Taipei/Hsinchu, Taiwan

It has been a week of goodbyes and messed up sleep schedules. Went up to Taipei on Tuesday night to do some shopping and chill with my ABC drinking buddy before he heads off. Ended up missing the last bus to Hsinchu and then taking the 5:45 bus back the next morning. Stayed up all night since the boys decided they wanted to fire up the hookahs and the nicotine overdose left my body relaxed and my mind alert and contemplative. The filtered first light of the magic half hour that starts of the day always makes me pensive especially if I have been trying to make sense of things. Went to work after an hour of sleep, napped and then went out later to say goodbye at Tipsy. Some middle aged retired dude started talking with us and purchased a bottle of Johnny Blue for the bar to drink. I hope when I am older, I don't have that look of envy; money can't buy youth and energy. Tipsy could be described a little bit of an upscale dive bar, but even there I normally don't get drunk off $US 170 bottles of booze. I am much more of a Lonestar at the patio at Lola's kind of guy.

Just as everyone who I might call is leaving, I bought a phone for my last week in Taiwan. I am planning on buying cheap SIM cards for Taiwan, Thailand, Egypt, Portugal, Spain and the UK. Why doesn't the US have this system? In a world that is becoming more interconnected the US insistence of separating itself in silly ways is going to hurt us in the long run. We are a country that that has a general population who suck at math and science, but prefer our measurements to be divided by 12s, 5280s and 64s instead of multiples of 10. It is really so much harder then it needs to be. Wanna holler at your boy? 0918315488 in Taiwan and 014514719 in Thailand.

I am procrastinating on a presentation I need to do for Monday. A quick review of a couple of articles relating to superhydrophobic thin films. Rough sol-gel thin films on a substrate coated with a fluronated self assembled monolayer: cool stuff. My goal here was to learn about industrial applications of nanotechology... I learned some cool things, but I did wish I had more projects. The other interns have been asked in their exit interviews if they would recommend their friends for this internship. After being asked there was usually a pregnant and awkward silence.