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...

My New Happy Place

If you have spent more than about thirty seconds in my presence, you have probably heard me mention my board-gaming habit. If you have spent more than about three days in my presence, you have probably been forcibly placed in a kitchen chair and taught the rules to Power Grid whether you liked it or not.

Anyway, board games are important to me. From my first Settlers of Catan experience (at Mynde Games, in Fayetteville, GA, at the tender age of twelve), I was hooked; one by one, the people in my life have generally fallen into my board-game habits, a situation which works out nicely because it means people very rarely try to make me watch television.

But I thought I'd have to abandon that while here, of course. I only brought one suitcase: while I considered bringing my copy of Citadels, I decided that even that would prove to be silliness and luxury. So when the lovely-and-wonderful Kevin--a co-worker here at TPR--casually mentioned a board-game bar, the sudden and violent gleam in my eyes was a little too eager for me to pretend that I wasn't excited at the prospect.

Last weekend, we traipsed down to Gongguan to go to the Witch House, and it exceeded my every expectation. This place is not just a board-game bar: it's a militant feminist board-game bar. Bras hang from most of the chairs, and the menu drips with sex jokes (pictured to the right is my drink, which was definitely called a Frothy Cock. It was non-alcoholic: I want to keep my wits about me to win at Dominion, of course). The venue advertises 10% off to any woman who drops to the floor and does 10 push-ups. The androgynous-looking ladies behind the bar are unapologetic about their policy: no food or drink on the same table as an open board game. No exceptions. The Witch House menu boasts an impressive collection of cold, sweet drinks, topped with cherries and inclusive of bendy-straws.

The Witch House gaming shelves are well-stocked with dozens of games, including several of my favorites. Of course, they're all in Chinese, which provides some added difficulty. I went with a speaker and a non-speaker, so we had to choose games with limited reading. After a few missteps--I forgot just how much reading is in Puerto Rico!--we settled on Settlers of Catan. I see several others, though, that require little to no language skills. Finca (the blue box with orange/yellow writing at the top) and Carcassonne both strike me as games that I could teach effectively to anyone.

Kevin and Lom and I dove into Settlers, the Chinese version of which has pretty pieces and cards. We didn't use all of the development cards--mostly just the Soldiers and the +1 point cards--which made the game a little less variable even than usual (and it's not a complicated game to begin with...), but it worked out fine for the most part. Maybe next time I will introduce the others. Without the cards, though, anything sufficiently important--like these trade rules--is represented pictographically.

And the little pieces are so cute! Up top you can see a settlement and some road, and this little orange château represents a city. I was pleased to see that the original game's colors are retained; I would be sad if I could not be orange. The Robber piece was extremely strange-looking--I think they were dwarves, maybe, or hobbits? Holding what looked like baseball bats? I don't know, maybe that's what robbers look like here in China.

Once Kevin left to make his train to Kaohsiung, Lom and I played several rounds of Lost Cities. Each of us won by an embarrassing margin once, so I guess we'll call it a tie overall (though his win over me was more decisive than mine over him: the final score was something like 150 to -36. Why yes, that is a negative sign). Lost Cities is even better than Settlers in that it requires no reading whatsoever--just pretty pictures!

Chinese Dominion proves a little more difficult because of its high level of reading. I went back--the next day, maybe, or the day after?--with the perfect person: Dave is both a native Chinese speaker and a person with preexisting familiarity with Dominion. We played a fun original-set game; fortunately, each card displays its name in English at the top, so as long as I remember the cards (and have you met me? Of course I remember the cards), I'll be fine. 


The Witch House sells games, too. I am strongly considering buying a Chinese copy of Citadels or another small game--or buying a new game, once I can ascertain that English rules are available on BoardGameGeek! Anyway, I am eternally indebted to Kevin for his casual mention of this place. He has enabled me to pester all of my Taipei friends into early graves with my board-game addiction. They're not going to know what hit them. 

Cities and Suitcases

The other day, I moved.

Just across the city--from nearish Jingan station to nearish Fuzhong. I'm not entirely certain why I moved, and the Powers that Be never quite communicated a distinct reason to me. But I knew that I must pack my stuff in a suitcase and be at Fuzhong station at 4PM. No, no! I laughingly told my friend Lom (who is big and strong and would have been an immense help, actually). I don't need help! It's just one little suitcase. Don't be ridiculous.

A close reader of my blog may begin to devise its thesis, encapsulated in the following confession: O reader, I am the ridiculous one after all.

I engaged first in a frenetic repacking of everything in my possession. This was accompanied by the constant question, at first silent and then uttered with increasingly wild fervor, how did this all fit before? At any rate, it all fit. Eventually, and with much sitting on my suitcase.

Living on the fourth floor can be nice; my room proved quiet even on weekend nights and other times when noise pollution drowns a city in catcalls and car-honks. However, Moving Day made me regret the height that I had been enjoying for the last month. I attempted to lug my bag downstairs, reasoning that I had carried this suitcase around before. Well, all of my things seem to have doubled in weight: I can't physically lift my suitcase. Yes, okay, I'm small--but I'm stronger than I look, at least a little. I stood for a moment at the top of the staircase, despairing at the dozens of stairs I must now descend.

I made a temporary home for my umbrella and book-bag at the top of said stairs and decided that I could carry my suitcase if I did so slowly, resting on every landing. About thirty seconds after the formation of this resolution, I lay in a heap at the bottom of the stairs, exhausted and bruised from having fallen over while carrying the bag. Classic rookie mistake: forgetting to correct for my own clumsiness. The new system, far slower and more ridiculous but more Corinne-proof, consisted of my scooting the bag to the edge of a step and kicking it lightly, minimizing the sound of its hitting the stair below as much as possible. Yes, one stair at a time. Yes, for three and a half flights of stairs. About halfway through this process, I felt a drop on my foot, and then another two or three. There's a leak!, I thought frantically. A leak in the roof! 

Dear reader, have you heard the expression "dripping with sweat"? It seems like a hyperbole, an exaggeration to evoke a mental image. Someone who is "dripping with sweat" is simply warm; that person has a faint glow, perhaps, or a lightly sodden back. Well, I can honestly say to you that I was literally dripping with sweat on account of my nine-thousand-pound suitcase, the thermostat-shattering heat, and the inconceivable levels of humidity. My shoes actually have faint salt-stains on them, in noticeable drip patterns.

Anyway, after about twenty minutes I arrived to the bottom of the stairs, soaked in sweat. I began the arduous process of wheeling my case--by which I mean something closer to dragging my case, since the wheels do not particularly work--to the station. About a minute into this walk, I thought to myself, halfway toward true despair: this cannot possibly get worse. 

Well, this is Taipei: cue the rain. The sky opened up, drenching me and my papers and my suitcase. Twenty very long minutes later, I stood shivering in the air-conditioned elevator at Jingan Station, preparing to use my suitcase as a battering ram against the other MRT passengers if necessary. I had three transfers; each required more psychological strength than I had remaining, with the end result being my scowling at everyone and everything. I will cut you, I thought to adorable elderly Chinese couples, young and sweet Taiwanese teenagers, and giddy visiting tourists. I will cut all of you. And then I will run you over with my suitcase. 

Improbably, I arrived to Fuzhong--half an hour late, and when I had planned to be half an hour early!--to meet the person who would show me to my new place. He was middle-aged but very small, and it quickly became apparent that despite my tininess and ineffectiveness, I could nevertheless carry the bag (which I have now determined must be made of dark matter on account of its density) better than he could. I looked out resignedly at the unfamiliar cityscape, gathering all of my remaining strength to combat uneven pavement, endless curbs, rude and unmoving fellow pedestrians, and--at the end of it all--a four-story climb up. 

At least it had mostly stopped raining.

The Best in Chinese Entertainment

The other day, we went to an arcade after eating our delicious Japanese food. Some of my coworkers decided to play a friendly little game of arcade basketball (Jenny can be seen here, undoubtedly about to sink this basket because she is amazing at this game). This friendly little game turned into a second slightly less friendly game, and then a third and a fourth and maybe a fifth along the same trajectory. Jenny looks small and not particularly intimidating, but she's actually really amazing at this game. Linnea, Connie, and Matthew--who are all pretty athletic--kept getting their butts kicked.

Anyway, after the arcade shenanigans I somehow became convinced to go engage in KTV. Karaoke bars here are not what they are in the States: in the US, everyone in the bar gets to put songs down on the list, if they want to, and then someone comes up and sings. This singing proves interesting to a limited number of people: the person on stage, surely. Perhaps that person's significant other or close friends. Precious few, however, have any interest at all: who cares if some yahoo does a credible Lynyrd Skynyrd? Nobody, that's who.

Anyway, karaoke here (as in much of Asia) operates in a much more fun way. One gets a room with one's friends and chooses all of the songs--ours were probably about 60% in English, 40% in Chinese. I think Jenny sang a Japanese song at one point. Food and alcohol can come to you via a bevy of adorable waiters dressed in bow-ties, and nobody has to sit through the pain of strangers who think they can actually sing "I Will Always Love You" embarrassing themselves. Significantly preferable to American karaoke bars.

**photo shamelessly stolen from Dave, because it was more adorable than any of mine.

In Which Corinne Comes to Own Three Umbrellas

So it's like rainy here and stuff.

I managed to arrive in Taipei at something close to the height of the rainy season: the rain proves by turns torrential and light, cold and warm, plan-debilitating and simply annoying. It starts without warning and continues for hours, sometimes days. We've already had class cancelled once on a "typhoon day" warning, during which time we holed up in Linnea and Andi's place and drank plum wine out of bowls while howling with laughter at increasingly ridiculous YouTube videos.

In the midst of all this, a good umbrella remains a necessity. Well, I bought a good umbrella: its attached plastic cover extends like a kiddie lightsaber toy, covering the soaking plastic fabric so that I can take the thing on the MRT without making immediate enemies of all of my fellow passengers. I like it. It's pretty. I named it Torvald. Laugh if you will, but I defy you to attempt living in Taipei in June without forming some sort of emotional attachment to your umbrella.

Then, weather-based tragedy struck: I left my umbrella at the office at an inopportune time. After a disastrously wet journey home (during which the valiant Dave could do only so much to protect me from the cruelty of the elements), I went to bed with the assurance that it couldn't still be raining in ten hours when I had to go to work. Surely.

Well, dear reader, you are smarter than I was; you've doubtlessly already figured out that it was still raining. So I stopped, on my commute, at the local cheap-flipsy-crap store and bought a second umbrella. Two umbrellas isn't that strange, I told myself. One is for home and one is for the office. It's fine.

Then, weather-based tragedy struck again. I teach class at a third location, up in Tianmu. Ten minutes before class was to let out on a bright, sunny day that doubtlessly held the promise of Frisbees or mangoes or something else exciting, we heard an ominous roll of thunder. That's okay! I chirped merrily to myself. I have my--oh, damn. 


That's correct. My home umbrella was home. My office umbrella was at the office. So, halfway through a hybrid walk/swim to the bus stop on my way home, I picked up another umbrella. Imagine, if you will: few if any foreigners ever enter this dingy corner supermarket in a back alley of northern Taipei. The bored-looking twentysomething behind the counter jumps with unaccustomed surprise to hear the door ding open. So when that door-ding is accompanied by a large, pale, frizzy-haired water-demon-monster whose clothes are so wet they are in serious danger of slipping to the dirty floor, the clerk can't help but widen her eyes in near-alarm. The large, pale, frizzy-haired water-demon-monster wordlessly selects a pink umbrella. With a look of immense long-suffering, she lumbers wetly to the counter, slaps down a few dripping coins, and grunts a badly-pronounced xie xie (thank you) before trudging, Hulk-like, once more into the typhoon outside.

And then nobody sat next to me on the bus. How weird.

And that's how Corinne became the weirdo with three umbrellas hanging in her dorm-room window.

The end.

I suck at taking pictures.

I never remember to take pictures. I'm the worst, ever. Maybe I'll trawl friends' blogs and see if they have photos I can mooch?

Speaking of my friends and their photos, now might be a good time to provide some shameless plugs to their blogs, which are consistently better than mine.

This is Linnea. She's a gorgeous teacher-of-everything with an incredibly infectious smile and a blog featuring a snazzy design. Her photos are fab (if I steal anyone's, it'll be hers), and her writing is fun and interesting to read. Go go go!

And this is Andi. She also teaches lots of things. Her writing is by turns amusing and insightful, and her blog is a total riot. Sometimes I read the same posts three or four times simply because they are wonderful, and I never stop giggling. Go go go here too!

And you've been introduced (in some previous post) to Connie, who is adorable and also hilarious.

Disclaimer: this photo is not from last night, because I am far too disorganized and lame for that. It's from a week ago. But it was another nightclub! From left to right is Jenny (my boss) then Connie (of the aforementioned adorable hilarity) and, of course, me. Why yes I am that shiny-skinned and messy-haired every day here. Shut up. It's humid, okay?

Anyway, last night we went to Roxy99, which seems like the hip place to be. Here in Taipei, the metro runs until midnight, and then it stops. What?! So I knew, as I left my apartment, that I'd have to take a cab home. Well, I didn't count on the metro's starting time--6AM. At about 5AM, we left the club; I noticed I didn't have long to wait. So Linnea and Dave and I hung out in McDonald's for a little bit, and then I came home on the metro, getting home at about quarter to seven. Whew!

It was a good night. There were an astonishing number of white people there, which felt odd. And people (well, men) seemed bizarrely forward: for years, I've never been flirted with or harassed at a bar, and then it happened last night. I utilized the tolerant good will of my friends probably one too many times trying to escape from people who couldn't remember what "no" meant...but oh well. We still had a fab time, and it was fun to go out with so many of my co-workers.

Um okay. I'm going to get better at taking photos. Here I go.

Botanical Gardens

A couple of days ago, I had some time to kill before I had to be anywhere. Spurred, I guess, by my enjoyment of Daan Park, I ventured to the Taipei Botanical Gardens, near Xiaonanmen.

The gardens are beautiful--and massive! Apparently the most famous part--the part where people really crowded around, taking photos--was the giant lotus pond in the middle of the garden. It's difficult to estimate the size of the pond, because it's nearly impossible to see where it ends. What looks like a sea of green leaves dotted with the occasional pink flower is actually, upon further inspection, a couple-feet-deep pool of standing water, from which lotus leaves and blossoms rise to impressive heights.

Sometimes the divisions within the botanical gardens are like ones we would see: a section might be labelled "flowering shrubs" or "woody plants." But some were far more interesting: there was a whole section, for example, devoted to plants that are significant in some way to Buddhist teachings. And another featuring plants that served some importance in ancient Chinese literature. This little dragon guy (chosen because we're currently in the year of the dragon--and I was born in a year of the dragon!) is one of the twelve similar cartoonish cutouts in a section entitled Plants of the Zodiac.

I had never seen many of the Chinese plants dotting all of the various exhibits. Even the animals could be a little strange: squirrels, much darker and rather larger than our American backyard variety, twitch away from sight whenever a person comes near. I watched an elderly Taiwanese couple put a bunch of peanuts in a row on a ledge, though, and then the squirrels came out to vie for them. Even more exciting, there are kitties everywhere! Cats roam the gardens freely. Some are skittish, and more than once I was surprised by a streak of orange or white disappearing into the crush of leaves. But some of the cats seem to like the attention that living in a tourist attraction can bring. Earlier in the afternoon, I caught this one purring contentedly as a couple of toddlers, under direct supervision from their mother, stroked its fur.

Mosquitoes are bad in Taiwan, and if I had any interest in healing from my many itchy spots, the botanical gardens was probably not the best bet. Even so, I'm glad that I went, and I'm glad that I went alone. It was relaxing, being in the midst of families and schoolkids and couples--hearing but not understanding their chatter, sitting in the gardens and petting my new kitty friends as all the people walk by.

LOL MORE PICTURES

(oh, my camera broke. It takes pictures sometimes, but maybe half the time it just says "turn off and on again!" and then does that consistently every time I try to take a picture for the next little while. Also the flash only works about 20% of the time. Also I can't use the zoom feature at all. Lame. So I didn't get lots of the pictures that I wanted.)

City Life

Nobody is about to be impressed by this insight, which could have easily been gained from the first sentence in a result of a very basic Wikipedia search, but I'll say it anyway: Taipei is big, y'all.

Restaurants and shops and office buildings, stacked atop one another, scratch the sky (unusually blue in this photo). In big American cities, we know that businesses belonging to the food-and-entertainment category go on the ground floor; anything above them must be something boring: loft apartment housing, cubicle-studded office complexes, law firms and insurance agencies. Who, in wandering the streets of New York searching for cheap lunch, bothers to look up? But in Taipei, there's simply no room. More than once, I've had delicious meals at places hidden not only down an alley somewhere, but also up five floors.

Meanwhile, shopping takes on similarly impressive proportions. To the right is one location of the Sogo shopping center here in Taipei, and it's something like seventeen floors. Each floor has its theme: Coach and Kate Moss and Nine West all have storefronts on the Accessories floor. A whole level exists for Bose and Sony and Dell and their cohorts. A vastly overpriced grocery store resides in one of the several basement levels. On every floor, though, the atmosphere is the same: people, everywhere. Fingering handbags and holding designer dresses up to themselves and pressing buttons to test headphones' sound quality, there are innumerable people in places like Sogo (which, incidentally, is very close indeed to the Princeton Review office).

The city is not without its moments of respite, even in the midst of the craziness. This Zenlike garden, complete with pagodas, moss-covered boulders, and carefully scraped sand designs is actually in the Sogo center. In fact, the window in this photo is the same window that you can see up in the air in the photo above: on the fifteenth floor, there's a strange quiet as people sit on the benches that dot this artificial garden and enjoy their food-court ramen.

Even eating can be a crowded experience. American restaurants give us room for our elbows and our massive handbags, and we're never too close to anyone else. Well, the average personal-bubble size is quite a bit smaller here, and sometimes we have to, say, fit six of us on two sides of a supremely tiny table. Ah, well--all part of the fun at the Drunken Monkey. Yikes, my hair is bluer than I realized. I should tone that down.

Anyway, last night, Connie--who knows things and also is immense amounts of fun, thus rendering her a useful person to know--took us to Ximen. Tentatively, I'm going to describe Ximen as the Times Square of Taipei: its lights, its colors, its wide swaths of pavement crawling with vendors and tourists and locals alike, all seem reminiscent of our great American landmark. I'm sure that such a statement bespeaks only my vast Western ignorance of all things non-Western, and that someone like Connie who knows things would put me in my place. But that's what it feels like to me. It's touristy--but does that make it any less legitimate? As much as I value exploring the side-streets, the areas unreachable by metro stations, and the things that a guidebook can't tell me, there's something very meaningful about sheer, well,  touristiness. What does a city, a people, a culture find impressive or interesting enough in itself that it wants to package that thing, market it, sell it with pride to the visiting world?

Last night, I had a delicious thing that was simultaneously pancake-y and egg-y. Oh, and cheesy. It was amazing and enormous and only about US$1.50. And then, because apparently my unspoken Taiwan goals include eating mango ice literally every day, we went to a famous ice place. Here, they make the ice itself out of milk: it was creamy and delicious and topped with mango ice-cream. Mmmm.


I think it probably says a fair bit about me that I have easily four times as many photos of just food as I do of people. I will work on this, dear readers.

Food, Part One of Many

When people told me I'd be eating like it's my full-time job, I didn't quite believe them. Every culture has its culinary draws, right? Every new place has its own scrumptious concoctions, and every conscientious tourist assumes as a personal goal the responsibility of trying, evaluating, and probably photographing those dishes. I did it in England; I did it in Hungary. I did it in New York and St Louis. I'll do it in Boston.

But, oh, the food here. Even people who live here year-round--perhaps especially people who live here year-round--eat as if they might lose the ability any day now. Recently, we went out for a lovely meal at a Japanese place, and the food just kept coming. They started us off with a rather spectacular display of various sushi-quality fish, served on ice. After that, we had endless rounds of soup and noodles and fried things that I couldn't name in English, much less Chinese.

The crowning glory of our experience that night was the main course, served hot-pot style. In this style of dining, the waiter brings a massive ceramic pot of thinly-sliced (and uncooked!) meat and veggies to the table, along with a hot-plate. At the table, we put some water in the pot and cover it, letting it heat up with the hot-plate. Sooner than you'd think, the juices start to boil, cooking the food. Hot-pot (called shabu-shabu, like in Japan, where the sound mimics the swish-swish of the food as one stirs it) isn't an exact science, and it's done whenever we say it's done.

At that point, we dump in some noodles--give them a couple of minutes to cook--and then go at it. Hot-pot eating can be vicious: you've gotta get your chopsticks in there! For awhile, all I can hear is the clicking of chopsticks and the slurping of noodles as people grab meat, tofu, and veggies. To the left, you can see Linnea, David, and Jenny (and Kelly's arm) duking it out for some dinner. In Taiwan (and not so much Japan or the mainland, as best I can devise), the dipping sauce is a raw egg. I cracked my egg into my soy-sauce dish and swirled it around with my chopsticks, beating it to an even consistency. Dipping meat and veggies into it gives them a slippery-sweet coating, and the raw egg was much better than I expected it to be.

You can't go far here without noticing a couple of unique-to-Taiwan things everywhere. The first you'll notice because of its smell: stinky tofu stands are everywhere, marked by the smell of rotten food, summer garbage, or day-old manure. All three, actually. Tourists and locals alike flock to the stinky tofu stalls in night-markets; the only difference is that the tourists probably don't come back for seconds. I had my first stinky tofu experience last night: the fried tofu chunks were soft with crispy outsides, and were expertly prepared. The pickled veggies on top helped counteract some of the greasiness (and took away a little of the oh-my-god-this-is-fermented-and-weird impulse). Stinky tofu tastes better than it smells, though that doesn't say much. Ultimately, it's not bad. In eating it, I felt implicitly that something about it was just wrong. Like milk that's only a day or two past its expiration date or macaroni that you accidentally left boiling for twenty minutes instead of the six that it wanted, nothing about it is dangerous: it's just wrong, a little.

Fortunately, the other Taiwan night-market specialty is far more palatable in both taste and smell. The vendor piles very finely-shaved ice into a bowl and tops it with sweetened/condensed milk and something sweet. The result is better than the best shaved ice you've ever had. Last night, as a reward from our stinky-tofu adventurousness, we hit up an ice place. The one at the back has rice-mochi balls and red beans, and the one in the foreground has strawberries and mangoes. Despite the variety of these dishes, I have to admit that my favorite shaved-ice topping is just mango: mango and lots of it.

Anyway, that's a little taste of some of my best (and, well, stinkiest) culinary experiences while here. There's so much left to cover; given that I eat pretty much constantly, I have a lot more food stories to tell. Stay tuned!

Daan Park

A mere three days in Taiwan was nevertheless enough to make me crave a little nature.  I miss the wide swaths of green in the US and the UK: overgrowing parks in Macon, bench-dotted college lawns in Oxford, pathside expanses of trees in Peachtree City. Taipei seems to have greenery in very limited quantities. I see potted plants dangling from tenth-story windows; I see patches of scraggly grass peeking through the pavement. I need trees! So, when Linnea--a brilliant American girl who arrived a couple of days before I did--offered to take me to Daan Park, I agreed immediately.

Daan Park is, unsurprisingly, in the Da'an district in central Taipei. It has the typical city-park feel: it is a carefully-manicured set of lawns and paths and trees, hemmed in on all sides by high-rise apartments and office buildings. The city smells and sounds still surround me in the park, but they're all muffled a little, like the sudden quiet that comes from dipping underwater at a crowded pool. At Daan, roots carpet the ground, whose softness feels strange after the endless sea of concrete that is the rest of the city. Knotty, knobbly trees rise from the ground at irregular intervals, providing a very welcome reprieve from the merciless Taipei sun (side note: it's really flippin' hot here. Like, all the dang time).

One of most unexpected attractions of the park is the presence of foot massage paths. These little trails are set off a bit from the main lanes of the park, and they are studded with smooth stones. The neat rows of protruding rocks are meant to provide therapy to anyone who walks across them. You're meant to step on each stone so that it presses into the arch of your foot, stretching the muscle a little and relieving the tension that you've undoubtedly built up from all that standing-around-in-MRT-trains and walking-on-concrete you've been doing all day.

The stones feel amazing. I keep a tennis ball under my desk for this exact purpose: if you haven't tried rolling your foot around on something smooth and round, do it. I even got adventurous enough to remove my shoes  and try walking across the stones. My life flashed before my eyes as I nearly fell to a pointy, stony doom, but it was totally worth it.

In addition to the obviously immense draw that stone footpaths provide, the park also has a lot of natural beauty. Pretty bushes and trees are everywhere, dripping with Asian-indigenous flowers and fruits that I've never seen before.

Anyway, it was refreshing to step away from the throngs of people--who have much smaller personal-space bubbles than that to which I am accustomed--and the clouds of exhaust and smog and frying noodles, and the oppressive cityscape. Despite its distance from my apartment, I feel sure that I will be spending more time in Daan.

Back, Baby!

I'm back, by popular request!

Nearly a year ago, I returned from my England adventures, bubbling with the excitement that Oxford had to offer. I settled down into a temporary life back home: living with my parents--a situation that for some would represent backpedaling or defeat, but for me was actually a lot of fun, mostly because if fun were muscles my parents could beat up your parents--working at the Princeton Review, tutoring a lot, applying to law school. 

Oh, right. Law school. Most of you, dear readers, probably know this, but in the fall I will be moving up to Boston and starting law school. That left me with a summer: three months before law school, in which I would not be tutoring or teaching. Three months to clear my head a little bit, make some money, have a medium-sized adventure. I applied to about ninety-seven thousand* internships, sowing my cover-letter-and-résumé seeds broadly and indiscriminately, having little hope for each individual attempt but great optimism for the venture as a whole. 

My internship process received an interruption when I checked my e-mail one morning to find one from The Princeton Review's Taipei office: seeking teachers, it told me. Summer teachers, part-time teachers. Couldn't hurt, right? I fired off another cover-letter-and-résumé combination, and to my surprised was invited to interview. Well, you know the rest, or at least the important parts. A summer in Taiwan might be the exact medium-sized adventure for which I have been looking, so I took the job (after some not inconsiderable convincing by TPR Taiwan's fantastic directorial team). 

I arrived two days ago. I speak very little Chinese (I can say "hello", "thank you", "I love you", and--probably most importantly--"kitty". I have Ms. Abby Rowswell to thank for that last one), and I read even less. Still, I won't have to know any Chinese to teach, and nearly all of my co-workers and office-mates have English fluency. I'm staying in a tiny little room in the Zhonghe district of New Taipei City (think metro Taipei: NTC surrounds the main city and is served by its metro transportation systems). My place might be tiny, but it's comfortable and I like the location. My co-workers were surprised at its distance from the city ("wait, you're in New Taipei City? How long does it take you to get here?!"), but it's not more than 25 minutes' travel time to reach the office. 

The view outside my window is a good representation of this part of town. It's heavily populated, and vertically populated: signs of life pour from every grate and window. House-plants, laundry, and roaming cats (māo!) spill out into the air. Taiwan is even more hot-and-humid than you've heard: every day is a bad hair day, and I can barely make it to the ground floor without being coated in a thin film of sweat. Still, that somehow lends to the sense of pervasive and undeniable life that Taipei exudes. If all else fails, one can always duck into a Wellcome Mart for some air-conditioning. 

Anyway, training's going well, I suppose. I've met some interesting people, and I look forward to getting to know them better. I'm going to resolve to be magically better at taking photos--we went to a fab place for dinner last night that I simply forgot to record. Ah, alas. Fortunately, I have three months' of dinners and outings and city rovings to document. 

Much love!

*note: actual number probably somewhat less than ninety-seven thousand