i will never love you more

the first couple of these are pictures from friday when we had typhoon day #1. this picture is my room at 3pm when it was sooo dark outside.
it was an odd weekend because we had our friday classes canceled on thursday night at around 10 because there was a huge typhoon headed right for us.
then we had the tru blood marathon, and no one wanted to go to work on saturday because we thought it was going to be crazy windy/rainy. so we got a call around midnight letting us know we wouldn't have class on saturday.
saturday was pretty long. i slept in late, went to lunch, tea and the stationery store with tess because she's going to canada today and i'm not going to see her again in taiwan. sad! tess is so much fun. she's girly and fun.
look what i found at the stationery store:
i've been dreaming about taiwan puzzles for a long time, i'm glad i found one. taoyuan county is that blue one at the top.

last night tess, katie, justin (katie's bf who's visiting) and jimmie made me delicious veggie dinner! mango salsa, black bean burgers, cabbage salad and chips. i brought cherries for dessert. it was so yummy. it makes me consider going veg if i could teach myself how to make food that tasted that good.
tess bought/made me some presents. this egg planner. it is so asian. the inside is even better.
and this picture frame! it's filled with stickers from school and 7-11, and funny asian things and a picture of our realtor, eddie. aaand it's bedazzled.
it says peng you which is 'friend'. i'm going to miss her! but her parents were both in the airline industry so she flies all around for cheap, so there will surely be a trip to texas in her future. love tess!
p.s. matt wore the thai fisherman pants to a play downtown and jeff wore them to a concert. i love my brothers.

start at the very beginning

my head is swimming after my chinese lesson tonight. linda grilled me on DC (which i didn't know any of the vocab for.. which makes it hard to follow along/answer questions) and i was proud that she was proud. she's such a serious, no-nonsense teacher that it's the kind of thing where you study extra hard just so they'll think highly of you.
this was our "look sexy" pose, which i'm not very good at. natalie's got it down (far left). these are jimmie's pictures from wine and cheese girly night at RPM last week.

here's tonight's chinese lesson.. past tense.
i watched tv yesterday. zuo tian wo kan dian shi.
i watched tv. wo kan dian shi le.
i've watched 4 hours of tv (and i'm still watching it). wo yi jing kan le si ge xiao shi dian shi le.
i watched a movie. i watched it for 2 hours. wo kan dian ying. kan le liang ge xiao shi.
i watched a movie for 2 hours. wo kan le liang ge xiao shi de dian ying.

woo! i think all of those are right. i'm not going to cheat and go get my book, so here's hoping i understand.
we watched a movie in class tonight! it's fun to get paid for watching movies. every time you change books, you get to watch a movie in english. this week i have twoooo movie classes.
cross your fingers that i find the perfect apartment in DC. it's pretty rough going from paying $40/month to live in taiwan to paying $600 or more to live in DC. it will be worth it though. ballet! yoga! bai gong! culturally varied food that isn't taiwanese food masquerading as another kind of food!!

from around here

some of my favorite pictures from last night:
my coteacher augusta and her fiance, jerry. last time i saw jerry, i couldn't say much chinese at all, so every time i would talk to him last night, he shook his head and said 'it's so weird to hear you speak chinese!'
jerry, katie, krissy, phil and george
augusta's taiwan fab shoes.

the couples were awesome.
alan and natalie
steph and carly in perfectly taiwanese matching couples shirts.
martin and olenka (in homemade shirts)
tess, danielle and i (look at that dressss!! i felt like a taiwanese princess)
evvvveryone playing bubblegum
dancin'
i bought balloons for minimal cost + maximum decor impact
katie, me, tess, phil

tonight i went over to the apartment to pick up some stuff i forgot and i asked the security guards what we should do about the cable and our lack of hot water. the security guard called the cable guy (at 11:30pm), woke him up, and scheduled an appointment for tomorrow.
megan: we don't have any hot water either
retired guy who hangs out behind the desk: you can say that in chinese
me: we don't have any hot water
guy: did you turn on the gas?
me: we can cook with it, but the water isn't hot
guy: did you try turning on the gas..?
me: we're a bunch of american girls who can't read the chinese. i don't know how to turn on the gas
guy: let's go try
me: now?
guy: yeah, why not?
..as we're walking to the elevator..
guy: you guys had a lot of people over for your party last night. was it fun?
me: yeah it was a lot of fun, i'm sorry we were loud, but we just wanted to show all of our friends the new apartment
guy: it's ok. it was saturday. i went to sleep at 2am
me: could you hear us?
guy: yep

so that was funny/productive. turns out the battery was missing from the hot water heater unit. we never would have figured that out on our own. we were also surprised to find out that the retired man lives on our floor, across the hall. he asked why i wasn't staying there that night and i told him i'm not going to live there since i'm going home. he told me to come over often. those guys are so nice.

love the way you move

i spent aaaaalllll of yesterday filling out this monstrous form for the internship. crazy. i'm still only halfway done.

well yesterday we threw a last minute girly wine and cheese party at romantic paris mansion. girls only. katie and tess had filled the apartment with tea lights and flowers and it was so pretty and clean and girly in there. 9 of us just ended up sitting around the dining room table, sharing 5 chairs, and eating our weight in cheese, crackers, chocolate and fruit. 9 bottles of wine.

i forgot how much fun it is to hang out with your girlfriends. it was interesting to hear that some of those girls never really had a group of girlfriends at home. so i think we're going to do that more often. it's probably a nice break for the boys, too.

at the end of the night, we pulled the twin bed mattress into tess' room and crammed it in the teeny space between her bed and the wall so 3 of us had a sleepover in her room. i'll post some of the pictures once jimmie and tess upload them.

yooooooohooooooooo

today was kind of a funny contrast with the past few days where i've just been all excited and floaty. this afternoon i went to lunch with allen, who was really quiet and somber and kept mentioning how he's sad that i have to leave. he's understandably not excited at all about me leaving in a month.

after that, i went over to romantic paris mansion to help them set up the internet. while i was waiting for the internet guy, i hung out in the lobby at a table with 2 security guards and 3 men who live in the complex. they were chattering in chinese as i sat down and they quickly asked if i understood chinese. i said yes, we became fast friends, as they said we have no foreign friends, you can be our foreign friend. they were all smoking and drinking tea so one of them bought me a tea from the vending machine and money just started pouring out of the change slot. we laughed and they kept pointing at me and telling me i was so lucky. so i felt a little twinge of sadness about not becoming besties with those guys. they seem like a lot of fun.

thenn i sat with tess and katie while the internet guys did their thing and it was sad that i don't get to live in romantic paris mansion with them.

thennnn! i went to see the kuo's who were all excited to see me after thailand. mr. kuo just stood there for a long time and looked at me when i first walked in. mrs. chan made some kind of cold cucumber salad she's never made before, and she made golden curry just for me because it's my favorite (as she reminded me when i told her i wasn't super hungry.. so of course i ended up eating a giant bowl of it).
but then i told mr. kuo about the internship and he was sad. he kept saying one month! and we agreed that this year has flown by too quickly. he kept staring at me as i ate and said taiwanese people love you. we will miss you when you go to america.

and my classes tonight are so sweet. i had a gaggle of girls meet me at the door when i came in and we all walked in a big clump up to the classroom, where the other kids raced to show me who got hair cuts (i always make a big deal of it when they get one because i think you always feel kind of special with new hair and it's fun to be noticed).

my next class had changed their seats all around and we have a new set of twins, eddie and .. someone. i forget the other kids name. that class loves to pick on me and today whenever i would say 'ask a question' (instead of ask a QA), they'd say 'what is megan's phone number?' or 'who is megan's boyfriend?' and they thought they were sooo clever. even emily, the quietest girl in the whole world, said something like 50 words to me at break which is unprecidented.

so it was kind of a bittersweet day. i think i'm going home under the best possible circumstances, but i do have a life here that i'll be sad to leave behind.

when the lights go down in the city

well it was another apartment-y day in taoyuan. i asked the owner about the water when we were touring it with him yesterday and he told me there was no filter but the water in taiwan just isn't good anyway and we would need to boil it. then the real estate company guy, eddie, called tess later in the evening and said the owner decided to install a water filter on the sink for us. so we spent the morning hanging out while they installed it.

the landlord is an interesting guy, mr. dong. he was in the air force for a long long time until he started flying for china airlines. he's retired now and lives in taipei. for the first 10 minutes of our lease meeting yesterday, his face was stone-cold serious. no smiling, no laughing, arms folded.

but tess, katie and i are all pretty smiley, bubbly north american girls and we were super excited about signing everything, so he loosened up over time. he said he has 2 daughters, 20 and 18. by the end of it, he was smiling and laughing and making little jokes. i think he's pretty good.

the beeest part of the contract signing was when we had to stamp 3 sets of contracts with our thumb prints. we had to stamp every folded over page.

we just got back from the friendship store, where everything is super cheap. we spent $100 on everything we need to get up and running. dishes, cleaning stuff, kitchen stuff, bathroom stuff. we opted for asian-fab whenever we had the option. the mop is barbie pink.

i find out about the internship sometime this week and i leave for thailand on wednesday! exciting week for me. at least all news is good news at this point. oh! speaking of good news, i was able to put my plane ticket on hold so i only have to change it once and i don't lose the $700 i have in it. good day all around.

parade of homes

i could tell you about my day, but it's more exciting to just show you a million pictures of our new apartmenttt! let's go on a tour.
welcome to the Romantic Paris Mansion.. (the name of our apartment complex. seriously.)
you'll know you're in paris because the louvre is right inside the courtyard. ours is better than the original, in my opinion, because it's surrounded by a moat.
we're on the 15th floor but we're apartment number 21F which i'm not sure i understand. you'll notice the door has been outfitted with the necessary lucky paper. if anyone who actually knows what that says feels like pointing it out, that would be lovely.
inside is super '80s fantastic. we're going to replace the window treatments.
this is the view from katie's room. the dorm is where you can see all of those green lights in the bottom righthand corner. when we were there this afternoon, we could see josh on the balcony so we just started screaming his name. he heard us, but he couldn't see us.

this is the view when you're looking out from the kitchen. there's a little dining room.
the dining room chairs might be my favorite part of the whole thing.
the kitchen is pretty bare bones. it's like we're camping. there's a fridge (there was originally a mini fridge but we said that wasn't going to fly..) and a stovetop. i don't cook a thing now though so i don't see that being a problem.
i just went over with jimmie and i introduced myself to the security guards at the front desk.
me: i live here now. my name is Megan.
them: 15F?
me: yep.
them: you need a thingy to get on the elevator. write down your name on this post-it.

they seemed less than enthused, but i'm hoping we'll all be best friends by the end of the month. i need to find out what kind of tea they like.
the end!

p.s. glad you're caught up, cherry hill, NJ. that was amazing.