"Vanishing"

As many of your already know, I went home unexpectedly for winter break. I had planned to stay here in Taiwan until the end but a free ticket and too many minnows did me in.

The thesis has hit a few snags recently. I had a meeting with the expert panel member who told me that it should have been denied if not for politics. So I went back to the drawing board and tried to plan a way to attack the subject in an academically accepted way. At one point, I needed a break from it all and took an offer from a friend to go deep into the mountains to a hot springs.

The springs themselves weren’t anything to write home about but the trip there was a lot of fun. We woke up at 5 AM (too early) and took a train to the eastern side of Taiwan. Once we got there, we rented scooters and drove for about 90 minutes through the mountains. Going 80 km/h is unsafe on mountain roads but it’s a great adrenaline rush and since I’m still young and stupid, I chose the adrenaline over the safety. Once we got to the springs we hiked down the mountain for about sixty minutes. There were points where it was so steep we had to hold onto ropes. The water going down the river was freezing when we first stepped in to go to the camp grounds but I got used to it going upstream to the springs. The next day we hiked up the mountain which was a good test of endurance. When we finally got back to the scooters, we realized that they did not have enough gas to go down the mountain, so we went down with our engines off. Once we got back to Tainan, I was ready to pass out in my bed.

The next day I sent a progress report to the expert and was told that all the work I had done since my proposal wasn’t good and that I needed to start again. At this point, I felt that I couldn’t catch the fish with the minnows given to me in Taiwan. I chose to take an offer to go home and visit professors at App. Home was refreshing, I saw many people who I haven’t seen in a long time and made the connections for my thesis. We’ll see if it pays off down the road.

Since coming back to Taiwan, I have been shuffling between the thesis and an IT job for a friend. It’s kept me busy during the day and tired at night. The jet lag only made it better but that’s something you have to deal with going halfway across the world I suppose. My birthday is next week and it will share a date with the third IMBA Rock Show. Hopefully they’ll let me in for free.