Friday, September 19, 2008

PTA, art workshop, scooter registration, and riding my bicycle

I thought I might write a normal "what's happening in my life?" post for a change.

Work has been really busy in the past three weeks since we started the new semester. Or should that be: I have been really busy with work for the last three weeks.

Today is Friday and tomorrow morning I will go in to school from 9-12 for an art workshop where we - the teachers - will learn how to make all of the art projects that we will teach this semester. Next week we have PTA (Parent-Teacher Association) on Thursday.

I ride my bike to work almost every day and I'm proud to be doing that. I decided yesterday that I didn't like riding the scooter to work. Perhaps the most accurate explanation I can come up with for why I formed that opinion is that it doesn't feel good, whatever that means. But I feel good about riding my bicycle to work, despite sweating a bit and being a bit washed out by the time I get there. I have a great bicycle here and I'm going to take it with me when I leave Taiwan and go to Canada or Australia.

We just received the new registration papers for our scooter. When I enquired at work the other day I discovered that the scooter registration actually expired back in April and I guess we've been driving it illegally for five months. Actually, the registration is less important than the insurance. If we were to have any kind of accident without insurance then we could face stiff financial penalties by which I mean we might have to pay some guy or girl bucket-fuls of money for the damage caused to their Mercedes Benz or BMW. It's surprising how many imported luxury cars there are here in Tainan. I guess a lot of people much get rich from the businesses they own and run. Or perhaps people have more money to spend on cars because they spend so much less on accommodation. Of course, apartment living is the norm and so the costs of housing are lower, as is the associated upkeep and maintenance.

Before I go I will say that I found an internet site that has song lyrics and Utube widgets so that you can listen to the song, watch the video (often the actual music video that was released to promote the song), and sing along karaoke-style from the lyrics sheet if you want. Brilliant. I won't put a link up here because I'm sure there are better sites than the advertisement/spyware-ridden site that I am using right now.

See you later
Adrian

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