12 months later...

Oh there's no place like home for the holidays,
Cause no matter how far away you roam,
If you want to be happy in a million ways,
For the holidays you can't beat home sweet home.

Especially after spending an hour digging your car out of a 2 foot snowdrift. Thank you Colorado Holiday Blizzard '06.

"I transited at Narita Airport, and all I got was this lousy shaber."

To be fair, I can actually use this one without waking up everyone within a 100 meter radius. Can't say that much for my old Remington.

The neighborhood is pretty much as I remembered from last year. It's election time for li-chang again so the alleys are covered in campaign flags. Some stores have opened while others have closed.

There are a bunch of new swanky looking apartment towers that weren't there last time. And for some inexplicable reason the 7-11 where I normally buy my Taiwan Beer moved next door.

Early morning on the MRT. The usual crowds... office workers in suits and ties and students headed off to school. I realize that I no longer have a student uniform to wear. Between the suits and ties, the uniformed students, and kids with baggy pants and hair even longer and shaggier than I remembered I feel a bit out of place in my jeans, t-shirt, and backpack.

An old guy come over and starts speaking to me in Japanese. This is the third time this has happened since I arrived at Taoyuan last night...

Me: "What makes you think I'm Japanese?"
Him: "Your clothes looked foreign but your hair wasn't spiked and looked too normal for an ABC."

So there you have it. Kids from overseas are discernible by their spiked and abnormal looking hair.

First things first of course. Lining up at the Immigration Office with a bunch of other students from abroad back for winter break and even more immigrants from the PRC.

Looking around, I start to wonder if I'm the only Taiwanese student studying in the US who doesn't have spiky hair and baggy pants.