More on CYCU and a Nihonjin in Taiwan

After my power breakfast

I say if you can't drink your breakfast...

I took a different route to class this morning, and passed the Graphic Design department. They have a nice planter lining the whole building that students helped decorate with ceramic tiles

my favorite

Our lab is, as I think I mentioned, the Image Processing lab

And our professor does work in Halftone Imaging and Watermarking

There will be a quiz later

Today was our last in-lab lecture. We finally got to watermarking and concealing images inside other images. It's very cool for a computer geek like me.

You just can't buy this kind of entertainment...

And following that, of course, lunch

This is how you order in many places. Always with a red pencil

These were awesome. I don't know what it's called, but it's meat, green onions and a barbecue sauce wrapped in a pastry-like dough and fried.

Umbrellas are so popular here (for the rain AND the sun), there is a "high-end" umbrella store.

Followed by more work, then dinner. This was where things got interesting. They wanted to take me to a place where we order a lot of things and share. Sounds good. So we walked the opposite direction from where we usually eat, down a very busy street (there are no sidewalks in JhongLi), dodging scooters and taxis, to an auto body shop. They mostly had it converted into a restaurant. For the first time, I had some real trepidation about where we were eating, from the smell outside, to watching them dump their water down the sewer in front of the "restaurant" to the inside

The tables were plastic so soft I could literally bend it in half by myself, covered with what appeared to be red garbage bags and a lazy susan on top (which, to my surprise, Sun, one of the CYCU students, knew how to say in English. Where did he learn that? "In school textbook", was his response). There was also a Beer Girl. This is generally an attractive young woman wearing a Japanese "race queen" dress who takes your drink orders, opens your beers, pours them for you, and allows the businessmen who were getting drunk next to us to flirt with them. Ours was very impressive, talking and laughing with the increasingly obnoxious table next to us. Thankfully, none of us were drinking.

All my concerns vanished when the food arrived. I'm just going to post pictures, but they were ALL good, though their pork tends to have a LOT of bones in them. We ate for over an hour.

Beer Girl. Notice the guy next to her. He comes up in just a minute.

As we were finishing, I wanted a picture with everyone, so we were going to ask Beer Girl to take it, since the "waitresses" had all the charm of a wildebeast (we were served as one would deal a deck of cards, and neither of them cracked a smile even once) but she had vanished, no doubt for a break to get away from the pawing businessmen. As we were lining everyone up for me to take a picture of them, the guy from the picture comes up to me, points at the camera and himself. I nod and hand it to him. He lines all of us up for a shot and then

takes a picture of himself, much to the delight of his table. We all laughed, he smiled, said "OK" and

did it again. He finally took a proper picture

and then one of his friends made us take this

As we were leaving, one of the businessmen said "He is our Japanese friend". He hadn't spoken a word, so I had no clue. He almost fell out of his chair when I said "そうですか？じゃ、ありがとうございました" to him. I was probably the last one in our motley group he expected to speak Japanese.

Moral of the story, don't judge a book by it's cover.