darkreinfly

It's not clear to me why I feel the urge to blog when nothing of interest has recently happened in my life, and yet the desire  is seemingly absent when there is news to share. Oh ah, on second thought, I think I know why now. I tend to get it all out of my system on Facebook with a million photos haha.

Anyway, for the majority of April I travelled up to Taiwan to visit my sister and my new nephew! He was the cutest baby I've ever interacted with, and had the best features of both parents. While in Taiwan I had a lot of first experiences, in between spending time with little E.T. (his initials) to give my sister a break from first time parenting. We'd never been to Taiwan before so these were new grounds to explore. We ended up on tours that took us to the far reaches of the island (we stayed in Taipei which was in the northern area, but visited the southern most point among other places), familiarised ourselves with their public transport system (their train network was as efficient as HK's and thus also better than ours haha), and visited many fascinating sites. The nature walks and hiking trails were invigorating, the food was (for the most part) divine, and the many, many museums we explored were incredibly interesting. I think I liked the museums the best - I don't normally visit them here at home because I'm just not as attached to the history. It's all fascinating of course, but because my parents migrated here, there aren't any cultural roots, so to speak.

Dot points because it's been a couple of months and my mind is scattered:

• It was wonderful to see my sister (and her hubby) again.
• My graphire 4 (and its malfunctioning pen) has been retired to make room for the new INTUOS 4. So shiny! I have no excuse not to produce more completed art now.
• I don't know why mochi is so popular there but I LOVE IT.
• I also love BUBBLE TEA. I was never a fan of the regular milk bubble tea after a bad first experience, but having it on this trip in a restaurant where it was one of their signature staples changed my mind. I may stick to the blended ice flavour I always get though now that I'm back home.
• UNIQLO had fantastic One Piece t-shirts! These images were straight from the manga, and looked more authentic than Baleno's, which were cute but kind of fanart-y.
• My collection of Korean albums grows <3 Miss A, CN Blue and FT Island, oh my! Photos of things I bought to be posted another day~
• The souvenirs from the Miniatures Museum of Taiwan and I were fated to meet. A lot of fun paper craft-y things that are sure to help the pop-up book project.
• My Chinese has hopefully improved while in this environment, though the Taiwanese accent & slang made it a bit difficult.

Perhaps next time we'll be able to visit the zoo and ride the gondolas!

 On Wednesday (the 8th), a friend and I spent the day up in Sydney to see Harry Potter: The Exhibition and also kill some time at the bookstore I'd been hoping to visit for ages, Kinokuniya.

First off, the exhibition was fabulousssssss and really, the whole day's activities were totally worth the super early start and super draining crash at the end of the day. I won't write about much of what we did specifically, because I wanted to try and create a travel comic for it.

The only downside to the exhibition was that although there was a lot to see, it still seemed too short an experience. We honestly probably spent more time afterwards browsing the gift shop hahaha. Total money vacuum, that place. There was no question of not buying something, because when would we ever see this sort of thing again? But as an example, there was a book there that I'd previously bought (the Film Wizardry one) for something like $30. At Borders (when it still, you know, existed) it was something like $60. At the gift shop? $95. Ouch. And then we checked out the time-turner they had on display. It's this delicate little thing, gold plated apparently, and the rings turn it in different directions. Looked quite cool as a pendant even if you weren't a fan of HP. But we passed because again, too expensive to justify buying.

Not that we didn't use up a chunk of money on other things. The only thing to really pull me in different directions was the Marauder's Map. Fwoarrrrr so amazing... but I couldn't get passed the $50 price tag. /tear

The rest of the museum (Powerhouse) was pretty interesting to explore. I had my first experience of arcade-style Space Invaders too on these random 2-player consoles there.

Kinokuniya was everything I had hoped it would be. It was like a souped-up version of Borders, and with cheaper prices. The manga were still too expensive for me though, so I think I'll just search online for them in future. We spent something like 3 hours in that place though, drifting from the Graphic Design & Illustration sections, to Crafts, to Films, to Manga, and then at one point, we went into the Children's area. There's always fun to be had in the Children's area of a bookstore.

We saw a lot of books and authors from our youth but the highlight was the Pop-up/Flip Book section. We looked through heaps of such books and discovered a new fascination of how they were created. Look out for something of our own in future, because this has become the start of something potentially amazing.