I'm Lazy and I Suck and I'm in Taiwan

I can't believe how lazy I've been about blogging. I guess it's like any good habit; once you get out of it, it's gone.

Anyway, tons of stuff has happened over the last few months. I took July and August off, and as you can see from the last post I made, we spent two weeks in Eastern Canada. Had a great time.

I've also been teaching all over the place. I did a three day class in Sydney, Australia. Which was very cool. David Suzuki was doing a thing in the next conference room which was kind of neat. I also met a couple of The Wiggles on the plane over. It was kind of funny since I told my kids before leaving that I would say hello to them if I happened to see them.

In October and November, I spent a month in South America. I taught courses in Bogota, Colombia; Lima, Peru; and Caracas, Venezuela. In between a couple of the courses, I had a week off which I spent in Quito, Ecuador. It was a great month. I met tons of great people, saw lots of wonderful things, and improved my Spanish immensely. I finally got my pictures up on flickr (although none of them are labelled yet). See the link to the right.

After getting back, I had a week in the San Francisco area which I always love. I had a chance to catch up with my friend John who lives in Oakland.

Now I'm in Taipei, Taiwan. I'm in the classroom, and the students are working on a lab. There don't seem to be a lot of questions, so I've got some time to kill. On Friday, I leave for London where I have another class next week, and then it's home for Christmas. Since I flew west to Taiwan, and will fly west to London and then to Ottawa, I will be able to literally say that I flew around the world this year. Kind of fitting with all of the international travel I've been doing.

I've done some sightseeing in Taiwan since I arrived early and had the weekend to kill. I spent some time on Saturday at Taipei 101, currently the tallest building in the world. There's a big mall there, and you can go up into the tower. One interesting thing they have there is that the wind damper (used to decrease the movement of the building under high winds) is open for viewing. It's 660 metric tons mounted across five storeys on steel cables and hydraulics. Kind of neat. The elevators move at 60km/h so it takes about 30 seconds or so to get to the top (over 500m). I also went to an electronics show and walked around for a bit. On Sunday, I hopped on the subway and saw Longshan temple. On Monday I visited Shilin Night Market. The night markets in Taipei are like malls, but instead of being indoors are in a series of interconnected alleys. There are tons of street food venders with all kinds of good food (imagine candy apples, but with fat strawberries, fried Chinese buns, and deep-fried seafood to name a few). I think I was able to identify about 75% of what I ate.

The labs coming to the end, so it's time to go.