the touch of your hand

loooordy lordy i do not know how to begin this story. we'll begin with a coincidence while i think about how i want to word the rest. twbf and i were chatting on skype this morning and he said 'be careful' when we said goodbye and i said 'be careful of what? i'm just going to lunch'.

..but when i was parking my scooter and moving it over a little bit so it fit better in the spot, my foot slipped up underneath it and i burnt the top of my ankle. so today when he met me in the train station and i was holding a giant bag of ice on my foot, he said 'are you the girl who said "i don't need to be careful?"'
so then we made our way into taipei via a train, 2 MRT lines and a bus and we got to a giant mall/movie complex. we shared a rose milk tea, i taught him a fun pen and paper game, and we people-watched for 2 hours until it was time to watch angels & demons.

when we went upstairs to the movie theater part of the mall, there was a big open deck area with a bubble machine blowing a cloud of bubbles everywhere and cheesy love songs (think backstreet boys) blasting over the speakers. i turned around and there was a giiiiant, multicolored ferris wheel. it was really beautiful up there. i felt right at home when 'when you say nothing at all' by kenny rogers (?) came on.
(this is the shirt i bought yesterday. the sleeves are the cutest part, i'll show you some other time).

so we get out of the movie and get in a little glassed-in car on the ferris wheel, we're about half way up and i'm getting crazy butterflies watching taipei 101 get smaller and smaller in the distance. then he asks me to close my eyes for a minute..

when i open them, a card is in my lap and he's literally down on one knee with a little black box in hand. inside was a sparkly necklace, and he asked me to be his girlfriend and said he loved me.. i explained that i wouldn't exactly call it 'love' just yet, and i'd happily be his girlfriend for a month.. but not when i go home.
he said really, you don't think you'll ever come back? and i said no.. i really don't think so. so i guess now i'm a twgf.

when we were sitting on the train going home, we were spelling words in the palm of our hands and this old couple across from us was whispering about us.
i was hoping i could just add his necklace charm onto the one i wear every day.. but i don't think the styles really mesh. it's hard to tell in this picture, but the one he bought seems a lot fancier than my little silver seasons charm.

so that was my day.

hotel california is a wedding song now?

busy day today. 2 classes in the morning and then right when i got home, tess and i left for wu fen pu road in taipei which is famous for being the place where the night market vendors buy their clothes from. it's interesting because they have samples hung up all along the walls and then in the middle it's just rows and rows of clothes wrapped in plastic. so you bring them the sample and they go get you one in the plastic wrap.
i bought a shirt for $3 and a dress for $10. love taiwan.

dena goes to this bakery called love cake and she always brings back delicious garlic bread, so today i set off to find it. turns out they have two locations. i brought home ham and cheese bread..
and deliiiicious garlic bread.
dan and i went to justin's wedding reception tonight. justin was a chef at latini's for a long long time. he is so sweet and fun and friendly, i was so happy to be invited. the reception was really interesting.

highlights..
before you walk in the door to the ballroom, they took your red envelope, opened it, counted and recorded how much money you gave the couple in this giant weddingy ledger. there are no wedding gifts, everyone just gives cash.
they put as at the table with justin's friends from canada, where he went to school for 10 years. they were all taiwanese but spoke english fluently. i sat beside a really nice couple who live in taipei. the girl was a merchandise buyer for a clothing company in taipei for a long time. she helped me figure out how to eat the food and explained the ins and outs of the reception.
when i sat down, one of the servers came over with a knife and fork and asked if i needed them. i said no thank you, chop sticks will be fine. then i flung the million-course dinner all over myself and others and dropped at least half of what i tried to pick up. i was so embarrassed because i've really mastered wooden chopsticks, but those slippery plastic ones are a whole different thing.

we had..
a tray of various meats
the most ridiculously difficult prawns ever. two people had to help me with those.
shrimp noodle soup
pork ribs
an unidentifiable animal-innard dish
sticky rice
a whole fish, who spent most of the evening staring at me
black chicken soup, which i now love. look how far i've come.
almond milk soup, totally yummy.
some kind of sweet potato pastry things
fresh fruit
the best part of the entire night was the light saber interlude. the lights went off, blacklights came on, and the female servers processed in with tealights in white gloved hands and stopped intermittently in the aisle. then, two male servers came in with blue light sabers and walked around the tables a few times.
meanwhile, a whole orchestral overture is booming in surround sound. thennn, two more guys with red light sabers came in and walked around. then they all left and the lights came back on and we went back to eating dinner. no explanation given.
coolest taiwan wedding factoid:
the couple takes these elaborate wedding pictures and the bride gets to wear all sorts of pretty outfits in them. none of them are her actual wedding dress, they're just costumes. but what i learned tonight was that the 4 dresses she wore tonight were also borrowed from the photographer. they cut them down to fit her and then when she's done with them, they rip the seams and make them fit the next girl.

at first i thought it was kind of sad not to have your own wedding dress.. but after seeing her in a beautiful sparkely white dress, then a beautiful silver sequined dress, then a pretty purple organza dress, i think i'm on board with the bazillion dresses thing. no one ever wears their wedding dress again. why not wear 10 for the price of 1?
time for bed.

be sure and take lots of pictures

do you think in george strait's song, 'run', when he says take a truck, take a chevy.. that chevy paid for it to be in there? doesn't he do chevy commercials? am i losing it? anyway it makes me laugh to listen to country in taiwan. it's one of the weirder juxtapositions i can think of.
dena had a papaya yesterday and offered me a piece and i reluctantly tried it.. the last time i had papaya was in 11th grade AP bio and it smelled/tasted exactly like throw up.. so i've stayed away from it since then. but the piece dena gave me tasted just like a lily smells. so today i bought one of my own.
it's kind of a test of wills because the fruit stand that opens early is way in the back of the market and you have to walk by the slaughtering station in the middle to get to it. i bought a mango and the papaya and the old, old woman who works there gave me a teeny little plum to try.
i'm a convert. papaya is delicious.
both classes were really fun tonight. i'm slowly bonding with this girl cindy in my first class. she has a crush on this kid tiger, who sits right up front by where i stand.. so she has no choice but to flirt with him in front of me, so we have a secret understanding. sometimes i pair them up during games and stuff and we always wink.

tonight she had her MP3 player and gave me one ear phone during break time so i could listen to her songs. she and i always end up at the drink place at the same time before class so we speak chinese while we wait. it's interesting how it opens up a new world for them when they can say things to you in their own language.

whales of tales

one of the girls who lives here, katie, has a blog too and it's very cute.
my favorite post is about the crazy things she's seen on scooters..

1. A family of four
2. Someone drinking a soda while driving
3. A golden retriever
4. Babies
5. A man with 3 massive propane tanks
6. A young child sitting on the back with no helmet, no shoes, and not holding on
7. Someone texting
8. A person with crutches
9. A big macho guy with a bit of a scowl on his face riding a pink hello kitty vino
10. A person riding with their dog and the dog was on his hind legs with his front legs up on the handle bars.
11. 2 people riding and the person on the back was holding an umbrella to protect them from the rain while driving through the market
12. A scooter that had a plastic grass floor added on.
13. Another dog one — 2 people on the scooter. One dog on the floorboard. Another dog running alongside on a leash. They were beagles.
14. A woman sitting on the back of a scooter not holding on riding side saddle (because she was wearing a skirt, of course).

time to sink way into the blue

today is a very random picture day of leftover things from weeks gone by, for lack of anything better. this is a passionfruit smoothie from coco. loooove their smoothies. lemon, mango and passionfruit are to die for, but their 'california fruit' smoothie is disgusting. pineapple jelly bu hao.
so i today found out that one of my exes, if you can call him that.. we dated for a month, is engaged. it's weird to be the last person someone dated before they got engaged. so close and yet so far.
that bread looks so yummy but it's really that yucky taiwanese bakery bread. they use so much sugar that the bread is unrecognizable. it isn't even the right texture on the inside. it's like white sandwich bread that's all airy and soft. you've been in taiwan too long when a) you start thinking shirts like this are cute and b) that theyre so cute, you're moved to buy them. tess and i are going shopping on saturday afternoon in taipei and i plan to buy a MILLION flowy cotton tops/dresses to take home.
(you know i've gone silly when i noticed my bag of nuts & things had spilled all over the inside of my bag when i was already running late for school and i felt the urgent need to photograph it before i stuffed it in my mouth and ran downstairs).

nothing interesting to report except that one of my kids tonight, ryan, keeps coming up to me with his giant dictionary and asking me how to pronounce words. last week it was 'kangaroo rat'.. this week is 'chimera'.

p.s. raise your hand if you think the tacky pillow ruined this otherwise cute bedroom
[photo from house beautiful].

through times of victory or defeat

it is really hard to take pictures of kite flying with a camera that lacks a good zoom lens. here's the best dena and i could do today.

i sort of felt like i was walking a dog except that the 'dog' in this case was getting no pleasure out of it.. it was just me holding onto a string. i sat on my blanket studying chinese while the kite just did its thing.
this shirt is one of my favorite taiwanese finds.
tonight my jerk class had the QA 'who do you look up to? why?' and one of the kids who can speak almost zero english, said i was graceful, which i thought was uncharacteristically nice. we had a good time in there today. chinese abounded, but they weren't being hateful.
..although they were talking about boobs a lot which was kind of awkward. they were picking on me and i told them to check in after high school and we could compare notes then. middle schoolers.

twbf and i went bowling tonight. i won 2 out of 3.. but he won't swim in the ocean. i'm supposed to think of a consolation prize. we were a liiiittle more touchy tonight.

when we were saying goodbye, outside of 7-11 with what seemed like hundreds of people walking by/waiting for the light to change sitting on their scooters, he took my hand and said he wanted to tell me something and ended up stumbling over 'i just want to say.. i love you. i mean! i like you.. i like you very much.'
it was adorable/awkward/sweet. so we'll see. the saga continues.

other things to be excited about..
these saltwater sandals that i just found on my blog crush of the week.
[photo from katiedid.squarespace.com]
a pair in yellow is on its way to my house right now. those red ones are calling my name too..

leave it up to me

remember last week when i was a bad teacher and forgot that i had promised one of my kids i would get her something for her birthday? today we got that all ironed out. it's amazing what you can find at the stationery store.
i was just going to buy this cool whiteout tape with little pieces of clothing printed on it, but then i saw all of these pretty beads and they were just calling to me.
two hours later, i had a card and two matching bracelets- one for her and one for me. it's funny how you would do anything for the kids you really have a connection with. the string kept unwinding and it didn't want to go through the teeny little beads, but i was happy to forge ahead because i knew lisa would really like it.

it was really cute, she came up to me at the beginning of class to recite a lesson but she kind of lingered like she was wondering if i had anything for her.. so i pretended like i was showing her something in her book and slipped her the presents and she quietly went back to her desk to check them out and flashed me a big grin.
twbf and i had lunch today and we decided to go bowling tomorrow night. tried to get him to agree to swim in the ocean if i win. i think i pushed a little too far for someone who just learned to swim in a pool.
i'm sad to report that upon leaving, there was a hand shake. can you imagine? i was so turned around that i didn't know how to react. we laughed though. whooo knows.
alex guppy and i went to dinner and dessert tonight. i feel likewe haven't chatted in such a long time. we had the perfect stack of hot brownies with vanilla ice cream and pecans at TGIFridays. he taught me a couple of things about my/our nikon that i'm anxious to try out tomorrow.
allen gave me a bunch of pictures on a CD today. this is one of our only ones "inside" the museum. ..can you tell i'm kind of on a yellow and bright blue kick?

this is at the buddhist temple last weekend. i don't think it's possible to flip a video on its side. i tried everything.