Charlene and Craig's wedding

Charlene and Craig got married on Dec 27th. Congratulations! Here are the beautiful bride and handsome groom. :-)

As the bridesmaid, basically my job is to take care and company my good friend Charlene. :-)

I arrived Charlene's apartment at 6:00AM. Charlene's family was all awake already. 8:00AM Craig's family arrived to escort the bride to his family. After some traditional procedures, we arrived Hwa Young for the wedding ceremony.

The place was well decorated, and few staffs took care of the procedures and the bride. Therefore I didn't have lots things to do, except of chatting with Charlene and some friends when they visited. Since the bride was arranged in another room before the relatives and friends arrived, Charlene was curious about the place of the ceremony. Taking my camera, I went to take few photos to show her.

Both Charlene and Craig like photographing. Charlene must want to take few photos by herself. Craig got some chance to take few photos by himself. Thanks Craig for the photo of me.

My friends, wish you love and happiness forever! :-)

2008 ING Taipei Marathon

There were 120,000 people joining 2008 ING Taipei Marathon. Shelby, my younger brother, is one of the members in the core team responsible for this event. As usual, I am proud of him! :-)

Check out the screen in the photo. It took more than 20 minutes to have all the runners to pass through the starting line.

Wen-Jun and I participated in the 3km fun run. I was surprised that it's quite short. Anyway, it was fun to run with so many people. Some people came with families, some people joined with friends, some people run with their dogs, and etc. People cheered up for strangers. One guy run backward for 42km... one old man finished 42km... everyone used his/her own position to participate. Some are professional, while the others are not. However, as long as people try their best, I think the positions are all beautiful!

Where the Hell is Matt?

This is the title of the video about Matt-Harding, a young man showing in the VISA commercials. He danced in a simple style in front of various landmarks and streets around the world, sometimes by himself and sometimes with locals. Because of him, the video spreads a comfortable feeling with pure, consistency, and happiness.

This diffusion reminds me of the movie "Pay It Forward". A simple idea could change the world. Although if I remember correctly, the idea "pay it forward" started from the reality "the world sucks". At the end of the movie, the kid was dead because of executing what he believed. However, his courage and spirit changed and affected the world already.

New ASML building

Recently, not only I am preparing to move to a new apartment, but also my company just moved to a new building.

This is the building we used to work in. It's a nice building as well, but not belong to ASML.

In Dec 2008, we moved to the new building.

By the way, because Christmas is coming, we got a present from the company, as usual. This year the present is a beautiful gift box with a chocolate cake, some chocolate cookies, and chocolate from Black as Chocolate. Merry Christmas! :-)

Christian the Lion

It's an unusual story for sure... :-)
http://tw.youtube.com/watch?v=adYbFQFXG0U&feature=related

new apartment progress

After one year, finally my new apartment, 遠雄未來家, is almost ready. I am busy in checking the quality and preparing the interior design.

2008 July

2008 Dec

So... the ocean is really close!

Linkou, the village I live at now in Taipei county, is actually on the top of a hill. Although the time I moved to Linkou is already one and half years ago, I didn't really have lots time to explore and get to know this village. Today, following the sign to Bali village, I ride my scooter "down" the hill and reached the ocean. It took less than 30 minutes.

Although my poor old scooter might get retired soon, she still completed the mission! Good girl!

The boats at this little port are all painted with faces.

Today it's quite windy, but still many people enjoyed fishing over there. The local village atmosphere was kind of surprising me. Sometimes I feel like a foreigner even in my own country. People could recognize that you are not local easily.

Smiley face in the sky

Yesterday there was a smiley face in the sky! The eyes were the Venus and Jupiter, while the first quarter of the moon presented as the mouth.

(Copied from a forwarded e-mail)

Maybe the smile did bring luck, today the government announced to have one more day off, Jan 2nd, during the New Year. ha ha~

Pei-yin's wedding and gathering with Peggy and Sophie

Going back to my home town, Tainan, I joined Pei-yin's wedding at Tayih Landis Hotel on Nov 30th. Congratulation, Pei-yin! It was fun to meet the old friends from senior high school after so many years as well. How many? well... maybe over ten years?... It was a pity that I missed Yen-lin's wedding when I was in the Netherlands. Now finally I didn't miss this one. :-)
In the evening, I had another rare gathering with Peggy and Sophie, my friends from the elementary school. Due to some personal reason, Peggy came back to Taiwan from US for one week. Sophie just came back to Taiwan from UK and flies for business all the time, but this weekend she came back to Tainan as well. I just came back from the Netherlands two weeks ago, and arranged to came back home this weekend. What a coincidence! You could imagine how great talk we had. By the way, I found Domo from Internet, and it is a fairly nice and easy restaurant for spaghetti.