Melvyn Chou: Letter 28

Hello, Tim!

We're so busy last week that I didn't have time to make a reply, but I don't think I will have to explain much about yearly presentation because others will help me doing so.

First, I'll answer your comment. I've talked to our counselor in the school, and she said that I would better major in transportation management or urban development in college and study linguistics or languages in graduate school, and my parents also said so. So I probably wouldn't put Chengchi University in my consideration because although they are abundant in language departments but they don't seem to regard management departments as very important ones. If I could, I would probably attend exams for flight traffic controller because I'm actually really interested in that. My father used to teach me to play flight simulation game since I was 4 or 5. I have a great enthusiasm in aviation since then. I recently started to try to figure out one kind of map called "En-route chart", this kind of map shows the "flight paths" in a certain area. An flight path is like a highway in the sky, all planes should fly on this flight path with different altitudes. If you're interested in this, I can give you 2 websites, you can view them at the same time. The first one is called Flightradar24, it shows almost all flying airplanes over the world real-time. The second one is called SkyVector, this website shows all the airways over the world. If you have free time, be sure to visit these two websites. I bet you'll find it interesting to see how airplanes fly all over the sky, if you see planes flying above your home next time, you can identify which airline the plane belongs to at a glance. What's more, in Taiwan, we have a website that you can listen to pilots contacting with air traffic controller, real-time. You can find out if there is one in the United States.

Since there's really nothing special to talk about aside from this and yearly presentation, I'll move on to picture of the week directly.

These are some examples of large "Familymart"s. If you had came to Taiwan or been to Japan, you must know Familymart. In addition to supermarkets and grocery stores, I also like large convenience stores much. They give me a sense of security. Can you tell where are these three Familymarts? Actually it's hard to tell. The first one is at Osaka, the second is at Penghu and the last is at Tokyo.
(1: 2016.07.30, 2: 2017.04.03, 3:2017.02.05)

Another thing I want to introduce to you is a special supermarket in Japan called "Gyomu Super (業務スーパー, literally Business Super). This supermarket has commodities with an extremely low price. There are several reasons: first, they don't sell fresh foods, so they basically don't have much damage on their commodities. Second, because they don't have much stores (658 in all Japan), and their targets are chefs and families with more members, so they basically don't need advertisement. Third, this supermarket has its own factories, so their products can directly go to supermarkets without wholesalers.(Photos taken 04.02.2017)