Chinese Traditional Music 國樂

7 月15号我們去中正紀念堂听国乐音乐会。那个国乐乐团有差不多一百多位的演奏家。舞台的背面都是打击乐器，前面最靠近观众是指挥者，還有中間有很多人拉二胡和大提琴。在音乐会上，他们表演了差不多八首樂曲。最令人印象深刻的歌是他们休息之前的那一首樂曲。在演奏前幾首樂曲時，我就已经开始习惯了国乐的风格和樂音。但是，到樂曲的中間時,，觀眾席中有及個人忽然站起來,讓其他觀眾忍不住想:到底是怎麼會事?然後他们开始吹乌笛，整个包厢就充满了蝗虫的声音。我刚开始有一点困惑。后来我开始欣赏舞台上的乐团和观众席里的樂手共同演奏的音樂。

We went to watch a Chinese Traditional Music performance at Chiang-Kai Shek Memorial. Many big performances are held here, and a part of our ICLP program was to attend this program. My reflections can be found in the Chinese above, a cut-and-paste job from one of my assignments.



If you couldn't read the Chinese, musicians hiding in the audience stood up to play a flute-like instrument. It ended up creating an atmosphere that felt like there were hundreds of locusts in the concert hall.

Hualien Trip, Day 2

For the second day, we went to a lake to foot-paddle some boats. If you've done this before, you'd realize that at about 20 minutes in, you're bored. So what did we do? We decided to reenact ChiBi 赤壁　Red Cliff. This movie talked about Cao Cao's rampage down to Southern China, where he was stopped at the Red Cliffs because of a flawed (but impressive-looking) naval strategy. His strategy was to link his boats together with metal beams to prevent his boats from rocking too much, and therefore, his soldiers from getting sick. So we linked up I think 9 or so of our paddle boats and paddled together. Yeah, we were a sight to behold.



Later on, we visited a Buddhist Medical School. It was interesting to see a religious medical school, they had an interesting tradition of calling the cadavers that they use for teaching, "teachers," signifying their respect and the purpose of the bodies.



After visiting a Buddhist temple, where we learned some Taiwan history and the local landscape, we headed to the beach, which to be more precise, was a rocky seaside. The rocks were pretty painful, but being Americans, we were really excited to hit the water. As you can see in the following picture, the hills rise steeply from the slope to down deep in the water.



Besides a large number of failed (uncoordinated) jumping pictures, we managed to grab a few group shots:



Finally, we also hit a Mochi shop. Apparently Hualien is reknown for its mochi, and gosh, it was sooo gooddd....We had a guide too, to show us the process. and free samples ^.^









So ended our Hualien Trip. We took the train back, and as usual, played games the entire way :)

Hualien Trip, Day 1

We went to Hualien for our first overnight trip. Some people barely woke up, while others took their bed with them. We took a train over and played 九九　ninety-nine and 杀手 mafia on the way, opening up a new favorite game among the students.
When we got to Hualien, we rode tour buses to various locations. Our journeys were punctuated by vivid and frustrating logic games, along the lines of "Black Magic", "I like Coffee but I don't like Tea", and "Whose Got the Ball?"

We visited Taroko, which is a scenic national park defined by caves and cliff faces. At one point, we had to cross a narrow bridge. Sometime during this, apparently Mona was sitting with her feet dangling off the bridge when she lost one of her sandals.


During the night, we headed around the town, dropping by for 小龍包　buns, not dumplings. We also walked to the nearest night market, a good ~40 minute walk. There was an awesome drumming game which by the end of playing it, my forearms were pretty much on fire.


Finally, when we went back to our hotels, (which had miserable 8x10 paper thin "towels"...luckily for me I brought my own) many of us hung around learning a little break dancing from Chris Ma and Sam Li. A couple of us also hung out with NTU buddies to ~3AM, playing again, mafia and 'Sea Turtle Soup'.

Wakeboarding

I went wakeboarding for the first time as part of a government-sponsored outing. That is, for government workers they can get in for free. Don't ask me how I got in, I'm not part of the government and I'm not clear either :O

Wakeboarding is very similar to snowboard in the sense of getting up and in movement. The main difference is that in wakeboarding you get pulled up and around by the boat. To do anything on your own force would be to ask for a serious planting.

Our group learned from GuangYou, who's Taiwan's country representative for wakeboarding (!). I got to watch him perform aerials from the boat. Awesome? ohhh yess...


Finally, besides getting whipped by a boat going 40mph, I got some random pictures of the boys rowing team messing around.

Buh-buh-buh-Bowling!

Bowling:
per Game: $2
Shoes: $4 (Except for Ryan)
Victory: mostly priceless

One of our first dhouse events was perhaps going out to bowl. We went to AMF Bowling Center in Alameda and ate at In-N-out beforehand, where we ran into Andy. I don't know if Andy hooked me up or what, but I had a serious mound of fries.

At the alley, we divided into two teams: Albert, Robert, Ryan and Mike, against me, Kevin Ding, Dennis and Alex. After going through multiple momentum-changing technical difficulties (we could never get our bowling balls back), our team sadly lost the first two games. We bet a yogurtland/boba, I don't remember...
We lost the first two games by a total of around 40 points. For our last game, we set the bet: Twice whatever the difference in team score was. Sure, my team was scared. Even if we lost, we figured at most it'd be around 50 pushups. Not too bad, we thought.

Here were the results:


Difference: 47 pts. Pushups: 94
Sweet vengeance.

Finally, at the end of the day we played Dragon Punch, some ridiculous macho game where you hit with all your might at a speedbag. I registered 9036, while Kevin Ding...

30-Person Indoor Group Portrait

Motivation is funny. When I'm most busy and hard at work (often from school work), I am also most wishing to be doing other things. Perhaps it's because I'm riding a high from finishing my IB104 lab practical earlier today, but particularly after reading strobist I was inspired to give this a try.

Besides whatever quirks inspires me, I hope to be able to track some of my photography experience. Notably, my experiments with one flash, one light stand, one tripod, one silver/white umbrella and a F42AM with my Sony a700 using the Sony wireless flash system.

Here's one of my recent group shots from celebrating two of my brothers' birthdays, Kevin Huang and Brian Phagley.

I placed my external flash on its own shoe and balanced it off of a couch to camera left, so it was about 3ft high, and the camera was shot from approximately 5'5" on a tripod with a radio trigger.

To do:
1) Put on a lens hood. I didn't realize the amount of lens flare I had caught from the flash. It took a lot of time photoshopping the circles out.

2) Use a light stand and set the flash off to the side.

2) Use the Stofen diffuser. This would level my bounce, and hopefully help avoid the problem of foreground overexposure and rear underexposure.

3) Use a gel. The warm lamp pulls focus to it.

4) Turn off the lamp

5) Check histogram. I well over-exposed the shot.