周玲妏 Chou Ling-wen

I happened to catch part of a speech of Chou Ling-wen's about the problems caused by motorcycles and the difficulty of navigating the 騎樓. It's nice to see that someone's concerned about the problem. (And that not everyone is a scion of a bribe-taking family). But what's all this concern about dogs? Is it her doing that there are lot more stray dogs around than last summer?

Thank your lucky stars

According to Xinhua

All 13 crew members aboard a small oil tanker that ran aground off Kaohsiung Harbor in southern Taiwan have been rescued, according to coast guard officials of Taipei on Wednesday.

The officials said the 1,685-ton Bolivia-registered oil tanker "Lucky Star" sent out a call for assistance Monday morning. Nine of the crew members, including the captain, are Indonesian, and the other four are Chinese.

The oil tanker has only a small amount of fuel oil aboard, and the coast guard is continuing to monitor the ship to detect and deal with an oil spill if it occurs.

高雄老鼠

There is construction on the rapid transit on 中山三路. (On the English map that's "Jung shan third road"--that's MPS2 romanization--although apparently if it were in the second road section, it would be "Jhongshan second road"--Tongyong pinyin.) To get from where we're staying to the 前鎮 (Cianjhen) swimming pool, because of the construction, we have to take a path in front of the 獅甲 Elementary and Middle Schools ("Shrjia", MPS2 romanization).


A couple of days ago early in the morning on our way to the 前鎮 swimming pool (it's kind of crummy, but OK for lap swimming), we saw a dead 8 inch rat in the passage in front of the school. So we decided to take another way way home, but becuse of construction on 勞工 park, we had to circle around to 一德路. As we were buying something for breakfast on the corner of 一德路 and 復興三路, I saw a whole family of rats running around a truck and refrigerator left there (probably for the night market).