No stories, just photos

International Spankout Day (Its not what you think)
Taichung Randomness Just a bunch of Random Randomness

If you haven't noticed, these photos are posted on Facebook. If you don't have facebook, you are a looser. Get it.

Canucks win, My Camera is lost, and St. Anthony comes through in the clutch.

Wow.

Ryan would like to let it be known that he is temporarily stripping himself of his self-proclaimed genius status.

He would also like to thank his boy, St. Anthony, for keeping his brand new $1000 camera safe for 18 hours on Tuesday, as it sat by itself on the side of the road.

While he's at it, Ryan would also like to request that anyone who reads this gives Ryan a verbal lashing for getting extremely wasted, driving his scooter, blacking out, and waking up the next morning without his backpack containing his brand new camera and his students' midterm exams.

After the longest, most tiring, most depressing and exhausting day of his life, Ryan was on his way home to go to bed and wallow in his own self pity, when he miraculously happened to spot his backpack lying on the curb about a block away from his house. Presumably the location where he chose to sit down and either puke his brains out, or drink and dial, this is where Ryan and his backpack parted ways the night before.

There is of coarse a lot more to this story, but as usual, I'm too lazy to type it.

Ryan's laying off the booze for a while and spending some time self evaluating his actions and determining what his punishment will be.

My New Toy

Free from the hellhole that was my old kindergarten job, I am happy to report that I am now beginning to enjoy life in Taiwan much more. Things are a lot less stressful, I have a lot more free time, and I have nothing holding me back from staying up till 3:30 am drinking and watching playoff hockey on a school night.

I also got paid last week, which meant that the $2300 in cash i received was not going to last very long hiding under my mattress. So I decided that i might as well go and blow half of it on a new camera so that i can be serious about taking up my new hobby of photography. And that I did.....

I have now realized that there is a lot more to photography than one might suspect, and I'm looking forward to the day when I can actually reach the full potential of my camera and take a decent photo. If you feel like checking out what i have experimented with so far, check out these two links:

Images of Taiwan - Random Photos
Images of Taiwan - People: Friends and Strangers

NHL Playoffs....Taiwan style

So when I came to Taiwan, I had pretty much writen off the idea of watching hockey. I've followed the Canucks' season by checking their website and watching highlights online, but the start of the playoffs made me realize that wasn't going to cut it. So, i managed to find a bar in Taichung that is actually playing hockey games!

One little catch though. The bar owner has to record the games on his moms computer in canada, and then send them over the internet to his computer here, where he plays them onto the big screen. This means that while the games start around 10am local time here, they don't show them in the bar until around 9:30 - about 14 hours after the games have begun back home.

So what does this mean? It means that every second day, Ryan lives in a bubble, cut off from the world of the internet. I can't check email out of fear that the yahoo home page will have a headline about hockey scores. I can't check msn out of fear that someone has changed their name to reflect a recent score. I can't check facebook in case someone has updated their status to say something about a game. And, I probably won't answer my phone in case some drunk friend from back home decides to phone me and be a spoiler.

Its pathetic, I know. but its comforting to know that two nights ago I was in a bar until 3:30 am with about 10 canucks fans from back home, recreating what honestly felt like watching a live canucks playoff game. Canucks fans in Taichung...they do exist and we are representin'!

Spring Scream 2007

Stick a fork in me. I'm done.

So i just got back from a 4 day music festival in southern Taiwan and I'm too exhausted, dehydrated, sleep deprived, and hung over to write about it. You can pretty much get the point from these photos that it was just a 4 day long gong show.

Spring Scream 2007 Photos