around

I stopped by the nearby supermarket and bought corn flakes and a small carton of milk. I'm eating some now, but I'm saving some for tomorrow, for breakfast. The one thing that's driven me a bit nuts about this country is that I don't have any way to prepare food in my apartment--not so much as a microwave. So any time I want food, I have to go out and get it from someone, which means dealing with "What am I hungry for? How much do I want to spend? What's nearby? What's open? What's healthy?" I'm learning to deal with that for lunch and dinner, but sometimes, when you've just woken up, you don't want to have to deal with other people just to satisfy your first basic need of the day. Sometimes, you just want to eat breakfast by yourself in your pajamas while surfing the 'net on your computer.

In the same way you get into the rhythm of making a controlled drop out of a plane, I think I'm getting into the rhythm of teaching. Today was my (fourth? fifth?) class where I filled in for Amelia, who is on vacation. She and I didn't meet up beforehand to hammer out what I was to teach, so I look it all up upon arriving at the school an hour and a half before class. (Fear makes me punctual.) I found out that the students had a mid-term exam today, and so I would have to do review for the first 45 minutes of class, and then while the students took the test, I would be pulling them aside one at a time to do the oral portion. All I gotta say is, I put on my big-girl pants and got to work. I hashed out a brief lesson plan that would review all the things the kids had learned up to that point (which wasn't that  much, to be fair). However, I still made up most of the lesson on the fly. I hadn't decided on a warmer (a short, fun activity to start the class and get th...

I was asked for more info and pictures of where I live. So I made a quick guided tour!

You can tell you're getting used to the climate when: You pull the covers over yourself at night against the "chill" of the fan on you. You put on jeans the next morning. It's 93 degrees Fahrenheit outside. This fashion choice seems reasonable to you. You don't notice anymore that your skin is sticky with humidity. The 80 degree nights with a light breeze are "cool." When you shower in the morning, you use lukewarm water at first because cold water is "too cold." When you shower at night, you use lukewarm water for the whole shower. You don't sweat like a pig the second you leave your apartment during the day. You don't chug water like your life depends on it. You can tell you're getting used to the culture when: It seems reasonable to cover up on a hot day. You don't always wait for the crossing signal before crossing the street. "Hey, no traffic!" is good enough. Of course everything is in Chinese. ...

If you go to the area and look it up online, it'll all be spelled "Tamsui," but it's pronounced "Danshui." Whatever you call it it's a cool place, and I'll definitely be going back.  Danshui is by the sea, so it has a very touristy feel. Nevertheless, there is good food and good fun. There are places selling clothes (I bought much-needed sunglasses) and food (including iron eggs (little eggs cooked in soy sauce), giant cups of tea, stinky tofu (which I tried, it's good!), bean paste buns, squid, and generally fried everything). There are also some little booths with carnival games. It was like a little seaside state fair. An Iron Egg! Giant Starbucks! Amelia and I walked around and she showed me the sights. It was very hard to believe that I live only an hour from here and can get here by bus and MRT, because it felt very much like an expensive ocean vacation. The river between the Danshui side and the Bali side of the island was...

The super fun thing about living in a different country with different customs, culture, language, and writing system is that getting "settled" is a daily, uphill battle for a while. Take, for example, the process of learning what parts of the body are acceptable to show. In Taiwan you can wear shorts almost up to your butt, but heaven forbid you wear a low-cut shirt or show your shoulders. (Although I think showing boob is worse than shoulders.) Skirts and shorts are really short around here, while tops tend to have very high necklines and almost always cover the shoulders. (Tank tops are usually for layering, so you'd be putting something on top of your shoulders, anyway.) Despite knowing this, I feel weird going out in shorts and heels, because in the States you'd be calling attention to yourself (particularly your butt) if you were wearing something that showed your legs and called attention to the way you were walking. Another thing that I'm going to have t...

Wu Fen Pu , pronounced woo-fen-poo; and a greater mashing-together of clothes stores I have never seen. It was like American Eagle, Abercrombie & Fitch, Forever 21, Express, and a bit of Hot Topic got caught in a tornado, mixed up a bit, and then deposited in tight-quarters clothing stores in a three square mile labyrinth of alleys. There was a roof overhead, so the area could be open during rainy days, too. Many of the shops had air conditioning and fans, and since it was all trapped under the roof and between tall apartment buildings, the area inside was very cool and pleasant, even during the heat of the day. (Today was very hot and bright, with almost no cloud cover, which is unusual for Taiwan.) What a shopper needs to know about Wu Fen Pu is that the clothes are not necessarily going to be high-quality, although you can find good clothes at good prices, and it is  very fashionable stuff; you see many people wearing these styles outside the district. The cheaper c...

  I ate a mango once. It was difficult to cut, a little like eating hair, and dull in flavor. This sucker I'm chopping up here is bleeding  sweet mango nectar, and it's like eating pure delicious. Amelia gave these to me after using them for demonstrations in her class. I ate the smaller one. They were both bigger than my fist, though! There's a large, flat seed in the middle so I sliced fat slivers of fruit around the seed and ate it like watermelon. This soon proved to be a mere formality, however, as the meat was tender enough for me to peel the skin right off it. Juice was going everywhere and I didn't care. The aftermath. Nothing but juice and devastation remains. The big piece at the bottom is the seed, which I sucked as clean as I could. This definitely counted as one of the best things I had ever eaten. Before this I'd have said I like mango flavor, and that I liked the fruit itself well enough. This was mango on a whole different level....

In less than a week my school is having an almost-week-long summer break, during which I fully plan to visit the beach. This is happening.

There are tricks to keeping cool in Taiwan. It's to your advantage to use every last one. First: Bring an umbrella. Keeping the hot sun off you when you're walking around town lowers the temperature a little, so it's a good idea to bring one or buy one when you get here. There are umbrella shops everywhere. Just make sure you're paying around NT$150 and not NT$200 since that's getting a bit expensive for an umbrella. If you WANT a high-end umbrella, that's fine, just know that going above NT$200 is paying more than you have to. Case in point. My friend got her umbrella's price knocked down to about NT$160. Second: Showers. My boss told me many Taiwanese take two showers a day because they get so hot and sweaty from the weather. Since that day I've been taking maybe two short shower/rinses a day and a long shower in the morning. (Water is included in my rent, so why not?) There's hot water available, but to be honest I only need enough to kee...

There's a myth about food in Asia that it's really healthy. Let me put that myth to rest about Taiwan. A friend of mine warned me that it might be difficult getting my hands on healthy, non-oil-fried food here in Taiwan, and boy was she right. I didn't notice this until Amelia pointed it out to me tonight at dinner, but it's really hard to find food in a "fresh" form here. You can't even find cachews, pecans, or pisachios in a un-salted, un-sugar-coated form. Most everything has an additive, be it sugar, salt, spices, or oil. Take, for example, the meat. At first glace it looks delicious, golden brown and crsipy. Then you start eating and realize it's dripping grease a bit. And there's bits of fat. And it's really oily. Most of the meat here is like that, either oily or greasy or fatty. As I described it to Amelia, it's like "They couldn't tell which parts were fat and which were meat, so they left it all on, and then when they ...

Thing one I have learned about Taiwan is always  expect to have to do major walking at any given time. I wore my nice shoes to my first day of training and although they are comfortable on the bottom, they're still new and therefore rub on the sides of my feet. We, the students, were assigned different schools in nearby Taiwan to visit and shadow, and after just one trip though the MRT (train system) I felt like bees were stinging my feet in multiple places. I eventually took off the shoes and went barefoot, until one of the teachers at the school we visited leant his giant sandals for me to wear home. My feet are covered in healing blisters from the various pairs of shoes I've worn that I thought would work but really, really didn't. Right now the only shoes I can rely on are my running shoes and loafers, maybe  my black sandals if I don't have to walk that far. I'm in another love hotel, where they at least supply bottled water and the bathroom isn't moldy ...

I have got to learn me some Mandarin. It's absolutely impossible to get around here without knowing basic phrases. I need to get some things down, starting with numbers. If I don't check prices before I buy something, it's a hassle trying to figure out what the cashier is trying to tell me, and it can't be a picnic for them trying to tell me what they mean, either. Also, this morning, a young man came to my hotel door and I think he was giving me a message from Joy that she was going to be late, but I didn't understand a word. This makes me want to not just learn competent Mandarin, but complete Mandarin, or as complete as I can get. Susan recommended a forum where you can meet people who will teach you Mandarin in return for lessons in English, sort of an informal language exchange program. I might go for that, because I really need help, and I hate not being able to understand what people are trying to tell me and not being able to tell them what they need to kn...

Let's start at the beginning. Coming home from my first day in Hsin Jhuang visiting Shane School, I had been beaten to death so thoroughly by the humidity, heat, and newness of a foreign country that I had just enough energy to brush my teeth, wash my face, take out my contacts, and put on my pyjamas before falling into bed. I put my iPod on "Near Silence," a calming playlist full of new age mood music, and after about half a song I was out cold. It was 9:30pm. I woke up at 2am. I have no idea why. I felt awake...ish, but knew there was no sane reason not to go back to sleep, so I did. And I woke up at 5am, which made me wonder if there wasn't some lingering jet lag after all, because I'd been fairly sure I'd had it in me to sleep a full 9 or 10 hours, easy. In any case, I wasn't set to wake up 'til 7:30am, so I went back to sleep. When I woke up at 6am, still feeling tired but unable to go to sleep, I decided that I may as well stay awake. I had...