around

I have purchased a new camera, and it is a thing of beauty. It's a Nikon PS500, compared to my first camera, a FujiFilm Fine Pix J150. Although my first camera has served me very well since 2009, seeing as I'm abroad and have proven to myself that I do use a camera and quite frequently, it would be a good idea to get a new camera, and one of a higher grade. So Rory (who had previously bought himself a new camera) and I went to Camera Street, which is by Taipei Main Station and is a small section of a long street filled with camera shops. Having looked online before our trip, I knew I wanted a Nikon 1500, or something very similar. The Nikon 1500 was out of my price range, but the Nikon PS500 was right in it, and had the features I was looking for: memory saved to an SD card, video-taking capability, good zoom, and a single re-chargeable battery. Plus it has all the bells and whistles of a quality camera, like the ability to manipulate shutter speed, ISO, aperture size, etc. (...

It's interesting what will engage kids, and sometimes there is no legit reason for it. For example, my CEI03 class, which is full of 6/7-year-olds and is alternately the best and worst class I have (their moods change with the weather) today was almost impossible to engage in games that involved a sticky ball (plastic ball covered in suction cups, it sticks to the whiteboard), which is normally their favorite. However, when I had them sit on the ground around me and I read a book to them about a kid who leaves his teddy bear on the bus, they were ENTHRALLED. It was a simple book and I did nothing but ask them if the kid was happy or sad, or have them look at what was in the pictures, but they were quiet and focused as if I was hypnotizing them. Two hours later, enter my second class for the day, CEO6D, whom I absolutely adore. They're 9/10-year-olds and will pretty much go with whatever I throw at them. They're insanely energetic but decently well-behaved, and usually fe...

I finally got monumentally sick from something I ate. If hearing about someone's illness grosses you out, seriously skip this. I'm sharing this as a kind of catharsis because being this sick in a foreign country on my day off has been really  miserable. (Although I have to thank friends and family who reached out to ask how I was feeling, because that has gone a long way toward making me feel I'm not alone.) There's a decent chance that I just have a stomach bug, but the fact that I ate street food prior to becoming violently ill is a good indicator that the food was what caused me to be sick. I had stomach cramps and nausea so bad it woke me up at 6:30am today, and by 10am I'd thrown up twice. By noon I'd thrown up a third time, although by then whatever was in my stomach was mostly gone, and I've just been left with an empty digestive system, mild stomach cramps, and nausea. It sucks, because this was my day off and I'd planned to go to the gym, ...