Update

So I've been long overdue for an update on my life.  Honestly, I have been very much preoccupied by several things going on in my life.  I am getting ready to move back to the States in about three weeks so there is a ton of little things that need to be taken care of before I can get on that plane.  

I am very excited to come back home after about 9 months living here in Taiwan.  This won't be good-bye but only a brief farewell.  I've greatly appreciated the time I've spent here and I feel that I've grown a ton as a person as a result.  

I have been studying for the LSAT almost every single night that I get a chance.  My scores have been improving so that is a plus.  However, every day that I count down to go home is also one day closer to the big day of the test.  

I can't wait till the day I can go back and see my family and friends.  Life abroad really makes you appreciate the small things that make a day:  a good debate on politics, a bowl of macaroni and cheese, the sound of your best friend giving you advice, and the expectant meow of your hungry cat.  

Hope all is well with everyone!

Tax Question!

Perhaps you guys can help me out since I seem to be tangled in Taiwan's seemingly endless bureaucratic system here... but if I am an overseas Taiwanese citizen, meaning I hold a Taiwan passport but I don't have a Taiwan ID number and I have an ARC, do I still have to pay the 20% income tax that other non-citizen, non-residents have to pay?? Honestly I still haven't figured it out yet and I am sick of getting the run around when I ask about it at work. Help!

Sorry this post is so boring and probably makes no sense to the people back home! I've recently been stressing out about job prospects for when I get back to the States along with getting the LSAT blues (and trying to figure out Taiwan's tax system!) so I have been unable to post with my more upbeat personality. I will update later on my wonderful past weekend which included Mexican food, basketball, and waffles. Yes, this all happened.

Vonnegut

Today Rudy and I got on the topic of Kurt Vonnegut (may he rest in peace).  We both agreed that he is one amazing writer, in addition to the fact that he makes great social and political observations.  I can't say he's my favorite writer since I've only read Cat's Cradle, but he is on the top of my list of authors for which I'd like to read every single work they've authored.  

Since I've been really busy at work lately and I'm planning on leaving for South Korea on Saturday, I just want to leave you with some of my favorite quotes from Vonnegut.  I will take lots of pictures in Korea and post them when I get back!  Sorry to go M.I.A. for a while but perhaps I will be able to post once more between now and when I leave.  

And here are some of my favorites (most I pulled from Wikiquotes):

"When the last living thing

has died on account of us,

how poetical it would be

if Earth could say,

in a voice floating up

perhaps 

from the floor 

of the Grand Canyon,

'It is done.'

People did not like it here."

— A Man Without a Country

"Hello, babies.  Welcome to Earth.  It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter.  It's round and wet and crowded.  At the outside, babies, you've got about a hundred years here.  There's only one rule that I know of, babies — 'God damn it, you've got to be kind.'"

—God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

"Doesn't anything socialistic make you want to throw up?  Like great public schools, or health insurance for all?"

—A Man Without a Country

"I have wanted to give Iraq a lesson in democracy — because we're experienced with it, you know.  And, in democracy, after a hundred years, you have to let your slaves go.  And, after a hundred and fifty years, you have to let your women vote.  And, at the beginning of democracy, is that quite a bit of genocide and ethnic cleansing is quite okay.  And that's what's going on now."

—Interview on The Daily Show

"If you want to really hurt your parents, and you don't have the nerve to be gay, the least  you can do is go into the arts.  I'm not kidding.  The arts are not a way to make a living.  They are a very human way of making life more bearable.  Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake.  Sing in the shower.  Dance to the radio.  Tell stories.  Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem.  Do it as well as you possibly can.  You will get an enormous reward.  You will have created something." 

—A Man Without a Country

I hope to create something for the world someday.  Although I don't sing in the shower, I do sing ridiculously loud to the radio in my car.  Too bad I haven't been able to drive since I've been in Taiwan.

Adios lovers, until next time.

Redesign?

I've been told by my lovely sister that I need to redesign my blog, perhaps I need to spruce up my font choices or my colors.  Maybe I could add a few more pictures.  Needless to say, I never knew that blogs would actually take so much work, not to mention so much html know-how.  Not that I am not up to the challenge, although I'm afraid either my work performance or my LSAT studying concentration levels might suffer the consequences.  Regardless, I'll take any suggestions and I'd like to share some pictures from this weekend.  

A group of friends from work and I went to stay in National Taiwan University's "dorm" up in Yangmingshan (a famous mountain here in Taipei).  The dorm is basically a house that you can rent for a little under 100 U.S. dollars for a night and it can sleep up to about 12 people, possibly more.  So we did some hiking and looked at pretty roses, which apparently is the THING to do right now, so it was super packed.  Apparently, in Taiwan, because the political situation can sometimes be so sensitive that the news is constantly filled with pointless things about current popular attractions in Taiwan.  Thus, leading to what was only slightly popular before being broadcast, to being a completely ridiculous circus over something only semi-cool.  

Anyway, here are a bunch of pictures of the dorm and flowers.  After a year of owning my camera,  I finally figured out how to take those artsy, albeit somewhat cliche now, flower pictures.  And by figured out, I mean someone showed me.

A rose that I found named "Oklahoma"!

Happy, dancing, singing man!

I think he's dressed in aboriginal garb.

Bee, hard at work.

When I figured out how to use my camera...

A cool waterfall that has turned the rock behind it completely white due to its sulfur content.

Cherry blossoms, I think.

Yangmingshan.

Our dorm!

The view.

Pictures I took today

So this post is not the post I promised about the bees but I promise I am not a chronic liar. I just wanted to share these pictures I took today when I decided to take the day off to take care of my permit issue and ended up wandering around with a camera.                

       
These are pictures of a leftover display of lanterns from the Lantern Festival.  If you look closely you can see that they are decorated by local kids.

I love the vibrancy of the colors all together and I particularly liked the textures and colors of this lantern.  I was thinking that these pictures could make great desktop backgrounds.  What do you think?

Self-portrait shot, also I'm going to have this double as the picture of my new hair cut that I promised back in January.  

I'm not quite sure what this building is, but I found it while wandering Taipei's governmental area so I want to say it's something official.  I believe it is left over from the Japanese colonial period, as many Taiwanese governmental buildings are, you can tell by the psuedo-Western style architecture that the Japanese were fond of using during the Meiji and Taisho eras.  


Hope you enjoyed my endeavor into some photography!

Too many thoughts in my head!

Ok, so minus the travesty that was my last post, I hope that my blog might make some more poignant observations of life but alas sometimes too much time on the internet can lead to discoveries such as that which I posted yesterday. Honestly, I was too embarrased to remove it once I had posted it but nevertheless have been cringing ever since it's been published.

I've also noticed that I've been getting a couple of new visiters lately. WELCOME! I know this is only a very small blog but it would be greatly appreciated, if you read my blog regularly, to become one of my followers/lovers. The button is on the right-hand side and you can just click the button that says "follow this blog"! I'm glad that there are people out there who might be interested in what is going on in my tiny little world here in Taiwan.

Also, as a thanks to my friend Charlie who mentioned my blog in his last post, I'd like to direct y'all to his blog here. It's beautifully called "Into the (Korean Hagwon) Wild," and it details his experiences as an expat teaching English and playing in South Korea.

And after being reprimanded by my sister about my links, I've gone ahead and fixed many of them. Sorry! I had no clue! I only discovered linking a little bit ago but now I love linking things (hehe), as well as posting music from Youtube, if you couldn't tell.

Today, I get/need to take a half day to deal with Taiwanese bureaucratic mumbo jumbo. Apparently, because I entered Taiwan using my Taiwanese passport (which I needed to do in order to apply for my residency card), I have to leave using my Taiwanese passport. But since I'm technically not a citizen of Taiwan, I need to apply for a re-entry permit so that I can leave and come back to Taiwan. I'm not too clear on the details, but needless to say, it's really annoying. So because of this hassle, today's post is incredibly mish-mash BUT I will promise that my next post will be more interesting. In fact, I will go so far as to tell you that my next post will be what I've been musing over for a while. I will give you a hint, it will be about BEES. So until next time!

LSAT Update!

Alright, so as you know, I've been preparing for the LSAT and I just took my second practice test last night. Let's just say, it did not go very well. On top of not finishing it because I took too long and it was way past my bed time, I am also pretty sure I bombed the reasoning section. This stinks because there are two reasoning sections (half of all the questions) on the actual test.

So tonight I'll have to finish the last section and then grade it! Well, hopefully when I get my new study books in, I can get better at the reasoning section with more techniques and then other than that I think I really just need to work on my timing. I want to score at least a 160, so we'll see how that goes!!

In other news, thanks to the generosity of the Taiwanese government, I was able to receive a sort of "tax refund" that the government handed out in efforts to stimulate the stagnating economy. Everyone here has been pretty appalled that as a foreigner, I was able to cash in on some of their country's money. BUT, I would like to point out that as a foreigner I pay 3 times as much in taxes as they do in the same pay scale. And if you knew how much I was making, you'd be annoyed too.

Note: That picture is the first picture that popped up on Google pictures when I searched "sad," haha. "You Don't Know Me," by Ben Folds featuring Regina Spektor.

Business Etiquette

Today I had an awful meeting with my boss and I've learned through these wonderful bi-monthly meetings with her, some helpful lessons of Taiwanese business etiquette that I must abide by, although they make me angry.

Business etiquette #1: Although I'm not an intern or assistant, I or another one of my coworkers must pour tea for our boss.

Perhaps I have been blessed with jobs and internships in the past that did not require me to be a coffee girl but I find this ritual to be an unecessarily degrading aspect of the job. It's not that bosses in general are incapable of pouring tea or getting coffee for themselves or that they are so incredibly busy that they can't take that one minute out of their time to do it for themselves but perhaps this is a general perk that they get for having made it to the top. In any case, I find it incredibly unnecesary and I also feel that this was not part of my original job description.

Business etiquette #2: We must all report directly to our topmost boss.

There is a business word for this and it's called micromanaging. Not only is it a waste of our time, it's a waste of our boss's time. The fact that I have to list even the smallest articles that I have edited these past two weeks to my boss's boss seems unnecessary. Because she is so far removed from my work it is difficult for her to assess how hard I work and what exactly it is I do or even if I am good at what I do. Therefore, it is difficult for me to plead my case twice a month to someone that I don't even see on a weekly basis.

Business etiquette #3: Courtesy is upheld most, even above the truth.

In my boss's interest in micromanagement, she often likes to ask us what we think of the work we're doing or whether we enjoying doing certain projects. There was one assignment to which I was tasked with for which I disdained with great fervor. So during one of our bi-monthly meetings I thought that I would enumerate my distaste for the task due to several valid reasons I had for its inappropriateness, but I was quickly shut down by my coworkers who thought it would be unwise and discourteous to confront the boss. But if everyone remains tight lipped on issues then how does a work place function smoothly?

You may say that perhaps these are not particular to Taiwan but only particular to my boss but I suppose I think otherwise due to the fact that I am the only one that seems to be shocked by these proceedings when discussing these issues with my fellow coworkers.

After a nice in depth discussion with one particular coworker, she came up with the conclusion that perhaps Taiwan is not as far along in worker rights as the U.S. so here, boss's have much bigger scope in power to do what they please. When I return to the U.S. I will gladly welcome my rights as a worker and as an individual and my hope is that Taiwanese citizens will begin to receive the same.