Craft Classes

Here are some of the things I have made in glass class and chinese painting. Enjoy!

I made it!

I am in my new dorm now, and feeling a little more relaxed about the move. The only bad thing I have noticed was a trail of ants walking from my computer desk and onto my closet. I think I got rid of them though, I haven't seen any since I wiped the area down.

The week is almost over, and then I only have one more week left before I come home. It seems crazy that I have been over here so long. I am ready to head back home though. It has been really hot here lately, reaching 102 degrees today! I feel bad for the guys because they had to move from a whole different building in the heat. Also, since last year's Auburn group did such a horrible job cleaning up after themselves last year, this year we were under a lot of pressure to make our areas spotless when we left.

Ryan and Matt's Taiwanese roommates left a huge mess that Ryan and Matt had to clean up. Luckily one of the professors came in and found out that the overall mess was not theirs and told them not to worry about it. Then, when they got to our dorm building, they had to move twice. At first they drug all of their stuff up to rooms on the third floor, only to be told that they had to relocate to the second floor. The room that Matt and Ryan moved into was even messier than the room they left in their old building, so they had to clean it up before they could even move in all the way. There was hair everywhere, dead bugs, etc. The cake topper was that when Ryan took a shower something scurried under the door into the shower with him and then disappeared into the drain. For all the trouble this dorm has put us through with moving a week before we leave, you would think they would at least have their stuff together and make sure we weren't moving from our comfortable rooms into disgusting messes.

What a Day

Last night we told one of our Cambodian roommates about us having to move rooms, and she got mad. She is staying the whole summer, and the other two girls are leaving their stuff even though they won't be there. So nobody is going to move in our room after we leave. She (Simorn) told us it was stupid to move (I agree) one week before we leave for America. So Simorn took us to the dorm managers office, along with two Taiwan student managers for backup. Simorn led the entourage outside to the office and confronted the lady in charge, and got her to agree to let us stay. But there was a catch, the lady in charge was not the final authority on the matter, another man was. Sadly for us he had already left campus for the night, so we had to wait until this morning to talk to him.

Sally and Katharine went to bed feeling confident that we wouldn't have to move. I felt a little nervous about the whole thing, so I packed my big suitcase to the brim, and did some general sorting this morning before class.

Sure enough, we got a call this morning from someone telling us the new room we had to move to. The thing that made everything difficult was that we had a metal class at 9 until 12, but we had to be out of our rooms and into the new one by 10. It ended up taking me 45 minutes to finish packing, and move all my stuff from one room to the next. They were right down the hall from eachother; my room number changed from 215 to 211. All Simorn could do was glare at the dorm staff for us.

Moving

For some strange reason, we have to move tomorrow. My roommates and I are going to be moving to somewhere in the same building, probably on the same floor. The guys have to move too, but they are moving from their building to ours because their building is closing. I have a lot of stuff everywhere, so this move is not going to be fun at all.

Also , the pig smells are coming in tonight. I have a theory that the school is feeding the pigs. When you get done with your food at the cafeteria, you have to put trash, food, and the plate/tray into separate trash cans. The food trash can is disgusting, and always full with nasty food that people didn't eat. I think it all gets passed over to the pig farm. Maybe they supply cheap pork to the university...

The rest of this week is going to be pretty hectic; tomorrow is the last day of craft classes and I have to work twice as hard because I missed the classes last week due to the internship.

Relaxing

Today was a great day to relax. We have been site seeing and working pretty hard lately, so today it was nice to just hang out.

The semester for the Taiwan students has already ended, and people are starting to move out of the dorms. Jay and Laura now have a room all to themselves. The downside to people moving out is that the convenience stores and cafeterias are closing down too. I think everyone is more upset about the Seven Eleven closing down though because we are always going there to get drinks and food. I bet we could keep them in the green if they stayed open just for us.

Cooking out and Site Seeing

I am getting a little behind on my posting, sorry guys. Here is the update on what I have been doing since I got back from NDD:

Friday morning we got up and went to KYMCO, a scooter/motorcycle/ATV company. We watched a short presentation on the company, and then they took us around the factory and told us about their process for making the vehicles. They are one of the largest manufacturers of scooters in the world, and can pump out Thousands of scooters a day. At one point we watched completed engines rolling off the line; every thirty seconds an engine is made (that seems so fast to me).

After the scooter tour finished we hopped back on the bus and headed back to school. Then, suddenly the bus stopped and everyone randomly decided to stay in the city since we were already there. So we all shuffled off of the bus and went to the mall. We ended up watching Cars, which was incredible.

After the movie we all met back up and went back to school to get ready for a cook out that was for all of the international students. My roommates (from Cambodia) had organized the whole thing, and did a pretty good job. When we walked up they were cutting fresh watermelon, and setting up grills. The grills were very small though and low to the ground, not what I was thinking of when they told us we were having a cook out.

The food was interesting, a lot of meat was cooked, and we drank green tea with it. Sally and Laura taught the other students the electric slide, and then the Sexuality Department came and brought us two baskets of free condoms, and candy shaped like viagra for the guys. This cook out was totally strange. We had no idea why they brought us the stuff; do they think that that is all the foreigners that come visit Taiwan do? I hope not...

There were some high points to the cook out. The green tea ended up tasting great, I played three on three soccer with the guys (and kicked butt), and the Auburn students taught everyone how to make S'mores.


Saturday:
On Saturday we went to a historical town called Meinong. The first thing we did was walk through a museum. It was alright as far as museums go. This town may be famous for their umbrellas, because after walking through the museum we took an umbrella craft class.

The umbrella class turned out different than I thought. We made paper umbrellas out of chop sticks and pre-made umbrella punch-outs. While we were making them the "teacher" played techno music that I haven't heard since high school. We all joked that this was the village's traditional music.

After we finished our beautiful paper umbrellas, we walked across the street to a market and had lunch and shopped. Tin-Man's wife (her name is pronounced Meow, like a cat) helped us order rice noodles for lunch. After we ate we got to go to the back kitchen and watch how the noodles are made. It was impressive how quickly they turned out noodles.

Having seen my fare share of noodles, I walked back out into the market. There was some interesting stuff there, but the second market that we went to after this one was even better. I was able to find a lot of neat souvenirs that seemed more authentic than other markets we have been to.

There was an old man at an instrument stand playing all sorts of music with whatever he felt like playing. He played everything from real instruments to newspaper and water bottles. Check out the video of him playing a saw-instrument.

Designing at NDD

Coming soon...

I am back from the internship at the NDD design firm. I will upload more about it later, but let me just say that it was a great experience.

A case of the Mundays

I have a lot of stuff going on this week, so today felt very oppressive. In studio today my group member came and we finalized our robot design. We also set a time later in the evening to make a full-sized model of the robot.

On Thursday one full-sized model is due, and a set of control drawings with dimensions and stuff like that are due as well. The problem with all of this is that some of the Auburn Students and I will be gone from Tuesday until Thursday working at a design firm for our professional practice class. So not only are we going to miss our craft classes, but we are going to have no time to work with our group on the robot design.

After class was over some of us took taxis out to McDonalds for dinner. I am really getting tired of that place. The only thing I look forward to there is the free World Cup Snoopy pins we get with our meals.

After we ate (I got a Ghana soccer pin tonight in case you were curious), we went back to school and started working. My group-mate met up with me and we cranked out a full-sized model by midnight. I was kind of proud of us; it looks pretty good for being developed in such a hurry.

Now I am just packing up my stuff for the internship tomorrow; we leave around eight and have to find a hotel before we go to the firm. I am taking my laptop with me, but in case I don't have internet, don't worry if you don't hear from me until Thursday or Friday; I am learning stuff.

Random Snacks

Last light Laura and Jay came to our room and brought peanut butter and bread, so we all sat down and made sandwiches. They didn't have any knives to spread the peanut butter with, so instead they used chopsticks. It is kind of hard to spread stuff with a chopstick, but we managed. Halfway through making them, one of my roommates produced a spoon that made things easier.


The same roommate that gave us the spoon also let us try some of her Cambodian food. She gave us dried pork. It came packed in a bag, and tasted kind of salty. The funny thing about it was how it looked. It didn't look like pork at all; it was kind of fuzzy, and looked like hamster bedding. I wasn't too into the pork bedding.

Beaches and Sunburns

This weekend was a blast. We left at nine am and arrived at Kenting around noon. Kenting is at the southern most tip of Taiwan, and is scattered with beaches and tourists.

We arrived at our hotel, this strange building across from the beach, and unpacked. It was a nice room for what we paid. Every wall had a window, so if you opened all the curtains up there was a view of the beach and the surrounding land. There was one funny thing about the room though: we weren't allowed to wear our shoes in the room. Maybe that isn't strange to everyone, but it is to me. I can understand having that rule at someone's house, but a no shoes in the hotel room policy is just weird. We are there to relax, who cares about shoes?

Here are some pictures of the view outside our balcony.









After we unpacked and had some lunch, we got back on the bus and drove around the tip of Taiwan for a little while. It was beautiful but a little frustrating. It was so hot outside and all we wanted to do was jump in the water, but we had to continue on the little tour we were on.

Below are some pictures of the first stop we made. We got out at a small docking area with really clear water, and some giant wave breakers.
The second stop we made was at a small market that had a bunch of crap for sale. Every booth had pretty much the same things for sale, crystal balls, big hats, jewelry, and shoes. Right beside the shops was a park that we walked through for a while. Once again, very pretty, but very hot.
We went back into town after walking around the park. The plan was to rent two-person bicycles to drive in and out of town with. I don't think anybody was excited about this. It took a while to get the bikes, so I walked around with Matt and Ryan and took some more pictures.









At last, the Taiwan students got the bikes. They took a truck full of the guys to go pick them up and ride them back to the hotel. The rest of us drove back to the hotel in cars.


It took a long time for the guys to get back to the hotel, and when they came peddling down the hill I couldn't stop laughing. The bicycles were not what I expected, so seeing them combined with the guys miserable faces was entertaining.

Finally, after everyone got back, we went swimming. The water was great, the beach was ok. There were a lot f people out there trying to sell waver runner rides, so therefore there were a lot of wave runners sitting around on the beach.

We swam till dark, then went back to the hotel and cooked out in the parking lot. Great night.

On Saturday we got up early and went back out onto the beach. I think there is no ozone left in the area we were in, because I got cooked by the time we got out. We had a lot of fun in the process though. We all went for a ride on the "banana float". It fit five people and the Taiwanese men drove us around on their wave runners and flipped us off occasionally.

Later that night we went to the more touristy area of Kenting and had a big group dinner then walked around Kenting's version of a night market.

This was a good trip not only because of the beach, but because we got to know the Taiwan students a little better. They were really fun to hang out with.

Later the group split off and some stayed in town at a dance club. I went back with some others and we drove over the mountain and star gazed for an hour. The moon was pretty large, and it was reflecting over the ocean, and the stars were bright. It was nice to be out of the smog for a while. I even got to see a shooting star!

Today we got up, packed, and said goodbye to the beach. Before we left we had some lunch at a place that was immediately terrifying. Looking around before we sat down I saw huge tables full of people and strange food. There were huge bowls of soup with unknown foods floating in them, and plates of food that were unidentifiable. Once we sat down, we were locked in. Food started coming at us from every angle in five minute increments. All we could do was sit there and try it all.

It turned out to be pretty good too! The fish (pictured above, which by the way I thought looked the most sketchy) turned out to be one of the things I liked the most.

Baseball with the Bears

Today we had studio class, and then went to a baseball game. In studio we had another fifteen sketches and three models due. I don't think anyone is at the point they should be at right now; we are all still trying to get our heads around what Tin-Man wants from the project. And in case I never fully explained what our project is, here it goes.

Every Auburn student is working with a group of one or more Taiwanese students to create a robot that will make a task easier. Some people are doing golf caddy robots, shopping assistant robots, kitchen robots, etc. I am designing a robot for the garden. Tin-Man wants these robots to be fully thought out and well explained in the drawings, so when he looks at it he can tell what kind of robot it is, and what exactly it does. On top of that, he challenged us to make it a Taiwanese styled robot. So, if you were looking at it in the store you would immediately know it was Taiwanese. The problem with the challenge is that right now, there isn't really a defined Taiwanese style, it is all borrowed from Singapore, Korea, Japan, etc. So at this point, we are all scratching our heads, wondering how we can put Taiwanese styles into our robots. It's hard to think of good ideas right now.

Enough with studio talk. Tonight we went to a baseball game featuring the two best pro teams in Taiwan, the Bears (the home team) versus the Elephants (from who knows where). I don't think the teams were as good as American teams; they seemed so slow compared to what I remember from going to Braves games. And one thing that was totally different here was the noise level. Both teams had gigantic drums, and whichever team was up to bat had a constant drum beat to hit to. The stadium wasn't very packed, but there was so much noise with the drums and noise makers people had.

At one point Matt and Ryan left to get away from the noise. After they walked away this little girl sitting in the seat in front of me turned around and started telling me hello, and waving, and offering me chips. She was a cute kid, maybe four or five years old. Her mom kept telling her to turn around and stop bothering me, but she would sneak glances back and eventually start trying to keep my attention again. Then, randomly, one of the security guards walked up to me and apologized to me for her, picked her up in his arms, and handed me a free baseball. I guess he knew the family because the mom was ok with this. I was just excited to get a baseball. The game ended a little while afterwards, the Bears won 6 to 1, and so we went home.

Tomorrow morning we are leaving for the beach, and staying through Sunday. Some of the Taiwan students are going with us, and we are all going to stay in a house together. Sounds like a good time to me; I'll post some pictures when I get back.

Sketching Fiends

Today was a pretty long day, but nothing to exciting happened. We just had a lot of work to do. Metal class was in the morning. We have to make a three piece set of jewelry, and it is all due in three weeks. The slowest part of the process for me seems to be cutting the copper out, so I decided to focus on getting all three of my shapes cut out. I almost made it.













Between classes I went down the road with Matt and Ryan to a "restaurant" we like. The guys made an interesting point about it today. They noted that in America the dining area is at the front of the restaurant, and the kitchen is in the back (most of the time it is out of sight). Here in Taiwan the kitchen is in the front, wide open for everyone to see (and outside), and the dining area is in the back. If we walked by this place back home, there is no way we'd want to eat there. But here, this is one of the better restaurants near the university.

After lunch we had Chinese painting class. Today we painted some trees and mountains. Also, one of the Auburn students had her 21st birthday today and was presented with a pig cake during class. Funny cake, that's all I can say.

Tomorrow we have more sketches due, so that is all I have been up to tonight. Tomorrow we are going to a baseball game after class. The two teams we are going to see are the top two teams in Taiwan, so it sounds like a pretty special game to see.

Monday, June 12th

Coming Soon

Sunday, June 11th

Sunday was one long day. I was tired from the day before, but we had lots of things planned for the day. First on the agenda was to walk around the day markets and look for cool stuff. Matt found a pair of shoes in Taiwan that he fell in love with but never bought for whatever reason. We have been searching everywhere for them since then. We learned today that they are discontinuing the shoes, and that is why we haven't been able to find them.
I bought a purse at one of the markets, which was an interesting experience. I lady took us into a building near the market, up some stairs, and through several locked doors. After I made my purchase she shuffled us out of the room, and out of the building a different way than we came in. We went down a set of dark, trash littered stairs, and popped out in an alley between buildings.

That night we went to the harbor and watched the light show. There was music playing in the background and all of the buildings on the opposite side of the harbor lit up to the music.

After the light show we walked to an Irish pub and had some fish and chips for dinner. It was amazing. I felt like I was in Ireland again; the fish was good, the beer was good, and rugby was on the big screen.

Saturday, June 10th

Saturday was our first day without Tin-Man' supervision. He left us to be with his family while we were in Hong Kong.


I got up in the morning and went out with Matt, Ryan, and Kevin. Our plan for the day was to go to "The Peak", on top of Mount Victoria. To get there you can either take a bus to the top, or a tram car (pictured above). We opted for the tram car. Tin-Man told us that it went up the mountain at a 45 degree angle, and has never had an accident in the one hundred years of its existence. We paid for the tram with our octopus card (that card came in handy so many times).

The ride up was exciting, and interesting. It had to be more steep than 45 degrees in some areas, it felt like we were climbing straight up the mountain. The ride kind of felt like the beginning of a roller coaster, except we weren't buckled in. Matt's face captures the experience pretty well.
Once we got to the top we did a little exploring. There was a mall at the top of the peak, and had a lot of cool stuff there. I found a nice Chinese chess set, and the guys were all able to find things they wanted as well.


After we explored the mall we went back outside and walked around. We found a hiking trail and decided to do a little walking. The walk was beautiful. It had been raining for most of the day, but it stopped while we were walking. We had a lot of fun goofing around, talking, and walking.


Later on we got a little nervous. We had been out walking downhill for two hours. It was getting kind of late to be out hiking around (5:15 pm), and we had no idea how far we had left to go. Eventually we found some signs that let us know we would actually make it back to the peak.


The peak ended up being an all day event. We were tired when we went back into the city via the tram car, but it was a good day. We topped off the good day with dinner from Outback Steak House, then went back to the hotel for the night.