101 Pics

I had some very serious good feelings toward Google's Sherlock Holmes logo today.

Okay, so here are the pics of me, Dr. Hartle, scaling Taipei 101. I'm such a crap photographer, cry for me, Argentina. There's a picture of the 50th floor--the stairwell wasn't as dark as it appears, it was just beige. There's a very unflattering picture of me next to a sign that says "I did it" which could have been taken in my apartment or any other nondescript white room for all the indication it gives of my whereabouts, and the next pic is of our whole Eagle Beaver team at the top. By the way, new estimate is closer to US $50,000 raised for the Garden of Hope!

This bottom pic is one of my going away presents from the Art Department. It was done in tribute to my love for Arab music and belly dancing. Hysterical.

I don't want to sound totally Amish or anything, but modern technology never ceases to amaze me. I managed to get my pictures developed and put onto cd within two hours, then I picked them up and posted them. Within 4 hours from being on my old school manual film camera to being on my blog.

Dude, today I bought like the entire Jay Chou catalog in search of this one cool song where he has a woman singing chinese opera style behind his rapping. And the lady at the music store lied to me and said it was on November's Chopin. Which it totally isn't. I think I am just going to take it from one of my university students.

Our lesson on prejudice and discrimination was a success. I gave each student an identity and they worked in pairs discussing the stereotypes of their identity, discrimination they might face, civil rights, and how they could improve their and their partner's situation. One of the most promising pairs was the National Taiwan University student (the Harvard of Taiwan) with the Vietnamese woman. When we got to the question asking how the Vietnamese woman could improve her situation they said she could win the lottery and the NTU student could help her by rigging the lottery. Nice. Since I clearly had a liberal point to make about how college students could fight for the rights of people like the Vietnamese workers who are trafficked here and have no recourse, I made them stand up there until they and the class came up with it. And then I made the most amazing analogy ever. I was trying to encourage them that college students could be very influential in Chinese society and so I brought up... the Tiananmen Square incident. Nice. I managed to bring up the incident where the government shot the college students to bits, ran over them with tanks and their efforts changed just about nothing. whoops. Remind me to pursue that career in inspirational speaking.