltburn), when Xiake finally shows up an hour before class ends (he passed out for seven hours after pulling three consecutive all nighters. the fact he is still alive with the amount of caffeine and other drug stimulants he takes and the complete and utter lack of sleep he gets continues to impress me), I get convinced into playing anyway.
> We go to Yang Jie's house again, and though I wasn't prepared to do a session today, I pull through. I've decided since I hate dungeons I'll actually let the party find the missing guard they're looking for next time, instead of stretching it out any longer, and then they can go bother the princess/go to North Dakota/whatever.

2023.12.15
> I explain the Seafort Saga thus far to Youren on the way to school, and finish carving my print block in art class, though I don't have time to do a test print.
> Playing badminton against the first years boosts my ego again, and once I get into the flow of it (and get very sweaty, though I didn't even bring my jacket today unlike the rest of the class), I imagine Seafort playing with the other midshipman in early book 1. I doubt they would ever play after he gets promoted to captain, and now he definitely can't play with his dear midshipman because [we'll get to that later].
> Our usual computer teacher has a meeting, so we get to take a test instead. This time it's actually about programming, and though it takes me a bit to get into it, I only have to use the internet to help with one problem, and that's solely because I'm fairly certain we never learned how to specify the number of decimal places that an answer should show.
> I have dinner alone again because there's a big multi-club Rotary Meeting, and I finish Prisoner's Hope while eating. I accidently spoiled myself to the fact that Vax dies by the end, though it was at least a better death than the way I began to suspect he would go as the page count dwindled near the end. In the end he chooses the share in Seafort's eternal damnation, and in true Feintuch fashion Seafort finally uses the L word to describe his feelings for him only after he's dead. This makes Seafort's hysterical/suicidal wife count 5, so while only the Vax situation was directly his fault, maybe he should stop seeing people. Though he's committed treason on at least 3 accounts by the time he gets back to Earth, the job of a Feintuch protagonist is never done so instead of executing him they give him even more power. There are three more books, but the NYPL only has one more, so I'm still trying to decide whether or not to finish it now or read something else first.
> I also finally finish the last twenty minutes of Saltburn, so I'll talk about that too. Aesthetically, it's probably one of my favorite movies ever. The story is also pretty solid, although I feel like it starts overexplaining itself at the very end. I feel like it would've been a lot more thought-provoking if they didn't show exactly how the main character killed them, much less how he set up the meeting with Felix in the very beginning. It definitely would have been improved via more Farleigh screen time, and that has nothing to do with him being my favorite character. Overall, 8.5/10.

2023.12.16
> Today is the Hsinchu Culture Trip, so I take my morning train to Hsinchu Station to meet up with the rest of the exchange students before we get on the bus.
> We spend the morning at a rice noodle restaurant, where we get to make and package noodles ourselves, go through a history exhibit, and then eat lunch. They're the thin kind of rice noodles, not the thick soft ones I like, so I'm a little disappointed.
> In the afternoon we go to a glass studio, which is in a very crowded and small warehouse, and very different from the Corning Museum of Glass. We take turns getting to make our own glass with the help of a worker, and the guy who helps me when it's finally my turn is super cool and has good taste in American music. We'll get our finished cups next week, but we also get a free drink stirrer (I choose one with a very cute whale on top) from the shop.
> While we wait, I watch Xie An get to the Chela scene in The Still. He, quite fairly, takes a break from reading it for the rest of the time. > I solve the "should I read Seafort Saga Book 4 or another book" dilemma in the most reasonable way possible: by reading not one other book, but three at once. I started the Bible when I first started reading the Seafort Saga and thought it would be a lot more theological reference heavy, so I pick that back up again (finished Genesis today), along with Dante's Divine Comedy and a nonfiction book of the history of stellar cartography, Mapping the Heavens.
> I go to the mall for dinner with my family, and it's very decorated for Christmas. There are no candy canes to be seen, but there's an awful lot of chocolate, which appears to be the Christmas candy of choice here.

2023.12.17
> I work through the first subchapter of the calculus textbook I found during my homeschooling kick last spring, along with all my Chinese homework.
> Somehow, I go back down the Julius Caesar rabbit hole again, though its with his early career as opposed to the end of it this time, so I end up spending most of the day reading a mix of scholarly articles and fanfiction.
> And because three books wasn't enough, I add two more to the rotating list: 30,000 Kisses, an anthology of queer Greco-Roman poetry and stories, and Since My Last Confession, a gay Catholic memoir.

2023.12.18
> I lied last time, and add a sixth book: Ender's Game, which is often mentioned in reference to the Seafort Saga. I'll give my thoughts on it once I finish it.
> During my library period, the old lady who teaches me Chinese decides to have me read the book she just finished too, the Chinese translation of Mitch Albom's The Stranger in the Lifeboat. We get through the first page in the hour we have together, and its a lot more fun than trying to think of conversation topics or going through textbooks below my level.
> I finish reading Exodus and nearly finish the test spoon-cavity I'm carving in Woodworking class. Carving out organic shapes is a lot more fun than the last geometric-shaped project.
> Xie An gets to the sword-selling scene in The Still today, and I was very glad that he not only kept going after the Chela scene but also to finally have someone to complain about my favorite fool to.

2023.12.19
> Typically boring Chinese class, and I even forgot my homework at home.
> At home I finish Ender's Game, so I get to talk about that now! I really enjoyed it, but I am sure I would have eaten it up even more had I read this when I was in elementary/middle school. It's feels very wish-fulfillmenty, which I suppose isn't inherently a bad thing, and it definitely does a good job of appealing to its clear target audience. Separate the artist from the art and all that but the knowledge that Orson Scott Card is a pretty sucky person (heard someone vaguely mention it on the internet and opened his Wikipedia page to see a "Personal Views" section... hoo boy) probably doesn't help, though the transphobia is kinda funny for the guy who made Ender the way he is. (only called his legal name by his parents and identifies entirely with an entirely different name... described as the combination of his brother and sister... do I need to go on?)

2023.12.20
> I finish Leviticus in Art, and read another page of The Stranger in the Life Boat while drinking expensive tea at the library. One of my classmates finally asks me for English help, and he acts blown away by the very fancy sentence I give him: "Three students stand in the school courtyard."
> I'm having a main character day, because on the way to Gym I look longingly at the stairs up the second floor of the gym building where the seating area is, only for the teacher to let us go up to watch the volleyball tournament instead of having class today. Later, I decide my after-school snack will be two handpies from the shop outside the school, but some teacher stops me in the library to give me two handpies, one with a boba filling, instead.

2023.12.21
> You've heard of stress dreams, but my dreams apparently decide I don't have enough stress in my life, so instead they make me do calculus. I also don't realize this until I'm thinking about it later in the day, but I also had the first dream in Chinese I can remember, where some students from another school ask me how much Chinese I can understand on the way to the station, but there's no street corner in real life like that one we stood on.
> We play Jeopardy in class and spend the rest of the day rehearsing for the talent show on Sunday. Puragatorio is done now too, so I just have the final book of The Divine Comedy left.
> It's finally cold enough for me to actually put on my sweatshirt, except even that's not enough. I regret not bringing any sweaters, even if it would've taken up a lot of space in my suitcase.
> I transfer a poem I wrote in the Notes app on my phone to my journal, and paste some of the papers I've collected in there too. My Secret Santa exchange comic is due in two days, so I make the responsible decision to go ahead and finish coloring it today, though at this point I doubt my chances of finishing the Christmas animatic before the big day.

2023.12.22
> For some reason when I wake up, this crisp silence of the morning feels like Christmas.
> We're finally onto the test printing in art class, and it's very fun! Rest of the day is pretty normal, and I spent most of my time reading the 300,000 Kisses anthology. I discover my new favorite poet (Catullus) and later find that my favorite poem of his is also the source of my favorite Latin phrase (I can not print it here)! One day I'd like to memorize the entire poem, but that's work for future me.

2023.12.23
> This morning my second host mother picks me up to show me how to get to my school from my next house. I feel proud of myself for recognizing that we could've just gotten off the bus before the bridge over the North Hsinchu station and taken the train there instead of going all the way to Hsinchu station.
> We go to Big City, the mall that serves as the primary attraction of Hsinchu, for lunch, and I find that it certainly is big. While waiting for Karen, the second host mother, to get her blood drawn for the Rotary Donation Drive, I talk to the host father of one of my classmates and finally find my way to go hiking! It turns out a bunch of Rotary members from their club go hiking together semi-frequently, so I get invited along for the next trip and complimented for my Chinese speaking skills.
> We get mediocre sushi, though I know I'll have to come back to get the delicious looking naan I see at a restaurant on the fast food level.
> We return home to pick up Eli and then go to our Rotary Club's Christmas pre-party, which involves making miniature Christmas trees (mine gets given away to my third host mother as a present) and delicious ginger and brown sugar tea. Then we move downstairs for the real party, with mediocre food but free drinks from the fridge and I only play lookout to Eli definitely not breaking Rotary rules twice(ish).

2023.12.24
> After doing my homework in the morning (and one unit of the classical Greek course I've started going through), it's time for the Exchange Students' Talent Show.
> The Rotary gods hate (or perhaps love) us, so they pick Yang Jie to go first (he speaks more Chinese in his very monotone speech than I've ever heard him say in all our classes combined, even if he mispronounces nearly all of it). When it's my turn (I'm singing a Chinese translation of Take Me Home, Country Roads), my voice shakes and I keep losing my place in the lyrics, but luckily Rotary is an organization of corruption, so they give me Runner Up and 200 dollars because they've heard I'm supposed to be good even if my singing didn't support such a conclusion.
> Most of the other students also sing (my favorite is one who came onto stage with a pink ski mask and a fake gun to sing a song about asking for money), my Spanish classmates plays kalimba, one of the Brazilians from the other class breakdances (he somehow doesn't win any prizes, which confirms my suspicions on the Rotary corruption), and the Brazilian girl in my class gives a presentation and then demonstration on a form of Brazilian dancing (dance-fighting?) that rightfully wins her first place.
> The food is impressively bad by any standards, but they give us Welch's fruit snacks in our candy bags so I am satisfied. They sit all the exchange students down to watch a video, which turns out to be a compilation of messages from our families back home. While not as long or as heartfelt as some of the other videos, my dad makes a beautiful Christmas graphic with corresponding 8-bit Christmas music with his Apple 2+ simulator, and is the only video to win applause from the audience. Even though I can't understand the languages the majority of the videos are in (I can understand the three other Americans' families and the trumpet player preforming Silent Night in the snow), the very tone of their voice is endlessly touching. Even though we're from places across the globe, it strikes me that we're really not that different at all. And if Christmas can bring us all together like this, maybe cultural imperialism isn't that bad after all-- (okay sorry I take that last part back).
> Apparently the cool thing here is to give Christmas presents on Christmas Eve, so my host parents give me a beautiful jade bracelet before I go to bed.

2023.12.25
> It's Christmas, but I still have school (I was given the option to skip, but I get the idea that going to class will probably be more relaxing than going to an amusement park, and my host sister wants to hang out with her friends at the mall). It's also Ivan Konev's birthday, so I whip up a quick drawing of him before leaving in the morning.
> This turns out to be a good choice, because I get candy from my classmates and get to start working on my actual spoon in Woodworking class.
> I finish reading Paradiso (didn't meet my quota yesterday, so it ended up taking 10 days instead of 9), but I'll definitely have to actually read it at some point in the future because the app tells me I read all 900 pages in only 4 hours, so I get the feeling I didn't actually read all 900 pages.
> The best Christmas present of all is that I manage to finally find an archived version of David Feintuch's old website, which I once saw referenced in an article and gave up on finding after 30 minutes of searching, while looking for a good photo of him to use in my version of the "Died in X, Born in X, welcome back X" meme, since Feintuch died in the same year as a I was born (rest his soul. no wait wake it up I have some questions for this guy).

2023.12.26
> Back to work in Chinese class. (I also have a nice Zoom conversation with my family in the morning, though.)
> I finish Book 4 of the Seafort Saga, Fisherman's Hope, and this is my favorite one yet (I felt the first continued to be better than both of the subsequent sequels, but Feintuch pulls himself back up here). This is probably because it's the most theology heavy by the end and Seafort finally gets to retire and becomes a monk (and then the afterword ruins that by telling us he unretires to become a politician and marries his old bunkie Arlene... this is perhaps a worse moral decision by Seafort's own words than the way he tricks 43 children into killing themselves to save humanity right before he retires.)

2023.12.27
> The library doesn't have the ebooks for the rest of the Seafort Saga, so I turn to my trust friend Google to find a very legal copy. Though my original goal fails, I find myself down the rabbit hole of an old sci-fi forum that was last active in the early 2000s, which features not only people with many opinions on the Seafort Saga and Rodrigo of Caledon (which is certainly not sci-fi but is still discussed here because everyone knows Feintuch here), but also David Feintuch himself. It's a bit of the jumpscare when I first scroll down to his name on a discussion thread about a guy trashing Nick Seafort, but it's incredibly interesting to see the author himself speak about his characters (his love of Seafort is so sweet it nearly moves me to tears, while his opinions on Rodrigo and Rustin make me hope they have therapists in the afterlife. hmm.)
> My collection of unintentionally ominous quotes wishing the poor guy a long life continues to grow (shout out to that one guy who said "It would be tragic for [the Seafort Saga] to end in an anticlimax. Lord God grant that doesn't happen," which is perhaps the funniest way a guy could phrase such a thought for a series where the main character's whole thing is that he's convinced God hates him and that does indeed end in anticlimax because Feintuch's family never publish his final manuscript. I also hope dear old T. Terry who joked about Seafort coming alive to take revenge on his author awkwardly remembered such a statement in 2006).
> Armed with new knowledge (Feintuch says he fully intends Rodrigo of Caledon to be a two book series, but he also says every book past the fourth one of the Seafort Saga was going to be the last, so do I really trust him?) and a very large reading list, this makes a very good day indeed.

2023.12.28
> Before class I finally work up the courage to open Feintuch's website. The only content on it besides links for buying his books are two forwards he wrote for special editions of two of the Seafort Saga novels, but the small insights they give into his life are invaluable to me (it's rather funny to read about his youthful angst at learning all his favorite authors were already dead, when he's now my favorite dead author) and the way this guy talks about his own fictional character never ceases to be one of the most earnest things I've ever read. The fact that he uses the very same pixel book icon I've used repeatedly on my own webpages is only a bittersweet cherry on top.
> After Chinese class, my host dad takes me and Eli to a bridal shop, since we need to pick out dresses for our future career as flower girls at a wedding for someone I don't even know next week. None of the dresses have sleeves or even anything thicker than spaghetti straps, but I suck it up and make do.
> I'm moving to my second host family tomorrow night, so I decide to start packing, and end up barely fitting all my stuff into my two suitcases in barely an hour. I spend the rest of the evening eating dinner and watching Clone High by myself, since my host parents are off at the gym, and then pacing the apartment while talking aloud to myself about Rodrigo of Caledon, like a normal and well adjusted person.

2023.12.29
> Friday classes are per usual. I finish reading that Catholic memoir, making us up to 129 books this year.
> After dinner, me and Eli switch host families. My new host mom, Karen, shows me my room and the shower, so I spend most of the evening unpacking before going to bed.

2023.12.30
> I sleep in till 7, but I'm still up earlier than the rest of my family, so I grab a melon pan from the kitchen (bought specifically for me, since I'm fairly certain no one else eats breakfast) and return to my room. I get a head start on my Chinese homework, even though we won't have class next week.
> For lunch, we go to a nearby hot pot restaurant, and I'm struck by how much I've already changed. My first meal out with my first host family was also hot pot, but back then I had no clue how to cook seafood (I get the seafood platter again at this one), and the amount of food I can eat is certainly bigger too. Last time, I couldn't even finish the single platter I ordered. Here, I not only eat the entire seafood platter, but also a vegetable platter that you plate yourself, along with desert soup and a winter melon slushie for dessert. (My new host dad is a snail, apparently, as he fills his vegetable platter with only lettuce. When he finishes the meat he was wrapping with the lettuce, he tries filling the lettuce with ice cream instead. In this way, he reminds me of my own father.)
> After lunch my host sister (like my last house, I have two, but one is off in Europe) and dad leave to visit an elderly relative, while Karen takes me shopping to the 7-Eleven under our apartment. It has half a shelf full of books that I'll need to check out at a later point, but also Swiss Miss and my favorite spicy konjac snacks (ridiculously expensive, though; nearly 1 USD for a single package that you can eat in a bite).
> For dinner, we meet up with the Spanish exchange student's family at a nearby Japanese restaurant. My tuna rice bowl is mediocre, but the pickled ginger here is heavenly.

2023.12.31
> I finish rereading one of my favorite zines, Youth Liberation Now (issue 1), and decide it's time to call it quits on books for the year. I spend the rest of the morning compiling the list of the 130 books on my Multiverse (LINK).
> We have our New Year's Rotary trip, so I pack for that (I successfully forget my charger and wallet, but I bring an extra unnecessary change of clothes). After everyone arrives at the meeting spot, we file onto the bus and head to Taipei. They release us at the Sun Yat Sen memorial, so I head to the closest book store (no manga or English novels, though they do have beautifully illustrated Chinese copies of the two sequels to Howl's Moving Castle, unfortunately too expensive for me to justify buying). We decide on Indian food for dinner, and the website of the closest restaurant promised not only South Indian cuisine but also momos. When we get there, it's only North Indian, but the naan, vegetable masala, and gulab jamun is still so delicious I could cry.
> After a quick trip through the memorial for the bathroom, we walk around a bit (I buy some red bean soup from a nearby stand, and a strawberry tanghulu from another, which betrays me by having the final strawberry not be a strawberry at all but a tomato), before regrouping and finding a place to sit for the countdown. We watch the Taipei 101 fireworks and walk through the streets shouting "Happy New Year" in Chinese to amused passerbys on our way to the bus, and finally get back to the hotel at around 2AM.

2024.01.01
> I wake up earlier than I would like to get the hotel breakfast, but it's not very good... We get back on the bus to go to a nice restaurant in the mountains, with unspectacular food but delicious black tea jelly for dessert (the rest of my table doesn't eat much, so I have two bowls there and take two more for the road).
> Then, we head to Shifen for the Lantern Festival. The rest of the exchange students already went to one in August, but since I hadn't arrived then, this is my first time. I'm not really sure what to wish for, so I write down "World Peace" and, in very small text underneath, "Feintuch unpublished manuscript release," and just write "Happy New Year from New York State" in Chinese on the other side. I buy myself winter melon bubble tea (with Yang Jie's money) and spend the rest of my time sketching the scenery. We release the lanterns on the train tracks, and twice a train comes through.
> On the bus back, it turns out the Rotex bought us bubble tea from the same place I got mine from, so I have a cup of milk tea this time, and later a cup of black tea because Yang Jie decides he doesn't want his. We finally reach home, but I'm still full from the tea so I only eat a green onion pancake and some wax apples for dinner.
> Because it gets somehow brought up every other week of my life, I watch Brokeback Mountain before going to bed.

2024.01.02
> I wait in my room for everyone else to leave this morning (we don't have Chinese class today), and enjoy having the apartment to myself. I finish my homework and finish reading The Man Who Folded Himself, which I enjoyed a lot despite my tendency to nitpick time travel mechanics.
> For lunch, I eat the 7-Eleven sandwich Karen bought for my last Saturday, seafood instant ramen, grapefruit jelly, and honey water. At some point, I need to remember how to cook, but that time isn't here yet.
> We have another dress fitting this afternoon, so Kelvin and Eli pick me up. While we wait, since the museum he originally wanted to take us to is closed, we go hiking at the place Elsie and I went before. This time, we get all the way to the peak, which is a fair trade-off in my mind for the fact that we have to walk an extra 5 km to get back to the car since we somehow took a horrendously wrong turn. I get incredibly sweet winter melon bubble tea and the dress fitting goes fine.
> For dinner, I figure out how to cook one of the green onion pancakes in the microwave (the package only has instructions for stovetop, but you can cook anything in the microwave) and have some more wax apples.
> My movie tonight is The Green Knight, which I think does a good job of adapting the classic Arthurian legend into a new form. I can't nitpick it for its differences from the original story because it clearly shows that it's something new and separate from its source material.

2024.01.03
> First day going to school from my new house! I miss the early bus by only a minute or two, so I sit and wait for the normal one. When my bus app tells me its only 3 minutes away, I stand up and watch for it. After seeing no sign for 5 minutes, I look back at my bus app, which helpfully informs me that it's already on the next stop. I could wait for the next one, but I don't want to risk it not showing again, so I decide to just walk to the train station. Google Maps tells me it'll take 45 minutes, and the late train (there's no way I'm making the usual train either way at this point) is coming in 40. It only takes me 25 minutes on a light jog/speed walk, so I get to sit down and rest for a bit.
> School is otherwise uninteresting. I grab a thing of my favorite Shin instant noodles on the way home, along with a black sesame wheel cake. The bus I planned to take back from the train station came four minutes before my train arrived, but the elusive 5608 (the one I failed to catch this morning) is supposed to be coming in 5 minutes. Google Maps tells me it stops at a different stop than my bus app, and I, like a fool, trust my bus app over both Google and the literal sign at the bus stop. I see 5608 this time, but fail to run fast enough to get to the right stop. Instead, I enjoy another 4km walk back home. I see one of the politicians I see on all the billboards waving from the back of the truck (another cultural difference here, less history of political assassination?) and, more importantly, a cool congee shop, so I tell myself it was worth it.
> I have an early dinner/late lunch of my instant ramen, the last green onion pancake, and the last grapefruit jelly. When Karen gets home at 7, it turns out she wants to make dinner too, so I get a whole three meals for once.
> Tonight's movie is Au Revoir Les Enfants, which is the first movie I get through in one sitting in months (something something modern film-making lame).

2024.01.04
> I do my laundry and spend most of my morning before class reading mediocre comics. I realize I forgot to take my clothes out of the washing machine right as I'm about to leave, so I resign myself to being late. But my legs once again impress me, and I make it to class with a minute to spare.
> For lunch I even order a rice bowl, which has nothing to do with the fact I've had instant noodles for the past two days now. In my afternoon class, I spend my time making tiny comics of my favorite Rodrigo of Caledon scenes (thinking about reread number 4... it's a new year...)
> After class, I run into some of my classmates on the way to the congee shop I was checking out yesterday. I find what I was looking for on the menu (oyster congee my beloved), but there's no one there to take my order despite the lights being on and the front being open, so I go with said classmates to the tech shops on the next block. The first game shop has LoZ: Skyward Sword for Switch priced at only 890 NTD (roughly 29 USD), so I cave and buy it (buying it in the States would cost around 40 USD, so I think its worth it). The next store we go into (I go back to the congee shop and there is still no one there, so I catch up with them again) is far bigger and fancier, and I decide I can probably find a new battery for my laptop here at a future date (it's been kindly informing me that my battery life is gone and I need to get a new one for about a week now, but of course when I get home to check what kind of battery I need it plays dumb and acts like I'm the crazy one). Here, they're selling Skyward Sword for 990 NTD. I return to the congee shop a final time to no luck, so I buy abalone congee from a shop two doors down instead.
> Once again, after my delicious congee dinner, my host mom returns to make dinner without telling me, so today I have four meals. My original fear of dying of malnutrition here is rapidly seeming very foolish.

2024.01.05
> Today, I actually catch the bus to the station (well, a bus. I get on the first one that stops, though it turns out to be only going to Hsinchu station, not North Hsinchu. I also get off on the wrong stop because a crowd of highschoolers also get off, but at least the walk was only 5 minutes today).
> Since my Friday art class is a third year class, it's been disbanded so the third years can focus on studying. I spend the morning in the library instead (I spend my time browsing Amazon to find the cheapest copies of the Seafort saga series. In total, I can get the entire series for $28. I also find a Japanese copy of the first novel, but more on that later). We watch a Taiwanese drama in dance and play table tennis in Gym.
> On the way home, there's a line for the wheel pie shop, so I skip getting my afternoon snack. I wait at the right stop for the bus this time, but its so crowded that me and the girl in front of me can't get on. On my walk home, there actually is a person at the congee shop, but I convince myself that I don't need to buy food since there's a sandwich in the fridge (there was not, as it later turned out). I fail to convince myself the same when I get to the boba shop near my house, because there's a monk ordering a drink too, and I figure if it's good enough for a monk, it's good enough for me. It turns out monks must be rich, though, because my apple green tea boba costs as much as three cups of my usual order at the university's cafeteria boba shop.
> All things happen for a reason, though, as I walk past a grandfather with three tiny kids in the apartment lobby. It turns out they're going to the same building as me, so while we wait for the elevator the kids try to scare me by roaring, and I play along. It also turns out we're going to the same floor, so I hope I can see them again.
> I spend my afternoon finding every unique cover of the Japanese release of the Seafort Saga, respectively titled 銀河の荒賛シーフォート (Galactic Eagle (?) Seafort). There are only 7 books in the series, but there's more than one cover for most of the books, so I find 12 in total. I've looked for Seafort fanart before to no luck, so seeing the illustrated covers makes me very happy. After a little more digging, I find a couple pieces of individual fanart and some doujinshi from Japanese fans (catboy Seafort real...), along with a six chapter fanfiction that goes through Google Translate decently and a couple of book reviews from fans. The LotGH/Rodrigo of Caledon fandom overlap might not exist, but I find three different cases of LotGH being mentioned in reference to the Seafort Saga!
> I eat Karen's homecooked dinner and watch the first episode of Delicious in the Dungeon before going to bed.

2024.01.06
> Day of the wedding! We go eat brunch with Elsie and Eli first, at a popular Taiwanese coffee chain that has Thai Ice Tea on the menu, but of a quality I should have expected. The corn and tuna wrapinni is passable though, as is the mochi and honey one I split with Eli.
> Next, it's off to the hotel for makeup and hair, and I find I feel a lot less uncomfortable in my dress when I look like a completely different person. I go back with Eli to her house (my old one) and we wait around for the evening. She calls her parents to show off her dress, so I finally get to meet the woman I profess my love for on the daily (her mother).
> The entrance to the wedding venue has a really nice Greco-Roman thing going on, and they have decent mocktails. After one short rehearsal, it's time for the real thing. I'm so nervous I forget to straighten my shoulders as I walk out, but all I have to do is walk down the aisle (the flowers are in the name only, apparently) before my role is done. The kid in front of us refuses to play rock-paper-scissors with me while we wait, and I'm only a little bit hurt by this. The ceremony is mostly talking, the bride and groom drink the wine, and then it's time for food (of decent quality). There's a slideshow playing of pictures of the happy (and already married, this was their second ceremony) couple, including one on the beach which shows off the groom's full back tattoo. A quick Google between courses informs me that such tattoos don't have the same connotations in Taiwan as they do in Japan, but that fails to make me less suspicious of the four tables only marked "VIP" on the seating chart that exclusively hosts grizzled middle aged to old men smoking, who all leave at the same time.
> The mid-dinner entertainment is good, and I begin to feel rather flattered by my use of a status symbol when I recognize one of the speakers as one of the prominent politicians I see on billboards all the time (when I run into her in the bathroom later, she compliments my dress), and I'm informed the singer is the recent winner of the Taiwanese equivalent of the Grammy's.
> Finally, it's time to go home and I take a very long shower before falling into my long-missed bed.

2024.01.07
> There's another wedding today, although I only have to attend as a guest, but luckily Eli's characteristically weak immune system didn't get along with her makeup yesterday, so my host mom offers to let me stay home since Eli won't be there, and I enthusiastically take her up on the offer.
> I spend most of my day reading comics. For lunch I planned to cook one of the delicious seafood ramen packets from the cupboard, but the only one left is already sitting on the counter and I (falsely, as I later learn) assume that means my sister is planning on eating it, so I walk to get my favorite abalone congee again. I finish rendering a scene based on a sketch I did of an excerpt from The Still, making it my first finished piece of the year.
> My sister disappears around dinner time, so it's just me and my host mom, who takes me to the bakery and then to a tiny Taiwanese shop to get noodle soup. Before bed, I watch The Talented Mr. Ripley (while I prefer the aesthetics of Saltburn, I feel it's predecessor does a much better job of developing the relationship between the main character and the rich guy he leeches off of).

2024.01.08
> This time, I get off on the right bus stop. In gym we're playing table tennis now, a game I used to be lucky to even hit the ball, but my improved hand-eye coordination from pickleball and badminton carries over and I do quite well, if I say so myself. I finish reading Hamlet today.
> Though I properly catch the bus home, it's still very crowded and I have to force my way through the people who got on after me to be able to escape at my stop.
> Once home, I help myself to the last seafood ramen packet from yesterday. I find a fan translation of the original light novel for one of the manga I read yesterday, which is somehow worse than it's visual counterpart, but the translator's warning in the front about how the author likes unhappy endings fills me with hope, since it seemed like the manga was going in the rather awful romance direction (I enjoy the politics and court intrigue, but the romance is so awful I assumed that it wasn't the point of the manga at all until I caught up to the end of what was currently translated...)

2024.01.09
> I leave too late and am subsequently late to class, which is as boring as usual. For lunch, I branch out from my usual boba order and get the 百香果QQ (passionfruit tea with boba and coconut jelly).
> After class, I spend about an hour working on an small animation of Rodrigo and Rustin to a scene from some movie I've never watched. After posting it to Instagram as a Reel, I resign myself to redownloading TikTok to post it there too--my account there still has over 9k followers despite not being used in a year, and if I'm an internet microcelebrity I might as well use that power to proselytize the masses into reading Rodrigo of Caledon.

2024.01.10
> Though the rest of my art class gets to do homework/play on their phones, and I was very into the current book I'm reading, Stranger in a Strange Land (I have a lot of thoughts on this one, but that'll wait until I finish it), the teacher pulls me away to do Chinese ink painting. Unlike the time I did this in the culture class, I have a reference piece to copy, so I can focus on technique instead of also having to think about composition. I get surpassingly into it, missing both of the bells.
> After class, I finish another piece that I did the sketch for last year--I've been thinking a lot about the Castle Country guys recently, especially after Hamlet (although I created these guys to be blatant Rodrigo of Caledon rip offs, somehow they were actually even bigger Hamlet rip offs, though this was my first time reading the play).

2024.01.11
> As a normal and well adjusted member of society, I decide to reread Julius Caesar's Wikipedia article while I'm waiting to leave for class. When we get to the section I quote the most (Rumors of Passive Homosexuality), I pause. I remembered the guy with a C name who accused Julius of having a relationship with his engineer, but the C name in question is shocking and unexpected. Catullus? My favorite poet of all time, Catullus? Catullus of Catullus 16? It's the very guy. The fact these guys not only lived at the same time, but actually interacted (after Catullus apologized for his crass poem insinuating the relationship between Julius and the engineer, he was invited over for dinner)... Unfortunately, Catullus dies young and can't leave any comments on Julius' downfall, as it happens 10 years after his death.
> After class, the DnD group comes home with me. We get food from my favorite congee place, although they just get chicken and rice. After loosely retconning one part of the last session, I let them find the person they've been searching for, who they avoid the boss fight with, and let them have it with the king instead.

2024.01.12
> Though I've already gotten decent at the Taiwanese arts of wearing two sweatshirts and sleeping in class, today I dabble in "dozing on public transport," which is somehow more restful than any sleep I've had in the past month and I don't even miss my stop.
> On the walk between the train station and the bus station, I pass by the back of an RT-Mart, the only large grocery store I've been to in Taiwan. Actually, it's the same one I previously visited, although I only figure this out after I walk all the way around and find myself on the other side of the food court. I grab some Jasmine Honey Tea bottles from the drinks aisle because I feel bad about having an empty basket, but when I finally find the canned food aisle, it's all fish and other canned meats. I haven't come this far to give up, though, so I ask one of the store attendant ladies about canned tomatoes, and she shows me to the foreign foods section, which is confusingly behind the wine section I had obviously walked by. They don't have cannellini beans, but they have another white Italian bean which I figure will work just as well. I assume (correctly) that my host family has olive oil, and I find the garlic and onions without too much trouble. The lady at the check-out confiscates the garlic for reasons beyond me, but I have the rest, so I dash out to save myself further embarrassment.
> Once home (I decide not to make the pasta fazool today), I am dealt a fatal blow by Wikipedia, who introduces me to a historical figure specifically designed for me. Ganymedes, named after Ganymede, was an Egyptian eunuch who wa a direct rival to Julius Caesar. Of course, the only historical source that ever mentions this guy is Julius Caesar's own journal, but doubt me not, because I am still more than capable of being insane about a guy with only one Wikipedia section. Actually, the only time the article uses a source other than Julius Caesar is when it mentions how Ganymedes dies in the final battle, but upon my brief reading of the Julius Caesar text (using ctrl+f for Ganymedes), Julius specifically mentions exiling Ganymedes and the princess he was working for... and I'm fairly certain you don't exile dead people? Regardless, this guy is going to rattle inside my brain for a bit.

2024.01.13
> I spend the day doing homework, reading scholarly articles on Egyptian eunuchs, and reading Korean webcomics about Egyptian gods.
> For lunch, I make the pasta fazool (luckily, my host mom left some garlic sitting on the counter). This is a recipe I've tried a couple of times before, but I think today was the closest I've gotten to the taste of my grandfather's pasta fazool. With remarkable restraint, I only have two bowls, and leave the last in the fridge for tomorrow.

2024.01.14
> In the afternoon, I get in the car with my host parents and we go to the south of Taoyuan for 石門山: Stone Gate Mountain. My host father checks if I can handle a two hour hike and I scoff, of course I can. It turns out, however, that my long and strenuous hiking experience means very little to a straight hour of mountain climbing at a near-constant 50 degree angle. I take an embarrassing amount of rests and run out of the bottle of honey water I brough far too soon, but I make it to the top.
> The view is beautiful of course, and like a cheesy movie, I can hear traditional music echoing from somewhere else in the mountains. The rest of the hike is a shallow downhill, and far more enjoyable. In true Taiwanese fashion, there's a hut and a canopied sitting section near the top, where an old man in selling everything you could need in the middle of a hike. Water, energy drinks, coffee, beer, and soup. There's a small temple in case the last three you passed weren't to your liking, and another canopy housing a KTV set up, where the music I heard earlier was coming from.
> After we get back, we go to a private restaurant back in Hsinchu, that has shrimp pools you can go fishing in yourself if you want. There were two other Rotary couples hiking with us, but another show up for dinner with their two younger kids. The food is good, especially the non-fried stinky tofu served in a deliciously spicy soup. The kids take a while to warm up to me, but we become fast friends by the end of the night. I drink my first two cans of beer, which is legal by Rotary rules with parental consent at private gatherings, which actually tastes better than expected.

2024.01.15
> I spend my morning classes talking to Neo about Jesus and Judas, as we often do these days. It's the last day of the semester before the finals, but I manage to finish my spoon!
> The bus home is already full by the time it gets to my stop, but I get to see the world's biggest and fluffiest dog on my walk back, as well as getting to pick up boba (of indeterminate flavor: I had planned my order before getting to the counter, looked down to see warm ginger brown sugar tea on the counter menu, only to learn they didn't have it in stock, and bluescreen until I pointed to something that ended up tasting good but I can't remember the name for the life of me). And best of all, the original congee place is actually open and staffed when I walk by, so I finally get my oyster congee. I finally figure out the difference between oysters and clams too, since I realize it was clams I liked, not oysters.
> Before bed I watch Weird Science.

2024.01.16
> For once I actually manage to get to Chinese class on time. It's a typically boring day, but as I try to decide watch Rodrigo of Caledon scene to convert to comic format in my notebook today, I have that moment of realization as I go through the scenes in my head where I realized one of them is not like the others. As in, it did not happen. I realize the imposter memory must be from some dream I didn't think about enough to clock as a dream. I draw it anyway so I don't forget it, but I am still torn on whether it was sent to me by Feintuch from beyond the grave or not, because on one hand it seems rather out of character for him, but on the other he is the most unpredictable author ever so who knows.
> At home, I spend my time doing interesting and productive things, like counting all the times Rodrigo uses the word "love" for Rustin and vice versa. Rustin wins, but the Rodrgio:Rustin proportion goes from 1:2 in the first book to nearly 4:5 in the second... While reading the Wikipedia article about the senator Catulus, who is significantly less interesting than my poet Catullus, I learn that "catulus" also means "puppy," so despite the extra L in Catullus' name, I am left with no choice but to draw the poet with dog ears. I point out he matches catboy Rodrigo and Seafort now to Xie An, who geniusly suggests I draw all three together. There are few times you can say you have drawn something truly original, but I am rather confident in my belief that no one else ever has or ever will draw fanart of ancient Roman poets with characters from obscure Feintuch novels from the 90s.

2024.01.17
> Today till Friday is the end of semester exams for my high school, and since I obviously don't have to take any, I get to stay home. I spend most of the day working on the to-do list I put together.
> After doing my laundry and sweeping my room (unlike my last house, this is something I have to do myself, and my habit of shedding hair like a dog is all the more obvious when my floor is white and not carpeted), I do my Chinese homework for tomorrow.
> I use the rest of the box of ditalini to cook pasta fazool again for lunch (I realize the other half of the onion I saved had been used, so I brave the wilds and go to the vegetable stand on the next block over; the old lady is very nice and her onions are far cheaper than supermarket onions), which I eat while watching the first lesson of a Latin course I saved last month. In the middle of the lesson I am struck with the urge to procrastinate by reading the article on Digital Gardens which I saved two years ago. My discipline is nonexistent, so I pause the video and read it. I finish the rest of the lesson before reading all the other articles linked by the first, which are just as intriguing. While thinking about this, I pull out my notebook and start brainstorming for my Utena e-shrine, which has had a link on the homepage of this site since it's inception two years ago, but has seen no attention since.
> I play a bit of Skyward Sword, draw Kircheis as a cowboy, and format the text for the zine I'm working on for the January Zine Jam I joined, themed "growth." After dinner I start reading a book that was recommended by my favorite Rodrigo of Caledon fanartist. I am a bit worried, since I tend to disagree with their actual opinions about Rodrigo of Caledon and the only other book we have in common was perhaps my least favorite book of all time, but I need a break from 80s sci-fi novels. As per usual, I'll save my thoughts until I finish it.

2024.01.18
> Keeping my streak of being on-time to Chinese class, I do little of interest.
> The wifi isn't working at home, so I work a bit on the art for my zine and finally read through the fic I got from the LOGH New Year's Exchange (so incredibly well written, though I fear I shall definitely have to finish watching LOGH now, given the rather ominous last line that implies my favorite character is going to die... I have seen nothing else to suggest this, but I also have not ever seen anyone talk about this guy unless I actively seek it out, because he has approximately 5 speaking lines in the entire show). I read a bit more of The Book of Tongues, which I am almost starting to enjoy half way through.

2024.01.19
> No classes again today, so I get another day to myself.
> I do my Chinese homework first again, and spend the rest of the morning doing a small Rodrigo of Caledon animatic.
> For lunch I go down to the 7-Eleven to get a fruit jelly and seafood ramen. I read another 100 pages of A Book of Tongues, and consider just finishing it today, but I get distracted by the correspondences of Marcus Aurelius and his old tutor, Fronto. I've heard of Aurelius' name before (he's the father of stoicism, after all), but in true Roman fashion he just seems entertainingly down bad for a man 20 years his senior who only seems interested in giving him more homework. Maybe I'll have to read The Meditations after all.
> Before dinner I go to the park across from the apartment complex and finish planning the Utena e-shrine in my notebook. I was planning on doing some sketching too, but I only realize I left my sketchbook in my other bag after I'm already on the ground floor.

2024.01.20
> We have our Zhunan culture trip today, so my host father drives me to the train station in the morning. Xiake (Owen) takes a train in the wrong direction, because he is an American with no appreciation for public transpiration and couldn't wait the five seconds it took to wait for the train sign to switch to English. We're an hour late to leave on the bus because of this.
> Our first stop is 獅潭仙山, which Ana's host mother (one of the Brazilian exchange students) said wasn't even a hike, barely even a walk. By the time you're nearly at the top, you have to use ropes to pull yourself up the near vertical stone. It takes a while, but I do make it to the top, and it feels like I could've probably seen all of Taiwan if it weren't for the amount of clouds below us.
> While I wait for the rest of the group to make it down the mountain, I go to the dimly lit store under the temple, which had a sign for my beloved winter melon tea. When I ask the old lady at the counter, she tells me they don't have any, but gives me a bottle of something else of a name I don't recognize. I ask her how much the candied sweet potatoes she's selling are, which she takes as me wanting to buy them. Back on the bus to the restaurant for lunch, I find the strange beverage I've been given is, quite unexpectedly, bissap. I wouldn't have known to order it, so I'm suddenly quite glad for the forceful old lady.
> Lunch is okay (hotel buffet), but afterwards it's hot spring time! Actually, if you told me it was just man-heated water, I'd believe you. It was, nonetheless, hot water, no matter the unclear source, so we enjoy relaxing for an hour or two.
> On the bus back, I finish A Book of Tongues, which closes in a manner as annoyingly as the rest of the book (cliffhanger and with the resurrection of the only enjoyable character... this is not enough to tempt me into the next book). Despite being from 2011, the book manages to be more uncomfortable racist and homophobic than any of the 80s sci fi I've been reading (not in any way the reflects the author's personal opinions, but simply as a fact of the setting, though plenty of books manage just fine not centering it as much... obviously such things shouldn't just be swept under the rug, but I have trouble liking historical fiction that puts such effort into emphasizing the bad parts of the time period without actually having anyone at least somewhat acknowledge that they're bad), and that's before you even learn which side of the Civil War our dear protagonists were fighting on. As much as I wanted to care about the main characters, the POVs get switched in a manner perfect at making it seem like every single character is constantly acting out of character. I was ready to accept the lack of cool theological discussion after the first quarter of the book, despite the fact one of the main character's entire power coming from quoting bible verses, only for the author to give you a hint of really cool theology (the aforementioned only enjoyable character) only to go back to completely ignoring it again. It was enjoyable in the way I enjoy bad movies, and hopefully in the manner that I won't ever think about it again.
> After my host mother picks me up from the train station, we go out to eat at a conveyer-belt sushi restaurant. Once home, I get about 20 minutes into the Matrix before falling into an incredibly restful 10 hours of sleep.

2024.01.21
> I sleep in until nearly 9 today, and decide, for once, that I don't really need to immediately check my emails in the morning and instead eat my breakfast in peace. I miss the Zoom meeting with my parents because of this.
> I spend the rest of the morning working on art and finishing the Matrix (which was... okay? it had some cool theming but the whole "chosen one" thing kinda ruins that. the entire premise is very reminiscent of the prologue of the current novel I'm reading, which came out 9 years prior).
> We go out to the hot pot restaurant for lunch and I even eat all the fish this time. Afterwards we walk around the General's Village, which were originally houses built for army generals after they left mainland China, but now house a bunch of small businesses and restaurants. My personal favorite so far is the artist's cafe, but there's also an incredibly homely cake and coffee shop just outside of the village that is so impeccably decorated it feels unreal, like you've walked into a movie frame.

2024.01.22
> It's winter vacation, I've learned, so no school for me! Though we don't get any other long breaks, Taiwanese schools make up for quantity with quality: I get the whole month off.
> I plan on going out to get my favorite abalone congee for lunch, but it's so cold that I decide to turn back and just make myself ramen instead. I spend most of the day struggling through my Latin homework--Chinese has spoiled me, and I really hate trying to figure out word endings.
> I've been playing Minecraft a bit recently, usually just half an hour or so at a time, but by not pressuring myself to get diamonds or set up fancy farms, I find I enjoy the game a lot more.

2024.01.23
> We still have Chinese class for the next two weeks, though. Before leaving in the morning, I finally have the Zoom meeting with my parents (applying for college financial aid again, yippee).
> Since all the students are on winter vacation, the campus buses don't run anymore, which is extra fun in the decently cold weather we're finally getting.
> Today's rabbit hole is Sir Gawain and the Green Knight again, which is, despite the promises of my high school English teacher, one of those stories that in fact gets more gay when you learn more about the historical context.

2024.01.24
> Today is a properly lazy day. I wake up around 9, don't get out of bed until 10, and don't leave my room to get breakfast until 11.
> Around 1 I finally feel hungry enough to leave for lunch, so I go to one of the restaurants in the General's Village I remember from the other day, the "puff burger" place. They only have a couple of options, and I choose the "pepper-flavored vegetarian puff burger," which includes lettuce, tomatoes, fermented eggs, and spongey tofu in a flaky but delicious bun. The lady at the counter asks me about myself while I wait, and we do the usual "she asks me a question in English and I answer in Chinese" thing.
> Somehow, I get Xie An into watching Legend of the Galactic Heroes completely unintentionally. The universe is finally rewarding me after everyone else in my life ignores all of my recommendations, apparently.

2024.01.25
> The morning class is not actually Chinese today, but a dance class, in preparation for some Lunar New Year Rotary event next month. We diligently memorize the routine, while Yang Jie watches from the hallway with his broken foot.
> The afternoon class is a culture class on martial arts. The teacher teaches us a style inspired by a praying mantis, so I have fun getting to hit my fellow American with the back of my forearm for the next two hours.

2024.01.26
> Another day at home. I make a short joke animation about Rodrigo and Rustin and I finish the zine for the Zine Jam. Check it out here.
> Since Xie An is watching LOGH now, I figure it's time for me to finally finish the show, so I watch an episode for the first time in ages (a month and a half).

2024.01.27
> Not one but two Rotary events today! In the morning we go to a tea place and make Lei Cha, a traditional Hakka drink that I last tried on my first week here. The Rotary Club goes to a nearby restaurant for lunch, which is yummy, and I get to engage in my favorite hobby of chasing small children around the parking lot afterwards.
> I get to rest for a bit at home, and then in the evening I have to go to the monthly Rotary meeting, which is at a different restaurant than usual. Nini's kids don't come, but there are two girls who I only met for the first time this morning that remind me of my sisters when they were younger, so it's probably the most enjoyable Rotary meeting yet.

2024.01.28
> I foolishly assumed that since all the Rotary people spent all of yesterday drinking that today we could rest, but there's yet another Rotary gathering at a hotpot/grill place today for lunch. I discover my love of grilled fish and get to win some more at rock-paper-scissors against the girls from last night, so it's not too bad.
> That evening, my host dad finally returns with his friends, but they bring fried rice so I decide I'll be sociable in return. We gamble over a game that was definitely not poker and it takes me an embarrassingly long time to figure out the rules, which are actually incredibly simple (add up your cards and whoever has the highest last digit wins). I get to try proper Taiwanese alcohol this time (Kaoliang liquor) and get to finally fulfill my life long dream of tasting acetone.

2024.01.29
> The other day I decided not to start reading a LOGH fic I hear a lot about because it was longer than the Bible, at around 900,000 words. Today, I learn that the current series I'm reading totals over 4,000,000 words, which I'm pretty sure puts it in the top 10 longest pieces of English literature. I'm already nearly done with the first book, though, so it's too late to give up now.
> For lunch my host dad comes home to bring me the fish dish that I used to eat a lot at my first host family, which is something I hadn't realized I missed (it also might help that he gets no spice instead of less spice, because even less spice is enough to nearly kill anyone who eats it).

2024.01.30
> We have our final exam for this semester today, which I actually take an entire 40 minutes to complete.
> Afterwards, I decide my fanart hasn't been obscure enough lately so I start a drawing of the Warden of the Sands and his attendant, two very minor characters from the second book of Rodrigo of Caledon.

2024.01.31
> I finally finish Dragon Wing, which, after a quick check, definitely was not ever recommended by my favorite Rodrigo of Caledon fanartist with the worst taste in literature known to man, which makes sense, because the book was actually good. I also read the Princess and the Grilled Cheese Sandwich, which was a nice comic and also recommended to me by a friend months ago. This makes 16 books I read this month!
> I get invited to go to the beach in Zhunan but only after everyone else was already in Zhunan and I'd already decided what I wanted to eat for lunch, so I pass on it, even if I rather wanted to go to the beach at some point. I'm still playing Minecraft semi frequently, and today I find 56 diamonds inside a single cave.
> In the afternoon after I sort my trash in the trash room, I decide that instead of going back to the apartment I want to see the roof. At my last apartment, there was a keypad next to the door that you swiped with your key to unlock it from the outside, but they don't have one here so I figure the doors must not automatically lock. The click when I close the doors corrects my misinterpretation. The view is very nice, though, so I try to enjoy it without freaking out too much. I didn't bring my phone, and there are a couple racks of clothes drying up here so I assume someone will come up for them eventually. There is a button clearly marked 'SOS' next to the door, but it is accompanied by some Chinese text in read that looks like it says "for emergency use only," and I'm unsure if my situation counts yet. I eventually get desperate enough to try and shout down to some of the people walking through the court yard, but they don't hear me. As I hypothesized, someone comes up for the clothes eventually, and we actually have a pretty nice conversation on the elevator down, where he informs me I definitely should've just pressed the button.

2024.02.01
> Today is our last Chinese class of the semester. We spend the morning practicing our dance again, and I am forced to promise Caio that I'll actually go to the beach next time I get asked. My first host dad buys us drinks and pizza for lunch, and I am very glad to see he specifically got a single cup of winter melon boba for me.
> In the afternoon, we have a culture class on the Lunar New Year and I spend my time at home starting the next book in the 4 million word series, only to decide that it's kind of boring and skipping to four books later (this is an acceptable thing to do, because each book centers on a different character in a different place, so the order of the books isn't inherently linear) and also Charlotte Mason style homeschooling.

2024.02.02
> Today I'm still thinking about Charlotte Mason, so I decide to try it on myself. I work through the first chapter and a half of a calculus course I found that does the best job of explaining the concepts out of all the previous textbooks I've found, and I work on learning to type using the Dvorak keyboard. I go to the roof again, properly propping the door open this time, and do some light exercise while appreciating the view with far less anxiety this time. I memorize the next two lines of Catullus 16, before pausing my studies to go get lunch from my favorite puff bun place.
> I ignore the rest of the things I wanted to study and spend my afternoon watching LOGH and talking to my friends, but when that gets boring I compulsively play map quizzes online until I memorize the location of every single country. I have yet to achieve a perfect score because I usually mix up the order of a couple of the islands in Oceania, but I'm getting pretty close.

2024.02.03
> Around noon the mother of my host mom visits, and we go out to eat lunch together (I discover the seafood udon is significantly better than the rice bowls I've been getting at the Japanese restaurant we frequent). We rest at home for about an hour, where I leave my room to work on my math on the couch to show off to my host grandmother, but she does not care because she is taking a nap.
> Then, we go to the artists' cafe in the General Village for an art class, where we make paintings with paint we mix ourselves. We're supposed to use the design that the teacher made instead of our own, which bums me out a little, but I think mine turned out decently and I can give it away as a gift.

2024.02.04
> I wake up early this morning since I'm going hiking today! At 8, Lin Renyou's (the Spanish exchange student) host parents pick me up. In typical Taiwanese fashion, we walk up the hard side of the mountain and then down the easy side. The very peak is still covered in clouds, so there isn't much of a view, but we buy the most delicious oranges I've ever had from an old lady on the way down, as well as some bread which suffers from the usual Taiwanese lack of a proper crust (the random little shops on the side of a mountain barely accessible by motorized vehicle are always a bit amusing to me).
> When we get back down to where we started, we visit a tiny cafe that's hidden by a very small set of stairs next to a temple and meet up with some family friends. They have a daughter around my age who doesn't talk to me much but gifts me paper and brushes for practicing Chinese calligraphy. I order peach black tea, which was actually extremely good because it was just sweet black tea with peach vinegar in it.
> Somehow Renyou's host parents decided we wanted to go to Neiwan, so instead of taking me home, they take me back to their house. It's an actual house, not an apartment, though the back is a warehouse where they make connectors for plugs. That seems like a thing you'd assume would be done in some fancy factory somewhere and not in a cluttered warehouse, but what do you know. It's a bit weird to wear my shoes inside, but I get to meet their two dogs and I get a brief tour of the road the live on, which has three houses and is otherwise mostly fallow rice fields. I find myself suddenly missing menial warehouse labor and fields of weeds and gardens, so I'm rather bummed out that I can't have them as my host parents.
> Neiwan is pretty nice (we take the train from the station near their house, past the road with the giant industrial complexes so big and old that they remind me of giant stone castles, which is so small that you literally just walk across the rails after looking both ways to a concrete platform in the middle--I really wish I could live here), we get noodle soup at one restaurant and tangyuan at another. I see a stand selling sweet basil seed drinks, so I think I'll have to come back to do some of my own shopping at some point. There's also stands selling calligraphy brushes, metal pans, dehydrated strawberries, pokemon cards, and about everything else you could probably think of.
> I was supposed to go to another Rotary dinner party tonight, but I pretend I'm too sleepy so I get to stay home.

2024.02.05
> It's a Monday. I do very litte.
> I finish a book that I fear has irreversibly impacted my outlook on the world and that I can never properly reread because it was published over such a broad time span that the characters in the beginning are completely unrecognizable when compared to the characters as they are now.
> I also start two Rodrigo of Caledon pieces, one based on the scene when Rodrigo wakes up after successfully reviving Rustin and the other being a redraw of Botticelli's The Lamentation, for what should fanart be if not mildly sacrilegious.

2024.02.06
> Wrote a post on Multiverse for the first time in forever.
> Made plans to visit Neiwan again with some friends on Thursday!

2024.02.07
> Read a humorous mix of Christian homeschooling blogs and Catholic boys school shojou manga today.
> Kaze to Ki no Uta has finally been replaced in my head by Thomas' Heart, which starts off with the aforementioned Thomas dying instead of waiting until the last volume, features no sudden opium addictions, and takes place in Germany instead of France, so it's all around a far superior specimen of this hyperspecific manga genre. (Also, there actually the occasional good theology takes too)

2024.02.08
> Return to Neiwan! Out of the four people I invited, only Xie An shows up. It's a rainy day, and while my prediction about there being less customers was true, I failed to consider there would also be less shops.
> The basil seed drink stand isn't there, but we get some mochi (+ a nice short conversation with the owner), takoyaki, and settle for drinks from 7-11.
> Once I get back to Hsinchu, my host family picks me up and we drive several hours down to... somewhere in Yunlin County near Beigang to visit family for the Lunar New Year. We meet my host grandma, aunt, uncle, and cousin at a restaurant with good food (soft shell turtle is surprisingly delicious), though we stay in a hotel tonight.

2024.02.09
> At 4 AM, I wake up after a restless night to get in the car again and drive another two hours to Alishan (Ali Mountain). Driving down the empty highway at night makes me half expect the Utena castle to show up, but it doesn't and I fall back asleep.
> We're there early on a rainy day, so there's barely anyone else on the trails. Actually, the fog lets up pretty soon for a sunny but still damp day. I get to see a lot of frogs on the bottom of a clear pond, and a couple trees that were around before than the Holy Roman Empire.
> We drive back, pick up my host sister, and drive to the actual family house. My general impression of wherever it is that we are is that of a combination of Florida and Kansas. It's pretty similar to the area Lin Renyou's family lives, actually, but they have mountains on either side of the valley, while it seems like you could drive forever and it would still be the same here. I meet more family, lit incense for somebody, and won $100 for being lucky and standing behind the old man who won the round of mahjong.
> It turns out that wasn't actually my host grandma's house though, so we go there next, where it turns out I actually have a host grandfather (thought he was the one we were lighting incense for oops) and also a second cousin who looks uncannily similar to the first. We all eat hotpot together and I drink a cup of wine, which is my least favorite form of alcohol so far.

2024.02.10
> It's the New Year, so we go visit more family, go pray at a temple that's so full of incense smoke that I'm so focused on trying to keep my eyes from watering that I don't notice I'm supposed to be bowing before putting the incense sticks in the containers until half way through, visit more family, go see the ocean, and eat shark (like fish with bad texture) at a seafood restaurant.
> I get to rest for about thirty minutes in the afternoon, which I waste doing math work, and then it's back in the car to go see a hand puppetry museum, another museum that I couldn't tell what it was about, and my uncle's house, before it's back home, where it turns out I have two other cousins who are very cool and we eat dinner again.

2024.02.11
> This morning we go to the highspeed rail station, though it turns out we're only dropping off my host sister, before driving to the Southern Branch of the National Palace Museum, which is nicer than the Northern one because there are less people, they have an animated monkey mascot, and one of the food trucks outside sells decent pizza.
> I hang out with 3/4 of the cousins in the living room until dinner (alcohol of the night was premixed margaritas).

2024.02.12
> In the morning we go to Beigang to try local food, visit another temple (larger and better ventilated, thankfully), and walk around buying more food from street vendors.
> Once returned, it's time to pack to leave, and in classic fashion only then do I properly fall in love with watching the garden behind the house. I make my peace with the endless countryside, and rather wish I could stay. Behind the garden is a field of rice, then a field of cabbage, then a field of corn, then a greenhouse, and the only thing tall enough to be seen in the distance is a roof of a temple.
> We get home, I unpack my stuff (all of my clothes smell like incense, so I start a load in the washing machine), and after half an hour we leave again for dinner with my first host family and another Rotary family. It's nice to see Eli and my first host sister again, and we play with the cat and Mario Kart after another dinner of hot pot.

2024.02.13
> Finally, a day to rest at home again. I get up around 9 to get breakfast, which is fresh soup dumplings my host mother bought that morning. She asks me if I want to go visit a mountain in Taipei, which I do not, so I say goodbye to her and my host father when they leave by themselves.
> I spend most of the day reading, though I also make some Valentine's day cards for my own amusement (half of them are theology jokes and the other half are serious LOGH and Utena quotes). Maybe next year I can print them out and actually give them to people.

2024.02.14
> This morning is much the same as yesterday's, although I actually do some Latin work and read slightly more serious books.
> We go out with my maternal host grandmother to a Spanish restaurant, which is surprisingly good. I get tomato soup and mushroom croquettes, though I try some of the seafood fideau and bread with spicy oil that almost seems like it has a proper crust.
> Afterwards, my mother, grandma, and I walk around the city park. My grandma gives me a jar of orange juice, which even for a orange juice hater such as I is delicious, if not for the fact that it tastes any different from normal orange juice, but for the fact it's from my grandma and is in a glass jar.
> She gives me a red envelope too, which makes my red envelope total up to $16300 (around 500 USD). I need to come back for the next Lunar New Year.

2024.02.15
> Another day of mostly reading (amazing how much of that I can get done when I'm not constantly checking my notifications... I gave up Instagram for Lent but since expanded that to Twitter and Tumblr too).
> It's back to work/school for the rest of my family, so I get my usual puff burger (I decide to get apple soda from Family Mart instead of the black tea I usually buy at the puff burger place, which surprises the lady at the checkout). I'm so used to getting both tea and a burger though that I brought the wrong amount of money. It's only $5 (around 15 cents) so she still gives me the burger.

2024.02.16
> I read a bit in the morning, but then it's off to Miaoli. We have another Rotary dance practice, but instead of the dance we've been preparing for the Rotary conference, we're learning dragon dancing.
> I end up as a body part, which is what I wanted until I belatedly realized I could've been playing the drums. I think I'm pretty good, but the timing of my classmates behind me is off so the look isn't quite perfect. The dragon dancers from the university who are teaching us are cool (I say as if I talked to them), and I get a free Pocari Sweat so it's pretty good all in all.
> I've had enough of being honest with people for a month, though, so rather than have the courage to be rude enough to Xie An to say I don't want to walk back to the station with him, I simply take off running as soon as we're dismissed. I make it to the station in less than half the time that Google Maps said it would take, and it was a very nice walk (I beat Xie An there too, who took a bike which should've made up for his late start).
> Since the train I'm taking goes past North Hsinchu, I get off at Hsinchu and figure I can try and take the bus I usually take to the station back home instead. I find the stop just as a bus is arriving, but the driver tells me that this is the last stop and to get on to go the other way I have to go somewhere else. I go in the direction he pointed to no luck, wait for my phone to finally connect to my data, and finally figure out the bus station, which I didn't know existed. Since it's the first stop, the usually full bus is actually empty, so when I go back to school I think I'll start getting off my train a stop later so I can actually get on the bus while there's still room (75% of the time at the usual stop I try, it's already so full that the driver doesn't let us on).

2024.02.17
> It's the weekend! Winter break is now over :(
> I decline to go hiking today, but I enjoy the danbing my host mother brought in addition to my usual breakfast. I finish Charlotte Mason's first book, Home Education, and do another chapter of the Shorthand book I'm working through, which was significantly harder than yesterday's.
> I go out to get lunch, consider stopping at the book store but don't, and in exchange the universe has me open the door just as my host parents are about to leave to go hiking on their own. My host father, who hadn't heard my earlier denial, asks if I want to go. I hold up my lunch. He tells me that they'll wait for me to eat. They do indeed wait, so I eat half of it before saying I'm ready to go.
> The mountain is indeed very nice. As hard to climb as any Taiwanese mountain, but there's a cafe at the top with good fruit tea and the walk back down is far easier.
> I came across 'small town' themed webhosting site, so after briefly considering how much free time I'll have once school returns, I submitted an application to create a 'free school' where I could organize educational theory/self education resources.
> Speaking of school, I finally got my schedule for the next semester. I've still got Gym everyday and only one English class, but I have a decent amount of Math and Mandarin classes? Only one Music class this semester but it's with my main class, so I suppose I'll live with taking it a third time. There's also the mysterious 'housekeeping' I have with a third year class on Friday mornings and 'Atron Musical' class? Will report back once I figure out what either of those are. I actually worked up the courage to ask why I didn't get any English classes with my main class, to whom my schedule lady gave me a non-answer that did include the information that she did specifically intend to give me Gym everyday. (I have to walk 3k to school and 3k back, I think my health will be fine if I have one less Gym class!) I do still have two library periods, so that's nice I guess.

2024.02.18
> Today we go out to lunch with my host mother's family, so I was expecting the grandma I already know, and probably an uncle and cousin or two. Instead, there were at least 20 people there, though it was worth it to meet my incredibly cool host aunt and exchange more than two words with my host sister (I make progress. Slowly).
> It was a steak restaurant, but they had a fish and chicken option that my host mom was able to get for me with just the fish, and the other five courses were pretty good too, even if they put chicken in the pumpkin soup.
> Back home, I decided to go draw on the roof. At one point, I thought I heard something, but figured I was just being paranoid and it was just the wind rustling the hanging clothes; if a person had come up they would shout before closing the already opened door. Eventually, I climbed out from behind the pillar, only to realize that my paranoia had been justified and that the door was shut. I stayed calm, for I had remembered to bring my phone this time, and texted my mom to ask her to come up when she got home. When she finally opened the message, she told me she'd contact one of the guards from the front desk to come help since she'd probably be a while yet, and he showed up to helpfully show that the door, in fact, had not been locked at all. I felt more than a little stupid, but he was the evening shift guard so he's not the one I see often, at least.

2024.02.19
> First day of school. I manage to catch a bus and get to school on time. I even talk to Youren a bit on the walk from the station to school.
> My first period is Math, and for the first time I get to stay in my classroom and don't have to leave to walk somewhere else for it. I don't get a textbook, but if I heard correctly the teacher will get me one for next class? He's pretty much explaining the textbook problems, so one of my classmates sits next to me so we can share her book, though I try and do the calculations on my own notebook (I get the denominator wrong, but close enough). Even though I don't know much math-related vocab, the teacher draws a lot of pictures and I'm able to figure out a couple phrases based on context, like 'line,' 'plane,' and 'parallel.' Once I get the textbook, I'll be able to study the vocab ahead of time too.
> Second period I get to go to the library, where my favorite old lady is there to drink tea and talk with. On the way to my next class, I run into my schedule lady and am able to check where my afternoon classes will be, which I was a bit unsure of.
> Third period is Mandarin, which is as over my head as I expected. Hopefully I'll be getting a textbook for that one too, so I at least have a chance at understanding it. (The passage they were reading had something to do with different foods, which was as much as I got.) After they read and highlighted it, and talked to the teacher a bit, they had to close their books and write out the answers to a long string of incomprehensible questions on whiteboards as groups. I stood around and pretended to know what was happening.
> Fourth period was Gym, though it's swim class again and I didn't know this, so I didn't bring my swimsuit. I got to sit on the side and worked on my shorthand chapter for the day.
> For lunch, since my host dad bought me a traditional metal lunchbox over the break, I was finally able to try Taiwanese school lunch. It was pretty average Taiwanese food, though nowhere close to how bad my classmates tried to convince me it definitely was. I had rice, vegetables, other vegetables, and a disgustingly sweet corn paddy. There was soup too, but I didn't have a lunch box with a second bowl and wasn't sure what the etiquette was for going back for seconds, so I didn't try it (if the lunch dishes were still in our room I probably would've, but this semester we're sharing with the class next door, so they're in the other room).
> Fifth and sixth period is the mysterious "Atron Musical" class, which I'm just going to call Musical. It's with the Acapella teacher I had last semester, though there are a lot more students. I sat in the back, only to be surrounded by a group of girls who were already friends but were so friendly to me for a while I was worried I had met them before and was supposed to remember them. It turned out they were just enthusiastic first years, but we got along well. We were told the class syllabus (incomprehensible to me), had to go up front one by one to do self introductions (my grammar forgets itself under pressure, but I decided it doesn't matter and I won't dwell on it), and played a weird scaled intensity version of charades where each group had to act out a phrase, but each member was assigned a different number and had to act it out with corresponding intensity.
> My friend from the manga class was there too, though she got there after I had already been surrounded by the girls, but I realized during the self introductions she was in the class I have Earth Science with, so I caught up to her on the way out. I followed her back to the first year building while she got her stuff, and then back to the main building to the Earth Science classrooms. This is the one subject I already have a textbook for, but I forgot it at home... The teacher was pretty happy just lecturing us, though she let me borrow her textbook halfway through. The lesson was about the development of the solar system and why Earth was were life developed, I think. Since this is a subject I know better, I was able to figure out a decent amount of vocabulary (X-ray is literally 'X light', gamma rays were pretty identifiable because the textbook was using the Greek letter, etc).
> I was trying to decide if I wanted to try walking to the bridge between Zhubei and Hsinchu today, but I ran into my manga class friend again at the school gate, so I walked with her and her friend to the train station. I continue to master the art of getting off the bus, which is always crowded, but it's easier to slip through the aisle if you let someone else go first.

2024.02.20
> We're back to Chinese class too, which is a little less interesting than school. It turns out advanced class isn't back yet, though, so I end up being 8 minutes late instead of 4.
> Winter break is over for the university students, and the line to my usual place is so long I decide to get danbing instead, which I had forgotten came in such small portions.
> My application for the 'school' site was accepted, so I spend most of my afternoon class planning that out in my notebook, since I need to get at least a base site up within 2 weeks.

2024.02.21
> I end up getting the earlier bus I nearly never catch, and find myself at the station early enough to catch the train before my usual one. With my newfound free time before first class, I do my Chinese class homework.
> First period is Gym, and I unfortunately remembered to bring my swimsuit this time, so in the water (comfortable in the already summer weather) I go. Luckily the teacher deigns to relegate two of my classmates to teach me the frog stroke so I don't have to keep up with her breakneck lesson, though I disappoint my poor classmates in my inability to coordinate my limbs and gasps for air.
> Second and third period are Mandarin, which starts with one of my classmates (unintentionally) misleading me and telling me that the teacher will want me to do a presentation in the beginning, but she apparently changed her mind and I just get to write an essay with the rest of them. The only part of the prompt I understand is "your favorite food" (she says it out loud and writes it down on the board, but her handwriting in indecipherable to me), so I write around 250 characters (my previous longest essay for Chinese class was only 100 characters) about soft shell turtle soup and stinky tofu. Luckily she doesn't collect them, so I don't get a chance to be embarrassed by my kindergartener level writing. The second half is spent reading about philosophical debates on flavors from our textbooks (I received mine, so I try to follow along, though I still just stand there unhelpfully while my group works on the questions).
> Fourth period is Music, which I never actually witnessed the beginning of because of my late arrival to Taiwan. The teacher gives some sort of presentation on the history of musicals, I think, which featured a slide on Jesus Christ Superstar (she plays a clip from the stage version, though, so no Carl Anderson or Ted Neeley).
> Lunch today is noodles, seasoned cucumber slices, and fried chicken, which I very much enjoy, though my classmate refuses to believe my positive report.
> We have a class meeting during club time, which I mostly read during, and then we go outside for an earthquake drill. My last period is Library, so I talk with my favorite old lady and decide I'm too tired to stick around for the eighth period math class.
> On the train back I finish Magic's Pawn, the first book of the Last Herald-Mage series. The main character reminded a lot of my dear Rodrigo, if he had actually had a tragic childhood but was also an asshole on purpose and not on accident. He has generally better emotional intelligence (the bar is low with Rodrigo, but still), though his ability to accept his feelings actually leads him into making mistakes even Rodrigo wouldn't make and to the (permanent) loss of his Rustin. It continued to be interesting despite the untimely demise of the love interest, though, even if I was a little disappointed that the evil wizard's offer wasn't taken up in the end. (The only comparison ever made between one of Feintuch's works (it was the Seafort Saga, not Rodrigo) and this series was in a post on my favorite early 2000s sci fi forum, where the author lists them as the only two authors he would never read again because they depressed him too much. This worries me a bit for the remaining two books, but press on I shall.)

2024.02.22
> I laze around before class, though I do finally read Leonid Andreyev's Judas Iscariot and Others, which was quite good.
> Morning class is another dance class, which is more challenging than the previous ones because of the muscles I strained trying to swim like an amphibian yesterday. For lunch the line to my usual place is still too long, so I get a Taiwanese style rice ball from the rice ball place I get my danbing from, which is very good and also $10 cheaper than my usual.
> We have our normal class in the afternoon, though I mayyyy have been trying to read my Earth Science textbook instead of paying attention to the adjective emphasis grammar lesson. Afterwards, me and a couple other classmates participate in an activity with a class of university students, where we get paired off and they try to teach us a sentence. My partners misunderstand what I had asked them to teach me, but I memorize the sentence they give me and we had a nice talk in mostly Chinese.
> Once home, I actually complete the entire index page for my "free school" in one sitting (I've discovered a love for using the built-in Notepad app for editing my html files). I even figure out FTP transfers and upload said index page to the site. Here's the link if you want to see it, though none of the other pages are up and it's not responsive enough to not be a mess on a phone yet.

2024.02.23
> It's Friday, but I have to be in Miaoli by 4:30 PM to prepare for the festival, so Rotary recommended we take half the school day off. My host parents said I could just take the whole day off (the Oingo Boingo song?), so I did that.
> For lunch I want to use the can of tomatoes and chickpeas I got from the grocery ages ago, even though I still haven't gotten the second box of ditalini. I cook half an onion and some pickled garlic (the only kind of garlic I could find in the house) in olive oil, mix in the chickpeas and tomatoes and a lot of garlic pepper salt. I swear I'd seen some plain spaghetti somewhere, but the only noodles I can find are ramen. You do what you must do. Regardless of the fact this definitely is sending me to Italian hell, it actually tasted pretty good.
> My host dad drives me to Miaoli, where we stand around at the largest high school I've ever been at, eat lunchbox dinners, and then practice the dragon dance a couple of times before lining up with the rest of the parade. There's a dragon dancing team made up of kids next to us, so we talk a bit and I beat them at rock paper scissors a bunch. Originally I was a little disappointed we had to be in the parade instead of getting to watch it, because all the other groups looked really cool from what I was able to see, but as soon as it started, I had the time of my life.
> We were split up into two teams, so one would do two performances before switching to the other to give our arms a break. When not holding the dragon, we could only really wave to people (I lost track of how many 'waiguoren's I heard pretty fast). The German boy from the other class may have gotten more 'shuaige's than me but I got asked by a girl to take a selfie with her! (She later asked the German boy too but he only got a peace sign while I got a heart. so.) Dragon dancing is really fun and I definitely hope I can do it again someday.

2024.02.24
> Weekend! I sleep in, read the second book of the Last Herald-Mage series in a single day, and watch an episode of LOGH (Reuenthal is finally dead! Yippee!)
> I try to work a bit on a couple of wips I have going in Krita, but I'm getting nowhere, so I pull up MS Paint and do some LOGH and Rodrigo of Caledon doodles instead.

2024.02.25
> It's my birthday. I start the day off with a Zoom meeting with my family, and we talk for about an hour.
> I was rather hoping my host parents wouldn't remember my birthday, but my host mom brings me some steamed buns for breakfast along with wishing me a happy birthday.
> Most of the day I spend reading the Dungeon Meshi manga, which I was originally trying to keep pace with the anime with, but decided to finally just read the whole thing now.
> In the evening, my host parents took the liberty of organizing a tiny party, which thankfully is just with my first host family, Eli, and Carina (the German student from our class). We make paper lanterns, eat mediocre pizza from Pizza Hut and strawberry cake, and open plenty of presents (I get a scroll case for my art, a fancy pen, several sketchbooks, a set of watercolor pencils, and a little DIY astronomy themed desk decor set.

2024.02.26
> Back to school. Math is fun (we're onto 3D coordinate systems, and though I still don't have a textbook I get to actually solve more than one problem this time), the library lady gives me a trashy isekai manga that's supposed to teach you about cybersecurity (???) and a bunch of traditional snacks, I barely keep up in Mandarin, and almost enjoy Swim.
> The girl I sit next to in Musical gives me a thing of chocolate, and we spend the break between periods playing piano outside the classroom. Earth Science is also fun, although I've realized the teacher is moving through the book far faster than I expected.
> At home, I finish Dungeon Meshi and read more of the Last Herald-Mage, along with some more MS Paint art.

2024.02.27
> Before class I finish Magic's Price, the final book in the Last Herald-Mage series. I usually hate Wiltking's taste in books, but since Wiltking also hated this series I thought it had a chance. I also ended up disliking it, but my reasons are cool and intellectual while his reason was really stupid (he thought the ending was bad. the ending that we've been told we'll get since the very first chapter of the very first book. who could've possibly foreseen it). My reasons include the soulmate thing being stupid, which I thought it was actually going to address after killing of the main character's soulmate, but as soon as he finally figured out how to love someone else it pulled a "Surprise! He's actually your soulmate somehow too!", that despite being a book that had a previously said "darkness wasn't the same thing as evil" the final battle was a "light/good vs. dark/evil" battle (also weirdly nationalistic/xenophobic in that all the 'evil' mages were from foreign kingdoms...), and also that the ending was bad but that's because I wanted it to be sadder (the repeated dream that he had since the beginning was very clear on him dying alone but in the actual end his magic horse companion showed up) which I'm pretty sure was the opposite of the problem that Wiltking had with it so I'm still cooler.
> Chinese class is boring as per usual, and I probably failed my quiz because I spent my time before class complaining about the book to my friends instead of paying attention to the homework I was speedrunning. In the afternoon, we graduate to the next set of textbooks though.
> I listen to Janelle Monae's new album (it's not new it came out last year I just didn't hear about it) and end up rewatching Dirty Computer, which was just as good as I remembered if not better because I'm pretty sure I skipped the post-credits scene last time.

2024.02.28
> It's the anniversary of the February 28th incident (aptly named), so no school today! I don't learn this until I put in the effort to drag myself out of bed, but it's appreciate nonetheless.
> I realize I need to redownload Bloody Day 2.28: Vampire Martina before I can play it, although I don't actually get around to playing it. It's still my favorite game of all time based on concept alone (Taiwanese visual novel in which you are a Dutch vampire during the February 28th incident).
> I do play some Minecraft, do my Chinese homework (mostly), and finally start reading Boswell's Same Sex Unions in Pre-Modern Europe.
> And in the evening, I even have my first ever proper conversation with my host sister (yes I've lived in this house for two months, no we haven't exchanged more than three sentences at a time before. this time we made it to six).

2024.02.29
> Dance class in the morning again, though I'm able to talk to the RYE lady about my plane ticket, which is for July 1st but Rotary told us they want us gone by June 30th. She says it's fine.
> I, feeling nostalgic, decide to do something I haven't done in a while: eat instant noodles on the roof for lunch. After I finish, I end up walking down to the cafeteria to get boba anyway, and I also find the two kiwis I need to buy for my cooking class tomorrow, which makes my afternoon a lot easier.
> It's Anthy's birthday, so I do a quick drawing of her. Apparently it's also Bittenfeld's, but he's less important to me so I don't get his done.

2024.03.01
> It's finally time to meet my Friday classes. I manage to find the classroom of the class I have Home Economics with in the morning and awkwardly stand outside the door until someone who knows I'm supposed to be there invites me in. I'm in a group of four other girls, who are nice but not particularly interested in talking to me. It turns out my kiwis weren't actually needed, but they use them anyway in our fruit and cream sandwiches (they taste bad) with a side of dalgona coffee (too much milk, also bad).
> Next is Math, which goes normally. I have Gym with the same class of first years from last semester, but I wasn't sure if we had swim or not and didn't bring my swimsuit. I get to sit on the side and read (Afrofuturism by Ytasha L. Womack).
> After lunch I have "Art & Life" with the same class of first years, where the teacher talks about the difference in street signs in Japan and Taiwan.
Then we have English class, which I realize is actually with the second year class I had music with last semester. The English teacher talks exclusively in English, so I can follow along pretty well (haha), and I write a couple of sentences on the worksheet she gave us about how I think the saddest ending to the story I didn't get a chance to read would be the man marrying the beautiful woman instead of getting mauled to death by tigers. When she makes me give a self introduction, I finally get a chance to use the Chinese sentence I've been holding on to since September (我的中文還不好，但是我希望我們可以成為朋友) and get a satisfactory amount of approval for it.
> I get to end the day with my beloved Earth Science and get to go home.

2024.03.02
> It's the weekend! I play Minecraft (I've started a new world in Beta 1.7.3, where I have an ugly house with a beautiful view of a very long fake aqueduct I made out in the ocean), listen to music, and realize that 'I Can Talk With My Eyes Shut' would make a really good LOTGH animatic if it wasn't 7 minutes long. I am bad at being reasonable, though, so I start planning one out anyway.
> For dinner we go out to eat xiaolongbao and have to wait two hours for a table.

2024.03.03
> I work a little more on the animatic before realizing that maybe I should finish watching LOTGH before trying to make a very cool and meaningful animation about it, which turns out to be rather hard when you don't know exactly how things end.
> More Minecraft and a Multiverse post that I'm decently proud of the finished look of.
> I don't usually read much on the weekends, but I read another chapter of Boswell's Same Sex Unions in Pre-Modern Europe because this guy is crazy and so am I. He talks a little about Catullus, and to my great dismay I realize that one of the lines of Catullus' poetry I had previously laughed at actually makes complete and utter sense after considering a line from my favorite paragraph of Rodrigo of Caledon.
> In the afternoon when my parents are out, I walk to the park and write in my journal a bit before walking around the block. I realize I've inadvertently walked into the very hypothetical question I had just posed to myself in my journal when I take a new turn, and decide that though I am now a new person, I also would've been a new person had I just went my normal way too.

2024.03.04
> Back to school. My old lady is travelling so I spend my library period doing homework for Chinese class. I read more Boswell. I learn English sayings I've never heard before from my classmates.
> While working through a bunch of short PDFs I've saved in the past, I find one about Taiwan! The village it talks about, Smangus, is actually in the county I'm living in now, but because it's deep in the mountains it's still a several hour drive. An indigenous Christian anarchist collective is probably worth it though, so I finally have a place in mind the next time my host parents ask me if there's anywhere I really want to visit.

2024.03.05
> The weather has been on the uncomfortable side of cool lately, but today is perfect. I've given up on accuracy on my Chinese test and do not think about tip 71 of the School-Stoppers Textbook.
I read yet more Boswell (it's a very long book, alright?) and doodle two guys from ancient Crete. I want to make a story about one of the anecdotes he mentions, but I can't figure out a way to make either of the guys I'm drawing interesting enough. Right as the teacher calls on me, I figure out. The answer is to introduce a third guy. My genius is unmatched.
> The old man at the bubble tea shop in the cafeteria mishears my order and I get my passion fruit tea sans the boba. I decide to try a new bubble tea shop on my way home, and the tea is both nicer and cheaper than the other place I walk by, even if it takes the two ladies working there at least five minutes to get the computer to work.
> I take another walk today, and end up finding my way to the park near the highway, which is as nice as it looked from the bus I used to take by it, although it is still right next to the highway so not as relaxing as it could be. There's a large swath of woods next to it, which I consider trespassing in but eventually decide against it.
> I finish The End of the Dream, the 110th and final episode of Legend of the Galactic Heroes. I am fine and normal about the fact that Reinhard's final words are to Kircheis (dead) and that Oberstein's final words were "Larbenard is my butler."

2024.03.06
> Wednesday classes. Still happy about yesterday's weather, I wear the uniform shorts despite the temperature my phone's weather app tells me of. Wishful thinking doesn't change the weather, as it turns out, so I'm cold the rest of the day.
I've been helping one of my classmates with his English homework recently, and I get the distinct idea that he doesn't believe me when I try to tell him Area 51 definitely is a real place (there are probably no aliens, but it definitely exists) when we're discussing the article on conspiracy theories that he's reading.
> It's the first Manhua club meeting of the semester, so while half the club plays Gartic Phone I draw more of my Crete guys.
> I stop at the same tea shop as yesterday, and get my first warm cup of boba (brown sugar ginger tea) since I've come to Taiwan.
> After dinner, I start watching the Gaidens, a series of pre-canon LOTGH shows.

2024.03.07
> It's the first Advanced class of the semester, which goes about the same as the old ones. I manage to eat my entire spicy rice ball for lunch while explaining Byzantinian emperor Basil I to Xie An. I'm pretty sure he starts tuning me out when I get to Serge and Bacchus, but I like the sound of my own voice so this doesn't matter.
> In the afternoon class I design another character for the Crete story, the third guy's sister, who is already carrying the story on her back. The German exchange student gives me a notebook with a cute drawing of me on the inside cover as a late birthday present, since she remembered how nice I thought the notebook she had brought with her to class a couple weeks ago was.
> After class, I finally get around to redoing my about page on this site, apply to a webring, and spend 10 minutes struggling to open a can of olives.

2024.03.08
> Friday classes. I catch the later bus, which, according to the bus clock, arrives at the station exactly one minute after my train departs. I don't even bother running, since I know it won't be there, except when I walk through the gates, it is, because the bus clock was 5 minutes fast. I'm not late to school.
> In the Home Ec class the teacher presents our next project, Japanese egg custard. I fail terribly at the Kahoot, mostly because I can't read the answers fast enough.
> Math continues to be more stressful than it should be, because while Taiwanese teachers generally just lecture the students and don't randomly call on them to answer questions, my dear math teacher has made an exception to this rule for me.
> I gain context for the conversation practice I did with one of my classmates last week in my English class, and this time ace the Kahoot because it's in English. My desk mate appreciates my presence and I appreciate being appreciated.
> I finish Boswell's Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe, which I enjoyed greatly with only two things to nitpick (he describes Elagabalus' heterosexual relationships as 'less genuine' with no supporting evidence--my guy Elagabalus did NOT deflower the vestal virgin just to get called 'disingenuine' for it and also bisexual people exist, and there was a later anecdote that seemed to dismiss the idea of transgender people existing but I don't know enough about the specific case to know if his conclusion about it was right or not), but to be fair to his many detractors I'll also put the time in to reading some of their negative responses at a later date.
> I do a quick digital piece of the Crete guys, so they now exist in color!

2024.03.09
> I sleep in, watch another arc and a half of the Gaidens, and fiddle with some code on this site.
> I do a bit more MS Paint art, including a piece of Kircheis I really don't like, but got a comment from one of my favorite LOTGH fanartists on, and a screenshot redraw testing out the MS Paint screentones that I do really like.
> Still deciding on the format of the Links and Buttons page here, but I put together the Gallery page in a rather rough format pretty quickly.
> My host dad buys me fruit tea with boba and coconut jelly which is really good, and I drink it while eating lunch and watching a movie with him that combined both the 'oppressed magical/mutant lower class' and 'robot cops' tropes which was decently fascinating but not enough to stick around and watch the entire thing.
> I think about going outside, but it's really cold today, so I don't. I've reached the ultimate level of fluency (reading memes) though, so here's an image I found that describes the seasons here (translation: title is 'Taiwan's four seasons', character on the right is 'summer' (May-November), bottom is 'fall' (doesn't exist), left is 'winter' (December-January), top is all four seasons (Feburary-April)).
> In the evening we have a Rotary party, so I get to hang out with Eli and my second favorite sister while eating mediocre food.

2024.03.11
> Monday classes, I spend most of the day bored.
> I do finish Kevin Chen's Ghost Town, which was really good. I read a bunch of Taiwanese novels (translated into English) while I was planning my exchange last spring, but this was my first Taiwanese novel I've read since I got here. I actually heard about it on the radio (something about it getting a stage adaption), and was able to find an English copy on the QLL. It builds up to the specific details of an event that it's been hinting to since the beginning in a manner that would make Mary Doria Russel (The Sparrow) jealous and goes off on beautiful tangents that would do the same to Amitav Ghosh. I enjoyed it a lot, would recommend!

2024.03.10
> Another lazy day: I watch more Gaidens, do more MS Paint art (this time screentone redrawings of LOTGH endings with Rodrigo of Caledon characters), and watch a 3 hour video essay on an Italian movie about a book I never read, but is nonetheless the best use of three hours I've had in a while. (you should check it out too, if you have the time).

2024.03.12
> I play Minecraft with my sister (we got lost in the Nether) and father (he is disappointed that mangrove trees don't burn easily) before heading to class.
> Xie An finally received the birthday present he ordered me in the mail: a tiny book pendant of the Still, except he took the liberty of using the fake cover I drew once and have hated ever sense. However, I've decided that it actually looks pretty nice in inch-tall form, so it works out. (The colors still lack enough contrast so it looks stupid wearing it, but I like looking at it).
> It's an even nicer day than last Tuesday, which was just a tad too hot, so though I didn't bring my notebook, I take a walk through the memorial gardens at the university and play a bit of Atelier Resleriana before a group of students comes looking for their own place to sit.
> I walk a bit around my neighborhood again, though I have not the courage to walk through the riverside garden in case someone yells at me. There's a large peach-tiled building that has the remarkable quality of looking abandoned despite the quantity of motorcycles parked outside it, and the fact that this time a group of business walk out as I'm walking by. I think it has something to do with the dusty tiles and the incredibly reflective blue-green windows that don't let any light from inside escape, but I'm not certain. The other side of the river comes out next to it, but there's more people around than usual because everyone in the not-abandoned building is getting off work, so I don't want to look suspicious poking around.

2024.03.13
> On my way to school I watch an old man cut down a single bamboo from the grove that grows along the wall across the street and walk off with it.
> In Music, we practice singing a song I've never heard before, but I get one of the harmony parts so there's not too many new characters I need to learn. Making music with other people is something I've found I decently enjoy, though not enough to seek it out on my own time.
> It starts raining in the afternoon, and I watch a different old man sing a folk song as he bikes by with an umbrella.
> Reinhard's birthday is tomorrow, so I work on digitally redrawing a sketch I did a couple months ago of him (it's not a happy birthday by any means).

2024.03.14
> Before class I draw another Reinhard piece (as unhappy as the last) and a quick Wakaba sketch, because it's her birthday too.
> I've learned how to order coconut jelly with my boba in Chinese, but I forgot I kinda hate the black tea from usual tea shop so I don't enjoy it as much as I could've. It seems I'll go back to my passionfruit QQ once again...
> On the walk home from class, I finally poke around one of the university book stores. If they had a foreign language books section I couldn't find it, but I do get an art reference book about medieval Europe.
> Also, in honor of Reinhard's birthday (aka complete chance) I finally stumble across the actual source of a comment I had seen once and assumed the person mentioning it had made it up. But because it is actually true that the author of LOTGH said Annerose only ever saw Kircheis as a brother, I have in fact formed the winning argument for the debate about the relationship of Reinhard and Kircheis (they are actually just friends. In the words of Boswell, of course, "no relationship was more emotional, more intimate, more intense than friendship," the phrase itself "just friends" does a disservice to their clear love for each other). No one who genuinely argues that they're just bros would use it though, because it would also been having to denounce Annerose and Kircheis' relationship. Not quite sure what if anything was accomplished here.

2024.03.15
> It's a day full of coincidences. Me and my host sister open our bedroom doors at the same time in the morning (I take the tactical retreat and let her use the bathroom first), I actually see said host sister for the first time at the school we both attend (yes it's been nearly seven months no I have not seen her there before), and I get to the door of our apartment at the same moment my host dad does, on his way to drop of some fruit tea he bought.
> I usually dislike Friday classes the most because I have the least classes with the 214 class, but today was probably one of my favorites so far.
> In the Home Ec. class we're making chawanmushi (savory Japanese egg custards). I'm tasked with bringing the eggs (4), but realize as I go to retrieve them from the refrigerator this morning that there are only three left. I stop by the old lady's vegetable stand, although her husband is the one running it today, and he lets me have an egg for free. The chawanmushi turns out really good, especially since we put significantly more shrimp and mushrooms in than restaurants do. My group mates even talk to me more this time, and they're really nice.
> Math is fun too, I feel like I actually learned something and get really into the flow of problem solving, which I hadn't done before in this class.
> It's the final swim class, which I'm glad for too. I've decided that swimming is actually pretty fun, but my classmates in the first year class don't talk to me and it's a pain to change and dry my hair afterwards.
> (For lunch, one of the sides is chawanmushi again lol). English class is as fun as always and one of my classmates offers (in a message passed through the girl I sit next to) to teach my mahjong which I accept but he gives no follow up. I even get through Earth Science without getting bored.
> On the way to the station, I run into Joyce, who talks to me about her dream to study mechanics because of her love of Formula One racing and expresses her disappointment that the legal age of driving is higher in Taiwan than in the US.

2024.03.16
> Another lazy weekend.
> In a single afternoon, I draw a short four page comic (in MS Paint, of course) of the first scene I ever wrote with the Crete guys.
> I find out that my favorite Thai girl idol group had an event in Taipei only after the fact :'(

2024.03.17
> Today, I finish the first LOTGH Gaiden series. I really liked getting more Kircheis content (although the real highlight was more Blumhart in the last arc...). I suppose I shall be appreciative for the clarification that while Reinhard and Kircheis always sleep in the same room, they sleep in separate beds with the possible exception of the vacation arc, where the hotel room definitely only had one bed.

2024.03.18
> In Earth Science we have a practice test, since the midterms are next Monday (I won't have to take them, of course). I hesitate to ask the teacher if I'm allowed to use Google Translate, since I can't read 80% of the characters, but I figure it's easier to power through. It's the first test I've ever taken where I actually ran out of time in my entire life, and also definitely my lowest grade (16%), but out of the 5 questions I answered, I get 4 correct (I definitely could've gotten the last question had I gotten to it too), so I'm going to count that as a pretty good win.
> I finish reading Victory City too, which is a fictional translation of a Indian epic that doesn't actually exist. It definitely did a good job of feeling like an ancient story, in both the positive and negative aspects therein, and while it definitely isn't my book of the year, it was a pretty nice read.

2024.03.19
> Ignoring the fact that my dreams are getting increasingly insistent in their attempts to prove that they are apparently a The Man Who Folded Himself type time loop where the reoccurring character who features in my dreams in elementary school is actually me now while the character reoccurring in my dreams now was me then, I treat myself to half a loaf of bread with my morning congee.
> Before class I play Minecraft with my sister again (and my neighbor instead of my father this time). I haven't actually been playing much of my Beta world recently, because resource gathering is too daunting for the projects I want to make.
> I download a bunch of new games, ignoring the fact I haven't started any new games in months now. I'll get to them someday...

2024.03.20
> I finally remember to record one of my days, but I'll probably put off editing the footage for a couple weeks.
> More singing in Music class, though the afternoon is boring because it's class study time instead of club meetings, and I already did my homework in the free period our Chinese teacher gave us for studying in the morning.
> We're onto the jump rope unit in Gym now, which is fun. (Last semester we had running, but we don't have a Sports Day to prepare for this time).
> After class I decide to play around a bit with Decker, which I've seen used in some pretty cool interactive fiction games and would put all my MS Paint practice into good use, but I realize that if I want to make a Castle Country game that requires actually thinking of a Castle Country plot. No work gets done.

2024.03.21
> I spend the morning going down the rabbit hole of old LOTGH games, specifically the NES game but also poking around to see what I can find of the SNES and Sega Saturn game. There are 6 different official games all simply titled 'Legend of the Galactic Heroes,' which is incredible marketing on their behalf.
> After class, I actually go out for once to play video games at Yang Jie's house with Xie An and Owen (my fellow American doesn't get to be referred to with his Chinese name). We get boba on the way, spend an hour and a half yelling at each other over Overcooked, followed by a bit of Mario Kart and then Super Smash Bros, which I do decently at despite not knowing the controls.

2024.03.22
> More practice tests at school: Of the seven questions I was able to get an answer for on the Math one, the only correct answer I had was the one I crossed out because I was sure it was wrong. I answer more questions than last time on the second Earth Science test, but get even less right (in my defense, astronomy involves a lot more reading Chinese than the last unit).
> I keep seeing intriguing screenshots about Bang Bravern, and because all modern anime is the same to me I ask the modern anime guy (Owen) if he's seen it. He has, and he enthusiastically recommends it, so I assume the screenshots I've been seeing must be from the latest episode that he hasn't watched yet (a foolish assumption to make). He did warn me about the "gay" ending theme where the main characters sing in the rain with the shirts off, so I went in completely unprepared for how our dear sentient robot, Bravern, talks. With a newfound respect for my Owen, I watch all 11 episodes that have been released so far in a single night.
> I also talk more with my host sister, who forgot her key so I had to go down to the lobby to let her in.

2024.03.23
> I spend the morning reading and try my hand at alphabet soup again, which this time actually is a soup and tastes delectable (thank you mysterious seasoning I could not read the name of).
> After lunch I have to go to Zhubei to practice the dance for the Rotary conference with my classmates, where I learn that my fellow American Owen has apparently never heard of Mormonism. (I also get to show off all the beautiful new Chinese vocabulary I've learned thanks to the Taiwanese Bravern fandom.)

2024.03.24
> When I wake up, my American friends are playing DnD in the voice chat for the first time in ages--the musical is finally over, so I forgot that they had time again. I listen to their session and then we take geography quizzes afterwards. It's been a while since I've talked to any of them, so it's a good way to wake up.
> I eat lunch with my host parents while we watch a surprisingly interesting British TV show. It's interesting enough that even after I finish eating, I decide to do my homework on the couch instead of staying in my room like usual, so I talk a bit more with my host parents too.
> In the evening I start working on my birthday art for Julian Mintz tomorrow.

2024.03.25
> DnD part two is just geography quizzes and no DnD, but I manage to finish the Julian art, which I'm quite proud of. I haven't fully rendered a piece in over a year, but it took less time than I remembered.
> I don't have to go to school today because it's the first day of Midterms, so instead I play one of the games I downloaded last week (Eloquent Countenance, free on itch.io) which was short but enjoyable.

2024.03.26
> After Minecraft with my family (for once I get both my sisters, my neighbor, AND my father all playing at once), I speed through our Chapter 12 test and work on designing new side characters for Castle Country.
> We have to register to take the TOCFL (Chinese proficiency test), so I try to take the practice tests to gauge my current level. The listening part glitches out after I've already put half an hour into it, but the reading test places me at B1 (upper intermediate), which I'm pretty happy with.
> I also spend more time than necessary looking through every single club offered by my university, finally settling with my top four being the Historical European Martial Arts (German longsword. they just use longswords) Club, the slightly vaguer Medieval Club, the Ethnobotany Club, and the Astronomy Club.

2024.03.27
> Instead of club time in the afternoon, we spend the fifth period learning a dance (by we, I mean my classmates; they have to preform it on their graduation trip, which I'm not attending, so I spend my time reading instead) and sixth period having a jump rope tournament with the other second year classes (again, I just watch, and my class gets 4th place, meaning they still have to take the jump rope test).
> I do get to finally witness one of their English classes afterwards though, where I get to finally do well on a test in (I got one multiple choice wrong because I was reading too fast, and two write-in answers because I didn't write in the exact vocabulary word since I had no clue what their vocabulary words were).
> I finished my book from last week too, Richard Morgan's The Steel Remains. The main character was cool, though I wish we could've seen more of Archeth because she was clearly the best character. The amount of incredibly well written freely available works of literature on the internet that I've been consuming recently have raised my expectations for this genre too high, I fear.
> I need to get my hands on unsalted butter for my cooking class on Friday, so I get off the train a stop early to walk to the scary grocery store, where I also buy a single can of tomatoes and feel a little silly as I stand in the check-out line.

2024.03.28
> I've started watching the original Mobile Suit Gundam instead of just finished the last LOTGH Gaiden, and I've been really enjoying it so far.
> For our afternoon class, we get to visit the library and watch a movie. The teacher gives us two options, neither of which are horror, so I go along with the class decision to watch Your Name Engraved Herein. I've had the theme for this movie on my music playlist for ages and it was a nice watch, but I feel it could've benefited from a vaguer ending (eg. ending directly after the beach scene without specifying that they didn't talk again) even though I liked seeing them as middle aged men.
> For dinner I buy myself my favorite abalone congee which I haven't had in ages, because I have to attend a Rotary meeting of my sponsor club tonight. I'm a little awkward at the beginning, but by the end I think I did a good job talking about my exchange so far, especially because they didn't give me a chance to tell them I only know 5 of my classmates names and that I've read 50 books in the last three months alone.

2024.03.29
> The Taiwanese rice krispie treats we make during Home Ec are tasty, although my Gym teacher makes me participate in the jump rope test with the rest of my class.
> My current book is really fascinating, but I shall wait until I finish to talk about it, although I found the world's funniest bad review on it's Goodreads page, which makes me sad because it wasn't even a Feintuch book.
> Once I make it back home, I finally have time to watch the final Bravern episode (I totally could've watched it this morning, but I had heard somewhere it was going to be extra long, which it wasn't). It was okay. I had already gone through the 3 stages of grief (what do you mean there's more than that) about ****'s final death so I was a bit miffed when they brought him back again, but I probably would've been just as upset if that hadn't.
> One of my favorite Taiwanese artists posted a draft for a Bravern charm bracelet, so I'm hoping they finish it before I leave so I can save on shipping!
> I finally got Owen to hand over the Discord of one of his classmates who is always messaging him weird things because I don't think Owen appreciates them enough, so we talk about what books we've been reading for a little bit. They seem pretty cool, even if I'm pretty sure I've somehow found myself inbetween the world's stupidest unrequited romance based on some of the questions this guy is asking me about Owen.
> While rereading the Nero manga, done by the same guy as the Jesus manga, I realize that at least part of my intrinsic dislike of Char (Gundam) is because he looks eerily similar to Nero. I made a joke about this to Xie An, and then remembered the other day when I was looking for pictures of Garma and came across a Gundam manga illustrated by the same guy. I went looking for Char images from that manga, but he actually looked farther from Nero than the animated 0079 Char did, so I was about to give it up until I decided to check the author's Wikipedia page. As it turns out, the creator of the Jesus manga is in fact significantly more well known for his work as the character designer and animation director of the original Gundam, and not his incredibly obscure historical manga. The more you know.

2024.03.30
> I spend my Saturday drawing (MS paint redraws of Gundam screencaps and paintings of my Castle Country guys), thinking about rereading the Seafort Saga (I never finished it in the first place), and learning how to haggle at the local vegetable stand.
> I wanted to make alphabet soup again, so I went down to the stand to buy an onion and potato (if he has garlic, I can't find it... this would surely increase the quality of my soup but until then, the pickled garlic from a glass jar will have to do). Last time I bought this it was $45, but I apparently pick out a larger potato and/or onion so when the old man weighs it, he says it's $55. I thought I only brought $50, so I tell him this, and he says it's fine. I fish the coins out of my pocket, hand them over to him, and he counts.. $55. He gives me back the extra $5 anyway, and I go on my way.
> When I'm almost done with my soup, my host parents return. With soup of their own that they bought for lunch. I don't want to be rude, so I eat the food they bought for me, and take my ominously large bowl of alphabet soup back to my room for an afternoon snack. Two hours later and halfway through said bowl, my host father knocks to bring me "afternoon tea," another bowl (of delicious spicy noodles), which tastes very good but was certainly three times too much lunch at this point.

2024.03.31
> Today is much the same as yesterday, though I have a simply cup of Shin kimchi instant ramen for lunch instead of three courses of fine dining.
> I read all the freely available 'Dykes to Watch Out For' comic strips on Bechdel's site, and make the mistake of promising Neo to read Homestuck in return for him promising to finally read Rodrigo of Caledon. I get through the first two acts, which I begrudgingly find incredibly fascinating, especially the different fetch modi.
> For dinner we have a Rotary gathering where I get to hang out with my two best friends (they are small children but they are undefeated in their holding of the title) even if the food isn't particularly good (except the dessert course, which is this delectable soft bread, hot and steaming, with an incredibly thin glaze and crushed peanuts on top, so delicate I can't bring myself to try another in case the delight of my mouth becomes too commonplace.)
2024.04.01
> I talk to Youren for the first time in a while on the walk to school, where he tells me about an upcoming test he has to pass to be able to study abroad (not Rotary) in Germany next year. I wish him luck, and am rather impressed with myself for how much German has become intelligible to me since I've come here (I've picked up a minimal amount of French and Portuguese too, but German is my best non-studied language).
> During my library period I listen to Bruce and Neo talk about depressed Japanese authors and Will Wood while I do calculus in my notebook.
> We're onto our basketball unit in Gym, which reminds me why I used to be unfond of Gym.
> I get through Acts 3 and 4 of Homestuck too, though I've stopped trying to understand absolutely anything that's happening at this point.

2024.04.02
> We don't have Chinese class today, so after some Minecraft with friend and family, I spend the rest of my morning doing absolutely nothing.
> I wait too long to take a shower and don't have time for lunch before I have to rush out to catch the bus (I miss it anyway), because today, I am doing the classic teenager thing of Going to The Mall. I walk 4km in the heat, somehow ending up on the side of the street that doesn't have a single convenience store, so it's not until I get to the station and meet up with 2 of the 3 invited friends that I get a chance to buy a drink and cool down.
> While Igor checks the KFC menu for smoothies, I realize we're right next to one of the bookstores I've been wanting to check out, so we walk through it and, lo and behold... I find the Chinese translation of Volume 25 of Fujisaki's Legend of the Galactic Heroes manga! I've been looking for anything LOTGH related every chance I get here, but after over six months, my prayers have finally been answered. I skim through it later at home, and realize it contains a lot of my favorite character moments (Eisenach's tea scene, Bucock's death, and one of the sweet Emil and Reinhard scenes), which is even better.
> Since Owen doesn't seem to be showing up, we make our way to the mall, though we are (read: I am) temporarily waylaid by a shoe store we pass. I've been wanting to buy a new pair of fancy men's dress shoes since my last pair fell apart last year, and when we went shoe shopping for the wedding months ago, I saw a whole bunch of nice and not insanely expensive ones. The shoe store we pass turns out to be mostly sneakers, but along with the only four pairs of men's dress shoes, they also have CAT work boots, including the most beautiful brown and green pair I have ever seen. The display pair is size 8, which I'm pretty sure is too small, so I stumble through my Chinese and ask the guy if he has any bigger sizes (I say 10, he says they have a 9, I forget to factor in the fact that men's sizes are different from women's sizes) and the pair he brings fits pretty well (the ankle is perfect even if there's a bit of wiggle room for my toes--I figure I'm wearing socks far thinner than I usually do, so hopefully that will help too) so I get them. They're $2900 (roughly $90 USD), which isn't the cheapest, but I've just found that the CAT website lists them at $140, so saving $50 is pretty damn nice.
> Finally, we get to the mall. The first stop is the Indian place in the food court, which has heavenly chana masala, even if everything else is mediocre at best (the naan is clearly reheated frozen stuff, the dahl is too thin and salty, and the yellow rice has no flavor, not even that of rice. the mango lassi is also too thin for my taste, but that one is a personal thing I think). We wander around for a bit more, but all the clothes shops are too fancy and expensive (I find a cool leather vest, but it's price tag informs me it is over $15000, so we move on rather quickly). We get boba at one point, and when Owen finally messages us to say he's arriving at the station soon, we tell him we'll meet him there because me and Igor are planning to skip out on him.
> I find the starting station for one of the buses I occasionally catch on the way to the train station, which leaves 10 minutes earlier than my usual bus and even stops at the stop directly across from my road, though I learn I need to be up at the front of the bus AT the stop or else I'll have to wait until the next one and walk back.

2024.04.03
> I'm on my phone before class starts, reading "Luck in the Shadows" when a presidential alert covers my screen: Earthquake warning. I have about enough time to wonder when they started doing warnings for those, when the earthquake starts.
> Since I've arrived in Taiwan, I've been witness to two rather small earthquakes, both of which happened while I was sitting in my room at my first host family and just large enough to be felt. This one does not merely rock me back and forth a little, but gives me a good shake. I follow suite when my classmates duck under their desks like we learned to do in the once-a-semester earthquake drills. No one ever taught me to grab my water bottle on the way down, though, so several into the shaking in comes crashing down on the floor next to my desk (this is the first part of the prophecy).
> Once the quaking stops, we file out the door to line up in the field. Other than my water bottle and what looks like it used to be some potted plants from an upper floor, now deposited onto the floor of the courtyard, there's not really any damage. It's the biggest in the country in 25 years, though, although we're far enough from the epicenter that it's between 4-5 in magnitude.
> While sitting in the field, we get the first aftershock, but after a mere twenty minutes they tell us to get up and go to our first period class. I feel a bit uneasy being under a roof again for basketball, but the heat makes me forget that soon. Next period, during Classical Chinese, we get a couple more aftershocks, but after the first one the teacher doesn't even pause in her lecture. During third period, we get a larger one, so we duck under the desks again, but when it's over we go right back to class. I get over my excitement after the first couple, but they keep going throughout the day with increasing softness. Even now as I write this, I'm accompanied by a very soft rocking.
> During club time my favorite politician lady gives a speech about something, followed by the two candidate speeches for student council. Only after the two hours are over do one of my classmates tell me I totally could've left whenever I wanted to.
> I finished the aforementioned "Luck in the Shadows," which was quite enjoyable and also served me right for laughing at people in the book reviews for seemingly arbitrarily assigning a genre to a book that never claimed to have that genre, because they were all right. The library doesn't have the next book in the series, but it does have the fourth. Not sure if I want to skip right to it or not.
> I try to find the bus stop I found yesterday and only succeed in finding the other American. I buy myself a bottle of apple soda from the train station convenience store, but when I go to open it, I spill it all over the floor because there's too much built up carbonation (this is the second part of the prophecy).
> Once home, I find the meaning of my prophecy, and the only thing in the entire house has fallen over: the bottle of ramune I bought on New Year's Day, saved for a date yet unknown. Luckily the glass didn't break when it hit the floor, but the plastic cap flew apart, leaving most of the soda on the floor of my room. The little bit left in the glass is long decarbonated and tastes rather similar to a melted gas station slushie. At least I finally have a ramune marble, safely separated from it's bottle.

2024.04.04
> We have a four-day weekend for 清明節 (Qingming Festival/Tomb-Sweeping Day), so back to my host father's hometown in Yunlin we go.
> I spend most of the car ride sleeping, though we stop around lunch time at a street market whose name I've forgotten, but ended with "green street" because of the trees covering it. Without them, the intense midday heat would've been utterly unbearable, but at least I can count my blessings that I'm not one of the people who has to stand in it all day frying food. I try a mung bean smoothie (good flavor but it's too hot to drink something so thick, even if it's cold), a fried taro ball (yummy but again, too hot), and some strawberry tanghulu (this one actually tastes better because of the sun soaked heat you find when you bite into the middle).
> Once we arrive at my grandparent's house, there's food waiting there too. Runbing, aka Taiwanese spring rolls (though they're not terribly close to what I imagine when I think of spring rolls) are waiting to be put together, the fillings prepared by my grandmother in advance. I'm a bit skeptical of the sweet peanut powder, but I realize that without it, the rolls would be practically tasteless. I like these a lot, but only eat one because I'm still full from earlier.
> Once the rest of the extended family arrives, we go to a temple to pray and meet even more family (featuring my host granduncle (?) who has the coolest eyebrows I've ever seen and will now spend the rest of my life lamenting that I will never have), though I wait outside with my host mother and one of my aunts who married into the family while the rest of them do the actual grave cleaning part.
> Afterwards, we return home to rest a bit before dinner. Somehow my room here is the one that feels the most like home out of all the rooms I've had in Taiwan, though for reasons I'm not quite clear on (there's nothing in it except two mattresses on the floor and a small stool in the corner).
> We go to the same restaurant we went to on my first visit here, though this time they have their famous Shan Yu Mian (eel noodles), which are quite good even if I'm a bit disappointed in how different eel tastes from my expectations.

2024.04.05
> After breakfast (me and my host mother walk to the convenient store for this, which I'm a bit sad about), my host parents take me to more temples.
> The first has two giant pagodas, while the second has a free cafeteria (monks eat better than highschoolers, it seems). From what I saw, non-monks were the ones cooking, but there's one female monk doing the dishes in a rather terrifyingly efficient fashion outside. Our third stop is the 水火同源 (Fire and Water spring?), where an ever burning fire (courtesy of a vein of natural gas) rests above a hot spring.
> I take the time in the afternoon to walk around the neighborhood a bit. It's garlic harvest season, so there's more workers out in the fields than last time and more garlic than I've ever seen at once piled in bags near the roads. Some of the rice is taller too, though there are still plenty of fields that are just sprouts, so I assume there's a near constant rotation there. I find a place to sit and draw next to an overgrown irrigation ditch on one side road, where I only get a weird look from one passerby (mostly because he was the only passerby, but nonetheless).
> We eat dinner at another restaurant with fresh seafood out front, and the seaweed soup is so good that it's started a craving that still hasn't gone away.
> For a reason I'm unsure of, I fall asleep thinking about Frog Hill.

2024.04.06
> We're going home today, but only after a visit 鹿港老街 (Lukang Old Street). One last temple, some street food, and one incredibly cool shirt later, it's back to the car.
> When I wake up, we're in Hsinchu again, but instead of going directly home we stop at a restaurant for lunch. I'm a bit miffed, since I'm still rather full from the morning and would really just like to go home, but the place is so good I forget all my complaints. The vibes of the place feel relaxingly effortless, even if there was clearly a lot of effort put into it. All the furniture is old and wooden, the hanging lamps are made of hand painted cloth, and the interior ceiling is made of bamboo. The food is just as delicious and is entirely plant based, while the tea is unexpectedly a nostalgic licorice flavor.

2024.04.07
> I spend most of the morning on the floor. I had hoped to make some pasta, but I barely feel well enough to stomach the takeout my mom buys instead. Luckily my friends are playing DnD this week, so I listen to them play and then eventually transition into talking about whatever is on their mind (in Neo's case, mostly Homestuck). They talk a little bit about my original characters too, which is unexpectedly pleasant to hear (I knew Neo liked them, but I didn't know he talked to Simon about them haha).
> When they finally go to bed, I spend the rest of my afternoon reading low quality comics.

2024.04.08
> Luckily I feel better today, because it's back to school. For once, I even get up at my first alarm.
> School is as uneventful as always, though I learn what I thought was a crashed flowerpot in the courtyard last Wednesday was actually a chunk of the wall plaster from the top of the building, because it's still there. In the Musical class we do an activity I don't understand, but it's rather nice to sit in the dark room with the light of cellphone flashlights like candles while my partner whispers stories about gods I can neither hear nor understand.

2024.04.09
> I spend most of the morning reading comics and only play Minecraft with my sister for 20 minutes because she was out looking at the eclipse (I am so upset that we have a full totality eclipse the one year I'm not in the country).
> I draw plenty in class, though, and we have our first TOCFL prep lesson in the afternoon. We have a new teacher for it, who seems very nice, and we work through a practice test which doesn't seem terribly difficult but I'm right on the edge of A2 instead of fully secure in it, so I suppose I need to work a bit harder.
> I finally get a chance to wear my new tangzhuang too, which is very cute and comfortable and I only get the side slit, which is sewn together at the very bottom, caught on a door at the end of the day, which breaks the tie at the bottom so I snap the other side too and won't have to worry about it again.
> I stay up later than I intended, waiting for Neo to see some art I posted while he was asleep, and am punished by the universe for this by getting the worst possible email I could get right now. Last week I had gotten an email from my university saying that my financial aid application wasn't complete, which was strange because I was pretty sure it was. Stranger yet, when I checked the status page, my to-do list was definitely empty with nothing else to submit, so I sent them an email. Instead of giving me a nice, short "oh sorry your application is totally good" email, they finally replied with a "we tried to pull up your information and there was nothing there. did you even do the fafsa and css profile????" I stress out about this for a while until I finally go to sleep.

2024.04.10
> After classes, I decide today is finally the day. I will walk home (10km) instead of taking the train.
> I find the park next to the river pretty easily, but I can't find my way down to the riverbank to access the stepping stones. I eventually find my way under the highway bridge, which I have to walk halfway across the river (it's dry enough that I only really cross the river once here) and then walk upstream to the rock. The only place the water is actually deep is around the rocks, of course, but I manage to jump between some tiny rocks until I am able to climb up between the gap of two of the giant stepping stones.
> I draw a bit in my sketchbook before moving on. I originally planned on walking to the closest train station and taking the next train to either of the stations I know, since there are buses that I know go by my house, but I realize it'll be just as fast to just keep walking once I get to the train station, so I do. At one point, Google Maps takes me down a road so narrow that no car could actually take it, and that at one point goes through a family's covered seating area, but the road continues on the other side so I keep going.
> I get home only an hour and half later than usual, and though my sister is home before me for once, she doesn't ask why I took so long.
> In the evening, I do a Zoom call with my parents to figure out the financial aid thing too, where we realize the CSS profile was never actually completed, so it was totally our fault. At least it's cleared up now.

2024.04.11
> It turns out those boots I bought totally don't fit at all, so I spend the day in a moderate amount of pain, but somehow avoid any blisters when I finally take them off at home.
> I read the manga "HITS" and listen to a guy talk about vtuber drama before bed.

2024.04.12
> We have the day off today for setting up our booths for the Rotary conference in the afternoon, so I spend the morning reading the manga "MW" and contemplating hypothetical designs for this year's inevitably never-to-be-finished vtuber model (the final sketch ends up as a midshipman in an unspecified space military).
> I didn't actually know we were setting up our booths--I thought it was a dance practice--so I have very little to do when we actually get there, but I walk around the building a bit, which houses the home game stadium for the city's basketball team. Like my American home town, the mascot is also a purple and white lion. When one of my classmates shouts "Go, lions, go!" I get the distinct feeling that the universe is incredibly unoriginal.

2024.04.13
> I end up deciding to rig the design sketch I did in MS Paint yesterday instead of actually making proper model art, and end up decently satisfied with the result.
> In the afternoon today, we actually have dance class. I argue with a classmate about how real cheese actually sucks. I may love seafood but vegan cheese has forever won me.

2024.04.14
> It's the day of the Rotary Conference. I initially felt bad about how little I contributed to our table, but the girl from the other group who did most of the set up doesn't help with the presentations at all, so it evens out. Some guy finally takes the 12 pack of American pencils I brought as a joke, and I manage to get rid of most of my pins and all the soap (except the last bar I've saved as a gift for my final host family).
> The dance goes fine, even if the lunch they give us tastes awful. I spend most of the afternoon eating the Polish table's latkes and borscht (made from a powder, but tasty nonetheless).
> I do accidentally run off with the third American's money (we got $500 NTD to split between ourselves) because she isn't back at the table for the last 30 minutes and I need to run to catch the bus. I promise her I'll get it to her next time I see her.

2024.04.15
> Rotary gives us a vacation in the morning for all our hard work, but not the afternoon. I consider various ways to convince my host parents to let me skip, only to fall asleep after a delicious lunch of my best alphabet soup yet. My host parents don't mind, so I enjoy a full day break.
> I do finally finish Hyperion on my second try, which I decently enjoyed. It's set up in a similar way to the Canterbury Tales (a group of pilgrims agree to tell stories to each other on their pilgrimage), though they have a Grendel problem with no Beowulf to kill him for them. Also, none of them are particularly keen on the religion they're doing the pilgrimage for, but despite inital appearances are all deeply involved with the evil ancient alien murder tree they're going to visit. It ends on an unsatisfying cliffhanger, though, and out of honor I'm not sure if I'll pick up the next book.

2024.04.16
> I spend extra time trying to make my hair look nice so I can impress the mother of my nemesis, who is visiting our class today, and I even leave 10 minutes earlier than usual to make sure I'm on time. It starts pouring 10 second after I'm out the door, so I show up looking more like a wet rat. To add insult to injury, the rain lightens to a sprinkle after 5 minutes, so if I'd left at my normal time I would've been fine.
> At home, I learn about the cheese caves. The wonders of the US government and the dairy industry never cease.

2024.04.17
> Finally back to school. I do my Chinese homework during the first period of Mandarin class, but we go to the special Mandarin classroom on the top floor to watch videos of Chinese opera in the second.
> I stumble over my words asking the guy at my favorite restaurant if I can order and then come back later to pick it up, and then realize it takes a lot longer to get from the restaurant to my house and back than I thought (I needed to buy dinner but didn't have any money on me). In any other circumstances, I'd probably be terribly embarrassed about it, but I got my abalone congee so I'm happy enough.
> Before bed I also finish "The Artist's Way," which was probably a good book to take your time with, but I don't have time for that.

2024.04.18
> Before class, I catch up to another book in the series that's among the top 10 longest pieces of English literature, which I had read two chapters of months ago, thought it was lame, and gave up on, until I heard someone discussing some of the latest chapters and then immediately binge read the entire thing. It's probably my second favorite of the books I've read so far. I then spend all the time between class explaining the plot to Xie An.

2024.04.19
> In my cooking class we make rice balls, but each group also makes an extra "joke" rice ball with the weirdest ingredients we can think of to trade to another group. Ours just had the Taiwanese equivalent to Pirate's Booty, which probably tasted better than our rather bland serious rice balls. The group across from us does mayo and salmon for their normal ones, and mayo and strawberry pocky for their evil one.
> I get to finally draw during my 1st Year Art Class, and while I would pretend to be offended that everyone in it still just calls me "the foreigner student," I realize I don't actually know any of their names either. I have Gym with the same class, and though I definitely lose my team a point in volleyball by failing to set a ball that would've gone out anyway, I decide it doesn't really matter even though my brain tries very hard to make me feel embarrassed about it.
> In English class, my group unanimously selects me to present the discussion questions to the class, which once again, my brain tries (and does a better job at succeeding than last time) to make me nervous about, but I remember that I'm fluent in English and none of my classmates are.
> While I pretend to pay attention in Earth Science, I end up finally stumbling upon a haircut that I think properly suits my evil alien emperor from Funo-Shika who I haven't thought about in a while.

2024.04.20
> I digitize my new evil alien emperor design in MS Paint in the morning, along with a couple of extra Funo-Shika doodles.
> For lunch I get to eat my host mother's wonderful congee, and learn that horror movies are scarier if you eat foods you don't like (oysters) while you watch them. By the time I get to the end of Saw I've finished my lunch, though, so it's back to being ridicilously stupid. Altogether a nice movie though.

2024.04.21
> In the morning, my host parents take me to an old street I didn't catch the name of somewhere near Taoyuan, where we try famous rice pudding (the brown sugar pudding isn't so good, but the savory one topped with soy sauce and dried radish is really yummy) and boiled tofu (that I would've never tried on my own since it looked like actual meat before it was cut up), and then go on a nice hike in an agriculture-leisure area. We're a bit late to whatever flower season it was, but it's almost more beautiful to see the heavy coating of white flowers across the ground than it is to see the few flowers that are left on the trees.
> Instead of working on writing the dialogue for a game jam I've had all month to work on and have only written ~100 words for, I decide to write some interactions between Castle Country guys that I haven't written interacting before. I get the really satisfyingly moment when writing Tawanema and Medes where the interaction goes surprisingly awful, which means I've done a good job of characterizing these guys if they can surprise even me. Then, in a follow up scene with Kimea, a moment of equal satisfaction is broken by the fact that I suddenly perfectly understand David Feintuch and a very similar scene he once wrote. I take a break after this because I don't actually want to relate to David Feintuch that much.

2024.04.22
> For the first time in a long while, I race Taiwanese Simon from the station to the school. We tie pretty evenly, but he waves to me which means he actually knew it was a race this time.
> I make it to fourth period before disaster strikes, aka, as I set the volleyball (in a very good set, I might add. I could barely set at all at this time last year) my right hand isn't at the exactly right angle, so the volleyball smashes my thumb into the joint. I can move it, so it's not broken, but it hurts an awful lot when I do, so I am reduced to my left hand for the rest of the day. (This is unfortunate, because Xie An sends me a giant paragraph about Rodrigo of Caledon and I need to respond with an equally giant paragraph, but doing so takes far longer with only one hand.)
> At home, I mourn the fact that the one day I had a million art ideas lined up to draw once I got home, I can't actually draw at all. We get a couple small earthquakes, too, and I realize that they get a little more scary when you're on the 8th floor of a building.

2024.04.23
> Another earthquake wakes me up around 2 AM, but I get back to sleep eventually to still wake up on time.
> At class, though my handwriting suffers terribly with my left hand, I figure out that I can still draw pretty decently, right up until I suddenly can't. I then realize that I can move my thumb painlessly enough to hold a pencil again with my right hand, so the world is restored to order.
> At lunch my French classmates try to convince me that I should probably see a doctor about it, but it's already nearly better so I think they're a bit silly.
> When my parents get home in the evening, we go out to the Big City shopping mall to eat dinner--conveyer belt sushi and milk tea from one of the two tea shops that claims to have invented bubble tea. The milk tea is pretty good, even as someone who doesn't usually care for it, but the bubbles are too soft for my tastes and they give it to me in a tiny teacup with a spoon instead of a straw because I forgot how weird fancy restaurants are about ordering bubble tea warm instead of cold.
> We also go shoe shopping, where I am indecisive about colors and have to keep reminding myself that the incredibly cute lightly colored shoes will not survive rural New York. Though I've been being better about not getting to caught up in my anxiety, I put off saying that I think the brown version of the shoes I end up deciding on would actually probably be better than the black pair until we somehow ended up already checking out, so I end up with the still nice pair of black shoes instead.

2024.04.24
> My grade has their class trip from toady till Friday, but I chose not to go so I get to stay home!
> I finally finish John Holt's Escape from Childhood (the subtitle within the low quality scan I had calls it "Escape for Childhood," which I think is pretty nice too). I've been slowly working through this for the last couple of months and it was a really good read on youth liberation, including a bunch of things I hadn't personally thought of before.
> I also finish John Dies at the End, a recommendation from Bruce (my old DM) which I feel certainly explains why he is the way he is. Hopefully he keeps to our deal and read Rodrigo of Caledon in return for this, though I liked the book enough I won't be too sad if he doesn't.

2024.04.25
> I spend the morning reading a manga inspired by Shakespeare's Richard III and Henry VI, though I heavily doubt the story it told held any real resemblance to either plays or what happened historically. Remember, you either die a nobody or live long enough for a Japanese mangaka to turn you into an emo twink.
> Class is fine and we finish grading our second practice TOCFL tests. Last time, I got 38/50 and thought about studying a bit. I forgot to do that, but I got a 45/50 on this one so it worked out I think. The new cashier at the rice ball place I go for lunch didn't add the spicy powder to mine :(

2024.04.26
> Another free day. I wake up incredibly happy that I'm a real person for some reason, which wasn't a thing I previously doubted, but now I will because that doesn't seem like something an actually real person would need to think.
> I spend the morning trying to short circuit my brain enough to get some writing done, which means watching a J-drama based on a manga I read sometime last year on my computer while simultaneously reading the Bible on my phone. The drama ends up being entertaining enough that I mostly just watch it though...
> In the afternoon, I see someone mention that it's Marcus Aurelius' birthday, so I spend the afternoon skimming through his correspondences with Fronto. I try to note down every single stupid pet name or otherwise memorable romantic quote so that I can make my Castle Country guys quote them, and there ends up being enough to fill more than 2 maximum length Discord messages.
> Made a rough painting of Reinhard (LOGH) quoting one such line from Aurelius, based on Gabriel Metsu's "A Man Writing a Letter." I also am struck by the thought that Asuka (Evangelion) and Rodrigo (of Caledon) would be very good friends if they existed in the same universe, so I spend the rest of the night thinking about how much better (worse) both of Feintuch's series could have been if he'd been into mecha.

2024.04.27
> I watch the rest of yesterday's J-drama in the morning, and then I go out to lunch with my host parents.
> We meet up with a couple of other Rotary families at one of their restaurants, where we get mala hotpot, except this place's mala hotpot is far spicier than the last place I went to. After I finish eating I spend my time trying to prevent the two small children from running away (at one point I have to princess carry both of them at the same time to get them back to the restaurant). When one of the adults finally takes pity on me and calls us back in, I drink my sorrows away (with orange juice and also several shots of kaoliang to impress the restaurant owner with my lack of reaction). Kaoliang is less bitter than beer, so as long as you know to expect the spicy taste it's not that bad?
> I spend the rest of the afternoon packing my stuff, since I'm switching host families tomorrow.

2024.04.28
> In the morning, we pack up my bags and drive to my new host family. Despite both belonging to the Rotary Club of this city and going to the national high school of this city, this will be my first time actually living there, since my two previous families lived across the river in the other city. It'll be my highest home too, at the 11th floor (I had previously asserted no building really ever needs to be taller than 10 stories, which I still generally agree with, but the view is sooooo nice).
> My old parents go through the first night questions with me and my new parents. In this family I'll have a little brother for the first time in my life, named Pudding. We all go out to lunch with Eli's new host family, since she switched yesterday and also lives nearby.
> I have a little bit of time to start unpacking at home before we leave again for a Rotary Event: go-kart racing. My first sister, Anna, is as affectionate as always, so I don't end up talking to Pudding much, which I feel a little bad about. Me and Anna agree to do the two-seater kart, though she lets me do all the driving. I go pretty slow, and though I'm pretty good at taking the turns fast by the end, when it's time for the actual race I don't hesitate to give up the wheel to Eli.

2024.04.29
> First day going to school from my new house! My host mother makes me a breakfast sandwich with an egg and lettuce, along with a bowl of cherry tomatoes and grapes. My school is only a ~15 minute walk away, which is super nice.
> Classes are pretty normal, though I get to see some gnarly giant orange caterpillars while we're (read: my classmates while I just stand to the side) practicing filming for my Musical class.
> During Earth Science, I understand none of as per usual and spend most of my time doodling in the margins of my textbook like the responsible student I am. Later, though, at home, I decide it's time to get serious. In two weeks there's another exam, so there'll probably be another practice exam before hand. I might not be able to figure out how the grading works well enough to not mess up for whatever poor classmate has to switch tests with me, but I can at least make it slightly less embarrassing by answering more than 3 questions. It's time I actually study for something.
> Before I come to this important decision, though, I sit on the balcony of the apartment and draw the view. I've been doing a lot of landscape art recently but it's been mostly nature, which is a lot more forgiving than the sharp angles of buildings. Perspective is no match for me, though, and though my finished piece is certainly not mathematically correct, I think it looks quite artistically beautiful.
> For dinner, it seems I'm back to my days of take out with only one parent. Wherever my host mother buys our dinners is damn good, so I don't mind a meal where every single side dish is delicious. My brother gets home later, though our only exchange is him giving me a bunch of chocolates that I had coincidentally been missing just the other day and my thanking him before he has to go work on homework.

2024.04.30
> In the inverse of my shortened commute to school, I now have to actually work to get to the university for Chinese class. Luckily, I have Eli to travel with, and we planned our route last night. We take a series of three different buses (though if I was going by myself I probably would have skipped the first one, since it just takes us to the stop near my school and I'm fine walking that). We manage to catch them all, and I end up earlier to class than I've been in months.
> In the afternoon, I take the bus to the train station and then the train to my city's station before walking back home since that's the route most of my classmates take, though this gives Igor the chance to coerce me and Emanuel into hanging out this weekend. It's also pouring rain, so all three of us end up crowding under Emanuel's umbrella and soaking wet either way. At the station I buy a cheap umbrella from the convenient store, though a truck splashes through a puddle at me when I'm almost home, so I end up more soaked than ever.
> Before, during, and after class I work on my Earth Science textbook, using Google Translate's image translation function to figure out characters I don't know. Since most of the content is stuff I've already learned, it's just a matter of learning to recognize characters. I've been saving all the handouts the teacher gives us despite my inability to fill them out, but I'm proud to realize I can actually read most of the questions now and answer quite a few of them without needing to use the translator at all.

2024.05.01
> Instead of a club meeting, all the second year classes have an English singing competition in the afternoon.
> They've added some hand/arm motions that I only have half an hour to learn, but my class does pretty well with our song, That's What Makes You Beautiful.
> Class 201, the smartest class (I'm not sure how far down the grade hierarchy goes, my class is 214 but it's the bilingual class with the best English grades so it doesn't make a lot of sense to me why they're at such a low number?) sings my beloved Take Me Home Country Roads, which I suppose is the universe's way of answering the question of whether I'd have been able to make it into 201 if I had actually been born in Taiwan.
> The best performance is a very offkey but very enthusiastic performance of Never Gonna Give You Up by one of the other classes, though.
> Book of the day is The Meaning of Proofs, which I was initially going to give up after the first 20 pages because it was discussing a whole bunch of stuff way over my level, but I kept going and a learned some cool things.

2024.05.02
> There's a chance of rain, so Eli's host mother just drives us both to class.
> While all the internet friends I've made in the previous 18 years of life have lived on different continents, I learn that one of my LOGH mutuals actually lives only around an hour away from the closest city to my hometown now that I'm on the other side of the world.
> After class I stop by a general store on my walk home because they have a sizeable book collection, but no LOGH manga is to be seen. I end up buying a tiny notebook, a fancy Japanese felt tip pen, and a mechanical pencil that I only learn didn't come with lead after I get home.
> In the end, I take so long that my high school classmates get out of class, and I learn one of them actually lives the next street over. I suspect that she not only went to the same middle school as my brother, but also must've had the same English teacher, because their accents are very similar.

2024.05.03
> I watch the first episode of Girls Band Cry, a really nicely animated 3D anime airing this season.
> I also remember that I need to start working on my art piece for the Manhua club's semesterly art book, themed "isekai," so I take the time to watch the 3 episode OVA of the "worst isekai ever made," Garzey's Wing. At least, that's what I'd been told. It was actually entirely decent, to the point where I went and researched all the reasons it gets hated on and decided none of them were valid. It wasn't a masterpiece by any means, but it was pretty average, art-wise, for the time period and, story-wise, a lot of stuff being released then and today.

2024.05.04
> Weekend! I find out that when I made plans to hang out with my friends this weekend, they said Saturday, not Sunday, so I skip out on them.

2024.05.05
> I had already told my host mother I was hanging out with friends today, so I spend the time outside walking around the neighborhoods between my house and the school (I get a cheap can of coconut water from a random vending machine next to an abandoned building), reviewing my textbook in the park, and then walking to the city's public library.
> The public library is cute, but disappointingly small for the size of the city. By my rough estimate, it was about the one near my hometown, except that this city has over 100 times the population of that town. If there was a foreign language section, I couldn't find it, and the comic section doesn't have any LOGH, though a book with two of the same characters in its title momentarily gets my hopes up.
> It's also Oberstein's birthday, so I redraw that one Garfield top surgery comic with him and Reinhard.

2024.05.06
> Finally, it's time to see if all my reviewing for Earth Science has meant anything. The result? It did!
> I get a 43%, which is significantly higher than my 17% last time, plus the guy sitting next to me only got a 54%, so I think being only 11% lower than a native speaker is pretty good. On the astronomy section I got 7/9 questions correct, with one error being because I overthought a simple question because the answer was so simple, and the other being because I had no clue what the question was asking.

2024.05.07
> Eli is home sick, so I go to class by myself. I look longingly at the manga shop across from the bus stop where I switch buses, and promise myself I'll let myself be late and take a look next time she's out sick.
> On the walk home, I finally check out the game shop that I always passed between the train station and my school for the last 8 months, and find out that despite all the exterior posters being for Nintendo switch products, most of the stuff inside is actually Gunpla (Gundam figurines). There's a couple cool Evangelion ones, though none of the only set I really want, an 0079 Zaku, so I call it quits and remind myself I'd have no room in my luggage either way.
> I spend the evening getting into a far more responsible waste of time: mobile games. The character I choose in the beginning turns out to be British, but his personality is fire so I'll forgive him.

2024.05.08
> Boring day full of studying. I don't do much.
> I get to talk a little bit to Joyce, who I haven't seen since I stopped taking the train, about our goals in life, to my computer teacher from last semester, where I show off my awesome test score, and then to my favorite old lady.

2024.05.09
> In the afternoon, instead of normal class we have a guided tour of the city. But our guides aren't just any guides, they're a bunch of first year high schoolers. I don't manage to make any new friends, but I get to learn a bit more about the city, I guess.
> More importantly, it gets me in the mood to go book shopping, so I drag Emanuel off afterwards to check out the manga shop I used to pass on the way to the station in the morning at my last host family, which was always closed then. We take our time looking through the whole store, before I finally give it one last shop and ask the shopkeeper if they have any LOGH manga I somehow missed. He wordlessly leads me to the entire shelf of LOGH manga I must've walked by at least twice. They have every volume except for the first and the two most recent releases, and for dirt cheap ($3 a piece) too. I settle for getting volume 23, because it has Julian on the cover and the tail end of one of my favorite arcs and I'm not entirely certain which volume contains Kircheis' death. If I can figure out how to ship things, I might have to come back.
> I've also gotten Emanuel to start reading the Seafort Saga now that he's done with Rodrigo, so I skim through the first book once I'm back home and realize that these guys are significantly more insane than I remembered and that perhaps I should've let him live with just Rodrigo because Seafort might actually be worse.

2024.05.10
> I only get a 22% on today's practice test, but the guy grading me only got a 30%, so I end up being glad he didn't have to give the foreigner who can barely speak his language a better grade than he got.
> After class, I spend my time reading about St. Aelred of Rievaulx.

2024.05.11
> I spend most of the day reading stupid comics.
> In the evening we have a Rotary dinner, where my host mother learns I eat raw fish. I'm a bit confused on why it was a shock, given that she has both fed me fish before and that one of the earlier courses was sushi, but nonetheless.
> Before bed, I finally get around to drawing Junji Ito's Tomie for an art trade that I'm been procrastinating for weeks on.

2024.05.12
> For lunch, I get to meet my host father's parents and younger brother at a... European? restaurant. The name is in French, the waiters are all dressed like Germans, and the beer is Japanese. I get a clearly Taiwanese-level spicy vegetable spaghetti, am vaguely disappointed in the quality of the fries, and enjoy a very delicious (but also not particularly European) soup. For a drink, I get a whole wine-sized bottle of kombucha.
> Once we return home, my host mother reveals that they do actually have a Switch, so me and Pudding play Mario Kart together. I lose the first two tournaments, but as soon as our mother joins us on our third, I hit my stride and absolutely demolish them both (aka I finally figured out a good bike for my play style). We take a break for a couple of hours, then play some more where I still win the majority.
> For dinner we finally go to the night market across the street, where I use my intrinsic American talent to pop one more balloon than my brother at the shooting range, letting us win a consolation prize of Pokémon cards that I'll give Neo. We're both equally bad at dart throwing, but the stinky tofu, clam soup, and drinks are all good.
> Before bed, we take a break from Mario to play Super Bomberman, which I am only okay at, and then switch the Super Smash Bros. Last time I hung out with my friends they did a very bad job of teaching me how to play, but in five minutes Pudding does a better job exclusively in Chinese, and I manage to get to the point where I'm beating him half the time.

2024.05.13
> My classmates have their midterms today, so I get to stay home. I talk to my friends on Discord and make my characters in Picrews.
> I buy two things of instant noodles, one for lunch and one for the future, but I'm so hungry I end up just eating them both.
> The deadline for this semester's comic club art book is coming up, so I get the lineart done before bed.

2024.05.14
> For our practice TOCFL in the afternoon, I get 49 out 50 questions correct, only missing the very last one.
> After class, I finish the Garzey's Wing piece and watch As You Are. I feel like this semester's piece is less good looking than last semester's, but the coloring is cleaner if nothing else.

2024.05.15
> We're finally onto our beloved badminton in Gym class. Comic club meeting in the afternoon, but my favorite guy isn't there so don't have anyone to explain Nicholas Seafort to.

2024.05.16
> Today, we do a full practice test, both listening and reading. I get 49/50 on listening, 42/50 on reading, both A2 level. While I wait between questions on the listening section, I frantically speedrun Seafort fanart in the margins.

2024.05.17
> Half day of school because our school is being used as a testing location for some big national test.
> I'm trying to resist the urge the actually reread Seafort, so I force myself to finally get through Psalms. Everything always comes back to Feintuch though, because I realize he probably purposefully named Phillip Tyre after the historical city of Tyre, which were both associated with sailors, known for their beauty, and eventually destroyed by God...

2024.05.18
> The day of the TOCFL exam!
> I had followed an Indian teenage expat on Instagram earlier in the week, replied to his "hi" message and then ghosted him, but on the train I suddenly develop an interest in side quests before the final boss, so we have a nice conversation before I arrive at the university.
> Besides my fellow exchange students, most of the other people taking it are significantly older, mostly from elsewhere in Southeast Asia. The guy who is assigned the seat next to me is mildly intimidating in how he doesn't even wait for the translation of the instructions.
> For once in my life, I'm not the fastest at a test, but when I finally do finish, it tells me I got a B1 (teacher needed us to get A1, expected the smarter students to get A2, both below B1). I couldn't understand most of the questions, which I took as a sign I was getting most of them right since the computerized test gives you harder questions when you get one right. My flawless technique of choosing the answer that sounds the best to my ear worked wonders though, even on the reading part where I was just guessing how the unfamiliar characters sounded. I did get B1 on the mock test I took online a month ago, so I didn't really learn a whole bunch from the TOCFL class they made us take all month though.
> Waiting for my host family to pick me up, I finally find the university bookstore, which is the best bookstore I've found so far and also had a very nice and large English book section on various mathematical and scientific subjects, which I somehow convinced myself not to buy.
> Then it was to the car for a two-ish hour drive to Zhushan, my host mother's family home. I met her parents and two of her siblings and got to eat a delicious meal which was only 25% (4 out of 12 dishes) bamboo. I was beginning to see why it was called "Bamboo Mountain." My parents kept calling it the country side, but the city is still bigger than the closest city to my home town... After dinner, though, it was back in the car. I'd been expecting to stay the night at the family home, but up into the mountains we went.
> Besides bamboo, there's several tea plantations in the mountains, and you could smell the tea leaves in the wind. The night view of the city from above was really nice, and just when I thought it couldn't get any better, we came to our destination. Across the road was an old fashioned open air restaurant area that was to die for, but to my shock my brother immediately got out of the car and ran over there. It turns out the building we parked in front of wasn't actually our destination, and that we weren't staying in a mountain hotel--this was the restaurant and house of the aunt I had met on my first day.
> After getting out our stuff, everyone walked down the mountain road to the point where there weren't street lights, and where there were fireflies. I flexed my impeccable firefly catching skills. Once back at the house, my cousin finally decided to accept me via attacking me with an organized pillow attack with Pudding. I mostly let them beat each other up, but I had no qualms at beating them up via Mario Kart. We played three tournaments, then fought each other in Super Smash Bros and Super Bomberman, before finally being forced to go to bed by the parents past midnight.

2024.05.19
> Breakfast was toast, but fancy (not really) mountain toast: spread peanut butter, a slice of tomato, pork floss, and a fried egg. Boiled sweet potatoes and fresh melon to finish off the meal and a cup of coffee lovingly brewed by my new favorite cousin.
> After breakfast, it was to work. Our cousin showed us how to wash off the bamboo her mom had cut the day before, and then we got to cut it up.
> Next up was visiting one of the tea plantations, where me, Pudding, and Little Apple (the cousin), all piled on the four wheeler our aunt was driving. Half way there, she took her hands off the handlebars and put my hands on, so I found that driving a four wheeler on curvy mountain roads is actually significantly easier than driving a van across a parking lot. Me and Pudding chased each other around with sticks as we appreciated the view, and then we all went back.
> Once home again, our aunt showed us how to identify good bamboo shoots and harvest them in the forest behind the house. All of us kid went back upstairs to play more Mario Kart while we waited for lunch, which was 50% (3 out of 6 dishes) bamboo this time, and all super delicious.
> In the afternoon, we alternated between spraying each other with the hose, racing up and down the road, and sitting in the restaurant. I've been to a lot of cool places in Taiwan, but so far I'd been fine never coming back because I knew it would never be the same again. Zhushan, however? I could stay here forever and ever.
> Eventually, we had to go back. Pudding got an ugly haircut from our aunt, and then back in the car we went, Pudding grieving his hair. We got home around dinner time: dumpling, no bamboo.

2024.05.20
> Back to school... I spent Mandarin class figuring out how to rewrite one of the Castle Country scenes that I felt did the worst disservice to one of the characters involved, which turned out to just make it a vaguely ridiculous misunderstanding.

2024.05.21
> Chinese class is now even more boring, since all our classes are the student teacher classes. The student teachers are very cute but the difficulty level is so low even my other classmates are complaining about it.
> I vicariously spoil Emanuel about various small events in the current Seafort book he's one (already to number three...) and draw a character using only Chinese characters in the margin of my worksheets, along with the usual array of Castle Country and Seafort doodles.

2024.05.22
> I'm on a roll with Castle Country breakthroughs this week, because I realize by changing one thing I can not only fix at least three plot holes but also incorporate another idea I thought I was going to have to use on a future project.
> In the afternoon, my classmates have an English presentation competition, which I get to watch. The topics range from "cats are cute" to "breakdown of the themes and lessons from Princess Mononoke" to "how and why should Taiwanese students become more involved in international affairs (student protests for Palestine)" to "what is peer pressure." I had to betray my classmates to the student from 201 with a British accent who gave the international affairs presentation and rightfully won, but they all did crazy well.

2024.05.24
> During my two free periods in the morning, I try to ink a piece by hand, get bored, and read a lot more of the Bible. Once again, I must begrudgingly admit that Feintuch knew what he was doing with the last words of Vax Holser within the context of a couple specific verses from Proverbs.
> At home I draw two new Castle Country pieces in MS Paint and learn that my favorite Taiwanese artist is finally selling the Bravern keychain I've been waiting for him to release.... at a convention in Taipei tomorrow, which I can't go to because I already agreed to go to a beach cleaning event with my first host family.

2024.05.23
> Today's Chinese class is mostly wedding-related vocabulary, which is funny because one of the doodles on my notes from last class was a very unhappy Seafort and Tolliver marriage, so I am now legally obligated to draw them getting married a whole lot more on my notes this time. Drawing fanart is a surprisingly good way to remember vocab phrases.

2024.05.25
> I clean the beach while my host sister yells at me for saying I want to eat all the cute things, and even the Bravern keychain thing works out because one of my friends had a different errand in Taipei and was more than happy to go check out the con for me.
> In the evening, my cousin and aunt from Zhushan visit so we stay up late playing Mario Kart and Super Smash Bros.

2024.05.26
> We visit a cute restaurant in the mountains of Toufen with everyone, which had good food, but the sort that gave the impression of food fairies would feed unsuspecting humans while trying to lure them into the woods forever. The combination of flavors was always slightly off and they just keep bringing more and more courses. The only completely normal dish was the soup, but all soup in pretty magical, and the glass bowl it was in was made in the city an hour away from my hometown on the other side of the world.

2024.05.27
> Today, Nicholas Seafort is responsible for me nearly falling down the stairs, because I'm thinking about those guys while playing badminton again and decide to stay after class to help put nets away when it starts raining, so I have to run back to the main building before it starts pouring.
> I end up rereading the entire end of Fisherman's Hope while waiting for Emanuel to get to it, and at the moment I'm impressed by how hard the theology bit at the end hits, as soon as I step outside to touch grass (and walk home) I realize that the paradox isn't even a paradox and I was just getting way too into Seafort's Calvinist grindset. God can both forgive him and not condone his actions, which he has some weird aversion to believing.
> I've started working on an animation in MS Paint, but I don't know if I'll ever get around to finishing it.

2024.05.28
> I finally reunite with the friend who went to the con for me, and the Bravern keychain is as cute as I imagined. I pay him back for both the keychain and entrance ticket.
> I've been relatively indifferent to the whole AI art thing going on because I simply don't engage in any spaces where AI art is present, but Pinterest gets my hopes up with a really cool looking 80s sci-fi cover, which turns out to not be an 80s sci-fi cover but just an AI generated image. Now I'm an AI hater forever, because it baited me with Seafort-adjacent space navy men.

2024.05.29
> I'd previously mentioned the Biblical city of Tyre/Seafort character Philip Tyre connection before, but while I'm reading today I learn that not only was the city destroyed by God, it was also supposed to be restored to it's righteous state 70 years after the fact. Given that Philip Tyre died to a magic space fish, it is entirely reasonable to hypothesize that he could simply blip back into existence 70 years later, since his death happened offscreen and the only evidence we have for it is that his radio cut off when he assumedly hit the fish.
> I'm discussing this possibility with Emanuel before I realize that I should probably read the next couple of books to learn what the future will actually look like in 70 years before I start writing fanfiction about it, when it hits me. I should read. The next couple books.
> I have my final presentation for Chinese class tomorrow, but instead of practicing for it, I open up Voices of Hope.

2024.05.30
> I also fail to practice the presentation in the morning, because I'm still reading Voices of Hope. Despite this, my presentation goes fine even though I accidentally skip one part in the morning practice run and a different part for the real deal in the afternoon. I'm also the only person to do it without a script, because I had assumed we couldn't use scripts during the actual presentation.
> My fellow classmates did a pretty good job too, though the problem with the topics we all chose meant that most of them were using vocabulary they learned specifically for that presentation, rendering it incomprehensible to the rest of us students. My topic was American and Taiwanese school systems, so I tried to use mostly words we already knew, with only three exception that I felt were pretty understandable in context. (My topic choice, which I momentarily regretted when I learned we could do literally anything and I didn't somehow make it about Feintuch, turned out to be very smart because one of my high school teachers asked me to present on the very same issue to my classmates sometime next week.)
> I walk with Owen and Emanuel to the train station, which will probably be the last time I ever see Owen again because he's leaving on Sunday, and then I go back home to read.
> In the span of 24 hours, I finish Voices of Hope, the fifth book in the Seafort Saga. This is the first book to not only be narrated by someone other than Seafort, but also to switch narrators, and is also perhaps my favorite. Our two new protagonists, P. T. Seafort (Seafort's son, an autistic gifted kid named after the one and only Philip Tyre) and Jared Tenere (son of Adam Tenere, one of the midshipman from the last book who now works for Seafort) are endlessly charming (if trying to destroy the world economy because you're convinced everyone hates you is charming, in Jared's case, but that's pretty deserved because everyone does actually hate the poor kid for no good reason), even if they suffer from the classic Feintuch best friend curse. It's both incredibly relevant to current events and also managed to predict both 9/11 and Homestuck.

2024.05.31
> School. I learn they're making me go Tuesdays and Thursdays now that Chinese class is over, but they're just making me sit in the library instead of giving me classes, which seems even meaner.
> After school, my host mom takes me and my brother to the meeting of some other fancy organization that they're apparently apart of, and I watch my host father get an award, though he doesn't start shouting about how corrupt the whole thing is because he isn't Seafort (this is probably a blessing), which Seafort does in the section of the book I'm reading while I sit there.
> After my phone dies and I can't read anymore, I draw P. T. and Jared on napkins until my host grandpa tries to steal them because he likes them so much. I get them back by trading a doodle I did of the room we're in. I play two rounds of Mario Kart with brother and cousin before bed, but when I say bed, I mean finishing book six, Patriarch's Hope.
> Patriarch's Hope was the book that haunted me when I was first trying to find the Seafort Saga. It was the only book I could find, both in libraries and tiny bookstores in Baltimore. I even tried just starting with it, but it was so unbearably boring I gave that up. Even now, with my love of Seafort, the first chapter was for some reason exceptionally boring and I cannot fault my past self.
> We're back to Seafort as a narrator, which I'm both disappointed and worried about, because I know Jared is going to die at some point and I'm becoming increasingly worried that he's died in the timeskip between this book and the last. Instead, beyond my wildest expectations, I learn the reason we've abandoned PT and Jared as narrators to go back to Seafort is because they've successfully beaten the Feintuch best friend curse, and have been happily married for five years. Given how much emphasis Feintuch put on showing how their relationship in the last book paralleled Seafort and his childhood best friend Jason (and Rodrigo and Rustin, if we consider the other series), this is mildly insane.
> Of course, when I say "breaking the best friend curse" I only mean the figuring out the feelings part. It's still a Seafort book, so 90% of the characters are dead by the end. Tolliver finally shows up in the epilogue now that Seafort's single again though, and despite it all, Feintuch manages to end the book on a nearly happy note. While perhaps not as beloved as the previous book, Patriarch's Hope is also quite nice, and I think for the current moment, it's going to be enough. There's still one more released book, but I'm satisfied enough with how things currently are to make the mature decision that I don't want them to change.
> I go to bed around 1 AM.

2024.06.01
> In the morning, my aunt and cousin leave. I don't do much in the morning, other than a couple MS Paint Seafort doodles.
> In the afternoon, however, I realize the game I'd been downloading incredibly slowly finally finished in the background, so I could finally play it. Bully: Scholarship Edition. I only play a little bit because it crashes about half an hour in and I realize I hadn't saved since the function was introduced in the beginning, but it's fun so far.

2024.06.02
> I finish packing my things for the finally Rotary trip and off we go. Because my parents are slow to leave, I nearly end up missing the bus, but I find it in the end.
> The biggest difference between the previous Rotary trips is that this time, we have the Taiwanese outbound students that are going on exchange next year with us. I already know two, one of my classmates (going to France) and my second host sister (going to Texas).
> The first stop is a temple with a giant Buddha statue you can walk around inside and a very heavy spear you can try to lift that belonged to Lord Guan. There's a couple stories in the Three Kingdoms where he shows up and before even doing anything, all the troublemakers run off scared, which I now completely understand if bro was holding a spear like that onehanded.
> After lunch, which we have to sit with the outbounds for our countries for (the American students are cool, but none of them are going to where I live so I don't have much helpful advice), we also visit a sock factory. I finally find the arm coolers I always see old people wearing and buy myself a pair, as well as a very expensive pair of socks that supposedly won't retain odors for 15 days. I have the money to spare, and it's funny if the most expensive thing I buy here is a pair of socks.
> The evening is the highlight, though, because we're having dinner on a boat. The food is mediocre and the tour guide talks exclusively in Chinese so I don't really follow along, but as soon as I finish my food I permanently install myself at one of the windows below deck to get the best view of all the giant cargo ships that we pass by in the harbor. When we get to the end and start turning around, me and Emanuel play a game to guess what country each of the ships come from. We guess wrong every single time, but it's cool to see how many different countries there are (Sierra Leone, Hong Kong, Mongolia). I think wistfully of my Plan B (SUNY Maritime), and wonder if maybe the reason my financial aid is so delayed is because God really just wants me to go there instead.
> Our hotel for the night is so fancy they have bellhops with silver suits on, but no toothbrushes to charge you for in the bathroom. There is a bathtub, so I take my first warm bath in a long time.

2024.06.03
> After hotel breakfast, we're back on the road.
> The morning activity is go-kart racing, but because of inflation the money we paid at the beginning of the exchange apparently isn't enough to cover to price of a kart, so if we want to play we have to pay ourselves. I deign to sit on the side and draw in my sketchbook.
> I've been talking too much about the MSI album I've had on repeat for the last two days to Emanuel, so I cede to his request to listen to it on the longer section of the bus ride. I momentarily consider the possibility that I'm ruining how he's sees me, and then remember he can see the comments I leave on the Seafort books so there is no surprise here. > In the afternoon, we walk around a natural park with really pretty sea cliffs and then go to a beach to swim, which I can't participate in. I end up taking photos for everyone else and drawing more.
> Hotel Number 2 is less fancy, but the beds are bigger and there's finally a giant staircase instead of just elevators. The Rotex put together a party, but after the mandatory game part, I slip out to return to my room, take another long bath, and accidentally follow through on an earlier joke to make space navy OCs.
> When Eli gets back, we watch scary story videos together and then go to bed.

2024.06.04
> We visit An Ping Old Street today, where I buy winter melon tea, look through a retro manga cafe (I can't tell if you're allowed to actually buy the books or if you're just supposed to read while you eat, so I regretfully leave the golf manga behind), and order at a sit-in restaurant by myself for the first time (Emanuel is there too but I'm the one ordering so it still counts). We get the shrimp version of Taiwanese oyster omelets, traditional style savory taro cake, and the filled toast that you only find in An Ping because of the Dutch.
> We visit a castle nearby but don't have time to visit the Dutch fort, which I've seen from a distance and thought looked lame, but this time got to see all the cool brick work at the bottom and was therefore a little bummed out I couldn't get a closer look.
> Before dinner we go to a market housed in the old Japanese general village, where I spend the rest of the money I bought on the trip at a trinket shop that divides their gems based on the five elements. Based on my birth year, I'm wood, which has the ugliest trinkets, but I eventually find a cute jade charm to add next to my fish keychain and also get a cool golden cross from the wood table, which the enthusiastic old guy thankfully doesn't tell me I can't do.
> In the evening, after Eli leaves to go party, I listen to another MSI album (Less than Three) which I also like a lot. Eli returns during one of the... choice songs, but if she's paying attention to the lyrics she doesn't say anything.

2024.06.05
> We spend the morning in a forest recreational area I forgot the name of, where there's a pretty lake and old street full of friendly vendors. I have a moment of weakness and take the free sample from one of the dried fruit guys, but after I tell him it tastes good he lets us go without asking us to buy things with money I don't have. Actually, I do have just enough money to buy a round of the really fragrant wood from the incense lady, and then I really am out.
> We have lunch at a steak place, but they don't give me the fish option so I just have the noodles. I realize that on this trip I've probably talked to my second host sister more than I ever did the entire time we lived together.
> On the final long bus ride back home, I let Emanuel listen to the other album and then laugh when Cain recommends the very same album to me after the fact.
> Eli kindly lets me carry her bag along with mine, which I have to powerlift up the stairs as we rush to catch the train whose doors nearly close on my leg as we jump on. Her mom cooks me dinner, though, and I get to play with their cat so it evens out. My host family gets back late, so I only say hi before going to bed (after a little bit of Bully, because I missed that game and also finally downloaded the fanmade patch that makes it not crash all the time).

2024.06.06
> First day of Tuesday/Thursday class (all day in library).
> Library lady makes me write cards to my classmates, teacher, and host families. It's boring but I realize once I'm done that I've written six very verbose thank you cards entirely in Chinese. Progress is cool I guess.
> I do a lesson of calculus (the one question I don't understand is the only one they don't give an explanation for...), play around on my phone. For lunch I go downstairs to the cafeteria beneath the library, which not only has my favorite drink I can only find sometimes at convenient stores, but also still has boxed lunches that you can buy (at the main store, they're always sold out before lunch). My host parents didn't buy school lunches for me this month, so I have to fend for myself here. My old computer teacher sees me returning with my haul and offers me a zongzi, which is yummier than I thought despite the meat.
> After lunch, I slip up to the stacks at the top floor. I wander around a bit, find the English section, which has some Orwell I've been meaning to read, but I find an ancient tome on the bottom shelf with Steinbeck's name, so I pick that one up. It's a collection of works from Noble Literary Prize winners. The first section is about William Faulkner, who I've never read before, but find myself enjoying. A Rose for Emily is short and good, so I start on the longer piece, As I Lay Dying.
> I've brought my computer (my back did not enjoy the heavier backpack on the walk to school), so I play a bit of Bully too.
> Finally, library lady summons me to print and laminate the cards, and I spend the rest of my school day running around to do that and talking to a girl who once helped me find my gym class. Library lady lets me use her name to check out my book.

2024.06.07
> Friday classes are pretty normal. I spend my library period in the stacks again, though I strategically sit on the other side of the room, which only has untouched reference books and is half hidden by the wall to the bathroom, as opposed to my open and vulnerable desk from last time which smelled better because it was right next to all the books but also meant students occasionally walked by.
> I don't get to go home at my normal time today, though. My class is having a farewell party (I'm still here for over two weeks). In Taiwanese fashion, it's mostly speeches. I was warned before hand, but everyone keeps clapping before I can get through my first section, so I give up and let them clap me away. Then there's too many photos, and then I'm finally finally released.

2024.06.08
> Lazy morning, I sleep in late. In the evening, we have a Rotary meeting/party. My brother just has shorts on, so I figure my outfit is probably fine. Instead, I feel terribly underdressed at the fancy dress party with my bright pink Inuyasha t-shirt and jeans.
> I play chess with the kids I usually hang out with. They don't know how, but since the app shows you the options for where to move, they figure it out. One would hope I could play better against elementary schoolers with no concept of forethought, but in their naivety they ruin all the plans I make. I still win in the end, but they get one draw.

2024.06.09
> I sleep in even later today, because I was up till 2AM last night. Cousin and aunt visit, so we all go to Nanliao to a restaurant against the water to watch the dragonboat races. The food is really good and I like hanging out with my family.
> After the typical rounds of Mario Kart and Super Smash Bros (I've discovered my winning character: Roy), I head to bed. Emanuel finishes Seafort Book 5 so I skim through my comments on Book 6, only to reread the entire epilogue. I think about how well Feintuch set up for the next book and finally surrender to the temptation. I will finish the series.
> I only stay up until 1AM tonight, because I need to get up by 9 tomorrow and also because I can imagine Seafort getting mad at me.

2024.06.10
> I wake up at 5AM, go back to bed, and then wake with my alarm at 6AM. We head out early since we have a longer drive today (the mountains, somewhere).
> We walk through an old street where I buy a leather cuff. Not because it reminds me of a similar accessory of a Bully character, because I hate that guy.
> Lunch at a restaurant that I don't love, except for the soup. I love the soup. The bowl is as big as my head, but that won't stop me. Afterwards, I pay for my gluttony by chucking it up in a squat toilet. Still tasted good, still worth it.
> Afterwards, we wait for our turn on the train bikes. There's a decommissioned railroad through the mountains that now serves as a tourist attraction, where you can ride multi-seat "bikes" shaped like small train cars on the tracks. It's really pretty.
> We go home, I read more Seafort. In the end, I can't finish this one in a single day because I do have school tomorrow, but I get through the last 150 pages as soon as I wake up, so I'll talk about it now.
> I decided to read Voices of Hope because I wanted to see Seafort with his new crew, clearly picked to keep him as far away from Earth politics as possible. Instead, our main character is the son of Derek Carr. He's goes through the typical Feintuch motions in his own unique way. I get attached. And then Seafort shows up again. You see, the problem here is that Jared is the Seafort hater incarnate. This, as usual, does not stop Seafort from adopting another son. Most of the haters I've found on old internet forums stopped reading long before this book, but I wonder how those who stuck through felt about that one. Feintuch brings back the fish. But this time, God gives Seafort a chance to make up for his past sins against them.
> He only realizes after the death of Carr Jr's best friend, in a sequence of events so unsubtle it's beautiful, as Feintuch shoves them into a closet to hide from the (nonviolent) alien. Kevin, the best friend, makes up his mind. He won't die in a closet (his words, not mine). He tells Carr Jr he likes him, apologizes for being rude to him, and tries to leave the closet to face the alien. Carr Jr tries to drag him back in. He fails. The ship's crew finally take their chance to shoot the alien, which explodes upon death, taking Kevin with him. Guy came out of the closet and Feintuch kills him for it. Real subtle, Feintuch. Real subtle.
> In the end, it's actually Kevin's repressed feelings that allow them to communicate with the aliens at all, as Carr Jr is able to understand the alien's motion by remembering how he and Kevin used to wrestle. Understanding the alien continues to be the only thing going for Carr Jr, as the rest of the crew begs Seafort to beach his insane son but the alien refuses to communicate with anyone else. Seafort's grows further distant from the Church he once worshipped. He falls in love with the host mother of his daughter (we are, perhaps, mercifully saved from Seafort as a girl dad by the fact she is only four), despite the woman's violent (deserved) murder of a bishop on live TV. Not sure how he thinks marrying her will protect her, given how his last three wives went, but a man can dream. I fear for Tolliver, as both he and Seafort become increasingly less discreet in the language they use to describe their feelings for each other, especially given the earlier closet incident, but he once again survives.
> Three times, Feintuch dangles the death of Seafort over my head. Each time, I pray it's true. Each time, it's not. In the end, he wraps it up well enough (it's still wide open, but I've learned not everything needs an end) that I decide I don't mind never knowing what was supposed to be in the final book, which had been nearly finished at the time of his death and was never followed up on by his family. Rodrigo has taught me well, perhaps, but I find myself more satisfied with this ending than that one. The final lines of the book, as Carr Jr finally decides he believes in the God he spent the entire book trying to reject, are "Someday, we're going to have a talk, You and I." Feintuch's talking to Him now. There couldn't be a better ending.

2024.06.11
> Today, I have the whole day free in the library. I do another lesson of calculus, read some more of the the Noble Prize Library book (I get through Eugene O'Neill, who I like less than Faulkner, but Homecoming wasn't bad).
> I talk to my friends until they go to sleep.
> I wander around the library some more. The downstairs part has all the fancy new books, but the third floor, where I've taken to lurking, in the "storage section." It's more recognizable as a library to me, shelves upon shelves of books instead of the small decorative stands downstairs. All except the oldest books, which don't have paper covers, have incredibly sun damaged spines, pale blues and pinks that make the titles hard to read. The English section is mostly children's' books, which makes sense, with the exception of the bottom shelf of Noble Prize Library books, which I'm not entirely sure anyone else has ever read since they were bought, and the side of one shelf made up of textbooks. They have a long series of TIME History textbooks from the early 90s that have a nice writing style, so I pick up the first one (pre-history) to read through at a later point. The art section is a humorous patchwork of giant reference books of Renaissance painters and BL manga, and while the programming section is large enough to have an entire shelf dedicated to various Basic languages, there's no Applesoft Basic (this makes since, since the Apple II was never released here, but whatever).

2024.06.12
> Wednesday classes. The music teacher lets me read instead of playing ukulele, hopefully because she remembers she already made me go through this class twice last semester.
> We have our last comic club meeting. I get this semester's artbook and spend most of my time talking to Ariel, the girl I met at my first meeting. We've been sitting next to each other since, but haven't talked this much since the first time.

2024.06.13
> I finish the Noble Prize Library book with the section on Steinbeck, the whole reason I picked up the book in the first. The book they choose for him is In Dubious Battle. It's a precursor to his more famous The Grapes of Wrath, and you can definitely see the later improvements in his writing, but I quite enjoyed it, especially the development of the main character. One thing I've noticed moreso in these older books is the abruptness of the endings. Perhaps it makes me appreciate Feintuch more.
> When I woke up, it was to an email from the Housing services at the university I'll be going to next fall, telling me they had my housing assignment ready. The housing portal crashed and stayed down for most of the day, though, in the frantic freshman rush. It's not until evening that it finally lets me in, and I learn that I not only got into the arts program house I was hoping for, but also was lucky enough to get a single! I'm happy enough to even post a message on one of the student groups asking if anyone else who'll be staying there wants to talk beforehand.
> A final piece of good news: I finish the main story of Bully today. I had been going through it faster than intended, mostly because I wanted to see Gary again, and while my wish was finally granted, it was only to through him through a roof. All's well that ends well, I suppose (for me, not Gary. He got expelled).
> Artfight is soon approaching too, so I get my first two refs done for Castle Country after deciding I'll do all three of my stories this year.

2024.06.14
> I read more of my pre-history textbook in my morning free periods, and then return to it later when neither teacher nor students shows up for my after-lunch art class.
> I think about preparing for my final speech tomorrow, and instead spend my time looking through Bully fanfiction and watching Challengers (I know the characters' names and did not just call them by those of Seafort characters. No way).
> My university finally gives me my financial aid offer. Though my expected need has gone up, tuition has gone up more. It is what it is, and I'm glad to finally have it. I look through student job listings and then through class options when one of my dormmates asks me about what I'm thinking of taking. My lack of a high school calculus course seems determined to make getting all my math credits impossible, but I'll try to figure it out again later.

2024.06.15
> I spend the morning being mostly lazy and still not preparing for my presentation. I try and fail to track down Bully mods that were only ever posted on websites that stopped working years ago.
> Then it's the afternoon, and time for the Rotary farewell party. I dress up nice, realize that I've somehow lost my antique Spock pin that used to be on my blazer. I restrain myself from explaining how I think the Bully storyline could have been majorly improved to Emanuel, because he actually did prepare for his speech and is working hard at keeping it in his head.
> I prepare to face the consequences of my actions. I walk up there, and start talking about whatever seems easiest to talk about: my Earth Science class. I get the judges to laugh, I stumble over my words, I sit back down and go back to reading Midshipman Hornblower. I don't win, nor did I expect to, but I was able to do a speech in a language I barely speak with essentially no preparation, something I couldn't even do in English at this time last year.
> After a less than mediocre dinner (I find myself missing real onion rings, and despair at the fact the best piece of bread I've had all year is one of those incredibly dry dinner rolls) and several more tear-filled speeches, it's party time. I didn't go to my high school prom last year. I went to an afterparty and had fun with friends, but I don't like dancing. Okay, I like dancing, just not in front of people. Except, I realized, I don't actually care anymore. The music was bad and Eli was definitely making fun of me when she said she really liked my "experimental dance style," but I'm having too much fun to care. If I'd gone to prom last year, I wouldn't have liked it. I don't know if I would've liked it if I'd stayed home and went this year. I've grown, though, and whether or not it was because of my year here, I'm happy about that.

2024.06.16
> I sleep in, not as late as I'd like, because my host grandparents are taking me and Pudding out for breakfast. I get a mushroom omelet, remember that it's a real omelet with real eggs and not a delicious chickpea flower one like the ones my mom makes, and manage to force myself through half of it. The apple tea is good, at least.
> In the evening, we go out to eat again with my host father at a Japanese place, which is decent. I duel with umbrellas against Pudding on the way back to the car.
> I finish the other three reference sheets for the rest of the Castle Country characters, so now I only have the other two stories left to get done before July.

2024.06.17
> I now have a data limit with the new SIM card (my old one was returned since it's original owner, the daughter of my first host family, is returning to the country), so I spend the day reading the txt file I have of the entire Horatio Hornblower series. I finish the first book, Midshipman Hornblower, so now I'll complain about it.
> I'd only heard about Hornblower because the Seafort Saga gets compared to it in the reviews of every book. I like Seafort, so surely it's apparently more popular predecessor must be good too (the Goodreads page has more than four times the reviews, and has 0.7 more stars). Instead, I'm a little confused. Seafort gets trashed on a lot, for very fair reasons. He's too in his own head, his overwhelming sense of honor makes him depressing to read, it's inconceivable how his crews likes him or how he continues to be promoted, etc, etc. Feintuch, as much as I like him, is no writing god, and I'm more than happy to admit that. After Hornblower, though? The improvements he made on his predecessor are near endless.
> Right away, the comparisons between Seafort and Hornblower make sense. 17 year old midshipmen who are out of place and awkward among their respective crews. Hornblower spends the first chapter being depressed to the point of discomfort to me, and that's coming from someone who loves Seafort. At least, I later learn, at least Hornblower is evokes emotion when he's being depressed. He gets over it, sinks the first ship given to him, gets kidnapped by the French, burns down the French ship, and continues to be generally incompetent, with the occasional unexpected flash of common sense. We don't get to see him get close to his crewmates. There's one guy who is once referred to as "his friend" in a later chapter, which completed stumped me, given the fact that every other time we've seen the two interact was in a vaguely hostile professional setting. There's a single sentence, when he gets command of his third ship, where he has to be cold to a fellow midshipman "he had been playing on the deck with just last week." This is the extent of the personal feelings we get from him. What he does off duty is a mystery.
> They make a point to tell him how weird it is that he's enlisting in the fleet at the late age of 17 in the first chapter, but we never get any follow up on that. We know he's decently well educated, but absolutely nothing else of his background. I can only assume this will be further elaborated in future books, but it makes for a boring first book.
> Perhaps my biggest single problem is the promotion, specifically because I saw a review of a Seafort book that once called his promotion "unrealistic and undeserved, as opposed to Hornblower's". Seafort certainly didn't deserve his promotion, but he and everyone else knows that. He gets it under extreme duress after arguing the finer points of naval law in order to convince the rest of the crew to promote Vax Holser instead, yet does well in the circumstances he's forced into, saving the ship from a technical error no one else would've thought to look for. Hornblower gets promoted several months into being a Spanish prisoner of war (the extent we know of how he feels about this is bad. They tell us it's not the conditions, because those aren't much different from shipside, but the knowledge that he's a captive that gets to him. They just tell us this, and don't actually bother to show it, of course) for no apparent reason other than the fact Admiralty possibly wanted him to enjoy his prisoner hood in a slightly nice cabin, which he continues in for the next year and a half before finally being freed by the Spanish king.
> In conclusion, I think Seafort is a far more interesting narrator than Hornblower, between interpersonal relationships and general cohesiveness of the plot, but most of that is probably personal preference. I'll read the rest of the series, to be fair to our dear Horatio, but my hopes aren't terribly high.

2024.06.18
> I spend the first period of my library day learning how to brew the coffee I roasted last week, which turns out to have quite a pleasant taste.
> The taste is only made better when the library lady asks me if I just want to stay in the library for the rest of the week/next Monday, since all my classes will just be preparation for the final exam. I'd brought both my math and Earth Science textbook to spend today preparing for the related practice exams, so I enthusiastically tell her I'd much rather stay in the library and the textbooks stay in my bag untouched.
> I read Orwell's Animal Farm in a single sitting, another chapter of the prehistory book, and the short story between Hornblower books 1 and 2. I like it better than the first book, so Hornblower has hope.
> On the way home, I pass the same walking school bus twice (a group of elementary students being herded to their respective homes by a teacher), since after I pass them the first time I duck into a Hi-Mart to buy my favorite grapefruit coconut jelly honey tea (I've only ever found this drink in this specific Hi-Mart and the Family Mart at Tsinghua University. Most convenient stores carry the other two similar drinks made by the same company, but not this one, for some reason), instant noodles for my lunch tomorrow, and a roll of sour gummies.
> As soon as I get home and empty my pockets I take a shower (now that I'm going to school everyday of the week, I need to be faster with clothes washing as to not get my uniform too sweaty--I switch between the uniform shirt and my class shirt but have to wear the shorts two days in a row before I can wash them). It's hot enough for a cold shower, and the post-shower temperature is perfect. I throw my shirt over my shoulder and put in my load of laundry before washing the dishes, feeling very distinctly alive.
> I think about drawing but spend the rest of my afternoon doing very little at all, and eat my dinner while watching "Stand By Me," a movie I both enjoyed and now wonder about the influence it had on Feintuch's work.

2024.06.19
> I go through another chapter of the prehistory book, do more studies on how to draw Bully characters--somehow, the act of transferring the 3D models into 2D form in my sketchbook makes me miss the Bargue plates that I had been working through at the beginning of the school year.
> I start Thus Spoke Zarathustra, picked up from the English section as I flip through books from my childhood--A Little Princess, Bud Not Buddy, and Bridge to Terabithia--that I can't quite bring myself to read in full. On my way back to my seat, I see a book with a diagram of a car engine on the front, and when I go to look through it, I find the Chinese translation of Zarathustra, shelved completely incorrectly, on the same shelf.
> Lunch is a Japanese brand of cup noodle I've learned to love recently--not only is the flavor quite nice, but the dried vegetable packet has several kernels of corn. I try to sleep a bit afterwards, but it's too hot to drift off.
> Tonight's movie is "Trainspotting," which was perhaps not the best choice of a film to watch while eating dinner, but nonetheless very enjoyable even if it had nothing to do with trains. Though the main character is perhaps not the sort of person one should emulate, I can look forward to cutting my hair more now.
> For the first time in a while, I'm in bed by 10PM.

2024.06.20
> I get through another lesson of my calculus course--I realize that I've perfectly timed it so that if I continue to do a lesson a day for all my days left in the library, I'll finish the course on my last day. As usual, the only questions I don't get are the ones that don't have explanation, so I mark them with question marks in my notebook and pretend that I'll look into the matter later.
> I finish the last chapter of the first history book (The Human Dawn). Next up is The Age of God-Kings, which I get through the first chapter of too.
> I bought another one of the cheap notebooks from the general store sometime last week and have decided to use it for planning and writing my Seafort ripoff. I commit the premise and short descriptions of the main characters' roles in the story to paper.
> I return to the stacks after lunch, once I'm sure my classmate is coming to say hi tomorrow instead of today and after a lunch of taro bread and green bean soup--I've been wanting to try that soup since I first saw it in the pool's vending machine when I would lurk next to it, waiting for the previous class to leave, last fall. I should've expected it's a sweet soup, the same as red bean soup but with different colored beans, which means my fears of a strangely bitter soup are allayed even if my thirst for a nice salty soup are dashed too.
> I finally edit together the videos I took at the beginning of the semester for a "day in the life at high school" vlog, deciding to record the audio another day. When I try my hand at drawing Peter Kowalski from Bully today, my art somehow turns out more realistic than the game model, which was not quite the direction I wanted to go but a pleasant to surprise to learn I'm capable of getting that close to realism.
> I don't watch a movie tonight, since I eat with my family (udon noodles--there's that salty soup I was looking for). Since I took a shower after school, I initially think I'm going to surprise myself by going to be by 9PM. Instead, I spend an hour and half going through what may be the world's stupidest thread on that old forum Feintuch use to frequent (he's not present in it, given that it's two years after his passing, but Seafort is brought up near the end).
> I start every paragraph with the word "I" for no apparent reason.

2024.06.21
> I spend my first period working through the pre-orientation Canvas course for my college--it's just about graduation requirements and schedule planning, which I'd mostly already learned on my own time, but the information about how advising works was new.
> Looking through the mock schedule I made earlier in the week, I finally figure out how to fit in all my required math credits. For the astronomy degree, they give you the option between two different courses for most math credits: a calculus for engineers course or a "just calculus" course. I had instinctively rejected the engineering course, but the first math class in the "just calculus" course is Calculus 2, and since I don't have an equivalent AP credit to skip Calculus 1, I would have to take that beforehand. It turns out, however, that the Calculus for Engineers only requires you having previously taken a course included differential and integral calculus--this I have (I took AP Calc AB last year online for funsies, but didn't take the exam).
> Afterwards, I finish the next the three chapters of The Age of God-Kings, completing that book in the series. Another calculus lesson that I'm able to completely comprehend for once.
> Kimchi Shin Ramen and a red bean bun that one of the library ladies gave me for lunch, along with Lieutenant Hornblower for entertainment. I finish the book, but I'll talk about it tomorrow.
> During the break period, one of my classmates comes to deliver this year's school t-shirt that I ordered and we have a nice conversation. She ends up inviting me to go to a douhua (tofu pudding) place near the school after class, and so, on my third to last day of school, I hang out with a classmate outside of school.
> The shop is in the opposite direction of my house and it's blazing hot today, but at least that means I'm appreciative of the shaved iced on top for once. The place is both inexpensive and very delicious, and we end up talking for nearly two hours on topics ranging from exchange programs (she's going to France next year), language learning, and Taiwanese slang. I wouldn't do it again, but that's because of the sheer quantity of douhua that completely ruined my appetite for dinner and not because of the company, for once.

2024.06.22
> My last truly lazy day--tomorrow I have my final Rotary dinner, Monday and Tuesday I have class, and then I'll be travelling until Saturday and using Sunday to pack.
> I use it well, and by well, I mean doing nothing at all. I try to work on reference sheets for Art Fight, but I can't force myself to hold my stylus for more than five minutes before I get bored.
> I start watching Falling Down for my evening movie, but I end up pausing it and playing Minecraft with Xie An instead, which is a far more enjoyable use of time.
> Now, Liuetenant Hornblower: Unlike the first book of the Hornblower series, this one isn't actually narrated by Hornblower. Instead, we have Lieutenant Bush, a senior to Hornblower, who is infinitely nicer for the fact that he actually mentions his feelings on occasion. Even Hornblower seems more likeable in this book, which is perhaps a combination of his own personal growth and the fact that we can only observe him from an outside perspective, which lets one pretend there's actually something going on inside that head of his.
> The first arc of the book deals with their insane captain, who eventually is removed from service after a mysterious fall. This is probably the reason we don't have Hornblower as narrator, since it's vaguely implied that either Hornblower or the midshipman Hornblower is sweet on, Wellard, probably has something to do with said fall, but confirmation is ever refused. Another criticism for Seafort I had seen that mentioned Hornblower was one about Feintuch's proclivity for corporal punishment. I'll be the last person to pretend he's not weird about it, but this review certainly said that Hornblower only ever featured it sparingly and with actual necessity. This is... not the case at all for poor Wellard, so I'm not quite sure what this person was talking about. (In typical Feintuch fashion, Wellard can't even catch a break after he and Hornblower go their separate ways, either--in the epilogue after both Bush and Hornblower are laid off after the war, they read in the paper that Wellard later fell overboard and drowned).
> Overall, I liked this book significantly more than the first. Bush is a bit of the Tolliver type, which is further confirmed in what I've read of the next book in the series, and it's nice to get something from his point of view instead of only sticking with our respective Seafort of the series.


2024.06.23
> I slept in rather late yesterday, but I wake up naturally around 6 today. I squander my morning before going out to lunch at the fancy xiaolongbao place my last host family took me to with this host family's grandparents.
> Afterwards, we walk through the grocery store in the mall, which is all expensive foreign stuff, but that means they have kombucha (and San Pelligrino and Arizona Tea, but I restrain myself).
> Then, in the evening, is the final Rotary party of my host club. Eli and Louisa are there, so I watch them smoke for a bit before going off to find my favorite kid. My first host family's eldest daughter is back from her exchange, so we talk a bit and I disappoint her by not disliking the licorice candy she brought from Denmark.
> I draw on a tissue until one of the moms finds me some paper, and once it gets late enough that most of the kids, my first host family, and Eli leave, I accept second host father's offer of a can of beer. I try to be polite and participate in their conversation, but I really just want to watch the district governor awkwardly dance while his wife sings karaoke on stage.

2024.06.24
> In the morning, I complete the second to last calculus lesson. I review the first subject I failed of the Math 1110 diagnostic quiz. As I check the wording of my ticket to email the travel agent about paying to have an extra suitcase, since there's no way I can fit all my items in the two I brought with me, I realize my ticket already includes two checked bags. That was easy.
> I go upstairs but can't get into the next book in the Time-Life World History series, so I record and rerecord a voiceover for the day in the life video before finally getting annoyed enough to quit and spend the rest of my time before lunch matching up clips from Bully cutscenes to MSI's Uncle.
> For lunch, I get the same peanut noodles I got at my first full-library day and read a little more Hornblower behind the library.
> Afterwards, I wander around the stacks shelving the books left in the carts to be returned. A while ago one of my friends sent me an essay he'd written about The Old Man and the Sea and since I've yet to read any Hemingway, I promised to check it out. There's no ebook version in my library, nor is there a physical copy in the English section of the school library--I did actually find one in the section for textbooks that are used in class, but it was a "simplified English" version that I didn't want to lower myself too. Yet today, in the Chinese fiction section for foreign books, I see it. I open it up, to see if I have any chance at deciphering the Chinese, and to my great delight, it has both the English and Chinese on alternating pages. I'll read it tomorrow.
> After class I get one of the passionfruit QQ (my favorite bubble tea) popsicles from the freezer, but however they freeze their boba is less good than whatever Trader Joe's does. Shortly after 5 we leave to go eat dinner at a hotpot place with all my host families and my counselor, who I've talked to all of three times.
> It's nice to talk to both of my host sisters from my first family, who also give me a gift of tea leaves to bring back with me. My host sister from the second family isn't there, but they give me a Taiwanese flag with photos from throughout my exchange on it.
> My current host family tries to dip out on me but I convince them to take me along, because even if this is my last chance to see my first host family (they'll be travelling when I leave next week), I'm really tired and still have school tomorrow.

2024.06.25
> Final day of classes. I do the final lesson of the An Approach to Calculus Course. I read The Old Man and the Sea. I draw a page and half in my sketchbook--only two pages left.
> I don't see any of my classmates, so the times I waved at them while waiting for my friend on Friday will have to suffice as our final goodbyes. As I leave the campus for a final time, it feels like summer vacation is upon me, the same as leaving on the last day back home.
> Right before I leave, though, I have a terrible discovery. My beloathed Horatio Hornblower not only had, but still has a decently active fandom. As I look through the Tumblr tag, I conclude this is probably because of the decently successful film series the books got. I shake my head and sigh. If only the film studio who bought Seafort had actually done something with it, then I could enjoy a Seafort fandom larger than me, myself, and I.
> Once home, I decide to look into the never produced film--it turns out the rights were sold to a fan fresh out of film school who was unable to meet the Kickstater goal to fund just the time it would take her to write the script so she could start pitching it to actual film companies. Interestingly, though, I realize she bought the rights in 2015, meaning it was from the family, not Feintuch. I had been under the impression they didn't care about his writing career given the still unpublished Book 8. If this wasn't the case... did I have a chance at finding the Book 8 manuscript if I asked the right person?
> This led me back to the Wikipedia page to check the source on the Book 8 information. Remember when I complained earlier about the lack of a Seafort fandom? The link leads to an old forum. Not the general sci-fi forum I've already dug through for every mention of Seafort, no, this was a Seafort forum. Boards and threads full of equally if not more enthusiastic fans in the early 2000s. I was in heaven.
> As I dug through these chats, one midshipman mentioned a Japanese fansite in reference to his own (mostly broken by time) fansite. I'd found a couple of Seafort fanarts later uploaded onto Pixiv, but back in the day, the Japanese side of the Seafort fandom seemed to thrive on beautiful homemade websites. I really was in heaven.

2024.06.26
> I spend the day reading through the forum. In the end, the real Book 8 was the friends we made along the way.
> In the earlier days of the internet, people were apparently far more casual with sharing their real names, so I take it upon myself to check up on my favorite regulars. The user who claimed Lt Arlene Sanders name once mentioned how she was planning on studying journalism in America. Now, she's an editor of major paper there. Another user who talked about his dreams of writing a book like Seafort is now a sci-fi screenwriter and audio drama producer. One user shared the story of how he ended up getting married after reading Seafort.
> One of the younger users who was an actual midshipman in the USNR during his time on the forum and was perhaps my favorite regular to come across passed away in 2013. There were plenty of users I couldn't find any other information on at all. Yet Seafort had an impact on all these people.
> Between the debates on the finer technical details of the books and attempts to organize PBEM (play by email) RPGs set in the Seafort universe, one thread stands out. The longest on the entire forum. "Seafort's sexuality?" Of course it was the user who took Philip Tyre's name that finally asks about the elephant in the room. As most conversations in the series go, it's a civil and respectable discussion that eventually turns to broader topics like the possible futility of labels in general. Then, Nick Seafort (one of the two mods on the forum, who also happens to be David Feintuch himself) appears. Nicholas Seafort isn't gay. Debate over. I don't have half an essay outlined on this topic, so this is fine.
> On the topic, though, it's the other actual midshipman who had linked me to the web of Japanese fansites. He does this with a straight face and, in all the threads, doesn't comment at all about the obviously different priorities of the Japanese fans. You see, while Seafort became popular among navy recruits and fans of older military fiction in the West, the Japanese fans are all fujoshis. Google Translate isn't around at this point and Midn Kevin has said his Japanese level is very low, but even without being able to read what's written on these sites. The vast majority of the images still up (tragically, as I can only access these long dead sites through the Internet Archive, most of the images are no longer available and are perhaps forever lost to history) make it rather clear. Either way, Kevin is my hero and I hope he's doing well in whatever mysterious things he's up to now.
> The fansites remind me of my own goal to eventually make my own fanpage for the series (and Rodrigo). I'll get on that eventually. While the Western fandom generally agreed of Seafort's heterosexuality (although of the ones I could track down in the present, an interesting majority were gay. the type of people Seafort attract are similar in both his own world and ours, it seems), the Japanese fans not only agree with some of my own opinions, they go above and beyond. I'd certainly never considered a relationship between Alexei and Phillip. After considering, I still hate it. I'm very happy to have finally found opinions to hate in a fandom I once thought was eternally desolate.
> Moving on from Seafort, in the afternoon I go out to a very cute cafe housed in one of the historical Japanese buildings in the next city over. I get fruit tea with delicious strawberry compote and pudding, topped with a scoop of vanilla ice cream and gingerbread crumbs.
> As I pick out my clothes for the last couple of days, I end up deciding to pack my clothes suitcase. The amount of clothes I own has increased, but I manage to squeeze everything in there. I'll pack the rest of my stuff on Sunday. In other preparations, I check out two more books on Libby and make sure they're downloaded for offline reading for the flight. (I have more than enough, but better safe than sorry. Besides, if I get bored of one, I'll have three others to switch between.)

2024.06.27
> Mixed up my dates, so just imagine the last half of yesterday is today instead.

2024.06.28
> In the morning, we get ready to leave. We're visiting Sun Moon Lake before I leave.
> I sleep in the car for most of the ride and then get out at our first stop, the Hohocha visitor center. They have tea, thin tea-almond crackers, and tea eggs, but I give my egg away to my brother.
> We drive on twisty mountain roads to one of the viewing platforms for the lake--it's smaller than the lakes I'm used to, but it has a pretty blue color and the mountains on its sides are really nice.
> After we check into our hotel we walk down the local old street for lunch. I get a deep fried banana from a stand and then very plain millet congee with a side of bamboo from a tiny restaurant.
> Later, after a boat ride across the lake we spend the rest of the afternoon lying around in the hotel room until we go out again for dinner.

2024.06.29
> In the morning we check out of the hotel and drive five minutes to the sky gondola station. The view is even nicer from above, but I don't think any of the photos I took did it much justice.
> Then, we drive to the same Checheng village that Rotary took us to on the last trip when we couldn't go to Sun Moon Lake. We feed the fish, eat at a restaurant that was closed last time I went, and I learn that "ox-tongue pastries" are named that for their shape and not for any of the ingredients inside them.
> I nap most of the way home.
> For dinner, once our aunt finally forces us to get out of the apartment, we go to the night market. I get stinky tofu every time, so I decide to mix it up and get takoyaki for once. This means a longer line and I nearly burn my tongue off from both the temperature and spice as I try to eat it in a timely manner.

2024.06.30
> I wake up earlier than I should with how late I went to sleep last night to listen to my friends play DnD, but the game was cancelled today. When Cain joins VC just to talk to me the other two (minus our DM) show up, though, so I get to talk with them for the last time from Taiwan.
> After breakfast (danbing, the same as the first breakfast I had here, though my host mother doesn't know that when she makes it for me), I start packing. Though my clothing suitcase is packed full, the extra suitcase means the rest of my belongings fit with room to spare in the other two.
> I'm dragged away for lunch, which is at a fancy Korean place with sketchy bathrooms. I get kimchi/seafood tofu soup and plum soda, which are both delicious. On the walk back to the car, I recognize the side street that houses a restaurant we once went to for a Rotary event. Half a minute later, my second host dad appears behind us, where he invites us to join them for Eli's last lunch before they head to the airport. We don't eat, but we stop in to say hi.
> Once home, I finish packing. I doodle in MS Paint. I open up Bully, play for a couple of minutes, close without saving. Time seems to have been getting every slower over the past month. By now it's barely moving.
> I make a face at something I'm reading. It reminds me of one of my sisters. I've spent the last ten months wondering if missing people is something I can even do. My question is finally answered, less than two days before I'll get to see my family again.
> For dinner, we go out again to a Southeast Asian restaurant (if they specified a country beyond the region, I couldn't read it). I haven't had coconut milk once since I've been here and hadn't realized how much I'd missed it.
> Before we go up to the apartment, we wait for the two girls I hang out with at Rotary meetings. They give me a children's' book and I give them my email, and we say goodbye. I pack the last of my things. For the last time in Taiwan, I go to sleep.

2024.07.01
> In the morning I finish downloading albums from friend recommendations--I end up with 34 in total, more than enough for the 24 hours of planes and layovers. I make sure my three e-books are available for offline reading. I carry my suitcases to the door of our apartment.
> I drive with my aunt, cousin, and brother in one car to the airport while my host parents take the other. We find the check-in gate, wait for it to open, learn we do indeed have to pay for the other suitcase. On the way to the security gate, I run into the Brazilian exchange student who was supposed to be on the same flight as me, but he somehow ended up with his delayed.
> I listen to my friends talk in a voice chat as I finish the final part of the Bible and wait for my first flight. From Taipei to Narita, I spend most of my time reading Ender's Shadow while I listen to albums. It's a nearly four hour wait, but my friends are still talking even after the three hour flight.
> The 12 hour flight from Narita to Texas is the longest. I read more of my book, listen to more music, and close my eyes for an hour or two when it gets dark though I only miss half of one album so I didn't actually sleep that long. When I wake up, the sun-protector on the windows gives the clouds a strange blue-green tint as if I'm on Neptune or Uranus. I watch the flight path on the screen until it shows us reaching the edge of North America. The first land I see is the tip of a caldera peaking through the clouds.
> I get through customs and transfer to my next and final flight successfully. I pass two nuns and a priest as I find my way through the airport and watch an organ performance of Star Spangled Banner on Youtube over the shoulder of the old man sitting next to me in the waiting area. I try to finish Ender's Shadow on my final flight but I end up with two chapters left when we land.
> Security is practically nonexistent compared to the last airport. I walk out of the same gate I entered 10 months ago. My family and best friend wait outside the door.
> My checked baggage didn't make it onto the last plane, so we head home. My youngest sister's taken up residence in my room, so I sleep on the top bunk in the room she used to share with our other sister. I finish the last two chapters of my book. I say goodnight to my best friend.
> The journey is over.

// *°:⋆ / ☆.:* //
Chronicle of my 2023-2024 Rotary Youth Exchange to Taiwan.