Shrimp Massacre and more Chinese skule

Well...this week as pretty uneventful.  Fri. was my last day at YWCA, I had a farewell lunch.  The chinese classes are in full gear now, I attend everyday, as my attendance record is required for visa extension.  I may start writing future blogs in chinese so I can get practice :P, otherwise hard to motivate myself to learn, its hard because the language is spoken in reverse like Yoda in Starwars, but similar to Hindhi, instead of saying something like What do you want , you would say you want to eat what?  or instead of saying how much is a pen and 2 books, you would say one book, 2 pens how much is it?  So it can be sometimes somewhat confusing, as I have to think what I will say before I say it. I also don't feel like learning the strokes and how to read them, as I don't have quite the motivation to learn the writing system.  I have the language somewhat down, now I need to learn more of the vocabulary which is a trial and error process, the tone system makes it tough though to speak and understand.  Since many words are similar, but just spoken in a different tone, one must really listen carefully, and speak carefully to convey the correct tones, otherwise the wrong meaning might be inferred.

 I had a few interviews this week for teaching english, which went quite good I think.  They were not very long, seeing as how I have no actual teaching experience, so not much to talk about :P.

On thursday, my friend asked me to go to this pool place with fish tanks, I thought it was like a bar with nice pool tables and some fish tanks to watch, but actually, there are these giant pools, and the people just sit around it and "fish" for food.  No joke, its a restaurant, and the workers through shrimp in the pool, and people just sit around and catch shrimp and than have it cooked.  Since people can't do actual fishing since the water around Taipei too polluted, and most people don't have boats, this restaurant type is actually quite popular.

It was really quite sad though, the shrimp were literally being tortured before being eaten.  When they were caught, they would fling their arms and try to get away, but couldn't as they would be flung out of the water and dangled on the ground.  The people would than rip off their arms, and it must've been very painful, as even after the arms were ripped off and thrown off of the body, the arms would keep moving which was really really gross.  The shrimp were than thrown in a pile, still alive, albeit now missing their arms and legs.  They still had their attenaes and the rest of their body parts.  After about 2 hour, people had amassed a sizeable armada of shrimp, probably several families worth (20) or so and had them cooked.  When the shrimp came back after being cooked, their bodies were still mostly intact, I assume they were just deep-fried alive, which must have been extremely painful.  The people than just broke the shrimp with their fingers and sucked out their internal body parts, it was really gross watching them suck out the head, cause the shrimp eyes were still eerily looking forward.  I had unfortunately neglected to bring my camera....as a picture would probably be more appropriate...or perhaps inappropriate.  By the end of the "dinner" a.k.a massacre, shrimp body parts littered the table, discarded heads, torsos and antennas... really don't see how it was fun for anyone, but everyone else seemed to really be enjoying it.

When I played badminton on Monday, I found out the school has a swimming pool on the first floor, it is quite large.  The school must be quite rich to afford so many luxuries... the school is quite large, I will try to take pics of it tomorrow night when I go to play again. 

One thing I find strange here is that Ice Tea is cheaper than coke, which is good because I drink a lot of Ice tea.  Yesterday I drank almost 3 L....granted it was really hot though.  Lately, my computer has been crashing, as the cpu overheats, I may buy a bigger heatsink in September if I am still here...