color

The fact that Taiwan has a tropical climate means there is a lot of color here all year 'round. The trees stay green, flowers keep blooming, and there is always fruit abundantly for sale in the various markets around the city.

(I took this photo today. It is February 28th, and about 70 degrees F outside. I love this place.)

I'm having a time of it trying to identify the fruit, but my rule of thumb is that if I see someone else eating it raw or it's for sale in a fruit pack at 7-Eleven, I'm good to go.

Quite often you'll see these recordable speakers playing the same thing over and over.

Also today made me wish I liked food really super spicy because wow, this was a lot of peppers and they were such an amazing red.

Sometimes I'll forget I'm in a foreign country, and then I look out a window or down the street and... mountains. Yep, I'm not in Ohio.

ximen market

I can't say enough good things about Ximeding (Ximen Market) in Taipei. There's a reason so many movies and videos take place there, and why so many tourists visit, and why so many people spend their evenings there. It's full of fun and unique things that make exploring it a lengthy endeavor, so it's hard to get bored. Just today, my friends and I found a skate park that I'd never known was there.

Here are some pictures from today's excursion!

asia is my fashion spirit-country

I think part of me has always known that Asia would be where I'd find my home fashion-wise.

Or maybe it's because I'm from Ohio, home of everything brand-name that can be found everywhere else in the USA. If it's a national company, a name everyone will know, we've got it. So the fashion is, while not boring, very VERY mainstream. To my knowledge we didn't see a lot of extreme fashion deviants, people wearing crazy shoes and spiky jewelry or dying their hair crazy colors. You want that fashion action, you find another city.

Asia, though, is a bit more liberal with their fashion. There are embellishments everywhere--lace, beads, sequins, rips, patterns, bleach spots--if it can be done to clothes, it's on something. Sometimes in triplicate. The accessories, hair, and make-up can be more extreme, too, without seeming over-the-top here.

I don't need to do full-on Tokyo Street Fashion, but I like the idea that a slightly embellished approach to fashion is more normal here. I like sticking a toe or a foot into the deep-end of what's okay. I like showing a bit of an "alternative" side in what I wear. I was just never comfortable doing it in Ohio. You either wore mainstream stuff or you were picking your clothes straight out of Hot Topic. You either fit in or you stuck out like two sore thumbs.

I am having a blast shopping in Taiwan. I have found a love of earrings I didn't know about or feed before, and a delight in tights and shoes I couldn't afford before. Clothes in Taiwan are fancy and also much cheaper, so I'm able to explore fashion a lot more easily.

I went shopping in Ximen today and I can't wait to wear what I bought tomorrow. :)

it's still all "asdfgjklwpvkciwj" to me

I have officially begun my search for a Chinese tutor. I'm sick of not even being able to count to ten, and of having people trying to make conversation with me and not being able to because I don't have a clue what they said. So I put an ad on Tealit, a website that is like Taiwan's Craigslist, and got a mountain of responses.

I've replied to three and am waiting to hear back. I don't need anything fancy, just someone to teach me basics and correct my pronunciation and help me practice.

What's weird is that I'm not intimidated at the idea of learning Chinese. It's like, there's a language, and it has words, and they go together a certain way, so I'll learn the words and I'll learn where they go and then I'll use them to talk. Maybe I'm not just an English nerd, maybe I'm a language nerd. The idea of learning languages doesn't scare me, and what bothers me when I'm actually learning them is the growing pains of getting my brain to remember everything, not the actual complications of the language. Once I've got enough language in me to start putting things together and pick up more words and phrases, it's a cakewalk.

Part of me thinks, "And I'll learn Mandarin and Japanese and re-learn Spanish and take a stab at French and--"

I am in a never-ending quest to absorb more words.

intuitive leaps about buses

I pleasantly surprised myself today by getting home via a new bus route.

Buses cover Taipei's streets like ants cover a picnic. There are buses to get you nearly anywhere in the main city and its outskirts. What's intimidating is that if you don't know where a bus goes, you could end up in a part of town you don't know and be far from home, at that. I know three fairly well: 235, 802, and 99. However, a few weeks ago a friend from work, Nicole, took myself and my co-workers out to Banciao and we took a bus I hadn't been on, the 37, going in a direction I hadn't traveled.

So when I found myself at Banciao MRT station by a major bus stop, I figured that instead of riding the MRT for one stop, getting off, and taking a bus the rest of the way home, I could try for one of the buses listed on the signs.

What made me nervous was that I could potentially take the bus in the wrong direction and have to stay on it for hours while it circled back to where I needed to go. However, I had my iPod Touch with me, and a handy app that lets me draw in Chinese characters. So I was able to look up the characters for the sounds "min" and "an" (the name of my street, Min'an) and "road." After establishing where Min'an Road was on the 37's route, I found the sign that indicated all buses going by it would be headed toward Xinzhuang, the town where I live.

I didn't have much more time to think, though, because the bus came and I hopped on.

And I got home perfectly fine.

The rest of the day was crap--I stayed up late last night and didn't sleep much, I was hungry all day because I couldn't think of anything I wanted to eat (ironic, right?), and the juicer I bought is proving to be rather bad at extracting juice. (At least it's a decent blender.) But I'm glad that I did, at least, manage to get on the right bus from a semi-strange part of town and get home without mishap. It's another small step in the process of getting used to how things work in Taiwan, finally having enough information to be able to make intuitive leaps.

Can't wait to see how much I know at the end of a year!

beitou

This is the short and happy story of my Chinese New Year trip to Beitou.

Beitou is an area north of Taipei that can be reached via the red MRT line. It is famous for its hot springs. A visitor can access the hot springs at a number of hotels and baths, which range in price and exclusivity. Myself and my accompanying friends decided to go the cheap route and visit a public bath, where we and about thirty other people were let loose into a large area covered in wide, shallow baths. All of us had one hour in the baths, at which point we would be kicked out for the next batch of tourists.

The baths' temperatures ranged from "hot tub" to "could boil a lobster". There was also a cold bath for people to relax in between their time in the hot baths.

It was a fairly nice day, so ironically, the baths all turned out to be too hot for me to stay in for long. This was true for my friend Nicole, as well, so she and I ended up sitting on the edge of a bath chatting for most of our allowed time.

After our time in the baths, we all wandered around the area, partially exploring but mostly in search of lunch. During this time we discovered a small park with a lovely lily pond.

We also found, by accident, a stream of hot spring water that seemed to be open for anyone to go in. (That, or it was off limits and no-one cared.) The water was luke-warm, PERFECT for me, and I have loved rocky creeks since I was a kid, so I couldn't resist tottering down to the water and hopping around the rocks. There were families everywhere, just hanging out with their feet in the water, and for me, THAT was the real Beitou experience.