Furniture Museum and NDD Visit

First off, I would like to show you these ridiculously cute bags of miniature m&m's and miniature Skittles. See? How cute!



Anywho, Wednesday :: Field Trip
At 8:45 after a very hectic no-fruit breakfast (Amigo's apparently doesn't open until 9) we boarded the bus and began our trip to NDD (New Design Dimensions) Studio and a furniture museum in Tainan. Upon "take-off," Vivian told us that we were going to watch and movie, and GUESS WHAT MOVIE IT WAS?! That Jenifer Lopez movie, Back Up Plan, that I've been wanting to see REALLY bad. Look, even Kenney thought it was funny:



New Design Dimensions is a studio with two locations in Taiwan. There was a surprise there! Robin is interning at NDD, so I've seen him two times in one week! CRAZY! (NDD is where I will be interning for two days in a few weeks. It is a requirement to fulfill the abroad-version of our Professional Practice class at Auburn.)
This is their website : http://www.ndddesign.com/




I really liked this lamp at NDD. It's flat-packed and assembles with only the lamp itself, no adhesive or mechanical fasteners.



After NDD, our bus drove us to Anpin Old Street for lunch. Reflecting on the pictures, I bought a lot of food, but didn't spend a lot of money. Don't worry. There was a raffle-type game where you would put in 10 NT and a dial would begin to spin. You'd push a button to stop it and the number it landed on was the amount of icecream scoops you got! You could get up to 5 scoops for about 30 cents! I only got one scoop. Oh well, more room for lunch.



We also bought a coffin cake to split. It was basically chicken pot pie, but in a funny, rectangular, crusty piece of bread.


Lunch was shrimp rolls and some REALLY bubbly soda water. Kenney did NOT fit at the table. Hell, I didn't even fit at the table.


This is me telling Tin-Man to shush because he was yelling at me for eating with my fingers. Chopsticks were being difficult!


I don't know if it's an ongoing trend, but it may become one: While still in the states, Tin-Man told us a story of how he told a girl on the trip last year, Lindsay, that he would buy her a bright red cowboy hat if she would wear it ALL day the rest of the day. As he's telling us this story I think "Oh God. I hope he doesn't make me do that." Sure enough, we passed a little store after lunch and I see the hats, so I kept walking. I hear, "Hey! Amanda! Come here." I slowly turn. Of course, he buys it for me and I looked like a RIDICULOUS American tourist the rest of the day.




Next stop was the furniture museum. I was a little bit disappointed because I thought it was going to be modern furniture. Instead it was the WAY over-decorated carved wood furniture. Pretty, but I was expecting something else.


Pictures weren't allowed inside, so this is all I've got!

This is the group outside the furniture museum after the tour (I'm the one with the ridiculous hat...and Kenney and Ian are squishing my head between theirs). And the next is a group of us jumping.




We returned back to the dorms around 5 and I met with my group from 6 to about 10 30 working on studio projects.

Thursday :: Oops.
I planned on waking up early and trying a cheese danbing at the breakfast cafe downstairs, but instead, I accidentally woke up literally 12 minutes before class. Either both mine and Arissa's alarms rebelled against us, or we both cannot hear a thing. 

Glass class today was REALLY cool! We learned sandblasting, which is a LOT easier than I thought! We spent a little while designing a pattern to be blasted onto our glass tile.


We then sketched our patterns on sticky paper and stuck it to the tiles. After they were good and stuck, we cut out the parts that were to be blasted.


Then we went and blasted them! Easy as pie, except my tiny little hands hardly held up to the job and they were cramped up the rest of the day. It was REALLY hard to see through that window because, previously, the plastic had been accidentally sand blasted by someone, haha.


My tile was a pretty little bamboo design. Kenney's is the leaf-water drop one.



I also tried to make little plaques for my parents' work desks, but only one turned out well. I think I will get a chance to make another though. If not, they'll have to wrestle for it.

In metal class, we "learned" etching. All we did was design some pattern, cut out some metal and draw the pattern on there. We then covered the parts to be etched with FINGER NAIL POLISH (Kenney used a pretty pink, haha). The metal was then placed in acid, and the nail polish will keep the acid from affecting the metal underneath it. It takes a few hours, but once done, the parts under the nail polish will be slightly raised from the rest of the metal. Hopefully, I made a pretty cool necklace pendant. I won't get to see it until next Thursday. This is Sarah Jayne helping me attach my keychain for the project from the last class.


Tin-Man didn't come to this whole class, so there's no pictures of the acid-nail polish project.