after the mini-trek around the various mountains and valleys, i've pretty much been having lunch/tea/dinner/dessert with seperate family friends and relatives every day.. didn't realize it had been so long, but i haven't been back to Taiwan in about 10 yrs and though i primarily came back to see my granddad, lots of my parents' friends demanded to see me and so here i am doing the smiling/charming good kid routine to put in a good word for my folks.. lol, can't really explain it better than that without getting into the social traditions and subculture of the area so i won't.. gets tedious, but i've had lots of practice (even in Canada) and i've gotten good at it, so i don't mind it as it pays off later on in strange ways when older generations like you.. all in all, its been an interesting experience. last i saw it, Taiwan was a budding industrial-newborn, booming its way onto the Asia-Pacific economy.. 9-10 yrs later, i see a country that has slowed considerably since then economically, with a strained dual-party political system primarily to blame.. looking forward, nobody (and i mean nobody) is optimistic about Taiwan's near future and until something drastic changes (like China's economy shrinking instead of EXPLODING - ha ha ha), Taiwan's gonna be in trouble.. (maybe one day when i have a lotta time i'll get into it more, coz since i've been here i've been thinkin about the situation a fair bit, and the conclusions are depressing.)
on a personal level, i've enjoyed talking to all sorts of older relatives and family friends who've seen a lot more of the world than i have, and being the sponge i am, i think i've absorbed quite a bit over the past week or so.. always a good thing to look at those who've come before you, in differing circumstances, and thinkin about what helped some become billionaires and what crippled others.. random note, in spending time with all these largely successful friends of my parents and hearing about their own lives and offspring, i'm a bit encouraged that despite my own convictions that i'm "behind," i think i'm actually doing ok for this stage of the game. plus, a couple job offers were thrown out on the table too, so if i ever really want to make absurd amounts of money to live in smog-infested over-populated country with a bleak future......
thats about it for now.. i started two different "year in review" type pieces a while ago (one for Kayce Models, one for myself personally) but seeing as we aren't ready to launch the new Kayce Models site in entirety yet, i'll hold off on posting those.. below are some (captioned) photos & screenshots from my "vacation" in Taiwan - as everyone who knows me already knows by now, i love what i do so would've ended up finding a way to work on my break regardless haha.. only 2 all-nighters in 10 days isn't too bad though =) mostly, i've been out and about but i managed chance to re-filter about 15 sets of photos in the late nights (k, jus so you know, that's over 10,000 photos) that i lost from my harddrives crashes over the past few mths, and i even got around to edittin the Circa photos as well as a set of Selena's photos.. there's screenshots below of the other sets that have now been filtered and that i will filter when I'm in Vancouver - i picked up a shiny (read: expensive) new Wacom tablet, so future photos that i airbrush are going to be beeeeeeeeeeautiful. i can't wait.
next stop, Vancouver.. hopefully i'll have time to email/call everyone i want to when i'm in the airport, but if not, i'll talk to everyone when i talk to you.. its been nuts tryin to communicate w/ people in HK, Vancouver, Toronto, and Paris while i'm in Taipei, butttttttt there's lots of updates/changes/upgrades and lots of work to be done so thats life ;)
HAPPY NEW YEAR EVERYONE =)
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