I sit here tonight on a drab Saturday night. It’s 11C outside, and raining on and off making the evening unpredictable. Still, it doesn’t stop the Nuit Blanche evening from happening. It’s the first time Toronto has taken part in this now international event that originally started in Paris, France.

From 7pm to 7am on Sunday, cultural portals in Toronto’s select neighbourhoods will be open to the public displaying various shows, exhibitions, and the like. Thousands of people are expected to attend despite the rain.

I thought about going this evening, as it would be rather interesting to check out various venues at night. But at this point in time I see myself not pulling off another all-nighter. I should be though, as a number of people I know will be out and about in the wee hours of the morning. I even missed a great opportunity to go up to the observation pod in the CN Tower to take sunset/sunrise photos to be possibly shown at the CONTACT photo exhibit next year.

In any case, life goes on. As I’ve so learned in a many cases.

Nuit Blanche will not doubt happen again next year, and it should prove to be bigger if this one is as successful as they anticipate it to be.

On another completely unrelated note, I am conscientiously trying my best to learn Korean now. With the help of youTube, I am watching the “Learn to Speak Korean” 15 minute Korean lessons. By moderating it to my own pace, I can learn at my own pace and it works quite nicely.

I find that I can manage about 2 lessons per session, which gives me enough material to learn and memorize for a good two-three days. These are basic expressions that they teach you and that’s fine by me.

I can proudly say that I can say, “My name is Taku” in 5 different languages now.

I am currently on lesson 6, and I can’t wait to learn what’s next. With a total of 20 lessons, I hope I can manage and remember everything that I’ve done from the beginning.

Yay for me!

I had an interesting dinner last night with people in the photography industry. It was an unexpected event and was quite happy to be a part of it. There were two other photographers, one fashion designer/student, one makeup stylist, and one model to round off the table. They each had their own fair share of interesting stories to tell and it was just interesting to listen to them considering what their roles in the industry were.

As it turns out, I had met one of the photographers last summer when a group of us from TPMG went to Elora Gorge. It’s a small world. The food was prepared by my friend’s friend, whom had prepared a Sicilian Italian course and a South Asian Fusion course. I had the latter and although it was on the spicier side, it was quite flavourful and I enjoyed it. It was a small and not too rowdy of a bunch, but still quite nice to hang around with.

Lately I’ve been a little more pre-occupied with U&I as I prepare for my next issue, which has been long overdue. I also just recently got the quote for the order, which I was planning on doing, and let’s just say I had to take a deep breath after reviewing it. It is quite expensive to go nation-wide and at the moment, I have no idea how I’m going to go about it. Somebody please help! Ahh…

Now, I just came back from my first Mandarin class of this year. I have once again found myself enrolled in a Mandarin class, which runs the entire school year, every Saturdays from 8:45am-12:15pm. The class is much larger than the last one, and we have even more of a mixed level this time around, which I’m sure will make it more difficult for the teacher to prepare lesson plans for.

There is this one Korean in my class who seems to understand Mandarin quite well and during the break, came up to me and started speaking Japanese. I was quite surprised… and even more surprised with her answer to my question of how she learned Japanese. She said she watched a lot of anime and basically learned from TV. I don’t know how many Japanese TV shows I’ve been watching lately and I have yet to improve on my Japanese skills. Actually, that’s a false statement in hindesight. I probably don’t know it myself but I do get the sneaking suspicion that I am doing a good job at at the very least maintaining my Japanese level, and hopefully increasing my vocabulary, which is my main goal now-a-days.

In any case, it’s September now. School has started and it’s another brand new season to start things off. Let’s see how long I can keep this schedule up now.