You may have seen on the news that there was a huge typhoon that went through the Philippines. It did quite a bit of damage there and is also causing some flooding and damage to the Southern parts of Taiwan (Taipei is in Northern Taiwan and we just have a lot of rain). Because of this typhoon, it has been raining literally non-stop for the past week, and the extended 10 day forecast says it will continue to rain for another week and maybe stop around Halloween.
In Los Angeles, if there is rain for more than a few hours, it is "Storm Watch 2010" on the local TV news: video footage of cars skidding off the freeway, accidents, mudslides, streets flooding, etc. Here in Taiwan, one week of solid rain doesn't even ruffle the feathers, it just comes with the territory of living in a tropical environment. It is so hot here, that it is actually nice to have some rain because the temperature drops at least 10 degrees Fahrenheit.
As far as my Chinese class, I got my second test back and wow did it suck; I got a 65%. I would have scored in the 80's but I didn't have enough time to go back and convert the pinyin words I wrote down that the teacher recited us, and convert them to Chinese characters. Pinyin uses English letters to represent Chinese sounds: like "zhong guo" = 中 國 = China. Without this part of the test, I would have gotten a 90% score.
Oh well, as the French say, "c'est la vie". As you can see, my 30 minutes a day of French studies are really paying off...au revior!
