fiji

you know i'm faj's daughter because when i get an idea about some trivial thing that i neeeeddd in my life, (like a certain perfect shade of pink nail polish, for instance) i can rarely go more than 3 days without pricing out and buying said object.

so today, i was about to go to ulta to buy this nail polish i've been pining after, but then i discovered it's also at walgreens, which is a mere 3 minutes from my house. on the way over, i was weighing whether or not i should look in their little coupon flier, but then i decided nothing i'm actually buying is ever in there, so i wouldn't bother.

i picked out the color and was walking to the front register when the makeup counter woman intercepted me. she complimented the nail polish and remembered that she might have a coupon for it. so then she pulls out this little accordion file with handwritten dividers for different products and brands. i asked if that was something walgreens did, or if she made it herself. she said different companies send all kinds of coupons, but that she keeps track of them herself.

not only did she find me a $1 off coupon for the nail polish, she sent me home with all kinds of little samples of lotions and creams and things. i don't know what it is, but girls love beauty products like guys love food samples at costco. i was thrilled.

the only downside is being a little distracted looking at my nail polish during downward dog in yoga this afternoon instead of keeping my head clear. they started the 40 day challenge today ... i think i'm going to sit this one out. we'll see.

on top of the world

..i usually write the blog at night, but i'm just too excited to wait. look who got a package in the mail today!

a couple of weeks ago, i posted something on facebook asking if anyone knew where i could find a cute fabric yoga bag. after scouring the internet for several days, i could only find one that i was in love with, and it was pretty expensive. but i have several crafty friends, and one of them offered to make me a yoga bag!

caroline was a yearbook editor when i worked on the yearbook and newspaper staffs in high school, and we have lots of mutual friends. it was so gracious of her to offer to spend time making me the bag. i could never have pulled something like that off and have it look so professional. check out her esty shop. really cute dresses for baby girls. 

i turned it inside out so you could see how pretty the lining fabric is, but it could work like that too. 

don't you looove it? i can hardly wait to go to yoga tomorrow.

this is where i found the fabric. it's really soft.

i've found my strength in you

these are some random pictures from the last couple of days.
i have the creepin crud (scratchy/cruddy throat, achey body, chills, headache) so i went and got a 2 hour massage today at the spa one last time. margaret is 4 months pregnant now! her tummy is pretty big. we had a conversation half in chinese and half in english today! she didn't know i was leaving, but she's very excited. she's going to send me pictures of her baby (we're hoping for a girl) and i'm going to send her pictures of me in DC.

the massage was fantastic. i managed to keep my mind from wandering for the majority of the time, which is always a struggle. every time i go, they've added some more things you can customize. which kind of oil for your foot soak (orange), which kind of spray for your room (nameless chinese stuff), which music (anything without birds), which oil for your body (lemon), which kind of tea (rose).

text message from mr. wang. it says miss megan.. something something america.. something something. mr. wang.
benny drying himself off after he took a bath in the sink after daisy creamed him with tin foil full of shaving cream.
then tonight, a whole bunch of us went to taipei for indian food at this really authentic restaurant down some little side street off of the jungshan denhua stop (exit 3, take a right, take a left at family mart and then right at the next little road. it's on the left). it was kind of my going away dinner. we had a nice time.

the bus ride home was pretty strange. we were the first ones in line for the taoyuan bus and they let the 10 of us on the bus and then stopped the line, so we were the only ones on the bus, even though there were still 20 or so taiwanese people in line. then the bus driver stopped at a light to walk back and count us. then he stopped to ask if we had seen any glasses. then he stopped to show us he had found them, so we all clapped. he was laughing. it was odd. we thought for a minute we were being kidnapped.
that's emily in her taiwan-fab top. she bought me pants from the same store. they're cream colored with red, blue and green polka dots all over them aaaand bows.
i'm still mostly feeling bummed about leaving. i'm sure once i'm home i'll be excited, but for now i'm just sad i'm leaving. i'm proud of myself for getting to the point that i wasn't missing america or my family really since we talk so often. there's been a lot of reflecting on how far i've come this year. i'm just trying to feel my feelings while i'm here so i don't get home and then freak out. done that once already!

p.s. the kid who walked from florida to washington to raise awareness for childhood homelessness emailed me back. i'm going to help him get a letter to the president's desk. it should be easy enough, right? there can't be a bazillion 11 year olds walking up the coasts of america for a cause.

aand this is a video of corey from tongue in cheek on the back of a motorcycle with her husband. if you've never been on a scooter/motorcycle before, you should watch it. he has more guts than me taking those turns so tight. i'm always way in the middle of the road.

she's got everything i need

my mom got an iphone. i think this means she can't make fun of the faj for his blackberry ways. we'll have a contest for who can drive one handed the best in a few months.
(the story of this stamp is at the bottom of the page so just deng yi xia.)
today was super fun and super long, so here are the highlights..
alex and i went to yingge this morning. i really enjoy alex, and riding on the back of his scooter is so nice. we were having the funniest luck. he doesn't like to acknowledge mistakes, but our mistakes today were what made the day really interesting. we got on a train that neither of us realized wasn't the kind of local train that stops frequently, so we zoomed right by the yingge stop. then we were waiting on the wrong platform at banciao station and would have just kept going toward taipei if i wasn't so lovely and attentive.
thennn we walked through downtown where all of the little vendors were set up with their baskets of produce and fish swimming around. once we got to the top, nothing was open. it was sweltering hot and we just walked around in circles pouring sweat until we stopped for some emergency ice cream and then ended up making some ceramic cups at one of the shops. the whole town is famous for pottery, so a couple of the places offer informal classes or just the opportunity to use a potter's wheel to make your own stuff. the girl showed us how to do it (all in chinese, i'll add) and then left us to our own devices. my previous ceramics experience didn't really help much. alex did awesome though--the wheel can be really tricky.
our ying ge day ended with a tea shop where alex chatted like a pro with the tea shop woman and i did my best to catch anything i could. i think i understood about half. the most interesting part was learning the proper tea etiquette.(this is leila's picture of a tea farm (?) in the Ruili/Alishan area.)
1. put dry, shrunken tea leaves into small cup
2. steep in boiling water for 30 seconds
3. pour hot tea all over the tea pot and cups to wash them
4. refill cup with boiling water and dump out, this time to rinse tea leaves
5. refill cup with boiling water and this time you get to drink it!
6. pour from little cup to strainer to pot to little cup that your drinking cup goes upside down on top of so you can smell the tea and then taste itthe tea i bought is from alishan which is where dawn, leila and dena went for vacation not too long ago. i'll be thinking of those tea fields every time i sip that tea.

after that, i spent 10 minutes at home and headed to da chu to go swimming with mr. kuo, his sister and nephew. it's funny that we've spent hundreds of hours together but never outside of their restaurant. we picked up his [taiwanese only speaking] mom and the three of us went to his sisters. he told them i was an english teacher andd a swimming instructor which is a little more than a white lie. then they wanted me to teach the nephew how to improve his swimming strokes. luckily, my blonde-girl-in-a-ruffly-bikini trick worked well enough to distract them from the fact that i don't know how to do any fancy swimming strokes, and the afternoon was a success. we stopped at a fried dumpling place on the way home and i think i ate 14 dumplings in about 3 minutes.
after class (which was the last class with my coteacher, angel. she's going to canada for her masters. we did the QA 'what do you like about angel?' and the kids wrote their answers in a card for her. sad! fun!), after picking up dinner, i went to family mart to cash in these stickers that would get me a free stamp. this girl with blue hair was waiting to buy stuff so i said i like your hair and asked the family mart dude if 15 stickers was enough to get me a stamp. he said no, i need 20, but since i just told that girl i like her hair, and since he likes my hair, he'll just give me 5 stickers and not make me buy anything. love taiwan.
cucumber salad that tastes juuust like aunt carols.

p.s. this video is what inspired me to apply for the internship in the office of correspondence. it is awesome.

and the o'sullivans have arrived in taichung and their blog is soo fabulous. it'll probably make you cry and definitely make you laugh.

the black hand

a crazy thing happened on the way home tonight. my scooter was acting funny and stalling at lights and it even stalled while i was driving once, which it's never done before. then i was about a mile from home and i hear this really loud POP and at first i thought it was someone around me, but i tried to throttle my scooter and nothing was happening and my lights were off on my dash.

so i pulled over at a 7-11 where i knew i wouldn't get towed if i left it overnight and started to walk home. 100 feet or so down the road, i notice that some guy is trying to ask me a question. i assumed he wanted to learn english or something, but when i looked closely, he was wearing a mechanic jumpsuit. i tell him what happened and he asks me if he can take a look.

he checks it out and hands me his card and i say thanks, maybe i'll give you a call. but thenn he just starts wheeling it down the street and we stop in front of his own scooter and he hands me the keys and his helmet and tells me to follow him. next, he starts running with my scooter down the street. he ran all the way to his shop, which was 5 or 6 blocks away, while i followed him on his own scooter.

4 minutes after we get to his shop, my scooter is up and running! he even fixed it so that it doesn't shut off when i idle too long. i was thrilled, to say the least. he showed me some scooter part that i guess had fallen out of my scooter? i tried to pay for it and he told me that it was mine.
i asked him if he had kids and he said no, he wasn't married. did i mention that he spoke zero english? not even one word. so i'm fumbling with my post-teaching brain, trying to muster up all the chinese i could while he's speaking a mile a minute. i think i caught a pretty good deal of it but there were a lot of times that he'd ask me a question and i just didn't know how to answer.

anyway we talk for 10 minutes or so and then he invites me to watch tv and have a cup of water or something inside the shop and i said ok i can sit for a minute. he asked me a millionnn questions and i think we did a surprisingly good job of communicating given the language limitations. he's 31 and the youngest of 4. i forget his name though =\

finally i find a way to gracefully get up and leave and he hopped on his scooter and followed me. i didn't know what he was saying to me but i knew i shouldn't go home, so i went to tapenyaki to pick up dinner and hoped he'd just leave after that. he waited with me and then i made sure he knew i couldn't teach him english right that moment, and he said yeah i know, i'm just making sure you make it home. even though his creepy factor was low, i just parked outside the coffee shop and pretended like i lived near there, so we said goodnight and he left. i think he was genuinely just making sure everything was fine.

so that was my adventure of the day.

p.s. 'black hand' or hei shou is the chinese word for mechanic. it was a pub quiz question several months ago.

philippines days 4 and 5

pictures! this is all from day 4 when we went to this place called treetop adventure and ziplined through the rain forest while sitting in chairs. it was awesome. this platform was up 50 or so feet in the trees and from there, you go on a whole zipline course.
the wait for the zipline was 2 hours so we did a 'jungle survival' course first with this nice man who taught us lots of useful things like..
how to make a fire using bamboo and a sharp knife:

how to be manly men in the rain forest:
how to glow like an angel due to a foggy lens in front of a giiiiant tree:
the trees can do it too.
i couldn't figure out a good way to photograph the torrential rain. it rained like we were in the middle of a typhoon for an hour or so, including the time we were on the zip line.
josh and steve have all of the pictures from when we were actually doing it since my camera isn't waterproof enough or small enough to take with me on stuff like that. hopefully i can get those pictures in the next couple of weeks.. but both of them are notorious for not ever uploading stuff.

steve did really well for being afraid of heights. it was creepy because you had a clip on your harness that they'd clip onto the fence somewhere.. but before you sat in your chair, you weren't clipped to anything while standing on a wet, metal, downsloping platform with a hundred-foot or more drop off.
we took a 4 hour bus back to manila and i was sitting next to this really fantastic philipino girl, ivy, who spoke fluent english. she told the bus driver where we wanted to get off the bus and then she somehow arranged it so there was a taxi to pick us up right when we got off. it was nice to chat with her during the ride and we both learned a little about the other's country.

we had heard that manila could be pretty sketchy and i read a million horrific hotel reviews (mice! cockroaches! worms coming out of shower drains! bedbugs.), but the imperial palace suites hotel was wonderful. for $100US or so, we had 2 beds, a real bath room and little living room area. the neighborhood wasn't scary at all and we had french food for dinner.

this early afternoon we hopped on a plane to come home. the guy sitting ahead of josh on our flight had the flu so they more or less made us put on face masks and they took our contact info so they can let us know if the guy turns out to have swine flu.
the man sitting next to me was flying to hawaii with his family and he wasn't happy at all about the mask situation. he felt weird and he didn't want to put it on his baby but the flight attendant was really adamant. i tried to explain that it's just an asian thing.. but he couldn't get over it.

i wish i had a picture of the look on my kids' faces when i told them i was in the philippines this morning. i think it blew their minds. i was so happy to see them. i chased everyone around in my little kid class to hug them, which has become our tradition in there, and scott and jerry kept lingering around me so i'd catch them.

tonight we went to dinner with tess' parents at the thai place. they were super friendly and tess-y. they both work in the airline industry so their family has traveled all around the world. i was surprised when tess didn't go stay with them in the hotel for their last night in town and she isn't going to go with them to the airport tomorrow. it would be nice to be so independent. i know i'd be at the airport until they went to the gate at the very least.

jai hoooooooo

so after chinese and lunch this afternoon, i headed to nova, which is taoyuan's big box computer store. i pull out my AC adapter with the frayed cable and hand it to the computer dude who just looks at it and says 'oooh noooo'.

he says 4 minutes worth of chinese to me and i get the gyst that i need to go to some other store where they can fix it. computer guy #2 writes down something in chinese (tonight allen told me it says 'jing ho electronic material') and brings up yahoo maps, in chinese, on the computer. at that point, i know it's on minzu road and if i hit jung shan rd, i went too far.
i find minzu road (which is in the opposite direction as the guy pointed), and stop a couple blocks short of jung shan rd, outside of a bakery. since i've had such brilliant luck with people who own restaurants and other little shops, i decide to ask the girls at the bakery. they look at my little paper and just keep saying 'no address. police station there. ask police'.

i probably just would have walked into another store to try my luck but the girl actually walked me to the front door of the police station, so i had no choice, i just went inside. the taipei times just ran a big story about how the public is outraged that foreigners get off so easy because we can't speak chinese so we can't really get ticketed, and a big campaign has been launched to go after us.. so it felt weird to be in the police station.

luckily, it was like any other place i walk in and everyone kind of looked at me and pointed frantically to the one person who can speak 'a little' english. it was a police officer who couldn't have been over 25. the guy was super nice and he just took my paper and i could see the wheels turning. he pulled out his cell phone, put it away, went to the computer, went outside and looked up and down the street. in the end, he pulled out his car keys and told me to get in the police car!

he asked me where i was from, where i teach, etc as we drove about 3 blocks until he matched up a sign with what was written on my paper. the guy at the store thought we could probably fix it, but i needed to bring my entire computer.. so i went back to the bakery, bought the police officer a couple of little cheesecake tarts, (he accepted them after a little bit of protest), and went back to get my computer.

in the end, we found a new adapter that does work with my laptop. success! it was a crazy, roundabout adventure of a day.

11 or somethin'

today as i was getting on the second bus to da chu, i sit in my seat and begin to adjust the air conditioning when this woman in front of me says 'megan!' and it was julie huang, the grandma of a kid i teach on wednesdays. she's the one who gave me a ride home a few weeks ago. i got up and sat next to her and she talked to the bus driver and it turned out that the driver was planning on parking on some back road for like 20 minutes because he was about to switch off with someone else and he had to make up some time or something. so she offered me a ride to school. that isn't really true. she told me to get off the bus and come see her son's office and her "mansion" which really meant "apartment building".

anyway i saw klaus' office. he was happy to see me again it seemed. on the bus, julie called him and was like 'megan is sitting next to me. MEGAN. MEGAN. MEGAN. MAGGIE. MAGGIE. you're going to give her a ride to school.' aaand she introduced me to her security guard, and i met her husband who was wearing an undershirt, sitting in a wheelchair. she gave me a glass of what i think was prune juice and she insisted that i could leave once i had drunk all of it. anyway she is super nice. i like julie. while we were walking to her apartment, she said 'i don't have any daughters. you can be like my daughter' and i kind of smiled and laughed and she was like 'that's not crazy! you can be my daughter.'

school was good. i played a game dena told me about with some squeaky chew toys for dogs and even my impossible-to-please WOW class liked it. it's fun. you have 2 kids leave the room, give a toy to 2 kids, have everyone hide their hands under the desks, and then the kids come back in and i say "SQUEAK" and everyone pretends to squeak and then the kids who left the room have to guess who has a toy. if they guess right, the person who had it has to ask a QA, if they get it wrong, they have to ask a QA. it's fun.

josh and i went to get thai food after for everyone in the whole dorm. it took us about an hour but it was good. aaand now i'm going to go mingle.

hilarity

http://tw.youtube.com/watch?v=EhCPEI9zwtY&feature=related
i live with that fool. he's actually a pretty cool guy. his name is Emil and he's been traveling around the world for the last 5 years and living out of a backpack. go to www.youtube.com/monkeetime to see his bio and various travel videos. i think it's pretty entertaining, but maybe it's only because i know him. anyway he's fun and i admire his ability to travel alone for so long.
tonight dena and i were talking about a dream i had last night in which i owned a little dog and it turned into a kid who i was putting into a car seat and how i don't want it right nowww, but when i do have a family, i'll be ready for it. i think my traveling right now is making me more comfortable with the idea of having roots somewhere later. it's making me realize exactly how much i love austin and going to central market every weekend and eating food that i looove and being able to drive 15 minutes to see my family. i'm happy i'm here, but i'll appreciate everything when i get back.

i had a fantastic day today. i found a stamp guy who can make me a stamp with my name in english. we have to sign all kinds of papers and books all day long so i had been using my new hello kitty stamp but i really wanted my name done. there are all of these little shops around town with big keys made out of poster board hanging from their awnings and some of them also make stamps. so i found a guy who is going to make me one. it's supposed to be ready tomorrow. i'm excited.
today i taught 2 classes that both went pretty well. i think my kids are starting to get a better handle on my personality and i'm remembering all of their names which is nice. we played some really fun relay games that they got excited about which is exciting for me.

there were 2 vehicle-related adventures:
1) the bus to dar chu takes you a different way every time, but eventually i get somewhere where i can see the school, so i just get off the bus. sometimes its on the right side of the street, sometimes not, but always close. todayyy, i see the school and then the bus turns down this road that i didn't know existed and starts off toward the middle of nowhere. i knew i should have pushed the button when i knew how to get back to the school, but for some reason i just waited and stayed on the bus. at that point i had 40 minutes until i had to be at the school so i wasn't worried. but it just kept going further and further (is it farther or further?) away from the main road and we were passing these big fields of sunflowers and orange flowers and little houses and fields. it was actually very pretty if i hadn't been completely lost. eventually i did get back to the school but i was within 10 minutes of the time i needed to be there which is cutting it a little close for my liking.

2) so i'm sitting in front of a bank, waiting for the bus after class when an SUV parks in front of the bank. an elderly woman gets out and says 'hi there' which set off the bells in my mind because it's so colloquial that no one who only knows a bit of english would ever say it. so i say 'hi!' and then she goes to use the ATM and when she comes back out, she starts to ask me the typical questions.. 'are you an english teacher? how long have you been here? where do you live? how long do you plan to stay? what do you think about taiwan?' so in the course of answering the questions, we figure out that i teach her grandson in one of my classes on wednesday nights. his name is harrison and he's a pretty good kid but he's in my 21-kid class so i don't know him very well. anyway they offer me a ride home which is AMAZING because the bus would have taken me at least an hour and a half. so on the way home we talk about the food and how it freaks me out and they invited me to their house to have dinner one night which i'm totally going to do. they also told me not to take random taxi's and corrected my pronunciation of 'tung an' (the street i live on). it's more like tong an than tung an. they said tung an is a street in taipei.
anyway they were obviously super nice and i can't wait to see them again. klaus and julie huang.
klaus is her son and he studied german so when i told them my last name was klein, he got all excited.

i know this is getting long so i'll gloss over the last part of my night.. we went to this bar/pub called Rodeo and there was a band playing american songs. the first one was Maria by Carlos Santana. i almost died laughing. the guy clearly 'learned' the words by listening to the song, so there were some words he sang that were not words at all but did sound like the words in the song. it was the funniest thing in the whole world. i ordered nachos that weren't too bad but i have super heartburn now.

ok time for bed! no class until 5 tomorrow woooo!

just waiting 'til the shine wears off

this is my new cell phone. it has chinese on the buttons! click on the picture to see a bigger version of it.

this is my room as of yesterday. mom sent me a care package and it had pictures in it so i taped them up right behind where my computer usually is. dad sent me an ethernet cable extension plug thing so now i can use my laptop from my bed! which is where i am now.

let's start with yesterday. i had class at 10 downstairs. there was a kid in the class, kevin, who couldn't keep himself from shouting out the answer before anyone else could. it was driving me crazy. i had to ask him to stop answering questions after a bit. i talked to matt later that day and he said i probably should have had him count to 10 and then if no one else answered, let him answer. that would have been a better strategy.
saturday afternoon i didn't do much of anything other than hang around in the dorm and do my lesson plans for the evening. i chatted with dena and serena for a while about random things. that evening i taught my faaavorite substitute class of highschoolers. i subbed for them last week and then this was my last week. they were a lot of fun. there was a QA about what your ideal husband/wife would be like and they were trying to set me up with their regular teacher, michael. we played spoons again. i'm going to miss that class. i did exchange numbers with the co-teacher, christine. she's a lot of fun.
actually saturday after class, keith picked me up and we scooted to gill and kat's apartment for a little party they were having and christine was there. a lot of the co-teachers were there. everyone was dancing and talking. i talked to beth's boyfriend, rob, for a looong time about how many countries he's been to/lived in, what it does for him, what he wants to do when he's done traveling, etc. his dad is a landscape architect just like my majjy so we talked about that for a while. it was a really good night. emil kept dancing all around me because he could tell i was uncomfortable, but it was alright. i just don't like dancing, what can i say.

today i woke up relatively early (9am) to shower and go to taipei with dena, natalie and alan. dena wanted to see Longshan temple
i think it's one of the biggest temples in taipei. there were people all over the place with incense sticks that they were putting into giant golden containers and then they would pray for a few minutes. there were also big tables set up where you could leave food to be blessed while you pray and then you pick it up before you leave. the temple was decorated so ornately, it was amazing. there were really detailed carvings all over the top of it painted in really bright colors. it must have taken decades to make all of them.
natalie and i in front of the waterfall at longshan temple

after longshan, we got on the MRT (subway) and took a train out to a town called Danshui
where alan and natalie had been last week. it's a harbor town and there's a view of the mountains and the water and it's pretty. the water cools it off a lot.
we walked along the waterfront where there was a big market with all kinds of food vendors and stores full of trinkets. we had giiiant ice cream cones that cost 10NT which is about 30 cents. they were refreshing in the heat. and we went in this funny shop with all kinds of miniature things. i bought some earrings, pictured below. i have yellow shoes and a yellow skirt and i couldn't help myself. i think they're hilarious. they were $1.33 and well worth it.

what else.. everyone had barbequed (im using that term loosely) squid for lunch. everyone except me. i tried a bite of dena's and it was gross. i just don't like squid. it's really thick and chewy. it's like chewing on a giant piece of the biggest, scariest calamari you can imagine. i did have a corndog though. it was pretty good. it was SOOO hot outside today and even more humid. i was dripping with sweat the entire time. but once you get home and shower, you forget all about how disgusting you felt all day.
on the way home, i was eating a worther's candy on the MRT and this woman across from me told me 'no eating anything!' and i said oh i'm sorry i didn't know. the woman beside me mentioned how you can't even drink water and that's why the subways are so clean in taipei. i apologized to the woman beside me because she seemed really shaken up about it and we started chatting. her name is evelyne and she's from taipei. she exports computer accessories to america so she goes to las vegas every year. her english is really fantastic so it was easy to talk to her. i told her all about taoyuan and what i'm doing there, how i got there.. we discussed the differences in food in the US and asia and how they like everything to be hot here because they think it disinfects it. she said she hates american food. she told me a story about staying in a hotel in orlando once and there was a japanese restaurant and an american one and she chose the japanese one, even though she didn't used to like japanese food, just to avoid the american one. we were laughing the whole time we were talking, it was fun. anyway evelyne and i exchanged numbers and i'm going to call her next time i'm in taipei.
so it was a nice day. i have a headache and a mild sunburn, but i had a cup of tea and i feel better. dena did some reflexology stuff to me and it did help, but i still feel kind of bad. she showed me a pressure point in my foot that's supposed to help though. i felt weirddd pinging sensations when she touched it. but i need to go to bed now.

i uploaded all of the new pictures from today to facebook
you can look at them by copying and pasting this link:
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2476713&l=05382&id=7900530