dr. snodgrass

when i went to turn on my scooter to drive to chinese, i was just getting this awful screeching without my engine actually doing anything. luckily, we have a scooter shop right down the road so i just wheeled it over there and the guys there fixed it.

first they told me to come back after an hour, then 2 hours, so finally i just gave them my phone number and they called me 6 hours later, just in time for class. at one point when i went over, my scooter was literally in at least 50 pieces. you could see right through the entire thing to the ground. but $40 later, we're back up and running.

so i didn't make it to chinese, but i've been hitting my new flash cards pretty hard. this week i'm learning flowers, clothing and one moreee topic.. oh, traditional chinese (taiwanese?) symbols. my name in chinese is mei gan. the mei part is the mei from plum blossom (mei hua) which is the flower on the taiwanese flag, and also has a symbolic meaning.[editor's note: this is not the flag with the plum blossom. apparently there's a proposed flag symbolizing taiwanese independence.. but this it the 'republic of china's' flag. see the comment some very helpful anonymous person left.]

my chinese book says.. 'Plum blossoms make their appearance in winter. They are representative of people who can withstand severe conditions.'
and the other half of my name, gan, means 'roots'. pretty solid.

i'm behind schedule because i was trying to install josh's copy of the rosetta stone for chinese. i'm half way there but i'm stumped, so i'm going to go try to figure that out. jimmie and keith in 2 days!

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.

and everywhere in between

driving in a pack is awesome. i can see why there are motorcycle gangs. tonight, 8 or 10 of us drove to a thai place in nan kan for carly's birthday dinner and it was so much fun to drive with people you know around you. they all drive faster than i usually do, so maybe part of the excitement was flying around turns and zipping past other people?

when we got back home, we went down into the garage one after another like a little mototcycle/scooter parade. it sounds lame now that i'm typing this, but you'll just have to imagine the awesomeness. for 3 minutes, we were our own little biker gang of english teachers.
dinner was reaalllly good. pad thai made by people who are truly from thailand. it came with an elegant little presentation of crushed peanuts on a lettuce leaf and a wedge of lime and then 4 white ceramic sugar bowls with sugar, chili oil, chili flakes and fish sauce to add according to your tastes. for $5.
carly is from england and she's here with her boyfriend, steph. they're so caring and sweet toward each other even though their style is kind of unconventional. love carly's eggplant colored hair.. she reminds me of my favorite parts of studying abroad in brighton.
that cake was chocolate with a layer of blueberry jam. it alllmost tasted like cake from home. i don't know how to describe taiwanese cake except to say that it's just full of air and doesn't have much of a taste. if your eyes were closed, you wouldn't be able to tell what flavor it is.
the best part of desserts are the teeny little utensils they come with. i know people will think i'm one of those weirdo's who's obsessed with the country she briefly lived in, but i'm definitely going to serve desserts with miniature spoons and forks from now on.

3-in-1

it wont let me change around the order of my photos so here's the back of my new (old) scooter..

here's the side.. notice the new basket they put on it for me
it's only 50 cc's so it's pretty tiny, but it works. it has a lot of get up and go.

this is my new coat.. this is just the outside part
this is just the lining. the downy part..
and this is both of them, all poofy and warm

we went to japanese for dinner and i think 2 glasses of sake really warmed me up. it's still pretty chilly outside and in my room, but i feel really warm.

taught my outside class this morning. it was a review day so we played a bunch of games. we played a dating game that was pretty fun. i came up with lots of 'either-or' questions, they all had to write down their answer and then someone got up in front and read theirs one by one and everyone sat down as their lists differed. so it was like cat/dog, pizza/chicken, cake/ice cream, hot/cold. it was fun. i was pretending to be a game show host with my hand as a microphone until someone pointed out that we had a real microphone, but it freaked me out to hear my own voice radiating from the ceiling, so that didn't last long.

time to dry my hair, mingle, and go to sleep. i have to get up early tomorrow to register my scooter at the govt office.

just settled down for a long winter's nap

i really want to go to sleep so here are the key points:
-lesley bought a super warm jacket the other day and i was soo cold yesterday that i went to buy one just like it this morning. hers is like burgundy red and mine is kind of a pretty medium blue. they're lined with a gray, down shell that unzips if you want to wear it on its own, and then the outside is like a warm rain jacket. it was toasty on the scooter today

-i got my scooter! i rode it around after class tonight because it needed gas. they delivered it on empty, the chums. you would think if someone buys a scooter from you, you could at least put 100NT worth of gas in it. they did wash it and put a new basket on it for me though. that was nice.
it drives well. the throttle doesn't have as much play as steve's does, so i had to adjust to a quick takeoff. and the brakes are good and strong. so i'm happy. glad to be mobile. yoga, here i come.

-i laid down the law in my yellow book class that speaks mostly chinese. i told them i had come too far for them to speak chinese in my class. i haven't seen my family in 5 months, i don't have good mexican food, i dont get to sleep in my own bed, and it's just rude for them to waste my time and theirs. so i instituted a strict no chinese policy. first they lose their stickers (which we use as bait) and on the third strike, they take a note home with them telling their mom that they spoke chinese all during class, and they have to get it signed and bring it back to me. and we didn't play a game at the beginning.
it worked like a charm. so i was thrilled. it's hard for me to be the bad cop.

time for bed. i'm too toasty in bed to go down in my jammies and take a picture of my scooter, so i'll show you tomorrow.

watch my corn pop up in rows

bought a scooter today! it was actually kind of convoluted. i went to latini's and dan drove me to pick up his friend and then the three of us went to the friend's friend's scooter shop. we went out there to look at a used scooter that was $9k (around 270US) but it was 125ccs and looked way too big for me to ride. eventually we decided on a 50cc scooter for 9k. it looks used but not dead. it's turquoise. they're going to put a basket on the front of it for me ;)
the guy is going to drop it off at latini's tomorrow so i'll show you a picture tomorrow night after i give it a bath.

other than that, it was a plain day. i taught a beginner class and gave a test in my other class. it's interesting to find out which kids have no clue what's going on and which kids are doing better than you thought.
it got pretty chilly out today. probably in the mid 60s. every time i say '60s' to someone from home they say the 60s? what are you talking about? that's not cold at all. here it's ... but it really feels cold when you're used to the 90s with dripping humidity. today it was drizzly and wet and it felt reaally chilly. lesley bought a puffy jacket at carrefour for 4k and i think i'm going to go buy one tomorrow. there's no price on being warm. especially whipping around on a scooter. it gets pretty cold.

time to watch obama's 60 minutes interview, read and go to bed.

life goes easy on me

when i got to the hospital today to teach the ladies, the lady who walks me down every day told me this would be the last class, so i'm all done with the hospital. i think they know a little more than they started with. i'm going to push to get the english fixed on the forms though.

i have a bunch of pictures for you!
i cleaned my room because i was beginning to feel a little cluttered:
(this is an 'after' photo)

remember the scooter burn?

it's pretty well healed. i just have a weird scar that hasn't changed in a few months. i'm assuming the dark part will eventually heal and be white like the rest of it.

remember the scooter gashes?


man, just looking at the pictures hurts :P
almost all gone. i think i have some permanent taiwanese street in my leg though. you can't see it here, but the one on the underside of my leg has a thin gray line.

time to read and get in bed. p.s. i applied for a job at home that i would looooove. so, visualize me working at the coolest company in austin.

fun facts from tonight's section of a short history of nearly everything by bill bryson:
- 'a fluffy summer cumulus (cloud) several hundred yards to a side may contain no more than twenty five or thirty gallons of water, about enough to fill up a bath tub.'
- it can take 1,500 years for water to travel from the north atlantic to the mid pacific ocean