Bowling, Take 2!

Friday December 14^th, 2012

There’s one other type of my birth year coffee and today was the day to try it. The other flavor was “American coffee.” This one, if my Chinese is correct, is “Caffeine X2.” Oh snap this sounds like a drink you have when about to die from exhaustion. XD You want to know something funny? As I’m typing this, I’m listening to a song titled “Caffeine.” Bwuhahaha now the caffeine is X3! I love the connection! …Moving on, it tasted like basic, normal coffee but the great thing is I wasn’t having a heated battle with drowsiness.  Yay! That means it beverage did its job! Whoo! …Yeah…I really need to catch up on sleep. Darn you workload! >:(

Lunch was yet another new experiment with ordering a “#12 Burger.” Will I order it ever again? The answer is: N…O… Nooooo thank you. At first I thought the meat, chicken perhaps, was overloaded with pepper. Later I concluded the burger was spiced to a hot degree. I’m not the biggest fan of spiciness, especially when I can only taste the spice and not the whole burger. Also, too many chunks of onion were added. It would’ve been better to slice the onion up instead of volcanic eruptions of the stuff. So I didn’t really eat a hamburger, I ate onion and spiciness. Ick.

The combo came with milk tea, which saved the meal from being disastrous. You could either choose cold or hot. Milk tea is normally cold because that’s the temperature preference when it comes to pearl milk tea. So trying something new I asked for “熱 的” (hot). Oh goody goodness YES! This stuff is even better when warm. Firstly because the cold version has ice, which melts quickly and waters down the drink to be “ok” status. The hot version is pleasantly devoid of this. Secondly, the fact that the temperature is cold in the classroom and then drinking a warm beverage, it totally heightens the experience to loveliness. ^_^

Remember the English song competition I mentioned in my school. Well I know another classroom’s song selection. It’s a real hoot. For five minutes, probably even longer, this was continually repeated “We all live in a yellow submarine, a yellow submarine, a yellow submarine.” Oh my lordie lord. Really? The good thing is they don’t need music and the song is ridiculously easy hence a nice choice for English beginners. The bad thing, I wager the students get pretty darn tired of that song really quickly. XD

I’ll admit, I’ve gotten bored in high school. Writing Taffys all the time, trying to study Chinese in such a tired state, the drifting asleep battle, it all gets suffocating in a constant cycle. In attempt to spice things up a bit, I took a pencil and paper and just drew. Plain, simple drawing. Some animals, some Christmas things, Ren Fest, people and other stuff. Best…decision…I’ve had in awhile. I went to town! Drawing is a definite part of my future at Tatung! I have my fingers crossed in hopes of learning how to draw characters if I keep on trying. You see, I can draw when copying an image I see in front of me, that’s my strength. I want to learn how to draw a character from my own mind and imagination. The ability to illustrate any pose and body type so I can create scenes, comics, anything! Oh boy that would be wonderful! I could finally depict all my ideas from over the years. Yep, I have my fingers crossed. ;D

School ends at 4:00. I had a get together scheduled for 7:30.  So that leaves 3.5 hours to kill since it’s pointless to go all the way home just to come all the way back and further, wasting time and money. I planned on helping Redy grade English homework from her class because I want to relieve some of her workload in her busy, busy life. Unfortunately she finished teaching at 5:00 and I had to leave at 5:45 so I could only help for forty-five minutes. But hey, any amount of assistance I can provide, I’ll do it happily. ^_^

After leaving, I went to grab dinner at a place called “Mos Burger,” a Japanese take on hamburgers. It seemed to be really popular and had nice facilities so I wanted to try it at least once. And once is all it’s going to be voluntarily out of me. Waaaaaay over priced and waaaaaay too crowded. At first I thought I wasn’t going to have a seat because none were available until I had to ninja snatch one right as the previous users left. The table was next to a snogging couple. Ewwwww, cooties! XD The food I ordered was a teriyaki burger, fries and iced tea. For a fourth of its price, I could get a burger that’s twice as big at the school cafeteria. The burger wasn’t even that great. So nope, not coming back here!

On a time budget I ran an errand at Taipei Main MRT Station Exit 8. And that’s as much detail I am giving because otherwise it would ruin a surprise for someone if they read this Taffy blog. ;)

The event at 7:30 was some more bowling practice, this time with a teacher (a.k.a. Yavanna; a.k.a. temporary host family sister)! But not just Yavanna came. Pi Nan, Allen, Eddie (Yavanna’s brother), Eddie’s wife, Eddie’s wife’s brother also attended. Now Yavanna and Eddie are both pros. They have their own bowling balls, the cases, bandages, the whole sha-bang! Needless to say, they knew what they were doing and they greatly helped me improve, well, everything about my game. XD Arms, hand, shoulders, feet, strength, all of it.

Eddie was adorable in the extremely shy sense. We never really had a proper introduction because he was so shy. When finished his turn bowling, he would flee to the back of the lane, behind the seats and when he wanted to give me some bowling tips, he spoke them to Allen who transferred/translated to me. It was cute. ^_^ I’m grateful for his help and yes, he’s a great bowler.

That is Eddie's back about to make his move

As a fun mention, this little gizzy was at the bowling alley. It's a gambling game for the prize of a bouncy ball featuring Pokemon. The slanted board has a bunch of thin, upright metal rods and at the bottom are many yellow slots. Your goal is to get the luck that enables the ball to swerve/bounce through the rods into a yellow slot with a red light above it. The gambling part comes from how much you bet on each round. Somehow Pokemon and gambling just don't mix for me. XD

Now at first I couldn’t bowl worth a dime. I had to experiment with different bowling balls in order to find the best one for me. The easiest one to work with and control concluded to be seven pounds. But during that experiment and trying to figure out how to bowl properly with all the correct components, many maaaaaany gutter balls were thrown, effectively making my score pitiful. XD With two games total, my first play was 52 and the second amounted to 61. There was improvement, yay but still pretty bad. The main thing is I won’t be completely clueless for tomorrow’s Rotary bowling competition. Heck no I won’t win but the goal is to not completely fail. XD We’ll just see how it goes, shall we?

Until then, adios amigos! :)