Friday

For the last two days our internet has been down. This is bad for two reasons, one being that I can't communicate with people, and two being I have a LOT of research to do for studio. I think I will share my last two days though before I buckle down on the research.

Yesterday (Friday), we went on a field trip back to Tainin ( I think that's how it's spelled). We went first to a man's furniture gallery. All of his furniture was beautiful. It was hand crafted with solid wood, and it is my understanding that the wood it so hard that it could not be joined with nails, which added that much more to the value of the furniture. Some of the joints were really complex looking.

The next room we went into had smaller furniture pieces, and a lot of bowls/containers. Some professor owned this space and had taken all of the scrap wood thrown out and made things with it. These pieces were beautiful as well.

All within this complex was the furniture gallery, the other gallery with the scrap wood, and also a museum of old furniture that the owner had collected. I like some of the more modern Chinese furniture that he made, but the antiques he collected were too ornate for my taste. They were pretty in their own way though, and had an impressive presence.

This portion of the field trip was enjoyable, but could have been improved. The owner didn't speak English, so we were partially bored when he stood around and talked, which may have came across to him as us not interested in his life's work (not true at all). Tin-Man translated sometimes for us, every time he stopped to translate for us he would miss the next thing the guide was saying, so he stopped doing that after a while.

After lunch, we got back on the bus and headed towards the final destination. We went to a design firm and watched a presentation on the things the firm designed. This didn't hold my attention very well, merely because I have been to several firms already, and this one seemed exactly like the previous ones I visited, just with different products. They had a messy creative space, with fun toys, and annoyed workers trying to ignore all of us walking around in their space.

We got back on the bus, which by the way had karaoke. Apparently everyone over here loves to sing on bus rides. The videos looked straight up out of the 80s, and who knows what the songs were about. It was fun though.

The some of the Taiwan students were going to see the Davinci Code later, so we decided to tag along. It was in the city, so we all had to take cabs (kind of expensive just to see a movie). We got to Kaosheung really early, so we went to the night market they have every night. It was enjoyable. Ryan and I tried some "barbecued" chicken. We had some legs, heart, and bladder. We didn't know that the bladder was in fact bladder, we were hoping for liver. The heart was actually pretty good, I didn't try the bladder. Ryan had to spit his out because he said it tasted like gristle.

After we ate we walked through the market and wasted time until the movie. They had a nice theater in Kaosheung. The seats were assigned when you bought your tickets, which was somewhat cool. I guess it is good for the theater; they can easily identify if someone is in a seat they didn't pay for. As for the movie, I really liked it. I think they nailed the characters, and it was really close to the book. A+

We got back from the movie really late, I think it was around 2 am. I felt really back waking up my roommates, but they seemed ok with it.