Day 1: Taipei the long way.

James eating a bagel at O'Hare, looking kind of like an Asian TinTin, only with a small white girlfriend instead of a small white dog for a companion. The woman in the background is not intentional.

I've left out a couple of important details.

What was the purpose of your visit?
James was born in Pingtung, Taiwan, and lived there and Taipei until he was about 8 before his parents moved to the United States. He makes designer toys, urban vinyl.

What's a designer toy? Urban vinyl? What?
According to myplasticheart.com, they are:

"limited edition collectible "art" toys from today's cutting edge artists and designers."

That works for me. We're here for the Taipei Toy Festival, a designer toy convention that runs from July 5-8. Established and emerging toy designers get to exhibit and sell their various vinyl creations, artists do signings, there are drawings for prizes, presentations....and much much more. For more concrete information:

http://www.taipeitoyfestival.com/

James' characters are produced by Crazy Label, a toy distributor...I'm going to talk more about it later. It'll get long. Back to the trip, backstory to come:

We get to O'Hare a few hours before our flight. Security check goes surprisingly and awesomely smoothly. We get bagels and wait.

I call my mom and look really serious while doing it. The plane comes. We get on it. Good-bye, United States! Hello, new lands!

I can't figure out how to switch this over to English.

I'm semi-new to this blogging thing, and brand-spanking-sparkly-new to this blogging in another country thing. It reads like Chinese in every sense of the word. Argh. Someone help a girl out: how do I switch over to my own language (English) while exploring exotic lands? I know it's probably some duh easy answer. Help!
My name is Rose. I'm visiting Taiwan with my lovely and talented boyfriend, James. You can find him at:

www.veggiesomething.com

www.fizziefuzzie.com/
www.myspace.com/129878829

And me and my small online presence at:

www.myspace.com/rosamundt

www.flickr.com/photos/rosa-mundi
http://www.loopdistro.com/index2.html

The last is the distro for a zine I did about a year ago. It's about half book size, my favorite publication size, 8 pages of facts and pictures about Luna Park, a long-dead Chicago amusement park on the South Side.

What else? I recently graduated from Loyola University Chicago with a degree in Creative Writing and Communication. I grew up in San Francisco, California and St. Paul, Minnesota, spending about equal time in each, and feel both have contributed to my character and general outlook on life. I'm short, blue-eyed, and blond. I love comic books, graphic novels, and books without pictures like not too much else, except my Mom. I have two jobs, one full-time and one part-time. I'm freezing my ass off in our hotel's wonderful, wonderful air conditioning and listening to James snore.

Ok! I think that does it for introductions, at least for right now. I'm in Taiwan. We've been here about 5 days, July 3rd-July 8th, and will be here until the 13th. It's been exciting. I can't figure out how to backdate entries (everything is in Chinese), so I'll label each entry by date and day.

-Rose