Breakfast today was white rice, seaweed, and natto. At lunch I showed the photo to Taizo Ito, and he said that was a Japanese breakfast. Japanese rice turned out not to be as difficult to cook as I had imagined, and it was really delicious.

Almost all of today’s work went into figuring out how to run Flask on Google App Engine, along with Google Open Connect. Honestly, it was a pain. I had originally wanted to deploy it to Elastic Beanstalk, but I did not have permission. GAE was full of hassles too. At first I tried using flask-appengine-template, but there were parts of it I did not really understand or know how to remove. The instructions were not especially thorough either. For example, they did not clearly explain that third-party libraries needed to be placed inside the project, and there was also very little guidance on how to deploy to GAE. That whole stretch nearly drove me insane.

GAE kept insisting that my password was wrong. After wasting a lot of effort, I decided to switch to appengine-python-flask-skeleton. At first I had not read the documentation carefully enough, so I ended up doing even more pointless work, but eventually I got it sorted out.

Ito-san told me that it would be my turn to present at the October 22 session. I would have ten minutes to talk about what I had been working on during this period. I realized I was already falling well behind on progress, so I would have to make use of the weekend while the typhoon kept me indoors. Another typhoon.

For lunch I had nanban udon. Ito-san and another coworker whose name I can no longer remember took me there. After we came back, Ito-san even bought me coffee, and the two of us went to a small open space next to the office to chat. He said he lived in Fuchu, so I pulled up a map of Taiwan and told him that New Taipei also has a place called Fuzhong, along with Banqiao and Sanchong.

After work, I decided to stop by Tsutaya Books in Daikanyama. It was not actually that far to walk from the office. It is a world-famous, beautiful bookstore. The atmosphere felt a little like Eslite, but its music selection was astonishing, and they even let you listen to samples. I happened to listen to a sample of “Oh Champs-Elysees” by Kimyō Reitarō, and it sounded so good that I found myself swaying along to the music.

After leaving Tsutaya, I walked all the way home. It was actually quite a long distance. The streets felt almost deserted, and from time to time I saw people out running, a couple of Westerners arguing, and passed by a few restaurants with a lot of character. But most stretches of the road looked a little intimidating. Good thing I am built on the sturdier side.

Note: This article is translated from Traditional Chinese.