but first be a person who needs people

7:15 came early this morning. i had the hardest time falling asleep and then i woke up at 6:45 because i was so paranoid about sleeping through my alarm (as i've been doing for the last several weeks with no early classes).
for as out of tune as i feel with my body at times, my internal clock is spot on. when i was studying abroad in england, my alarm clock didn't work because it plugged into the wall and the different electrical current made the clock work overtime. did you know the time on alarm clocks is regulated by the electrical current? anyway i magically woke up on time in spite of the 8 hour time change.

my first class felt like i was pulling teeth. the pace was off and i kept having to look back at my lesson plan and there was lots of boring down time. but my all-girls-and-ian class was great and flew by. those girls are just sooo cuuuute. we have a new girl, vivi. now i have vivi and vivian in there. at one point i said 'vivi and ian' and vivian jumped up.
i got dry erase marker on my new hoodie :( i tried water, dish soap, nail polish remover (which works for sharpie on hard surfaces), went to carrefour and bought some vanish! or fantastic! or something like that on martyn's recommendation, and finally leslie's tide to go pen.
nothing really worked. it's better but certainly not gone. i'm going to take it to the dry cleaners tomorrow and see if they have anything. the internet says murphy's oil soap but heck if i know how to ask for it/where to find it/if they have it in taiwan.

between my babies and my class from hell, i hung out for an hour and a half with the kuo's. we ate a giant pear and it rekindled my love of fresh fruit. i showed off my 'because... so...' new sentence construction we learned this week.
mr. kuo called mr. wang to tell him that i was hanging out over there, so when i got out of class there was a note on my scooter tucked inside my helmet. i went over and we all hung out and chatted for a bit. they tried to get me to drink with them but i said no thanks to that one.

oh and tonight i made the vegetable soup mix from stonewall that gram and spanky sent. it was pretty good, it tastes a lot like the corn chowder base actually. i think tomorrow i might add chicken when i have it for lunch. thanks guys :)

bring what i am able

guess what's new at 7-11. arizona green tea!! mannn i love that stuff so much. my dad used to buy me the big jugs of it and i could go through about 1 a week. now we have it in those big big cans at 7-11.
it's an anomaly because they actually did a really good job changing it to fit the asian market while keeping it friendly for foreigners. the packaging is the same but everything is in english and chinese. i meant to take a picture of it the other day but i forgot and the cleaning lady emptied the recycling today so i'm out of luck.
i just hope enough taiwanese poeple buy it to keep them in business over here. it's not like there's any shortage of fresh green tea.

well i don't know if it's the recent influx of couples or what, but i'm starting to feel the single girl lonliness creeping in on me. i've given my friends the whole 'it's good to be young and independent and detatched' speech a million times (and it is) but the truth is that it's more fun to share your experiences with someone else. and i'm a chatty kind of girl, you know. i like to have someone to chat to. so i'm going to put a relationship back on my radar and see what happens.

i'm also having kind of a weird too many options issue. the job market in the US is looking pretty bleak so i'm trying to figure out what i want to do in july when my year here is up. picking up and moving to taiwan and just doing it has really given me the sense that i can do whatever i'd like to do, but i just don't know what i want to do.
keep working on my chinese and teach in china for a year? korea? japan? be an au pair in europe? go to grad school? but what for? and i missed the deadlines for fall of '09 so what would i do until spring? try to find a job in the US?

i'm glad i still have 5 months to figure it out, but i'm just not sure.

with space to swing your arms around

it's past my bedtime and i haven't even started reading so i'm showing you 14 pictures you haven't seen. i just chose one out of each of my folders inside the 'taiwan' folder on my computer.

the view from the top of taipei 101
jerry and i at latini's with the shu fa (caligraphy) we did at bobo's. it says 'mom and dad, i love you'. that's my taiwanese military shirt.
a bunch of us in our halloween costumes at bobo's halloween movie night.
alex meditating. those yellow post it's on the side are chinese characters with english underneath. and the trash cans are where we throw our toilet paper because you can't flush it.
fish feet freak out.
alex drying spinach for spinach salad on thanksgiving
keith and i at the top of the tiny mountain after the most excruciating voluntary exercise i've ever done.
taroko.
matsu beach.
kaohsiung. that's a bike but parents regularly have their kids ride on the back of scooters like that too.
jamie and joyce in their taiwanese glamourshot getups. i think they're way cuter as normal girls.
leslie and alex on typhoon day 2008 when the dorm went crazy
carrot cake deliciousness
me at the bowling alley
i recommend that you go check out tastespotting. it's an amalgamation of different food blogs and they have really pretty pictures and if you click on them, it takes you to the blog entry with the recipe. it's also searchable. that's where i got the carrot cake recipe from.
since it's a bunch of people who love food and being creative with it, it's not your typical recipe site. the stuff is generally really well thought out and delicious.

bright young women, sick of swimmin'

i'm all blogged out. i'll tell you a story and then i'm going to spend some quality time with my book.

went to chinese this morning with jerry and asked bobo about the dentist. i have this little spot that hurts when i drink hot or cold stuff where i thought i needed my filling redone. so bobo gave me the info and i went to the dentist she takes the girls to, which happens to be right down the street from where i live.
me: ni hui shuo yingwen ma? (can you speak english?)
front desk lady: yes, how can i help you?
me: excellent! ..then i explain my issue. she says no problem. come back at 3.

i go back at 3 and the woman takes my health card and hands me a form, all in chinese. she asks if i'll understand her if she speaks chinese.. i say probably not.. so she just talks to me in english with her face literally 3 inches from my face the entire time. i'm not sure what the reasoning was, but i was trying my very hardest not to burst out laughing.

so she takes me to get xrayed which was also like something from candid camera. she had me put my chin on that little chin rest and then bite the plastic stick thing as she adjusted the x ray machine that rotates around your head. she must have moved it up, down, back and forth a good 15 times before she settled on a position. meanwhile i'm just standing there trying not to let go of the stick.

i could tell you a million things about the dentist but the highlight was that he spoke dental english. i told him about the spot that was bugging me and he couldn't find it but he kept saying 'your teeth have natural morphological differences' and then showed me how my teeth have bumps 'so [you] can chew your food' and i tried to politely explain that yes i know my teeth aren't supposed to be flat, but a spot is bugging me.
so he hands me a hand mirror and his poking tool and asks me to find it myself. i did, but he said it was nothing but the 'natural morphological contours'. better luck in july when i'm back in america.

whose-its and whats-its galore

gram and spanky's long awaited box arrived today. there were tons of stickers to add to my growing sticker collection, and a million soup mixes, and a warm long sleeve shirt, and bullion, and homemade peanut brittle anddd date nut bars which are my faaavorite of the christmas cookies.
i've been hoarding all of my stickers but with only 5 months left to go, i really need to start doling (is it doling or doleing, or is that a made up word?) them out.
i taught my first class 'this old man' which was reaaally impossible for them to grasp. this old man, he played one, he played knick knack on my thumb, with a knick knack paddy whack, give a dog a bone, this old man came rolling home. now explain that to a non-native english speaker.
it probably didn't help that i tried to reinforce the song by playing musical chairs with it. my coteacher and i just screamed it while the kids ran around like crazy people and hovered around empty chairs. we did have a whoooole lot of fun though.
my second class likes to repeat everything i say in exactly the same tone as me, and today they had to make sentences with vocab words and they added my name into every sentence and they thought they were sooo clever.
i've been regularly bringing my stickers to my little tiny baby classes but i clearly need to spread the love if i want to make a dent in the stockpile.
only the tin is from the bakery. the cookies are straight from gram's kitchen.
i brought mr. kuo and company some peanut brittle and mr. kuo took a bite and went running inside to bring out some taiwanese peanut brittle. it isn't the same at all though. it's almost all peanut with just enough candy to hold it together in a bar. i prefer grams.

mrs. chan gave me a plate of 2 different kinds of fried things and i took a bite and it was like.. gummy banana taffy/paste the consistency of really dried out and stretchy turkish delight, just fried in a won ton wrapper. and the other was the same taffy but rolled in cornflakeish stuff. i said xiang jiao? (babana?) and mrs. chan was all excited that i knew the word for banana and properly identified it.

breeze driftin' on by

let's do the bad news first.
jerry and i went to the tax office this morning and we fill out this big complicated form while this woman with a lazy eye barks directions at us in limited english, and i made the mistake of saying one word in chinese and then she switched to chinese for most of the rest of it. anyway she comes back with one thing for me to sign and a whole bunch of stuff for jerry and she just says 'you, no refund,' to me and then gives jerry all this stuff.

let's backtrack. we're taxed 20% of our income all year and then we file taxes at the end of the year. if you're in the country for at least 183 days of the calendar year, you get it all refunded. if you're not, you don't get any of it back.
i calculated my vacation so i'd be in the country exactly 183 days. what they didn't tell me is that the day you arrive in the country doesn't count. so i was really 181 in the taiwanese government's eyes. so i lost all of that money :(
i think it only amounts to like.. let's see. $606 US. which is less than i would have paid at home, i suppose. but i was/am still a little bummed.

all of my good news is chinese related.
-this morning jerry and i went to chinese and i really retained what we had learned a week ago before vacation. i spoke chinese all day to everyone and it was great. and joyce has no school for 2 weeks while she's on new year's vacation, so she sat in my lap for half the class and just hung out.

-in my first class, i played colors of the wind from pocahontas for them and had them write down the words they recognized. jennifer won with 22.
i never realized how tacky and overdone disney songs could seem if you hadn't seen the movies. my kids cracked up through all of the dramatic parts.

they wanted one more try so i played michael buble's version of 'feelin good' which is easier because he sings the words really clearly and relatively slowly, and jennifer won again, this time with 37.
i couldn't find any working links to that song on youtube, but you should go search for it. that's the best song. they thought all of the really big jazzy band parts were pretty funny.

-in my little kid class, they were learning 'koala, bear, giraffe, tiger, lion and panda' and i said english and they had to say chinese. after that, carol said 'ok megan will say chinese and you say english' and she remembered that i don't speak chinese when she saw the look of horror on my face. so she decided to go with it anyway and whispered the chinese in my ear and then i repeated it.

the thing is that chinese is hard enough at full volume, but it's nearly impossible in a whisper. so at one point i was trying to say 'bear' and ended up with 'comb' [same words, different tones] which sent my class into 3 minutes of unstoppable giggling. it was sooo funny.

-i stopped by the japanese restaurant on the way home. they were closed basically, but they still made me tempura shrimp and mushrooms to go and it was soo good. the chef asked me a bazillion things in chinese but i only caught about half of them.

i asked sara how to say 'full' when i'm at the gas station, and she filled me in. i need to think of a thank you for them staying open late.

we got new people in the dorm tonight. kaylie/caylie? and stephano, who introduced himself as 'steph' the second time around. she has purple hair and he wears skinny jeans. i only talked to them for 2 seconds so we'll see how it goes later in the week.

are you starting to change?

happy birthday spanky! i swear last time it was 83. how'd we get to 86 already?
our post office was closed all week so my card will be a liiiittle late.

it was a beautiful day to end our week-long break on. sunny and warm with the lantern festival going all through the day right in our backyard. i put a note on the whiteboard saying i'd be at the park with a blanket and headed to latini's to get a panini and bottle of water to go.
i was there for probably 15 minutes before chris and danielle showed up with some books and then noe was right behind them about 3 minutes after that. we all read for a while and then noe and i decided to check out the food stands.
as we were the only foreigners there, except for one 50ish guy with a taiwanese wife and kids, we were getting a lot of lingering stares. i think we were also pretty obvious because most of the taiwanese people were bundled up in winter gear in spite of the 80ish degree weather. i bought delicious strawberry 'juice' for about a dollar and hung out by myself for half an hour after everyone else left. i was watching some girls perform on this big stage until a group of 10 girls who were 50 feet or so away from me all started pointing at me in unison and coming closer to me.
it's so awkward when they all crowd around saying 'hello. how old are you? where are you from?' and then you just stand there awkwardly while they just look at you. i don't mind it as much when i'm not alone.

bobo called in the afternoon to see if i wanted to hang out with the girls for a while. jack picked me up and the 4 of us went to the public library down the street and picked out some books. i picked up one in the english section that was about a cowgirl and told jamie that she was just like me, so jamie decided we should add it to our basket.
(this is jamie and the turtle her class made). then we headed to bobo's apartment and played hide and seek for about an hour and then joyce and i sang while jamie played the piano. jamie sang 'siment night' with us. and joyce was all over the place with 'you are my sunshine', but she had the hand gestures down. she sang and did some hilarious interpretive dancing.
jamie's class also made this heart. bobo made curry stew for dinner and cabbage soup. i'm not sure that i've ever eaten anything that bobo has actually cooked. she frequently barrages you with snacks when you visit. it's mostly cut up fruit or slices of cheese or nuts and juice though.
after dinner, we headed to the lantern festival. we nabbed jerry at the dorm. he has a weakness for those girls, i think. it's almost impossible to pry him out of his little room, but when the two of them showed up at his door, he was no match.
this bull is probably 15 feet high, up on a big column in the middle of the park, and it lit up and changed colors and then a bunch of fireworks went off.
i've heard them over the last several nights, but this was the first time i got to see them. it was a little too loud for jamie.
so good last day of vacation! i have chinese early tomorrow morning so i'm going to hit my books and get in bed. newly washed sheets!