Work Hard, Party Harder.

After a long first week of school, we decided it was time to unwind in ultimate awesome fashion. On Friday right after class, we got ready to watch Wang Lee Hom at the Taipei Sony Ericsson Arena. The tickets cost about 1500 NT for some pretty nosebleed seats, but the Taipei Arena is pretty small to begin with so the seats were still pretty good. We all had a blast! (Except for the Brian but he falls asleep all the time anyway, haha)

These pictures come from the camera of the awesome Sarah Ho, without whom there would have been no pictures OR Leehom concert. Thanks Sarah!

Wang Lee Hom live is ten kinds of amazing. His voice is as good or better live than on his CDs. When he performs, he is sort of lifeless (a lot of the time he's just sort of standing there singing, which is admittedly kind of boring), but that still doesn't detract from the fact that he's usually singing while playing piano, violin, or his awesome yet slightly ridiculous dragon guitar. This dude is talented. Basically when he pulled out his violin for 落葉歸根 and played with a small string orchestra behind him AND sang, I was amazed. Sounded absolutely beautiful!

The only thing that we booed at was when Lee Hom was giving shout outs to all the different countries in the arena. He gave a shout out to Indonesia and Singapore, but when it came time to give a shout out to his home country, he totally gipped us hyped Mei Guo Ren and shouted out "TAIWAN!" Ted said it best: "That bitch is from New York!" It's ok, Lee Hom, we forgive you, sort of.

We went to Gong Guan again after the concert to get some food and drinks. For being a night market, Gong Guan is 100% DEAD on a Friday night at 11:45 PM. We couldn't find a single open restaurant or tea station in the entire area, it was slightly ridiculous.

Saturday was sleep in day, but my beastly roommate Kota likes to wake up at around 8 or 9 every morning so I was up by then as well. That day the girls decided to go to Wu Feng Pu, which is basically a girls-only shopping district, so us men decided to go look for some manly stuff, like T-shirts, cell phones, and laptops. What we actually ended up doing in the labrynith that is the Taipei main station underground mall largely consisted of this:

The underground mall is nice but the stores are personally of little interest. There aren't that many guy clothing stores and when there are, they are tiny. There are a LOT of video game stores, though, and a few pirated DVD places. At the end of one part of the mall, there was a huge dance troupe practicing their moves, and a bunch of people showing off their yo yo skills. It was actually pretty sweet. All in all, though, the shopping experience was kind of blah, though it might have just been because I was really, really tired.

We decided to take it up top and find the electronics store.

NOVA is a huge mall filled with small electronics shops. I think it might be 7 or 8 stories tall; we only went through three of them before we had to leave. It's jam packed with different, competing stores, so all you really have to do is go into NOVA, find what you're looking for, and walk around to all the different stores selling that same thing and compare prices. Yours truly was looking for a spiffy Asian-market cell phone to take back to the states. I tend to have an expensive eye, unfortnately; the three cell phones I picked out all happened to be more than 18,000 NT. That's 600$. Safe to say, I bought one. Just kidding, mom and dad, I didn't; your son has self control, really!

Today is Jenny Hunyh's 21st birthday so the men decided to get her some gifts. We got her some alcohol, Ted got her a beautiful cake that looked like it wasn't supposed to be eaten. But we did, and it was delicious.


Last night we went clubbing around Taipei 101 to celebrate her birthday. Yours truly has never gone clubbing either in the states or in Taiwan so it was a completely new experience for me. The 16 of us got into Lava at a pretty decent price (8800 NT for all 16 of us, including three handles of alcohol, Red Bull and Coke). Yours truly got pushed onto the stage to dance, but got kicked off by an angry bouncer about 30 seconds later. Apparently they don't like the robot dance in Taipei. We stayed there until around 2AM, when our friend Tiffany dropped by and told us she could get us into Room 18 for free. Honestly I'm not really sure what makes for a good club or a bad club, but according to my friends Room 18 was a lot better than Lava. They seemed about the same to me. Also, I'm not sure if it's just Taipei clubs or clubs all around, but people (especially the too-cool-for-school dudes) like to just stand, stare around and look cool on the dance floor. The dance floor is for DANCING, people!

And I know mom and dad are probably freaking out right now and getting ready to send me emails about not going too wild, studying hard, etc. Your son is alive, didn't get drunk and didn't fool around with any girls, ok?

We got back at 4AM smelling of sweat, second-hand smoke and satisfaction. All around, a very nice way to end a long, studious week! Now, back to the homework; I do have a LOT of it due tomorrow! Til next, time, zai jian!

-Justin