tao yen

went to the zoo today! it was just cool enough to be bearable walking around outside from 3-5. guess what it costs to go to the zoo. [that's one of the dresses i bought in song shan yesterday. it's watermelon chic and it was $10.. who needs dresses?]
SIXTY NT. that's two dollars. do you know how much it is to go to the san diego zoo these days? $35. although, we grew up in san diego so we went to the zoo/wild animal park quite a few times, and it's a much better zoo. the animals are in giant enclosures or on this big rolling savannah. at the taipei zoo, they're in teeny little cages that are just painted concrete with some rocks.
but look how close they let you get to the pandas!
allen took all of these pictures with his camera phone so i'm not going to barrage you with lots of slightly blurry animal photos, but this was our favorite. a llama that had just passed out in the full sun while all of the others cowered in the shade.

after the zoo, we went back to our fav shaved ice place in ximending to conquer the boat ice.
that thing is not messing around. it's mango and strawberry ice cream on top of a bazillion cut up strawberries, kiwi and mango, on top of shaved ice, on top of [what else but] pearls.
this is the halfway point. doing well.
this is when i realized there were pearls in the bottom. kind of creepy digging around for strawberries and coming up with little black circles.

success! i don't know if you can see how blue my lips were at that point.. but i was freezing.

this evening when i came home, there was a passionfruit green tea hanging on my doorknob. i can't figure out who it was. mystery..

p.s. i added a link to jerry's new brainchild, taiwan english. it's on its way to becoming the most comprehensive taiwan teachers guide out there. i'm writing a bunch of stuff for it in the next couple of days, in time for jimmie's arrival on friday! getting excited.

watch the speech.

man it was nice not to wake up at 7:15 this morning for class! what a nice saturday.
this afternoon tess, bobo and i went to song shan to hit up the cheap clothing shops. we found a lot of brightly colored stuff this time thanks to bobo. apparently last time tess and i went, the street we went down was mostly clothes from korea which are all cream, dusty pink and gray.
i found a couple of dresses and a top i couldn't live without. i'll show you pictures after i've washed them in our newww washer. our old one was dying a slow death, so now we have a new one with chinese buttons. one of the secretaries labeled it in english this evening.
after shopping, i went over to bobo's because i haven't seen the girls in weeks and weeks. joyce's hair is longer every time i see her. we colored up a storm and played about 20 rounds of hide and seek.
when we couldn't take any more hide and seek, we headed for the big park. now every time we go, the first thing they want to do is cartwheel. people always watch us play.

this evening i went to this place called tina coffee. all of the teachers have been going there lately because they have a sandwich/coffee or tea deal for $150. i brought my chinese homework/flashcards and camped out at the counter for 2 hours tonight.
[you have to click to enlarge that pic to fully appreciate how adorable joyce is. i would leave all of my possessions here in order to fit her in my suit case if i didn't think she'd get all banged up in the cargo area.]
one of the women working there helped me order something, since the menu was all in chinese, and we chatted for a long time. i think i might become a regular there in my last month.
tomorrow i'm headed to the zoo with allen and i'm all excited because i get to practice the zoo animals.

the sun-sweet berries of the earth

i haven't done so well with pictures this week. alex guppy invited me to be a part of a group he's forming where we have a new photo assignment every 2 weeks. this weeks theme is 'an object out of its element'. i guess right now there are only 3 of us. two in taiwan and one in paris.
it's just for fun but if you want to submit something, just email (this means you, david chu).

well tonight i went to bobo's movie night because my early morning classes were canceled! and serena goes back to america on sunday so it's likely the last time i'll see her.
it always makes me feel a little heartsick when people leave. i can't believe we've already been here for a year! it's bizarre to think back to this time last year and how the dynamics in the dorm have changed since then. but being an english teacher abroad reminds you, more often than most situations would, that things are always changing and you can't live in the past.

things to love about taiwan today..
-a bundle of lychees, 2 mangoes and a bag of gingery plums for $5 and the continuation of my new fruit women friendship. i swear every time i go there, there are more butchering stands along the path to the fruit way at the back
-my 3rd favorite tea shop lady was wearing her work polo with a gold sequined, multi-tiered skirt, leggings and boots
-bobo's nighttime security guard, michael, who i haven't seen in months and his unabashed hitting on every foreign girl in sight

p.s. anthropologie did its fashion shoot for the catalog in austin this time and they wrote about it on design crisis. love that blog.

come again some other day

the rain woke me up last night because it was banging so hard on the air conditioner sticking halfway out my window, and it hasn't stopped raining since then. there's something really relaxing and cozy about a good rainy day though. and teaching my jr. high class with all of those open windows was pretty nice. larry had a bag of chocolate with pop rocks in the middle and i probably ate 10 of them while i was teaching today.

this week is playdough week in all of my classes and we've been spelling, shaping and throwing it. it's amazing how i've given each table two colors to work with and they've resisted the urge to swirl the colors because they have such respect for teachers and other people's belongings.

i'm excited tonight because frank, one of my biggest trouble makers, was doing really really well in class. he was answering questions and he was actually making the right things out of playdough. we're making progress. maybe it was because alex was stealing the troublemakers spotlight. he was cackling like a crazed witch the entire class. boys.

speaking of troublemakin boys, allen and i were saying goodnight outside of the dorm after we had tea tonight at the coffee shop, and josh was on the balcony with his guitar and started to serenade us.. it went something like megan and her boyfriendddd saying goodnightttt in the rain under some umbrellas, i love youuuu, i love youuuu.

candy consumption

taking a break from the blog tonight to watch brian williams' report on life inside the white house from last night. they're processing applications to the internships this month, so keep your fingers crossed for me! office of presidential correspondence.. here i come?

p.s. here are my pictures of the philippines

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.

philippines days 4 and 5

pictures! this is all from day 4 when we went to this place called treetop adventure and ziplined through the rain forest while sitting in chairs. it was awesome. this platform was up 50 or so feet in the trees and from there, you go on a whole zipline course.
the wait for the zipline was 2 hours so we did a 'jungle survival' course first with this nice man who taught us lots of useful things like..
how to make a fire using bamboo and a sharp knife:

how to be manly men in the rain forest:
how to glow like an angel due to a foggy lens in front of a giiiiant tree:
the trees can do it too.
i couldn't figure out a good way to photograph the torrential rain. it rained like we were in the middle of a typhoon for an hour or so, including the time we were on the zip line.
josh and steve have all of the pictures from when we were actually doing it since my camera isn't waterproof enough or small enough to take with me on stuff like that. hopefully i can get those pictures in the next couple of weeks.. but both of them are notorious for not ever uploading stuff.

steve did really well for being afraid of heights. it was creepy because you had a clip on your harness that they'd clip onto the fence somewhere.. but before you sat in your chair, you weren't clipped to anything while standing on a wet, metal, downsloping platform with a hundred-foot or more drop off.
we took a 4 hour bus back to manila and i was sitting next to this really fantastic philipino girl, ivy, who spoke fluent english. she told the bus driver where we wanted to get off the bus and then she somehow arranged it so there was a taxi to pick us up right when we got off. it was nice to chat with her during the ride and we both learned a little about the other's country.

we had heard that manila could be pretty sketchy and i read a million horrific hotel reviews (mice! cockroaches! worms coming out of shower drains! bedbugs.), but the imperial palace suites hotel was wonderful. for $100US or so, we had 2 beds, a real bath room and little living room area. the neighborhood wasn't scary at all and we had french food for dinner.

this early afternoon we hopped on a plane to come home. the guy sitting ahead of josh on our flight had the flu so they more or less made us put on face masks and they took our contact info so they can let us know if the guy turns out to have swine flu.
the man sitting next to me was flying to hawaii with his family and he wasn't happy at all about the mask situation. he felt weird and he didn't want to put it on his baby but the flight attendant was really adamant. i tried to explain that it's just an asian thing.. but he couldn't get over it.

i wish i had a picture of the look on my kids' faces when i told them i was in the philippines this morning. i think it blew their minds. i was so happy to see them. i chased everyone around in my little kid class to hug them, which has become our tradition in there, and scott and jerry kept lingering around me so i'd catch them.

tonight we went to dinner with tess' parents at the thai place. they were super friendly and tess-y. they both work in the airline industry so their family has traveled all around the world. i was surprised when tess didn't go stay with them in the hotel for their last night in town and she isn't going to go with them to the airport tomorrow. it would be nice to be so independent. i know i'd be at the airport until they went to the gate at the very least.