elaine came to visit me in la today and saved me from playing too much animal crossing ds by myself by playing it with me for some reason she’s never been to c & o trattoria, so that’s where we decided to go for dinner. it’s an italian restaurant that has the most delicious bread: garlic knots.
mmmmmm, garlic knots.
the food was so good! both elaine and charles ordered dishes using their wide, flat noodles, and i think i’ll have to order them next time. they were delicious!
it was already 7, and the restaurant was uncharacteristically empty. the economy really must be bad
we walked a bit behind the restaurant before deciding it was kind of cold..
i don’t know if you noticed or can tell, but my skin looks so good now! i turned into a major taiwanese girl during my trip and started buying face masks, and i’ve been using one every night before i go to bed. it’s been less than a week, and it really makes a huge difference. awwwwesome! i’ve also started using sunscreen every day. i know it’s just good sense (especially since i actually get rashes from being in the sun for even 5-10 minutes) but i’ve always been too lazy to really keep up with it. i’ve got some nice shiseido sunscreen that doesn’t irritate my sensitive skin (i think) the way the aerosol ones do, so hopefully i’ll have healthier skin all over from now on.
aah, i left my camera at home today! it was raining insanely when we left the house today, and i wanted to take a picture of all the water in the streets when we were in the car, but when i reached for my camera, it wasn’t there oops!
we had a pretty chill morning and then we headed over to 新光三越 (shin kong mitsukoshi department store) near taipei main station. my dad left us a bunch of gift certificates for the department store before he left for shanghai (i guess he has their credit card and so he gets rewards) so we went to go spend them, muahahahaha! i bought some clothes and then i caved and got a shu umura eyelash curler, too. my eyelashes are pretty curly on their own so i don’t really spend much time curling them and i like to buy cute little plastic japanese eyelash curlers, but the shu umura one is so popular and it’s at least $5 cheaper here, so i was like.. okay. haha.
my mom and i have been itching to try the kimchi/baked chicken leg burgers at mcdonald’s, but there’s no mcdonald’s near our house, so we haven’t been able to.. until today! it’s really too bad i couldn’t take a picture of it. there was the baked chicken leg meat, kimchi, lettuce and sauce on a wheat/sesame seed/sunflower seed bun. interesting, no? it was pretty good. i’ll get a picture of one if i eat another before i go home.
today was full of me getting to eat things i’ve been wanting to because i got to eat some 阿Q instant noodles for lunch! their tv commercials are so funny that i just had to get some, so we bought some yesterday at the rt-mart. it’s like.. their noodles are so “Q” (it means like.. chewy.. not limp.. i don’t know how else to describe it) that they bounce. so in the commercials the drop bowls of 阿Q instant noodles on the floor but the bounce right back up with ridiculosity. the noodles were pretty good
after going to shin kong mitsukoshi and eating kimchi burgers, we walked around outside for a bit and i went into this cute store and bought snoopy oil blotting sheets (so random, huh??) for super cheap. they were sold in a 3-pack, and each pack has 100 sheets, and the total was about $2. my mom was like.. don’t you want to get more? stock up? and i’m like.. but that’s already so many.. yeah. at marukai in socal they’re about $3 for a pack of ~70 sheets, and they’re not as cute. i love buying stuff in taiwan.
alright, well i have no pictures to share from my day since i left my camera at home. but i will show u my fatty mosquito bite on my right leg.
absolutely no idea when i got that thing. freaking mosquitos. and now here are some things that are completely random!
that’s a joke, obviously, but i like how the ds actually has useful games now. charles and i are going to go to japan on vacation within the next year, and i think i’m going to get that japanese coach game. i hear you can actually draw in characters with your stylus and get definitions and stuff.. so useful.
lastly.. this is my favorite dance from last week’s episode of so you think you can dance (the top 20 episode). i’m not sure i’ve really warmed up to this girl (katee) that much yet, but i really like this routine.
friday at last! another week (week 7/10 to be exact) bites the dust at school. this was definitely the worst one so far.. i’d been doing really well this quarter until this week, haha. oh, well, just gotta bounce back in the 3 remaining weeks before finals. i find myself caring less and less about getting perfect grades.. the cost of that feeling of achievement doesn’t seem to be worth it. i think i maintain an above-average level of okay-ness pretty effortlessly, and my happiness meter stays fuller. is that bad?
charles is an advocate of always striving for the best, but i often find that path to stray closer to feelings of depression than anything else. it’s strange because i’m such a perfectionist in so many areas but completely apathetic in other ways.. and i find myself jumping between those two states even when the same conditions are involved. i guess i’m one for extremes. one minute i’ll care intensely about my grades, the next i won’t care at all (given i’m not truly failing); one minute i’ll have decided to dedicate my entire existence to one video game but i’ll be completely over it by tomorrow. not to worry.. of course there are things that i’ll always care about. not every feeling, person or object can be fully replaced by something else.
i spent pretty much all afternoon (and well into the night) playing lost in blue 2 on my ds. i never managed to finish the first lost in blue game because after a while it’s like.. you’re hungry again?! i just fed you! and you almost always leave one of the characters in a cave and even if you leave food and water behind for him/her to consume, the character will inevitably starve until you go back and do some force-feeding. i got frustrated with it, if you can’t tell however, that doesn’t mean i didn’t get sucked into playing the second one. it’s still frustrating because there’s this one cave you have to live in but the things you need to do and the places you need to get to are so far away from the cave you have to start and end every day at and the characters get tired so quickly. why am i still playing? i don’t really know. i might just be THAT bored. it’s my evasive-studying technique. if i’m really into something else, then i don’t have to study for my 9 chapter test on monday! haha. anyway, this version of the game has a 2-player mode that i’m dying to try out with someone. any takers?
since blog posts that have no pictures are insanely boring, i’ll leave you with this. man, i miss pokémon so much. there’s this guy in my class who didn’t know what pokémon was this week. it made me sad.. but i’m glad i was of some educational use.
for some reason she’s never been to c & o trattoria, so that’s where we decided to go for dinner. it’s an italian restaurant that has the most delicious bread: garlic knots.
