roadtrip taipei

ivo and i are going to taipei with karin tomorrow to bring mary her stuff, go shopping, see a rock show and mostly to hang out with friends.

we are excited. maybe too excited - ivo woke up w 5 red circles on his face which i hope are bug bites, i guess, but i have no idea really... yesterday he ate pineapple and a bit of cheese - but i don't think it's an allergic reaction.

we got new brake pads and two new tires on the opel astra. yippee! safe!

so this elimination communication: yesterday morning i anticipated 2 pees and brought ivo to the bathroom in time, made the shhhh/pssss sound - viola! he wore a diaper in th pm bc we had stuff to do and couldn't be monitoring wee wee all day! well, today, i missed each time - and in any event, ivo seemed to have diarrhea so he's wearing a diaper. we'll go at it hard core when we get back from taipei.

i'm still working on the missionary of scientific thought bit and i'm also thinking about the dif b/w language and dialect in the Chinese world - i think it's a political distinction - i don't think that taiwanese and mandarin are simply dialects like Queen's english is to Bostonian english... especially since it wasn't until intellectuals in the 20th century made a successful push for written chinese to reflect spoken chinese/baihua rather than classical chinese which has long been unintelligible to all but the super educated

so baihua in the 1920s and simplified characters in the 1950s - isn't it clear that the chinese language(s) hasn't been one uninterupted unifying force thruout/among china an han people...