Hsinchu, Taiwan

It is funny how quickly the novel becomes the mundane. No one in my intern group takes pictures anymore with the exception of group snapshots. Where I once was nervous about crossing the street, now I blindly just walk focused more of the street food I am chowing down then the scooters charging towards me. The neon lights and dust are just a part of the landscape and the stare downs by the children under five just seem to come with the territory.

In the business lexicon (it amuses me that I once taught this stuff to new corporate peons), I would be described as an underutilized resource. Right now I am learning how to use an AFM and supposed to brainstorm new applications utilizing nanotechnology. The former is a bit tedious and requires guidance from busy people and the latter is a broad 5 year goal of mine that I am supposed to somehow compress into 5 weeks. The result is that I have much unstructured, unfocused and unsupervised time. The irony of my position, considering that I enrolled in a expensive and difficult graduate program and traveled half way around the world to escape the fate of being bored, sitting in a cubicle and surfing the web, doesn't escape me.

The other elements of hip hop are well represented in East Asia. On the tempered glass platform under lit with led powered fiber optics in the middle of the traffic circle where the ancient East Gate sits (Hsinchu is known for its traditional glass arts as well as high technology), it is common to see breakers and poppers practicing their moves. There are break dancing studios in downtown and some people in the club can move and not just jerk around arhythmically. There is plenty of graff downtown and in Taipei as well. In Tokyo I didn't understand why writers chose to throw up burners in English. With a country that has a rich history of calligraphy and graphic design, why not spit it out in Kanji? In Taiwan there are more tags in Chinese then English. Some have been amazing, but mostly garbage... this I imagine is a universal trend. I do wonder where on this trip I will see a Houston style ->NEXT<- tag…