Gut Ding will Weile...

Ladies and Gentlemen, I am proud to announce:
The first official update from Taipei, here it is, finally! Let me preclude by mentioning that I have had an amazing time here so far and that I totally love Taiwan! I've seen quite a bit of it by now and met many people and it really is a beautiful country with super friendly people.
And now, for the more in-depth version of my report.
Since I didn't just come here for fun, I think I should mention a few words about my work here. I'm working at ASIAA, or Academia Sinica Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics in Taibei, which is located on campus of National Taiwan University (NTU) in the southern downtown area of Taibei known as Da-An District. I'm working with data taken with the Very Large Array in Sorroco, New Mexico. At the moment I'm busy reducing data which will be used for hypothesis testing of chemical models for circumstellar envelopes, especially those of Asymptotic Giant Branch stars. It's cool! I didn't have a lot of prior knowledge of radio astronomy and so I can learn a lot here. Perfect! Now... to the pictures! The main entrance to NTU campus is really sweet! Check it out!


Lots of students mean lots of bicycles, but, of course, even more scooters. Here you see a little bike-stop on campus where people get there bicycles fixed. Scooters can be fixed everywhere else, so no problem there.


Right next to this place is the post office, where I always grab my lunchboxes (pictures in that order)



Here you can see the sports center of Tai Da (NTU) and the Physics building. I am on the top floor (8th) of the annex to the right, in an office with no windows which I share with 5 others. And the airconditioning is freezing my brains right now.


Here, that's me on the rooftop patio on the 13th floor of the main building. Somewhere behind me are the hills where I live. And here are another other couple of pictures taken from here, they should be pretty self-explanatory.





Here's Andy, Pei-Ying, Fang Chun, Birgit, Christof and I going for lunch. I'm quite surprised the bikes survived this trip.


So much for the working environment part for now. Now to the fun part!

Miranda came to visit me here on Aug 14 and stayed till September 1. For the first 9 days, we stayed at a hostel right downtown and this was the night time view of the scooter armada photographed from the balcony of the building.


Unfortunately, we couldn't really do a whole lot during that week, since I had to work during the day and since Typhoon Sepat made it impossible for us to leave the building. At least during the day on Saturday. Here's proof.


And this is what it looked like from space:
http://www.typhoon2000.ph/activeflash/stormloop.htm

Taiwan is full of arcades. Here, Christof and I were super awesome special agents and rescued the President on board the Air Force One. Steven Segal is a little wimp compared to our super awesomenessmentity.


Being able to celebrate both Miranda's and my birthday together this year was really great! The night before my birthday, a lot of my colleagues and I went to a bar together. The place is called CO2 and serves a number of Belgian beers. 5% alc. is considered light here. Needless to say that we got a little bit hammered and that I did not make it out of bed very early the next day. But that wasn't a problem at all, because it meant that the first thing I did was to go to the beach with my colleagues! Aaaanyway, in the evening, Miranda and I went out for a really nice dinner featuring Shrimp Dumplings and some other super delicious stuff.
The night before her birthday, we went out to the movies and saw the Bourne Ultimatum. Really intense and cool! On the actual day, we went out for dinner again, this time, in the mall right next to Taipei 101. Again, super delicious food! Once you get over the fact that you're eating little fishes including their heads and fishbones... Here's the birthday girl! These brown balls you can seen in the veggies are tree seeds, by the way, and extremely tasty!



Aren't we such a handsome couple?


Thanks to my very kind supervisor, I had the opportunity to travel around Taiwan with Miranda for a whole week! But since I have a million pictures I'd like to post regarding that trip, I'll just start a new post. Guess that might make it a little easier to look through...

Later!