Happy New Year! 新年快樂!

Happy New Year 2009. In recent years, i unintentionally started a collection of countries to watch the New Year's Eve fireworks in. These have been

2003 - Seattle, Washington, United States
2007 - Singapore, Singapore
2008 - Maribor, Slovenia
2009 - Taipei, Taiwan

and obviously the Czech Republic all the other years. The fireworks at the Taipei 101 were impressive, but super short (3 minutes maybe). Compare that to Singapore, where it was so long we almost got bored watching. Anyways, here's a pic.



The party was great. We gathered in a friend's apartment to celebrate along with people from: Czech Republic, Slovakia, Chile, Taiwan, United States, Salvador, Portugal, France and maybe some others. The original plan was to have a bbq on a roof, but we had to move inside due to bad weather. Had a good time there, then went to watch the fireworks and sing the Czechoslovak anthem on the roof, then keep on partying. Unfortunately i missed a part of it, when i went for a walk and for the first time here, got lost in the streets of Taipei. The home-made meruňkovice may have had something to do with that though. Thanks again to my friends who rescued me :) We even got to celebrate the New Year again, at the same time that people back home did (7 a.m. Taiwan time). The streets were surprisingly clean and lively in the morning - apparently, the Taiwanese people actually follow the "Jak na nový rok, tak po celý rok" rule and make sure not to spend the whole 1st of January nursing their hangovers.

Other than that, I'm excited that the school semester is almost over and that the break is starting soon. I also just moved from the dormitory to a new place, a great apartment on the slope of the mountain, also walking distance from the university. It will be even better when, starting from next week, there will be two of us living here. However, the moving itself was rather hard - i had no idea i have so much stuff now! Just 4 months ago i arrived here with 1 suitcase, 1 backpack and the laptop. Now, I had to go from the dorm to the apartment twice, looking like a Christmas tree with different bags and pieces of luggage attached to me in any way imaginable.

I won't share any new year's resolutions or wishes, except for the wish to add some more red bits on the following "Where I've been" map - the first addition will be Philippines in just over 2 weeks.



Yeah, I just want to show off a bit.