Life has stayed busy lately. Days after I got back from Taiwan, my dad visited for a week. Since then I've been working late nearly every night on two different consulting projects. Also, unexpectedly, I managed to get outrageously drunk two weekends in a row. Got a bit more to go with work, and another rock concert this weekend, so the adventure continues...

I'm in a remarkably good mood despite all this. I guess i just needed to go a bit nuts, and I'm actually really excited about my latest project, which involves a newly invented electric motor that may very well revolutionize the industry.

Definitely plan to calm down in May though, and get myself back in order.

Last weekend I tore it up at Taiwan's version of spring break and thoroughly fell in love with the island. The incentives were in place to party all night: I was staying in a tiny room with 6 guys, and out on the street and down on the beaches was the rowdiest party I'd ever attended, with by far the highest concentration of beautiful women I'd ever seen.

I'm left with a delightful montage of memories: only three mattresses for 6 people! beers. building a fire on the beach. trip to 7-11. bikini truck! going into the middle of nowhere in a cab. punk rocker screaming. whoa, the beach party is where it's at. crazy blond girl introduces me to everyone. laying out on the beach the next day. got so burned. hot sisters. gangsters eating beetle nut. even bigger fire, so everyone we met found us. said i was a yoga teacher, very good idea. so many people arriving now. crazy all night. sun comes up, thought the night was over, it wasn't. find my friends drinking whiskey at 10Am. A round of espresso, whiskey, tequila, and a long island ice tea. ha. party is dieing down. suddenly at a dance party, then in the ocean. fuck my phone is broken. back in Taipei. somehow going out again. almost beat up by gangsters. just barely woke up on time. at the airport eating some good bread and sipping brown rice milk.

I am in Taipei right now for business and pleasure. For business I'm trying to promote American dehydrated potatoes (boring, but at least I'm hitting the street and stretching my Chinese). For pleasure I'm headed down to Spring Scream, a huge 200 band, 4 day raucous beach party in the south of Taiwan. A bunch of friends from Shanghai are coming over. We leave tomorrow morning and I could not be more psyched.

The other good thing is that Taiwan itself is awesome. I'm definitely going to move here at some point. Every person I've met has been very friendly. Beautiful women are everywhere. The food, especially the street food, is incredible fresh, tasty and diverse. I could go on and on. Basically it's China in a developed country form. One thing that's really interesting for me is that I can communicate with old people and working people here much more naturally. They are not awed by me. They don't go on about my Chinese or America. We just talk.

Every now and then something interesting goes on outside my window. Today the sludge cleaners have arrived. Not sewage, just collected runoff water and mud, but still fairly stinky. The cleaners work in a 5 man team. One guy uses a pick axe to lift out the lid. Another brings over a sludge bucket. A third uses a long bamboo pole with with a sack on the end to scoop out the sludge. The sack has a ring on the bottom, and one guy uses a metal rod to lift the sack up and dump out the contents. Once a bucket is filled, two other guys mount it onto a truck. A fairly clean operation, unless the truck tipped over.

The best place to hangout outside when it's rainy and cold is a hot spring; that or a heated rock slab. A bunch of us did both this weekend in a little city called Wuyi, about 3 hrs drive south of Hangzhou. Like so many places in China, we worked our way through worn out looking streets and found a little oasis amongst all the mess. The hot spring resort had 20+ piping hot pools, each infused with different substances including chinese medicine, coffee, and wine. Afterwards we got massages, wrapped in towels laying on rock slabs that must have been heated with water pipes below. After a month of rain, today the warm sun finally returned. Our timing was perfect.

Last Sunday, after a pleasant walk in the mountains with my dog, I passed by the organic food place in my neighborhood and went to buy some buckwheat noodles. The usually sleepy venue was packed with people, most of them, it turned out, avid environmentalists. In the picture is Mrs. Hu, the store owner (and quickly becoming my personal hero), showing off her trash cans made from trash. She plans to sell them and donate the proceeds to environmental cleanup efforts.

I got into a conversation about trash cleanup. Lots of Chinese throw trash on the ground without a thought. One lady was talking up organizing a group to pick up trash somewhere in Hangzhou. She also runs a big brother big sister like program, and suggested she could bring some of the kids along. Another lady said she had some media contacts and perhaps could make a story out of it.

Mrs. Hu was telling me a story the other day about a foreigner in Western China that started picking up trash himself on the weekends and ended up inspiring more than a thousand people to join him in the process every weekend. Very inspiring to be amidst all the passion.

Here is a ridiculous video I came across. A toddler in Western China smokes an entire cigarette. No good, no good at all.