Fall has finally arrived!

I was waiting until we had 3 consecutive days of cold before I posted this. Fall has finally arrived! After having hot weather from when I arrived in August until November, cold weather feel WONDERFUL! I talked to my friend Mike who is in Northeast China and he got snow this week. I know he'll wish he didn't have snow come February...

Its windy and cold outside right now. Weatherunderground.com has the temperature at 61 F (16 C), humidity at 55% and 10 mph wind. Not quite cold enough to wear my coats yet, but cold enough that I can't wear shorts outside anymore. For the first time in a while, I didn't run my Air Conditioner today. Pretty soon I'll need to get a heater and heavy blankets for my bed.

I'm still looking for jobs teaching English to fix the problem with my residency requirements here, but my student Anthony gave me an interesting idea. Apparently Skype has a new service that you can purchase at a premium that acts like a virtual classroom of sorts. You can be an "expert" in some field, decide how much you want to charge per minute, and what hours you are going to be available for. People call you (the first call is free) and the Skype deals with the details. They withdraw the cost amount for the call from the persons Skype credit and add it to your account. Pretty nifty idea that I am thinking about trying. My buddy Ryan suggested that I postpone it though, otherwise I'll never leave my apartment and will become depressed. He makes a very good point.

I have almost caught up with my schedule for work at CSULB. I was a month and a half behind schedule in the middle of October. In 1 month I was able to reduce that to being only two weeks behind schedule. I can finally start translating the braille now and I will be able to get everything done on time. I'm extremely happy, and very tired of looking at my computer screen!

Thanksgiving is coming up and I'm still looking for places that are doing a US style dinner. If that doesn't work I'll try Anthony's suggestion of heading to Costco, buying turkey lunch meat and grilling it on my hot plate. Really what I want from Costco is pumpkin pie. They have every other type of gourd here in Taiwan except for pumpkins.

I don't know what I'll do for the holidays yet. My buddies Ryan and Natalie will be leaving soon. Natalie flies out this Sunday and Ryan a week later. It will be weird without them around but I'll find a way to manage. If I get a job quickly then it won't be a huge issue. What will be interesting is Chinese New Year. Mike and my friend Jeremy want to go to Japan for a week and I really want to go. Meeting up with the two of them in Japan for a week would be a lot of fun. The only issue is that during Chinese New Year, everyone who is non-Chinese tries to leave to island. Flights to Japan from Taipei are mostly full already and look to be about 600 US just for economy class tickets.

I'll see what I can do. At least I'm not in Korea right now. I saw that the Korean Won fell in value by 30% in the last three months. It use to be around 1050 Won to the dollar, now its 1450 Won to the dollar. Great if you want to visit Korea, but for my friends who went there to teach English, it makes it much harder to pay off student loans when you now have to pay 30-40% more for every US dollar.