My Philly Apartment

Entrance to our apartment:


Kitchen:


What I eat:



The homework table - I cleaned it off! It's usually cluttered with like 3 books, multiple pencils, an assortment of packets, various colored scratch paper (yellow is the way to go) , and at least one cup we forgot about:


Bathroom:


Tom's on the left, I'm on the right:


My room:


My desk (also usually covered with papers):


Tom's Room - in his defense, his bed is usually made. Guitar hero 4 is kind of like our seventh class:


Our windows open onto the roof, dental school is across the street (on the left), the three main dorms on campus are the three high rises there. We're literally half a block from the edge of campus:

More food

Drunken chicken: It's cold and basted in some sort of alcohol (hence the name). It's really good.


I don't remember the name of this, but it was a noodle shop that was open at like 3 am only about 3 blocks from my apartment and it was delicious:


Japanese fish:


More shaved ice!


This doesn't have the fruit topping, but rather an assortment of fillings. I forget what I got here exactly, but the purple round things that look like fish eggs were taro, the orange chunks are mango, the black and white things were some sorts of sweet tofu, maybe? Delicious

Danshui

Lover's/Valentine's Bridge:




It apparently doesn't qualify as a night market, but this alley is home to many, many delicious things, most of which come on a stick:



Quail eggs, you get to roll them in hot sauce, some other sauce, and salt(MSG?) to your liking:



Fish balls! Same deal as the quail eggs, though the sauces might be different?

Fried mushrooms:


Green tea ice cream:


This soup and chicken dish is from a restaurant right down the street from Taiwanese pop superstar Jay Chou's former high school, and is supposedly a favorite of his. It was pretty good, though it didn't really offer the Asian pop megastar feeling that it advertised:

Mei Li Hua

" The Miramar Entertainment Park (美麗華百樂園) is a shopping mall in the Dazhi area of Taipei, Taiwan. The department store is notable for its 70 m tall Ferris wheel on its rooftop, which is the second largest Ferris wheel in diameter in Taiwan.

The department store also contains an IMAX theatre, which is the only IMAX theatre showing commercial films in Taiwan. With dimensions 28m × 21m, its movie screen is the largest in Asia for showing commercial films. "

The IMAX theatre is an incredible deal, you can get a combo with ticket, drink, and popcorn for like $10. The ferris wheel also has a pretty sweet view, though trying to take pictures through grates doesn't really work out well.





Stolen from Wikipedia:

TV Performance!

I've tried to put subtitles on this, but have failed miserably, so you'll just have to trust me that this was amusing. So, here I am singing the first versus of 我愛台妹:



I'm back in Philly, but still have like 800 pictures from Taiwan, so have plenty more to come!

Snake Alley

For one of my oral tests I talked about how awesome snake meat and chicken hearts were and suggested we should go out to grab snake meat as a class, since I was the only person who had been. So, of course, we did! It's right next to a Buddhist temple, so our teacher was kind enough to take us on a quick tour through it beforehand. If you're particularly afraid of snakes, you probably want somebody else to take a look through this for you.






After that, we headed over to snake alley:



In addition to the snake meat, you get a glass of (left to right) snake venom, snake bile, and snake blood. I have no idea what the pills in the snake blood are, last time I had snake blood there definitely weren't any pills floating in it. The blood is not pure blood, it's mixed in with something else and it has kind of a sweet taste. The venom and bile taste like paint thinner.


Typically when someone presents me with random pills I've never seen before, and then tells me that they're fine to take and that there's not going to be any side effects, I tend to avoid eating them, but who can say no when they're floating in snake blood?



Here's the main course:




It's actually fairly bland and tastes a lot like turkey:



Not everyone agrees with it so much though:


And in case you had any doubts it was actual snake, this is where we got the blood and bile from. We actually got to watch the full preparation process, but the sign above the snakes there says no pictures, though they let us take pics after we committed to paying for a meal. And no, the preparation process is not very sanitary.


Aside from snake, turtle was right next door, but morale for a turtle trip so soon seemed low. The semi-prepared turtles are under the lamp. No Taking Picture? We'll see about that:


My classmates! Minus the guy nobody really talks to. The two other white guys are American, the girl in blue is Korean American, the girl in purple is our teacher, the other girl is Japanese, the guy on the far right is Indonesian, and the last guy is Japanese as well. This picture is kind of misleading, since like 2/3 of the students at our program are from Asia, with only 17% from North and South America, so our demographic is a little skewed.

Preview

I could quite possibly be the person whose entire body is blocked out by the circle that says "wonderful."

Let me tell you the story...

I had my first TV performance! I'll post more when I have videos. (And after I've translated them...) I assure you, my description is not nearly as amusing as actually watching it should be.
I will say that my dancing was called very "liberal" twice, I almost knocked a girl over, I was spontaneously asked to do 5 different model poses, and sang the first verse of this song. (Up to about 1:15)

Also, (surprisingly), I did no handstands, did not break out any of Rain's dance moves (I wasn't wearing a jacket), or lay down for any poses.


Me being grilled.

While true that this is a typical "You got served" stance for me, I don't remember doing this at all.


Me performing, I think this was at the "we can kiss the sky" part?


Also, completely unrelated, but just for Kristine (and Annika too, I guess):

Surprise..!2

These are from a place called Ximending, which is basically like "West Gate." Supposedly it's more popular with the teenage crowd, so it's apparently kind of strange that I go here at least once a week, but I'm the foreigner, so I get to break the social norms!


Not so lively during the day, but there's an all you can eat restaurant that also comes with all you can eat Haagen-Daas ice cream for 13 dollars.

This is sort of the main entrance street. That giant KTV is directly to the right of this picture.

This is down the main entry street, the screen plays advertisements and some sort of entertainment related stuff.

This guy rolled that ring around and did all sorts of crazy acrobatics. It was awesome.

And at night it's hyper crowded!