10:40 pm greencastle, june 25; 11:40 am taipei, june 26

't's sunday. here, anyways. okay, that sushi a few days ago? it came along this...arg, i can't remember the word...but basically a belt. conveyor belt, there we go; similar to the ones in airports that carry luggage around. the tables are all stationed around this, and you can just grab whatever you want--including some stuff like cokes, wasabi sauce (free), gensing (free), or whatever. the bill is calculated by the number of plates you have--all the sushi comes on these small orange plates (usually about two pieces per plate), which you can also order, rather than just wait for to come around, and each plate costs (i think it was) NT$30. one u.s. dollar is about 30 or 31 new taiwan dollars, if i'm not mistaken.

...and so yesterday i really didn't do anything of interest; i just ran around a bunch with my mom seeing old friends of hers and whatnot. although in the morning, at like ten, i was supposed to meet her at a certain station of the mrt, which is taipei's mass transit system, but don't ask me what that stands for. anyways, i was supposed to meet her at ten, so i decided to get ready to leave at 9:15 and figured that by the time i got all my stuff together and made it out of the building, walked over to the mrt station closest, and found my way over to the designated (my mind unbiddenly went back to latin, but i consciously stopped that train of thought before it could be completed. yes! big step this is!) stop, and i remembered that we were to meet by the stop for the train that heads in the direction in which we were to travel. of course, because it was early morning, i wasn't thinking and actually got on the train and took it to the next stop, by which point i'd realized what i'd done and turned around. unfortunately, i also realized that i was like 25 minutes early, and so i stood around really awkwardly for a long while as some official guy who, i dunno, directs the people and makes sure they don't get too close or something. he kept watching me...especially when like three trains had gone by in each direction (the stops for going in both directions are right next to eachother) and i was still standing around...so i left and took a bunch of laps up and down stairs. eventually i wandered over to a map of the stations on a wall and stood there, where i could look quasi-purposeful, for a while; eventually my mom found me there. she was also kinda early, but not *quite* as early as i was...oh, well.

the rest of the day was exceedingly boring.

...but then at night, when i returned to the apartment, there was nobody home...there was, however, a note, which explained that the family'd gone out and would be back at elevenish. i found the note at ten. so, now having gotten a cell phone (borrowing a cell phone), i could call them and see when they'd be back. they said probably around 10:30 or so, and that i should go...uhh...in english, it's kinda like just wandering around the streets window shopping and mostly looking at stuff, maybe buying some. well...having bought some pastry custard things (just cooked and taken out of the oven probably less than four minutes before i got there, and still really, really hot), i sat around outside the apartment for a while and ate one, which was still really, really hot (and almost burned me) as i waited for them to return. it ended up taking until about 11:20...but i had whipped out my book by then and was reading, so it wasn't bad. kinda.

now listening to "brick," by the way...

around 11:45ish, probably, we headed up to the fourteenth floor, where there is not only the internet, but video games. apparently, tv is a huge thing around here...people spend large portions of their day watching it. i haven't yet, at "home," anyways, but i did a little while otherwise out. but i helped barney with his homework briefly, and then we gamed a bunch. hah...gamecube. he has a ps2, but it's broken. he's borrowed a friend's, but it doesn't have the right audio/visual cord thing and won't work. so we started off with some smash bros., and he and the computers definitely ganged up against me. i almost won, though; i just had way too much damage when it came down to him against me. i had the most kills by like four, but he barely out-lived me. second round, i totally pwned. three lives by the time i'd taken out one computer, two when i had barney and the other bot to one, killed the bot, tried to suicide/kill barney, failed, then just took him out. it was nice. seventeen kills of a possible eighteen--stock at six. i was pretty happy about that. little girls, of course, would occasionally insist upon playing themselves, and then we had to relinquish the controls for a short time. meh. then some double dash...where i could definitely out-race him. apparently he plays battle, though, and so we tried that out for a bit. uhh...so i won the first round, then not a lot after that. score climbed to 9-3 him after a bit, and i decided that i was losing way, way too much. so i turned it around to 9-12, me, and he got kinda upset. well, he won a few more, and i won a few more, and the score settled down to about 13-15 me at the end, between many rounds of all three types--two kinds of deathmatch and a sort of "king of the hill" type of game. it was pretty cool. finally, we were going to play some starfox, and we only had enough time for him to kinda explain it to me and for me to kill him once before it was like two and we decided to sleep. so i headed back down, was unhappy because i couldn't catch any wireless networks from downstairs (unprotected networks, that is), read a bit, and crashed.

now...i dunno what i'll do. maybe see about something. that's a new one, isn't it? "see about something..."