08:01 am greencastle, june 27; 09:01 pm taipei, june 27

and today we came to "hua lien," a sort of "county" or subdistrict of some sort of taiwan. we (my mom and i)'ll be staying here for perhaps two more days, but at least tomorrow, with one of those "old school friends" i'd mentioned before. man, so i didn't bring my computer, and you should see my handwriting; there are maybe three teachers that wouldn't flip out over it rigth now--i'd bet that mrs. kempf, at least, is suddenly and inexplicably waking up screaming and in a cold sweat. hah!

anyways, we took a real train to get here (and i realized that "mrt" stands for "mass rapid transit.") and it was an...approximately...let's say three hour ride--very comfortable and extremely scenic. took a few pics, read a bit, listend to a lot of mogwai; [mwahahaha, a brief edited part; less than twenty words, i assure you.]. think one of the things i'll have to do with this post is scan it or something, too; it's looking pretty good. i'll edit that one part out, though. no doubt...some of my "g"'s are definitely standing out, and it's pretty cool, methinks. ah...but where was i? oh, yeh. saw a whole bunch of extraordinarily green mountains, and kept thinking how great it'd be to hike or backpack them. we'll be hiking (or, says my mom, unfortunately, and kinda disappointingly, "walking") tomorrow, but probably not anywhere that rough. i think it'd be pretty dang cool to take a day trip up there, though, with a good friend--or just alone, to reax a bit. meh...

tonight, though, there happened a hwa lien "shui wu," literally "water dance." it was a relatively good water (hah, "water" is being used as a modifier, an [oh, man. i just realized that when writing, i wrote "and" there...so those typos that i make transfer over. oh, my...] adjective, so it's almost as if in the event that i wanted to make the water good, it'd have to be "well water." hypothetical syntactical pun? oh, noes!) show with entertaining lights and...music. including some song from "phantom of the opera." more pictures, i assure you.

...and finally, i had (most notably) papaya milk and "ai yu" again. not contemporaneously, of course. the former was really just papaya pureed with water and condensed milk added, though i don't think it has the water when well made...but it was pretty good. (and i just realized that i neglected to mention that the water show was on a lake. it was. or, perhaps, "it's true, you know...so watch yourself." *cough cough*) the latter, "ai yu," is jello-esque gelatin floating in some kind of sweet flavored beverage, usually lemon. i had mine in ice shavings with lemon syrup stuff and one whole freshly squeezed lemon. very good.

...and so that's really all that happened today. we're staying in this hotel that seems as if it was once really, really nice, but is now rather...unkempt. very unfortunately. they even have some bikes that one may borrow, but they're very old, rusty, cobwebby, aireless-tired [sic] bikes. still used them. packed light for this trip--no compy. that's why i'm writing this entry/post out. [must have forgotten that i'd mentioned that...] meh. out.

oh, and i just realized eariler today (and just now that i spelled "earlier" as "eariler" right there, in handwriting [sic]. definitely. i'll leave that and this in.)...that i have trouble concnetrating on exactly one thing; i need to be doing at least two, or, at the very least, thinking. meh.