Typhoon!

We began to feel that the Central Weather Bureau was the organization-that-cried-wolf: typhoon! it would warn, and then we would get a standard amount of rain. We were unimpressed.

Yesterday morning, on my way to work, I began to take this recent bout of warnings seriously. The wind made a mockery of umbrella-carriers, and the rain presented its own set of trials: it was not so much falling as flying, sideways and in discernible sheets. By the onset of evening, the MRT stations like Zhongxiao Fuxing (pictured at left) were total madhouses. Crazed metro passengers, dripping wet and reeking of a collective wet-dog smell, pushed forward inch by inch. I was nearly trampled by tiny Asian women who were using their umbrellas as first defensive implements, and then offensive ones. I would have been terrified if I weren't so impressed.

Yes, Typhoon Saola was in full swing. It's rained an obscene amount down here, which is fun but a little frustrating. At any rate, a day and a half of classes were cancelled, which meant I had a sudden onset of free time. Today, Jenny and Thekla and Andrea and Andi and I went for a lovely typhoon tea. We braved the rain and the scary public transport and the umbrella-wielding Asian women so that we could do something other than sit around in our boring rooms drinking directly from our gallon-sized water bottles. Maybe that was just me.


This place, a buffet featuring teas and juices and salads and light lunchy-type items, also featured cake. Lots of cake. Yes that is unlimited cake. As in, cake buffet. Needless to say, I fit an improbable amount of cake into my stomach this afternoon. Some cakes had sparkly edible adornments; some had jellies and creams and deliciousness associated with them. It was wonderful.

The rest of our day featured some mango ice and some arcade basketball: all in all, not the cowering-in-a-dark-room that I would have expected Typhoon Day to be.

Back to work tomorrow, I'm afraid, which means it's bedtime for this little cake-filled SAT teacher. Ah, if only these mild typhoons could happen every day...

Antibiotics and English

I spoke too soon; I am not better. But I will spare you the details of my Amoxicillin-ravaged urinary tract, since that's not really my point.

I visited the tiny little pharmacy down in my area of town--strictly speaking, not quite in Taipei but on the outskirts, which is called New Taipei City--and inquired about some medicine. To my surprise, the pharmacist spoke pretty good English, which rarely happens this far out of the city. But she, like many decent English-speakers around here, approached the whole conversation from a place of what seemed to be extreme embarrassment. If she ever couldn't come up with a word (it took her a little bit to think of infection; my doctor last week kept confusing Tuesday with Thursday, much to his consternation), she apologized three or four times.

This woman has never been to America or another predominantly English-speaking country: I asked. Her English is, I would wager, about as good as my Chinese would be if I lived here for perhaps a year. She should be extremely proud of having achieved communicative ability in two of the world's most difficult and important languages, but instead she apologizes over and over for forgetting to conjugate a verb properly or not remembering the number words.

In the limited experience that I have, people here don't seem to feel that way about any other language. I have seen store-clerks who seem to feel no shame in speaking no Korean or Japanese, but who--when I take my place in the front of line--shyly try out a couple of English phrases, anxiously searching my face for signs of understanding.

Out of every five T-shirts I see with writing, four are in English. Maybe more. Some are poorly-translated or just plain silly, but they're in English. Advertisements and shop names and flashy bits of product packaging are all in proud (and often bad) English. English--in particular, American English--seems to be en vogue, to the point where people feel ashamed to have anything less than proficiency.

I want to relieve these worries. To tell them how impressive it is that they have any degree of mastery, however slim, over my language, which I know is immensely difficult. To point out that I'm the one in their country, showing up with little more than my badly pronounced 我要这个 (wo yao zhege: I want this) and 谢谢 (xie xie: thanks). To assure doctors and pharmacists and 7-11 clerks that I think no less of them regardless of English skill: it's convenient for me when people speak English, but not an expected luxury.

I would tell them all of this, but I don't speak Chinese.

Oh, well.

My Last Two Weeks, Part 2: Recuperating in Taipei

When we last left our intrepid and possibly contagious heroine, she was sleeping twelve hours a day, but she was doing so more comfortably given her new Taipei surroundings as opposed to her previous Hsinchu ones. Tirelessly, Mark doted upon her, providing her with Coke Slurpees and unimaginable quantities of duck and bread, demanding the consumption of ludicrous quantities of water, earning himself many boyfriend-points in the process of tending to my every need and whim.

Anyway, I recovered. I kept taking my medicine, except the foul-smelling Chinese syrup stuff which I eschewed fairly early. I was still too sick to work--and I didn't have any classes anyway, since mine had been given to co-workers who were doing, with their free time, something other than coughing their lungs up--so Mark and I got to spend more time together than we would have thought. We went to the Planetarium and watched a ridiculously awesome early-2000s made IMAX film about weather patterns. We juggled in the park (well, I watched juggling in the park). We took silly photos in touristy locations (namely Taipei 101, the now-second-tallest building in the world).

In some ways, the timing of my sickness was an immense blessing. At any other point during the summer, weeklong unemployment would have engendered serious discontent, but I actually couldn't have been happier about being underworked during Mark's visit. Though I lost a fair bit of what had promised to be a sizable paycheck, that proved to be a relatively minor drawback. Being sick sucked, in short, but the timing ended up OK.

Anyway, Mark's visit was lovely and wonderful in every way and already Taipei seems a little less bright and exciting with him away from it, et cetera et cetera.

A day or two after he left--by this time, I'm entirely better except for a bad-sounding cough--I started to have some serious abdominal pains. I did exactly what I always do in these situations: I ignored it and hoped it would get better. I drank a little more water than I normally would have.

But it didn't get better. Soon I couldn't sleep because I would have several-hour-long intense pains. So, after a few days of this, I used my free Saturday to go to the Taipei City Hospital. It was already closed, so I had to be seen by the emergency room personnel. They concluded, after blood and urine tests and lots of loud Chinglish from both sides, that I had a massive infection brought on by a pretty terrible immune system after my illness.

Nobody speaks English at the Taipei City Hospital, but everyone is really freaking helpful anyway. Doctors and nurses and info-desk personnel and laboratory technicians and some particularly sympathetic fellow patients were all really invested in pointing and shouting and getting me where I needed to be. It was adorable and then annoying, but mostly adorable.

Anyway, to shorten what is not a particularly interesting story, I have spent three afternoons in the last week and a half in the city hospital, waiting around. The hospital system here is extraordinarily confusing: you walk in and you have to grab a number. It's like the Department of Motor Vehicles. A cool female voice comes over the loudspeaker and tells number 906 to proceed to desk eight for check-in. Except that's all in Chinese.

And that happens lots of times. I had to get a main-desk number, then a urinalysis number, then a urology number, then another main-desk number. Each of these times involved a fair bit of waiting and also confusion: the hospital has, like, twelve floors or something? And, as aforementioned, very few English speakers.

Sigh. I was on one kind of antibiotics then another. But I'm finally done! And better! And working all the time.

Hooray!

My Last Two Weeks, Part 1: the Curse of the Gothic Short Story Room

Two weeks ago, Boyfriend arrived for his much-awaited visit to Taipei. I met Mark at the Taoyuan International Airport, giddy with excitement that the intersection of the set "Days in which Corinne and Mark are in a Relationship" and the set "Days in which Corinne and Mark are on the same Continent" was about to increase from nine elements to twenty-one. We spent our first night in Hsinchu, wandering the streets and drinking mango milk.

The following day, we went into Taipei. I started feeling a little woozy on the way there, but I expected that it was just the heat: it was around 30 degrees (95ish, for the Fahrenheit-preferrers), after all, and extraordinarily humid. Even once in air conditioning, though, I thought I might pass out. Opting to hide my discomfort such that I could still engage in fun things, I found myself eventually at a little bar with Mark and Lom, drinking my share of a pitcher of Taiwan Beer. It was late, and had cooled down. The bar was air-conditioned. It was then that I realized just how very warm I was. And headachey. And coughing. And sore.

The following day brought no improvement to my condition, and Mark returned home--home here having the operative meaning of the scary Gothic-short-story-room in Hsinchu--with a thermometer, which wasted no time in informing me of my alarming temperature. At a whopping 39 degrees (something like 102 Fahrenheit), I was easily exceeding my usual lower-than-average body temperature. Hmmmm, I thought in my sleepy fever-induced haze. I should be fine in a couple hours. 


Shockingly to perhaps no one but me, I was not fine in a couple of hours. Picture this: it's a Sunday night. In about twelve hours, I will start a new SAT class. My students' first impressions of me will likely consist of them having to back away from a very sweaty and very pink person who is coughing about plugging in numbers. I will then collapse into a polo-wearing pile of illness during the chapter on sentence completions, leaving my students to wonder forever whether the Hubble telescope's mirrors were (A) efficient, (B) homogeneous, (C) augmented, (D) imperfect, or (E) enormous. I will be cast onto Princeton Review Shame Island, forever to remain for my failure to impart test-based knowledge.

So I called Tiffany, one of my many bosses. She assured me that she would find substitutes for both of my classes and that I should rest. And drink water. And also rest, and drink lots of water. Mostly resting.

So I did! And then I still wasn't better. Some cycle continued of my optimistically pretending to feel okay, my being thoroughly tired out by the abovementioned effort in pretense, and my taking lots of pills and passing out. A Mandarin-speaking co-worker took me to a doctor who prescribed me lots of pills and also some foul-smelling-and-worse-tasting Chinese medicine, which I promptly threw in the garbage bin. I survived from pill to pill, painfully gulping water to the best of my ability. Poor Mark, who came to Taiwan to have fun and party and do fun things, ended up spending his first five days getting me water and mangoes and medicine, insisting that I take my temperature every twenty minutes ("I like data", he would explain patiently to me when I frowned at this practice), and reading Atlas Shrugged while I napped.

The office couldn't quite figure out what to do with me. Within the space of about 24 hours, they had: given all my classes away and told me to rest up in Hsinchu, decided that I was to move to Kaohsiung to recuperate, concluded that I was instead to stay in Hsinchu at least one more night, determined that Taipei might be the best place for me after all, and reassigned me to some new classes.

So Mark and I, both weary--me with the being sick and him with the nursing the sick--packed up our stuff and moved back into my old room in Zhonghe. Even while quite ill, I could feel how nice it was to be back in Taipei. My room is clean and well-lit. My friends are here. Public transportation is easy and cheap and, well, existent. Yes. It's good to be home.

And now, because it is late and I must work tomorrow, I will leave my dedicated readers with an unsatisfying middle to a similarly unsatisfying story.

Sorry 'bout that.

To be continued?

Adventures in Google Translate

Hello

((Chicken volume)), Taiwan's first first, which is the system boneless thigh meat after three days of flooded and then the chicken skin rolled up, now bake for 3-5 minutes, a roll of 35 yuan of three volumes of 100 yuan, welcome to eatlook at the good in helping us to make introduction.

Thank you.





That is all.

(Who am I kidding? This is probably bad enough to be Bing Translator)

Happy Birthday 'Merica

Being abroad doesn't mean we can't celebrate our beloved homeland (well, the beloved homeland of most of us, but we're not picky and are willing to approve some honorary Americans). Even though I'm all the way in Hsinchu, I knew when Lom said he was having a Fourth party that I'd just have to take the high-speed rail so that I could help inaugurate my country's 237th year in style.

I hadn't been in Taipei long when the America-based excitement started. Steven--a true patriot--asked our resident artist Connie if she could draw an awesomely American tattoo on his bicep. If Connie had refused, the terrorists probably would have won then and there, but fortunately she has more sense than that. The resulting eagle, complete with American flag backdrop, made Steven a true paragon of American excellence (later, Connie would add some cartoonish chickens in a reference to a Chinese idiom, 鹤立鸡群, translating to "a crane among chickens" and having the meaning of standing out among the a crowd: Steven decided that he wanted his eagle to be one among chickens).

Tattooed and bandanna'd (and Steven having inflicted similar inking upon Connie's arm, though this eagle looks a bit more like one of the chickens), we were finally ready to partake in that most American of pastimes: beer pong. We actually opted for Taiwan Beer, reasoning that a true American wants the cheapest beer possible so it was actually a very patriotic choice. Now, apartments here are too small for large tables. The ceilings are fairly low. Plus we don't even have a table. Worst of all, we can't get red solo cups.

But we're American, and we can't let any of that stop us! The setup, then, consisted of a couple of glass tables propped up by books and DVD cases. Shockingly, neither glass table broke, though we had a couple of near misses. Here, Andi and Jenny play their first (and only?) beer pong game. They look a little too excited for people who haven't even started losing yet.

I am pleased to announce that Lom and I ended the evening with by far the best streak: we won four games in a row (which meant we played five games in a row: yikes!). Here, we give our best patriotic poses. The America bandannas definitely won it for us, and we have Steven to thank for those. Photo shamelessly stolen from Lom's facebook album, but oh well. Hopefully he won't mind.

Perhaps most importantly, we hit up McDonald's after the beer-pong tournament. We got a little lost getting there, and then in true American fashion we took a cab instead of retracing our steps like a reasonable person might do. Y'all know that I almost never eat fast food: it grosses me out with the overprocessed meat-bits and the grease and the way it would still look and taste the same if I locked it in a box for three years. But after a long night of America-celebration, McD's just felt right.

All in all: good America party. It was totally worth the effort of taking the high-speed rail from Hsinchu, which is where this tired but patriotic 'Merican is about to take a nap.

My Gothic Short Story (Moving to Hsinchu)

Last night, Dave and I moved to 新竹, which is a smallish city down the coast from 台北 a bit (dig my 中文, y'all). I will be here for the duration of July, during which time I shall be teaching a TL A+ class and an SAT class.

It's just occurred to me that I have yet to post about what I actually do here. That will happen soon.

Anyway, Dave has dubbed my room the Gothic short-story room, and I see his point. The walls are purple; the furniture is mostly black and a little shabby. The lighting is poor, and my only window looks out toward a dark brick wall--no natural sunlight here. Old pipes for air and water cause the walls to creak a little. The artwork adorning the walls--an apple, a vase of flowers, a ballerina en pointe--seems generic and cheerful, but each somehow has something a little, well, off about it. The ballerina, for example, stares at the viewer a bit too frankly, in a position that suggests her watchful all-knowingness; the apple's slight green tint and inexplicable shadowing give it an otherworldly feel. Metal roses rim the dingy mirror that reflects mostly shadows, even in full light.

Anyway, you get the picture.

When it was determined that I would live in Hsinchu, the rest of the office wailed in commiseration. It's so boring, they told me gravely. Seriously. There's nothing to do.

Well, I set out today to explore by myself for awhile, and I had fun! Sights were seen; smells were smelled. Tasty-things-in-steam-buns and tasty-things-on-sticks were bought and consumed with indecent fervor.  I also drank a delicious mangoey something that I can neither define nor describe, but rest assured that it was incredible. At any rate, this city doesn't seem so bad to me. Tomorrow Dave and I will hit the local night market, where we will participate in meatball-eating festivities. Then I guess I'll truly be able to judge whether this city is going to bore me to death or not.

In the meantime, I want a suit of armor to stand in the hallway, moving its eyes when no-one is watching...