09:31 am greencastle, june 29; 10:31 pm taipei, june 29

...*dang*it...and the album to which i was planning to listen is protected and won't let me do so. ugh, i hate it when they do that...

but more importantly, i caught up on a bunch of stuff today. talked to a few people, returned all necessary emails (there were a total of 22, a few more than half of which, i believe, were entitled responses), borrowed a server, found a few handy new programs, and was generally (imho) computer-productive. otherwise...i did very little. oh, wait, slept in. that was nice. then, this evening, i went to taipei 101--which, contrary to my belief, is fully built; it's just some of the floors that aren't in use or something, or they're still moving offices or shops or whatever in; something like that. i'm not really sure because my mom wasn't. but that's where we ate dinner and walked around for a few hours, and it was pretty cool. i believe...seven of every eight shops were designer clothes shops, three of four of which were strictly women's clothing, and the other fourth of which would have been mostly women's, but with some men's stuff. few watch stores, too.

the important places, besides food, were "your sony," a sony stuff store, with some unbelievably amazing electronics--credit-card sized and shaped cameras, cd jewel case sized cd players, 20 gb mp3 players probably 3/4 the size of an ipod mini, but 20 gbs...and the coolest cell phones i've ever seen. not to mention brilliant screens, ipod-sized video cameras, etraordinary laptops...just a whole bunch of really cool stuff. oh, and a ps2 in the corner, and big ads for the psp. if i've not mentioned it, i've seen a few around on the mrt.

the other important store, which we visited first, was a bookstore by the name of "page one." lesse...yes, i do believe i have an appropriate analogy: the music section of barnes and noble's is to tower records as the book section of barnes and noble's is to page one. unfortunately, their book selection didn't have anything that i could understand that i absolutely needed. of course, that didn't stop me from buying a book or two--one of which is pratchett's "strata," which i may have read long, long ago, but i've long since forgotten. it's the book (1981) that sets the scene for all the discworld ones, though. i remember "the dark side of the sun," another one of his earlier books, and it's definitely one of the best. i look forward to that one. the other book is by clive barker, an author of whom i've heard much but read nothing.

...and the first place that we visited was the food court. huge! not obscenely huge, but pretty darn big, it is. most of the resturants looked equally enticing, but there a few that stood out: those that served food on hot plates (or grills, or whatever) with some raw(ish) food that one could finish preparing on one's own. so we ordered from a cantonese place which put only slightly fried eggs--yolk still wholly runny--on top of our rice with numerous "side" dishes, though they were served on the rice. you know, how at a real chinese restaurant one gets a few dishes and eats them with the rice. like that, i'm just bad at describing it. oh, also had fresh guava juice. so...this "ba la" in chinese? i only realized today that that's what guava is--and i wouldn't have figured it out had we not walked into a supermarket and had i not seen the guava, then commented on it, then also noticed how it looked exactly like ba la. ah, well.

...oh, and so taipei 101 is huge, but we didn't get a chance to take pictures because i left the camera in my room. no matter, for we didn't have time to go to the top floor--the stores all closed at 9:30, and so we decided it was about time to head back. i'll definitely visit again, though, and see about that.

find out my teaching schedule (for daisy) tomorrow. should be good.

'bout done here, for now. off to read, especially now that i have seven or eight hundred more pages. woo!