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.