Double Tens Day

October Tenth (10/10) is the anniversary of the founding of the Peoples Republic of China, so we didn't have school. I had wanted to get up early, but kept resetting my alarm, and until I finally got up. I made some rice, and had breakfast, before going to meet Aijin at 9:45. We were going meeting some Taiwanese people, and going to see a movie. We met up with them, and on the way stopped to get a mid morning snack. A couple of them got egg sandwiches, but I had just eaten, so I bought a piece of peanut butter toast, and some rice milk tea. We had a bit more travelling to do to get to the theater, I was hungry, and it was a delicious piece of toast so I ate mine on the way. No one else did, and I have since found out that Chinese people view eating and walking at the same time as uncouth. I believe that this stems from the general enjoyment of sitting around eating and talking. Why walk and eat if you could sit and talk and eat?

One of the girls we were going to see the movie with loves watching movies, and goes by herself a lot, so she had already seen all of the 'happy go lucky' kinds of movies. The only one she hadn't seen was this horror movie from Thailand, so we went to watch that. The spoken language was Thai, and there Chinese subtitles, but no english. Which wasn't really that bad because it wasn't too high of a dialogue movie, and if I couldn't catch any of the meaning from the subtitle, then I could always just look on screen and see what was happening. I don't like watching scary movies, and so I haven't seen too many of them, but I think this one was the scariest I've ever seen. It was about a pair of Siamese twins. One of them falls in love with this guy, and he falls in love with her to. Their love just makes the other twin bitter, and she comes back to haunt the happy twin. I think it was a clever strategy to take an already socially uncomfortable subject, Siamese twins, and make a horror movie out of it. They certainly succeeded too.

This movie turned out to be a buy one get one free, and we got to see another Thai horror movie in the same theater, right after the first one. This one had English subtitles, so I was able to follow the plot. It was really scary too, about a girl who is in the top of her freshman medical class. This rich guy bets his friends he can seduce her, and so starts trying, and he succeeds. They have sex, she gets pregnant, has an abortion and dies. Then she starts haunting her apartment. In the end she kills the guy who had sex with her, a couple people he had sex with in the interim, and her father who sexually molested her.

The combination of these two movies not only freaked me out about living alone, but made me not want to look at women at all. The fist movie made me not want to make friends with women, because it might hurt one of their friends, who might or might not go crazy, but I'd still be hurting her. The second movie made me never ever want to touch a woman.

After we left the theater, we went and got some lunch, and after lunch we went and got some smoothies, and sat down in the smoothie place. We basically just sat and ate and drank and talked from about 2:30 when the movies got out, until about 9:00. I think this kind of thing is more in keeping with what most Taiwanese people do. All the girls we were eating with were freinds of a girl Aijin is trying to date, so it was sort of like an interview session with these three Taiwanese girls questioning him about life the universe and everything. There was that, and Aijin likes to talk a lot anyway, so I mostly just listened, but it was interesting, and funny cause they were grilling Aijin.

Before bed I was worried about having nightmares, so I listened to happy American music and looked at pictures from school on my ipod. It was kind of intense because I basically relived most of my college career to date in only a few minutes. Then I stood up and I was back in Taiwan. I didn't have nightmares.