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.

ho cakes

you can't judge me for what i'm about to write.
we had a typhoon day today so we spent TEN HOURSSS watching a tru blood marathon. it's an HBO show about vampires and humans coexisting. anyway we started watching it at 5pm and we just finished at three in the morning. i think i got off the couch for a total of 20 minutes in the last 10 hours. at least danielle, natalie, alan, martin and olenka were also there for most of it. only danielle and i made it to the very end.

look what made it to texas.. thai fisherman pants! awesome. that package went sooo fast. i think i mailed it last thursday.

we have another typhoon day tomorrow. we haven't gotten much rain today, it's supposed to hit in the next couple of hours. should be crazy. we're watching the first 7 episodes of season 2 tomorrow.

i could listen to that song all day.

granted

we have a typhoon day friday! no school!
driving to school today was crazy. last year, i was still taking the bus, so this time around was a whole different thing. there was a weird layer of yellow stuff on the roads that i later figured out was sand from the ocean water? or something. anyway it was pelting me as i was trying to drive over this bridge on the way to school and i was in a mixture of giggles and screaming as water was really hurting my arms as it hit my thin little stupid north face rain jacket, and my helmet turned out to be completely useless. water was dripping right from the top and hitting my nose which was just making me laugh.
after successfully crossing under a bridge through 6 inches of water, i was just happy to have made it to school/the kuo's, where i knew i could seek refuge. my shirt was soaked right down the middle where it leaked at the zipper, so mr. kuo gave me a polyester baby blue zip up polo to wear. so funny.

anyway we found out we have no school tomorrow at like 9pm tonight so everyone ran to 7-11 to buy wine and then we started watching movies. it's 2am and i'm exhausted so i'm headed to bed. tomorrow we're watching a marathon of true blood, some vampire show. i love typhoon days.

typhoonin'

dear typhoon morakot,
please live up to the hype that we've been feeding to the new teachers since october. i expect at least one typhoon day. preferably saturday.
sincerely,
megan

typhoon nangka

though it looks like it's headed our way, it's really just headed for southern china. we're getting lots of thunder right now though.

the hidden pine trails of the forest

well, potentially bad news for the water gun fight tomorrow evening: typhoon linfa is headed our way. wunderground is only giving us a 30% chance of rain though, so who knows. it would be nice to have a little break from this insane humidity.
i fell asleep after my alarm went off this morning and woke up at 8:08 to be out the door by 8:15. that's never a good feeling.

the rest of the day was a blur of trains and flashcards. i started off with a whole pile and now i know all but 5 of them! white water rafting, skiing,.. now i don't even remember the english for the ones i can't remember. tess has the cuuutest new haircut so today i went to the salon she found in taipei, mix and match. eddie, the hairdresser, is from hong kong and he trained in london so he speaks english/has experience cutting 'foreign hair'. apparently asian hair grows straight out from their head and ours grows down.
well eddie was awesome. i told him i wanted it to have more movement, and he just did his thing. he asked if i was learning chinese and i told him i'm learning the animals now.. so he quizzed me. he was trying to stump me and i knew sea cucumber, but i got stuck on 'moose' (si bu xiang.. which literally means 4 animals not the same.. it's not like a deer, a horse, a something or a something). it was stick-straight when i left, but as soon as i stepped outside into the 90% humidity, it sprang into curls. it's so much lighter now though. love summer hair.allen is conflicted about the internship thing. when he doesn't know what to say, he puffs his cheeks out. he wants me to meet his parents next week. ...
i told him i'm nervous because i don't know how far my chinese will take me. 'i like watermelon, i'm an english teacher, i've been here for a year. comforter. tennis. moose.'

josh's girlfriend, elva (who's taiwanese, if the name didn't give it away), came over tonight and she had a big bag of clothes for me to try! i always compliment her dresses and she says they're only 100NT, so she brought me some to try tonight. one shirt is purple and it has a giant white M on it for Megan! she is so sweet. i picked out a few things. one dress was soooo taiwanese, it was yellow and red hawaiian flowers with a thick band of black satin trim at the top and along the waist. passed on that one.

hey guess who's been here a year and 2 days?!