Taipei 101

10...9...8...7...6...5...4...3...2...1! Happy New Year! With every number, one floor of Taipei 101, the tallest building in the world, lights up in a different color. When the countdown is complete, fireworks erupt off of the building in every direction and the New Years Eve celebration is complete. It sounds amazing and I really want to be there one year to see it happen. I learned all this after asking my new friend who I met at the Rotary Weekend in Jindřich Hradec last weekend. She is from the capitol city of Taiwan; Taipei. She told me that every New Years Eve there are huge celebrations in the streets and many performances in front of or near Taipei 101. Apparently this causes massive traffic jams that make a twenty minute usual trip home into a three hour trip home. Anyways, she's the only one here from Taiwan and she knows Mandarin Chinese, Japanese, Korean, English and she's learning Czech with the rest of us. It was so interesting to learn about Taiwan, since I've never been there before and we've never learned about it in school I didn't know anything about it. Did you know that they only get air conditioning in their last year of high school? Did you know that their last year of high school has 14 hour days? Did you know that China claims it rules Taiwan? I didn't know any of this! Anyways... I felt like it was a really good example of Rotary helping to bring about cultural learning and understanding, and it was really interesting...so.

While the rest of the weekend wasn't quite as interesting, it was very nice. To get there I took a bus with my friend from America who is staying in another town that is sort of nearby. I went from Uhersky Brod to Brno, an hour and a half. Then from Brno the Jindřich Hradec, four hours. And then we missed our stop. Five hours. And then we waited for the kid who missed his train stop. Six hours. As you may imagine we were a wee bit late. Instead of walking to the hotel, though, we got to be driven by the Rotarians who were searching for us; every cloud has a silver lining I guess. I felt a little bit like Harry Potter after he missed the Hogwarts Express and arrived, by car I might add, late to the opening feast. We were late to dinner as well. After dinner we took a language test on Czech, you may remember it from my last post. So I ended up getting a perfect score on my test which was very nice to hear considering I've been studying like crazy to learn it. After that was a dull speech about stuff we've already heard before and I don't feel like reliving again here on the blog so you can use your imagination to decide what the Rotarians spoke about and spice things up a bit. Post speech about [insert whatever you imagined here] we got to just talk and hang out and my Czech notes I made were requested by people. Then we went to bed.

On Saturday we had breakfast. After breakfast we went sightseeing in town and that was when I talked to my Taiwanese friend. Since I was talking to her, I didn't take many pictures of the town. Later we carved pumpkins and made food. We had Chocolate Chip Cookies, Brownies, Monkey Bread, Pumpkin Seeds, Pudding, and some Taiwanese food. Brownie Mix would be greatly appreciated here. For dinner we went out and had a Czech version of Thanksgiving dinner. Turkey, Mashed Potatoes, Cranberry Dressing, Green Beans. I feel that this is a good time to tell you that I've lost weight here, instead of gaining it. So after dinner we played games. We had to build the tallest tower we could out of marshmallows and spaghetti. Then we had to get an apple out of a bucket of water and then a gummy bear out of a tub of flour, hence the pictures of me on Facebok with flour all over my face. Then we had more free time and then bed.

On Sunday we got up and had breakfast and then left. We were the last people to leave. Also on the way home we had McDonalds, I was pleased.

So I went and had dinner while I was writing this and we were watching the news and I learned that my parents make as much as the drug dealers in Juarez, Mexico do. I wanted to tell my host family this, but felt it would be an akward conversation so I'm posting it here instead.