Lost in Translation?

Today, I was locked inside of a convenience store for half an hour.

Laura and I went out to get breakfast and wait for Bob by the subway station before we went to Danshui and a fisherman's pier (kind of like a boardwalk...but much tastier than those sorry American excuses for street food!). We got lunch at a 7-11 for $50 and $80 Yuan (~$1.80 and $2.10 USD, respectively...booyah!) We gave into our innate American-ness (ironic, I know I just made fun of America...whatever, it's my right) and sought shelter from the hot hot heat in a Starbucks where we knew there would be air-conditioning.

I have to preface my anger at Starbucks by saying that up til then, we'd been consistently buying delicious tea from street vendors all week for about 85 cents. Starbucks charged me $100 for a tazo tea (which I didn't even really want in the first place). Anyway, so I'm kind of annoyed that I spent more money on a stupid tea than I did on my entire lunch, but we go sit upstairs and wait for Bob's arrival...this is 1:20 pm. Two minutes later, a barista comes upstairs and makes an announcement. I couldn't understand it all (let's be honest, I'm on the same literacy level as my 6-year old niece), so I interpret her speech as she's saying something about a group coming into the Starbucks for 30 minutes, and that we won't be able to leave the upstairs in the meantime. I also hear something about the possibility of lights flashing on and off, but was also told to not be alarmed, that at 2:00 we could exit the building. No one else seemed to be particularly surprised or annoyed, but we decided to leave just in case. So much for air conditioning, what a rip-off. Sorry this isn't making sense, just follow me.

So anyway, we leave by 1:30 so that we wouldn't be trapped inside the Starbucks in case Bob arrived during that time. We're walking up the next block when a policeman starts blowing his whistle at Laura and forces us into the nearest shop (which happens to be a convenience store). They're closing the corrugated metal doors and everything, so I'm kind of panicking, thinking of worst case scenarios (i.e. we're being bombed, there's a shooting somewhere, I don't know what happens in Taiwan?!?!). I kept asking people what exactly was happening, since no one seemed particularly upset, and my rudimentary Chinese got me as far as something that sounded similar to (but was not, in fact) a "performance" of some sort coming through town that you had to be indoors for.

So I thought to myself, this is strange, why would you have to be indoors for a street performance? Maybe there's a famous personality coming through town? Then I thought, does this sh*t happen every day?

I took some pictures of the before and after of the streets during the 'performance' that I'll put up later. Bob called me pretty confused and was unable to exit to the street from the subway either (literally there was no one on the streets). They let us out at 2 pm, as promised, and we met up with Bob, went about our way, still seriously confused. Poor Bob said that he had had the most boring 15 minutes of his life...at least I had hilarious cleansing products and condoms to look at.

We consulted with Laura's cousins tonight after getting back from Danshui, and I have to give myself SOME credit, I was pretty close. We just happened to be in Taipei during the one time of each year that they close down all the street to have military street rehearsals.

What?

Anyway, I guess 'performance' is pseudo-close to 'military rehearsal'. Illiteracy sucks.

just breathe

so friday night we had graduation feista for the people who were leaving, wine, cheese, chips plus... musical chairs! hahaha so funny...also the losers have to do various embarassing things when they get out. then we all went to a michael jackson tribute party at a bar where they planned all his music videos...man were they crazy! i had only seen thriller and let me tell ya that was one interesting dude.












yesterday i got up at 4am to join some other ppl at 5am to climb a volcano! so we hiked up santa maria in order to view another volcano called santa aquito not sure about the spelling. well apparently it is like the most active volcano in guatemala and erupts all day long so we got to witness an eruption!

and then a huge cloud that rose above us and we were joking about how it looked like it was just going to crash down on us...then like 10 minutes later it starts raining ash. it was crazy! but omg it was the hardest hike ever...i kept having to stop the 5 of us and be like hold....on....i ....cant...breathe- the altitude is insane i think we were at 2,800 meters or something like that. im workin those red blood cells

i have an awesome teacher this week for spanish school...shes hilarious
just to let you know there are certain phrases that are fine to say in spain but in latin america they are slang for sexual things...
likeeee
coger which usually means to take or to choose means to have sex with
estoy calienta...which usually means i am hot because of the weather means i am hot sexually

Je ne parle pas francais

Bonjour! I'm alive! After a few ridiculous flight mishaps and Delta losing our luggage for three days, I'm finally getting settled into life in Montpellier. My first meal was a baguette, croissant, Nutella, and cheese.
I'm learning to recognize more French words, but I still don't know how to say anything really. My mom and sister are still here on their vacation, and they're leaving Wednesday, but the other exchange students are supposed to be here by then, so hopefully I'll have friends.

Today was my first day of "work." My professor is really nice; he tries to explain everything to me in English, but sometimes things come out hilariously. His research is really interesting though (cognitive evoked potentials in Alzheimer's), and he knows of Dean DeKosky, so he thinks I'm from a legit school. If only he knew about my medical school life...

I've gotten to explore the city a pretty good amount so far. I have a tramway card, which is crucial to get around the city since it's 90 degrees and sunny here all the time. And yes, the Ligne 2 tram is called "flower power."
Montpellier is a really old city, and it actually has the oldest, still-functional medical school in the Western world. They've really tried to hold on to the French culture as much as possible, hence, no one here really speaks English that well. So far, I've seen two accordion players, a lady dressed in black and white stripes head to toe, lots of men wearing crazy hats, and almost everyone walks around carrying a baguette. I'm determined to get pictures of all these things.

Here's a portion of downtown: the Charles de Gaulle Esplanade. You can see the blue "swallow-covered" Ligne 1 tram in the left corner. There's a carousel. Monoprix is the supermarket in the bottom right corner. Everything is so expensive here! I hate the Euro!

Here's a typical Montpellier street. Little boutiques, markets, and sandwicheries are all along them. There are also a couple of McDonald's. And Neil, there are so many doner kebab places! I haven't had one yet, but I will.

Here, I'm sitting on top of the Corum, another opera house downtown. It's a pretty sweet view of the city.

I saw the Mediterranean Sea a couple of days ago! My mom, sister, and I decided to take an adventure and ride the tram and a bus to the beach. It's pretty hilarious trying to do this when none of us speak French, know the bus route, or know where in the hell we're going. But, we just followed everyone else in bathing suits and ended up there!

Alright, gotta save some pictures for future posts. Hope everyone is doing well! Miss you guys!

veryyy niceeee!

for nosheens benefit:
i forgot to mention we went to salsa yesterday and i danced with a guatemalteco and he would randomly say VERY NICE! in borat fashion....and i was like do you know where thats from (he didnt speak english really) and he was like no, ppl just say it its a common phrase..i was cracking up.

alright adios

una semana ha pasado

holllllllaaaaaa
or halo

yikes i can´t believe its been almost a whole week...
so we went to the hot springs yesterday i´ll try and figure out how to share my picasa album to you guys. first we took a public bus to get there which are basically old school buses from the US that have been painted and altered in certain ways to fit their use. My favorite part is like a tassel hanging in the middle near the front for the driver to pull in order to honk....which they do here A LOT... like really a lot... honking equals annoyance, hello, we are here, im coming through, im going fast... and basically for any reason you can think of
so anyway we ride the bus to this town which is mostly indigenous people and then julio who is our instructor taking us on this trip asks around for a ride to the hot springs. he finds this guy with a pick up that is used to carry produce or flowers to drive us up there. for a 15 minute ride jon, this girl kathleen, and i ride in the back, bruising our tailbones every time we hit a pothole or speed bump. it was a really pretty view the whole time tho. we got there and there was a big pool that was filled with naturally hot water that was reallllly hot... it was nice
and had a gorgeous view of a giant mountain, which my teacher told me was a volcano and banana trees everywhere. that was a blast, the only problem was when i got out of the pool into the cold i felt like i was going to pass out and vomit... and i kept being like come on body you cant do this in guatemala... i feel better today tho

a few days ago we made CHOCOLATE! from absolute scratch. they had the cacao beans and we roasted them on the stove and then peeled EACH ONE separately. we then took them to a mill in this person´s house and ground it, adding it to sugar, vanilla, cinnamon, and eggs. after it was ground several times we spread it out on the table and proceeded to palmarlo or pound it with our hands...which took....a very...very...very long time... like hours we were all sweating from pounding it and then you have to make it into little tortilla shaped things and then you are finally done. you can then add it to hot water to make hot chocolate. the teacher said we would all die of hunger if we had to rely on chocolate made by ourselves...hahaha sooooo true. that shit is hard work...i appreciate chocolate a lot more now (and secretly so does jon) trying to figure out how to upload pics
i will update you all mas tarde.

hope you guys are all having a wonderful summer! miss you all!
ps. jon loves chocolate

Love, Sex, Magic

So upon our arrival, my uncle gave me a cell phone to use (in case I get abducted, or an air conditioning unit falls on my head, per my dad's impressions of Taiwan's top 2 hazards).  The phone is set to be in Chinese, naturally, but the problem was that he didn't know how to change the settings to be in English.  Seeing that I can't read more than 10 words of Chinese, we gave up until we found someone bilingual, and had just been using the phone in the Chinese setting, blindly pushing buttons and hoping that we called the right person (not exactly what happened... a lot of accidental calls were made).

Anyway, at lunch yesterday with my Aunt-in-law and her sister who Laura and I just met, we received a text message reading "Sunny! (Chinese character, chinese character chinese character etc., etc., etc.)"  I showed it to my aunts in case it was important and I needed to know what it said.  They both looked at it and frowned disapprovingly... "Have you been doing anything bad on that phone?" (No, I had just got it the day before, I hadn't had time to do anything bad!) "Then your UNCLE has been doing bad things on that phone!!"  This would be feasible, as his surname is Sun, and who knows what nicknames his friends give him?...

Anyway, they wouldn't say what the message said, but we assumed that it was some sort of lewd advertisement.  We met up with Bob later on in the day, at which point the mystery was solved.....  He had sent me a text but just messed with keys in Chinese to send to me.  Apparently he has quite the talent for naughty words, because as my aunts so eloquently put it, "There is a SEX!  And a LOVE!" (In the text...)

So anyway, for Bob "Moral Mountain "Hsia ....... Button mashing WIN!!!

oh yeah.  it's consistently 95% humidity all over this entire island.  Never have I ever sweated so profusely and consistently as I have this week.  Ick.

In Taiwan!

So here's my first post from Taiwan. Flew with Sunny and her friend Laura over here, total of 17 hours of flying time. I was awake a total of about 28 hours with about 3 hours of sleep on the flights, and I still had a horrible time sleeping last night because of the jet lag. I slept for maybe 6 hours and got up at 7am because i couldn't sleep anymore. There's no AC in my room and I swear it's the hardest bed i've ever slept on. It's like an inch of foam on top of wood, and they put down a bamboo mat over top of the 1-inch "mattress", why the hell would I want to sleep on top of a bunch of bamboo? I quickly removed that thing and just slept on the foam. Anyway i'm gonna start exploring around here today and find out what's fun and where to get a beer, I'll let you all know what craziness I get into... btw apparently this website knew that I was in Taiwan because all the website buttons were in chinese and I had to click on random things to figure out how to start a new post.

Love,

Bob "Moral Mountain" Hsia

(That's what Sunny's mom told me my name translated to haha)

bien vinidos a guatemala

Wow...so much to talk about.
lets see flight went well on sat- i was super lucky and my aunt got me first class tickets w her work miles sweeeet - the food was delicious on the plane and the last flight i sat next to a pilot- he was being sent down to guate to pick up a broken plane. no kidding....
so we get to guatemala go through customs stuff and go outside and there are like a hundred people lined up waiting for ppl it was crazy!found our names and the person from the bed and breakfast that we were staying at drove us to the place in a van very similar to my family´s old moon unit like old old white toyota van it was sweetthe bandb was really cute had this garden in the center... jon and i ordered chinese food for that night i think it cost 5bucks total
next day we took a bus to xela which took about four hours and i started feeling a little nauseos towards the end... there were a lot of turns i tried to capitalize a lot but this keyboard is different and i cant figure it out lol
so met my fam they are really cool the oldest daughter is a 5th year in medical school- they have 6 years of schooling here but i think that includes residency? not surewe watched a mexican version of american idol last night en la tele because they knew a guatemalan girl that was on it... it was really funny to see their reactions to everythingate a delicious guatemalan lunch at a restaurant and w this fresh papaya juice yummmmmmtoook a FREEEEZING shower last night not becuase the water was cold but because the air was and the window was open i think it was like 40 degrees
ahhh necisito salir para clase adios!

Au revoir!

I can't believe I'm leaving so soon! My flight out from Dulles is at 11am, and hopefully I'll arrive at Montpellier on Wednesday afternoon. I've been talking about going to France for so long; it's weird that it's finally here.

I tried cramming as much French into my brain as possible before today. So far, I know how to say things like "I am American", "I speak a little French", "Hello, how are you, very well, thanks", "Where is ___ Street/Boulevard?", and "It is here/over there." I have 6 more lessons on my Basic French CDs, so I'm planning to listen to those during the long flights. I bought a Lonely Planet French phrasebook, and I was surprised to find four whole pages dedicated to romance and sex! So, if I want, I can also learn to say "harder", "faster", "That felt amazing/wonderful/weird", and "I never want to see you again!" Great success!

Speaking of great successes, I hope that I can control my inner Borat on this trip. There will be a Russian student named Bulat on the exchange with me. I can only imagine the hilarity that will ensue.

Goodbye Summer, Hello Winter

Alright guys, I'm off! Here's to hoping that I don't get eaten by a lion!

Radio Reminders

As I was driving home ridiculously late, the radio seemed to only remind me of how awesome we are and how much I miss you guys:
1)Carrie Underwood=Lindsay
2)Byron's favorite Matt Nathanson's "Come On Get Higher", only because of "I see angels and devils and god, when you come.... ...... ......on, hold on". Byron would like that
3)Total Eclipse of the Heart! Finally! The sad thing is I knew all the real words, but kept laughing at the literal translation music video playing in my head :)
4)Did anyone know that Dirty Dancing was my favorite movie when I was 3? Wait, this doesn't surprise you? But... why not? (Anyway the song was on, and it's still as awesome as it was 20 yrs ago)

And it's only day one...

I was kinda excited to start working today because I had way to much family time this weekend w/ my little brother's graduation. Of course I stalked Sam's pics on facebook and you guys had way more fun on friday night than I did w/ my aunt I can't stand.



So my day didn't start off too well. I left my lunch at home, spilled coffee on my white coat, and then the person at the front desk had no idea who I was and made me sit in the waiting room for 20 minutes. Once I got going it was a pretty eventful day. ( Some of my stories w/o making too many patient confidentiality violations) I started out my day w/ a 2 1/2 yr old with a previously undiagnosed ASD and a IV/VI murmur; totally got pimped on how to gauge a murmur. Other highlights: A 5 yr old who had eye trauma and was told by an south am. hospital it would get fixed when he got to the states; a drug seeking felon; a woman who said BP 170/110 was low for her; a guy who thought he had an STD for 3 yrs; a girl who was missing part of her kidney, part of her lung, and spleen after a drive by shooting; and I got hit on by an illegal immigrant. That was day one, don't know if I'm excited or scared to go back tomorrow

Sorry I didn't catch some of you guys before leaving for the summer. I miss you all already. I'll be back on saturday, for those of you still in cville :).

Since blogging is such an asian thing, I'm training for my Taiwan trip by posting this... my first blog post ever! God I hope I don't become too asian and start buying Hello Kitty shit over there.

-Bobaloo "twinkie" Hsia (yellow on the outside, white on the inside... for you white kids who don't know the lingo)

Randos

Nate Poiro made ridiculous homemade apple pie, cappucinos, and fresh mojitos for everyone still in C-ville last night. THEN he let Sam and Lee trick him into having movie night at his place. Woe to people who missed amazing food (Randy also got fed ribs) and The Running Man--the only movie other than Predator to have two governors in it. McGrady's Trivia tonight, but getting more and more lonely/sad because Nosh and Sunny left today :( Sam leaves Thursday, which leaves us with so few people... I expect those of you left to really step up the entertainment; actually, I demand it!

preparations

So I went to staples to get copies of my passport made and laminated...I go up to the lady at the desk and tell her what I need and she looks at me like I'm a criminal who is planning to give a bunch of illegal immigrants copies of my passport and says "WE canNOT laminate government documents"....YIKES, hope the rest of my packing and preparing goes a little smoother

Inaugural Post

Here it is: our summer blog. I decided on Acute Onset because I thought it would be a cute name. Ba dum, chi! Anyway, I hope everyone posts and everyone posts often, because I want to know what everyone is up to during our last summer vacation.

I'll start: I'm in HSL 1326 right now. That's right, I'm back in the library, because it is the closest thing I have to a home. I'm with two of the girls that I'll be going to Lesotho with, and we're doing research on HIV/AIDS. Hopefully, I can at least act like I know something about the disease by the time I have to teach the Basotho people all about it.

Welp, back to work for me... HAGS and KIT!