Typing Chinese...

...is slow, when you're not a good student. I've decided to accelerate my learning I'm going to try to type everything in Chinese, even if I haven't officially learned the characters yet. The general process goes like this...

Try to remember the word you're looking for.
Think about how to 'spell it' in Mandarin phonetics.
Try to remember the correct tone for each syllable.
Search in the back of my book to find the correct tone, and try to remember what the character looks like.
Look for the correct phonetic symbols on the keyboard.
Type them.
Type the correct tone.
Make sure that the character is correct (by this time I've usually forgotten, so I have to check my book again).

And voila! You have successfully typed a single character! Translating 6 written sentences from English into Chinese usually takes me about 2 hours. However, I can do it verbally in about 1 minute.

Congratulations

Congratulations again must go to my room mate and good friend Rob Sparrow on his impending marriage to Dorienne Spencer. Here's a photo of a photo being taken of the very happy couple at their Taiwanese 'mock' wedding. They'll get married properly in South Africa in a short while.

Rice Paddy

Long exposure of me running with a torch in a rice paddy. The dip in the light is me falling on my rear end in the mud. It was kind of hard to see what was going on. Good thing only one person saw that happen ;)

Tension...

There's nothing quite as tense as a good game of Table Soccer. This was taken at my church and was a post prayer meeting match between the pastor of our church and one of my mates.

Dragon Boat Festival

This occured on the 31st of May this year. However there wasn't much celebration this time round, because everyone's attention was on the current political scandal involving the president's son. At least one of my classes got to celebrate by having their own dragon boat races.