Hanami Addendum: 5 seconds of... well, not fame, per se...

Can't believe I forgot this!

While we were walking up to the bridge to Kitanomaru park, a Japanese guy started walking along with us. Since he wasn't handing out any flyers or tissues, clearly he wasn't selling anything, so I thought maybe he was asking for change. Then I started to figure out that he was just talking about the flowers, and saying something or another about us. And then, finally, I noticed the rather large microphone in his hand.

After some muddling through in Japanese, broken English (the Japanese interviewer had no English, but the Taiwanese cameraman had a little), and a quickly aborted foray into Chinese, they got their intentions through to me.

Family. Friends. We were interviewed by a Taipei news show!

There is a very low, but non-zero probability that our little 5 second clip ("...the blossoms are very pretty...") will be seen by someone who knows us. If someone does see it, in all likelihood it will be a former student from one of my tutorials at SFU, who will no doubt hate my guts because I gave him/her something in the C range.

I'm not sure why they decided to interview us, exactly, but they probably wanted to interview a white person, saw Kate with me, and figured I could help bridge the language barrier. Which I suppose I did, kinda, eventually.

So this is maybe kinda exciting, but it is surely nothing compared to the post that Kate is going to have to make Real Soon Now.