While I was at Dean’s place chatting about my upcoming move, I got a call out of the blue. It was my old buddy Warren, and he was in Taiwan! He couldn’t have picked a worse week to visit, but hey. When an old buddy of more than a decade shows up from halfway around the world, you’ve gotta at least meet him for dinner- and that’s exactly what I did.

We agreed to meet up at that Harbin restaurant I love so much, and catch up. When he showed up at the MRT, he had another friend with him, Karen. A bio-chem major back at UCBoulder, and a chronic 4.0 GPA student, she was the last college friend I ever expected to see in Taiwan. I could have imagined her being at CERN, or maybe some bio-tech research facility in Brazil, but never here in Taiwan. She’s teaching science classes at TAS, just the school where Martin almost decided to work as a sub. What a coincidence!

I can’t say that Warren or Karen were as impressed with the restaurant as I am. Warren was stymied by their lack of a restroom and his westernized attitudes that held him back from going next door, and I had to run out to get Karen some water at a convenience store, since they don’t serve any at the restaurant. Still, it was a good meal, and we got some pictures with the chef that will go up on my Zooomr account as soon as Warren emails them to me.

After dinner, I took them back to my place and showed it to them. We chatted about old times, and about life here as well. Warren, who is a fluent Taiwanese speaker, heard my first faltering attempts at using some of that language, and then saw my current book I’m using for studying Mandarin. He denies it, but I could swear his Mandarin’s gotten a bit better since he took that tech job that sent him out to Singapore. I do envy that kind of job set-up a bit, but at least he didn’t have the chance to kick my ass at Magic the Gathering again, like last time.

Both of them are taking off to go traveling soon. Warren will go to Thailand, and Karen to India (I think). Even though it is a busy week, it was nice to see them. Irene and Thomas, on the other hand, didn’t even contact me when they came to Taiwan… the punks.

BattlePanda just hit me with blogging’s equivalent of a chain-letter. I hate this kind of thing, but it would seem rude not to accept, so I’ll do the sensible thing… go along with it and grumble. I’m not really much of a movie guy, though, and I don’t go on many vacations either. Grumble, grumble, whine, whine, grumble.

Four Jobs I’ve Had
1. Fast Food Slave Team Member
2. Home Painting Franchise Manager
3. Bartender
4. Programmer

Four Movies I can watch over and over
1. Dead Poet’s Society
2. The Matrix
3. The Princess Bride
4. Any Zhou Qinshi Movie

Four Places I’ve lived
1. Boulder, Colorado
2. Austin, Texas
3. Xela, Guatemala
4. Jiayi, Taiwan

Four TV shows I love:
1. DS9
2: Babylon 5
3. Highlander
4. Friends

Four highly regarded and recommended TV shows I haven’t seen (much of):
1. Battlestar Galactica
2. That one with the writer of Seinfeld
3. That other new show everyone’s talking about
4. The other one… you know?

Four places I’ve vacationed:
1. Chicago, Il., sort of
2. Vancouver, BC
3. Hualian, Taiwan
4. Home (to see my family and friends)

Four of my favorite dishes:
1. Combo #5 (at any Mexican restaurant)
2. Pad Thai Phet
3. 宮寶雞丁
4. Pizza (Jalepeno and Black Olive)

Four sites I visit daily:
1. slashdot.org
2. theregister.co.uk
3. cnn.com
4. technorati.com

Four places I’d rather be right now:
1. Beijing, China
2. Harbin, China
3. Chengdu, China
4. My grandma’s house in Colorado

Four new bloggers I’m tagging:
1. Matt’s Wiki (that’ll kill this thing for sure)
2. Frequent Sinosplice commenter, Carl
3. Warren
4. Darin

Last night, I continued on my mad geeking spree. Robb, Lisa, Aubrey and Warren came over and we played Magic the Gathering. Geez, it’s been a long time since I played that game. It was pretty fun, though. Warren had never played before, so to save time we each made decks out of 10 random cards of each color, 7 lands of each type, and 5 artifacts. For the first game, we played with the whole deck. After that, we pruned our decks down (but kept the 40 card minimum rule). Somehow Warren completely wasted us, punk that he is.

I got my chance to gloat though, and it was a big one. You see, Warren’s Taiwanese. He moved to Colorado before middle school, and ended up living a couple blocks from me. We both went to the same high school and college. By the time I got to know him, a little in highschool and a lot better in college, his English was already great and he didn’t need ESL classes anymore. I do remember him reading Chinese books every now and then, though. Anyway, I still had some old Chinese study materials at my family’s house, from my last visit a couple of years ago. Warren noticed my flash cards and picked up a few stacks and started going through them, much like I did when I noticed them after getting here last week. Here’s the thing, though: he couldn’t read about 20% of them, and I knew them all. He couldn’t read my 國語日報, either. I could read about half the articles.

Yeah, baby! I knew my writing would be better, but I never imagined my reading would be, too. Ok, I have to admit I’m far from literate, his listening is still better, and his English and Taiwanese are perfect, but still! So what if he hasn’t lived in Taiwan or used Chinese in school since he was a little kid? I beat a Taiwanese person at something Chinese related and I’m going to cling to my moment of glory forever! Yeah, I got wasted at our geeky card game, but I’d rather have the Chinese. It means my 3 years of livin’ in “the ‘wan”haven’t all been in vain.

Tonight I was able to borrow my uncle’s car and drive up to Boulder. I got to see my old roommate and running partner Matt, Mike, and Warren. Warren went to high school with me, but I didn’t really get to know any of these guys well until college. Still, they all ended up becoming great friends, especially Matt who I probably hung out with more than anyone else I knew in college. Matt’s wife Nicole (another old friend of all of ours) was there, too. She wasn’t feeling too well, so we didn’t chat much. I made a horrible blunder calling their baby “he” when it was a she. It probably had something to do with the downright evil way Matt used her for part of his Halloween costume last year. Hopefully nobody’s feelings were hurt!

We all went out to eat at a nearby Mexican restaurant, and had a pretty good conversation. It spanned everything from the morality and ethics question on my blog a few posts ago to eugenics, twin studies, and imbalances in sports betting. I meant to ask Mike why the heck he’s back in school going for an undergrad EE after already having earned an M.A. in Physics from UC Santa Barbara, but I forgot. He got married recently, and he’s been setting up a pretty neat charity in Guatemala. Warren’s got a drive failure analysis job that jets him back and forth between Boulder and Singapore. It sounded pretty cool. After dinner we went back to Matt’s place for some more chatting, and catching up. He had a neat stack of Rubick’s cubes there- a 2×2, a 3×3, a 4×4 and a 5×5. Having already solved the 3×3, I figured the 2×2 would be trivial. It really wasn’t. I got one layer solved pretty quickly, but I didn’t manage the right sequence to rotate the pieces on the bottom. I’ve got to pick up some of those.