Where?

Typhoon today over Taiwan, that just means one thing: rain, lots of rain, and wind.

Most of the central and southern part is flooded. News keep showing all the damage in those areas, which is quite a lot. Rural areas were flooded so that only rooftops were visible, and in some cities, the water level reached the bottom of cars. Really sad. Fortunately it’s calmed down now, so it’ll soon start getting back to normal. Which is good.

Thankfully the weather here wasn’t that bad, just lots of rain and wind, which managed to break my umbrella while on my way to classes. Naturally I ended all wet. Sigh.

So I’ve spent most of my day indoors, cleaning up the water that seeped into my room and sewing

Apart from that, there’s not much to say, nothing else has happened. So I’ll shall end this post with a few pics:

Hsinchu cityscape from the 12th floor of Sogo:

and the Train station, which is down below Sogo:

Finally, something I saw the other day that just cracked me up :

I just gotta say that is one HUGE! pudding, talk about family size. (It actually weighed quite a bit)

heh.

Well that’s all for now. Enjoy.

Cheers, NM

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At the early hours of 11:37 am of Thursday morning my friend called me. Yes that is early, considering I went to sleep at 6 am, it is early.

No my friend is not evil. My celly is Evil*.

Anyways. She called me to go off on the trip of the week: she invited me to go with her family to a theme park “Window on China“. Great fun, roller coasters and water by the tons, small scaled villages and lots of sun (it being summer in Taiwan, the heat and sun is to be expected of course.) but never the less, it was great fun.

We rode on every fun (fast) ride they had. I personally loved one called Wipeout, which was a lovely centrifugal ride, just turning and going up and down. My friend wasn’t so crazy bout that one she preferred the dark space-type roller coaster (you know, those ones that are all in the dark with just an eventual light here and there) That, I must admit was great fun, twists and turns, ups and downs and, as my friend made sure everybody could hear, points where your “differential was zero!” (that for the non-nerds/geeks are the highest points on a roller coaster, i.e. the peaks before the fall downward.) For my part, I was either laughing uncontrollably or just plain screaming, but I desisted from that when the girl in the front car screamed for everybody in the ride.

By the seventh turn on that roller coaster, we were quite relaxed and enjoying the ride… except the odd halt just before the end, talk about a solution to lack of space. The first time it almost injured our necks, as it throws you forward quite hard, due to it coming at a rather high speed and then suddenly stopping. Anyways, enough physics… for now ;).

But overall, I must say it was very enjoyable, and a great way to spend time and liberate a bit of bottled up stress and energy.

Another one was this one where they threw us down a nice [very] inclined slope with water (you can imagine the result of that :)) which was quite high over the park (maybe 500 meters? dunno, I’m not good at estimating that) we came out all dripping wet. Thankfully I had my bathing suit on, so no prob for me ^_^.

Now, the other attraction of the park is a collection of small scale models of several important or famous buildings and places in Taiwan, China, Japan and Europe. The ones from Taiwan are incredibly similar to their real counter parts, the detail is quite nice and at night the have all the lights on in the windows, make it a great sight.

The ones in China are also nice, including small people moving around. The Japanese ones (my favorites) we only managed to see them towards the end (you wouldn’t imagine how similar some of the Chinese models were to several Japanese building models. But as my friend pointed out, it’s more of how the Japanese imported architecture details from China. Quite true.) The European ones left me some doubt as to their accuracy, as the Parthenon from Greece look a bit too complete and other structures were a little dubious.

In the end, it was all great fun. Here are some pics ^_^. Enjoy.
Taipei… in a nutshell:

My Friend:

Just makes me want to have tea:

More in the photo page ^_^

Cheers, NM.

* Evil, by Interpol

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So today as I was strolling after my dinner, I went into the bookstore near the uni campus (I, btw, just love bookstores and office supplies stores if I could I’d buy everything in them… but then I’d be broke) and started looking at the art section. Now, for a while I’d been meaning to buy myself a set of watercolor paints, but hadn’t because of classes, too much homework and reports. But then I thought, because I’m now in summer vacation, it’s not such a bad idea, so I bought them, a nice new set of 12 watercolor paints.

I get home and start experimenting with them a bit, mixing colors and all. So after a while, I manage to produce this:

It’s not so bad (in my opinion), though I’m not exactly thrilled as to how the hair lights turned out, or the lips, wanted something more subtle, but then again being the first attempt, it ain’t so bad. Definitely will keep trying, I really like how you can layer the paint and how it creates great light effects.
Well then, that said, I’ve lately done other sketches, but till now I post them cause I’m a bit lazy with the scanner. Anyways. First, I finished Spring for the fairies of the four seasons, really like the fact that I could add much more color and detail to this one, gives it a nice feeling:

Again, calligraphy pen and watercolor pencils. (I’ve found a not so good side to these. I really like how the color comes out rather bold [compare it to the skin color which is from a normal color pencil] but they tend to rub of on the other pages. Thankfully, it doesn’t smear the drawing.)

Finally, something I did a while back:

I really love fractals, everything from their symmetry to their somewhat mathematical nature, and everything in between. I find them so unique and complex, yet they are composed of the same repeating shape. For this one, I begun with a circle, and then started to do arrow head like shapes around. I purposely did it offset from the center, so as to balance out so much symmetry with a little anti-symmetry.

Also new pics in the photos section. ^_^

Well, that’s all for the moment.

Hope you enjoyed it.

Cheers, NM

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