Happy (late) Turkey Day! 30 November 2009

I’m happy to say that my Thanksgiving festivities were a success. A bunch of people came over and brought stuff to eat so we had a bit of a feast. Turkey, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, twice baked potatoes (with lots of deliciousness inside), corn, salad, broccoli and bean sprouts, Indian curry…yum, yum! We don’t have an oven, so I ordered a turkey from a big hotel down the road. It came wrapped up like a present in a basket with a baguette, gravy, cranberry sauce, and a bottle of wine. No pictures yet because the internet is running too slow to load them, but I’ll put them up sometime soon.

There will also be pictures of my new apartment! Woohoo! I’m still pretty excited about the fact that there is more than one room here. I’m even more excited that we’ve decorated for Christmas! Even though we didn’t have our Thanksgiving shindig until Saturday, we still decorated for Christmas on Friday. The thing is that not everyone celebrates Thanksgiving. Pretty much just Americans unless, of course, you convince a bunch of other English speaking foreigners in Taiwan to eat lots of food with you.

Anyhow, we have a small Christmas tree and other various decorations. Plus my mom sent an even smaller tree and a wall sticker tree in the past few days. It’s all very exciting. This is the time I figured I’d get the most homesick but I think it would be worse if Christmas was kind of ignored here. Lucky for me, Christmas seems to be fully embraced. There are mass quantities of cards, decorations, (fake) trees, tinsel, candies, etc readily available all over the place. It’s quite nice, in my opinion.

On that note, I’m off to bed! I hope you all have a lovely week!

Take Four… 25 November 2009

Well, I’ve done it again. I’ve packed up all my stuff for the fourth time since June and moved to my third room in Taiwan. This time I’m in a full size, furnished apartment that comes complete with two roommates! They’re Canadian and they’re super nice. So nice, in fact, that they’re going along with American Thanksgiving and we’re having a feast on Saturday. Surprisingly enough, Taiwan does not celebrate American Thanksgiving so we’ll all be working on Thursday and Friday while you guys eat and shop. It’s alright, though. You can’t expect to get the same holidays that you get at home when you move to another country.

On that note, Happy Turkey Day! I hope you all eat way too much food and take some glorious naps!

Uh-Oh! 21 November 2009

So, you know how I’m still super excited about my scooter? Well, imagine my shock when I left for work on Tuesday and it wouldn’t start. Ack! This was definitely no bueno. Luckily, I have a wonderful landlady who offered to take me to work (she speaks English very well, too…it’s pretty awesome and overall convenient for me). Anyhow, I told the girls at the Kindergarten that my scooter wasn’t starting and they told the girl I bought it from who works at the Language School (for older kids). She was really great about it- she and her husband came over during lunch to try and start it, but when it still wouldn’t work, they bought a new battery for me!

The mechanic drove to my place to pick up the scooter. When scooters are broken they do this funny sort of “towing” thing, except it’s more like pushing. A working scooter drives behind the broken one and the person on the working scooter kicks/pushes the broken one with their feet. I wouldn’t want to be in charge of it, but it works. Anyhow, my scooter was pushed off to the shop and I had it back in working condition in about 15 minutes! I can’t even get my oil changed that fast back home and there’s certainly not any pick-up or drop-off services. I was impressed. Plus, I was able to make it to Chinese class that afternoon!

On Wednesday evenings, I teach the Kindergarten teachers English. Sometimes this is fun and sometimes it makes me hate everyone. Last Wednesday was horrible for me, so I was really dreading this Wednesday’s class. Luckily, it went pretty well and at the end of it Angela, who is the teacher of one of my Kindergarten classes, told me that they had had a potluck in her class that afternoon and started throwing leftover food at me. Not literally throwing, but I went home with a big bag of samples from the potluck.

I’m not sure how I feel about the sticky-rice/chicken “muffin.” There was something kind of gooey in it. I don’t know if I’ve ever had chestnuts before, but they were pretty tasty. I sort of like red bean cake, but you can’t go into it thinking that it’s like actual cake, on account of it being made from beans.

Today my Puppy Class (they’re my youngest class- I think they’re 4 or 5) had a Western meal for lunch. I was in charge of teaching them how to use a fork and knife, eat a roll properly, and not slurp their soup directly from the bowl, which is fairly common practice here.

Corn soup, chicken, broccoli, and french fries

They are so adorable. I’m sure I wasn’t cutting up my own chicken when I was that young and considering that they usually use spoons or chopsticks, they did really well. There were a few spills and a few kids needed help cutting their food, but overall it was pretty successful.

I Can Read!…(sort of) 16 November 2009

I feel like I have to apologize profusely. I’m sure I’ve kept you in anticipation of what my scooter looks like for far too long. You’ve probably been coming here every day, just hoping that I’ve added pictures and you can see my sweet new ride. Well, wait no more! I’ve finally gotten around to taking pictures, loading them onto my computer, and adding a new post.

So here’s an exciting Renee-is-trying-to-learn-Chinese story. Well, it’s exciting for me, at least, so now you get to know all about it. I’m trying to learn how to read the Chinese characters and not Pinyin (which is Chinese written with English letters. It’s easier to read, but not a lot is written in Pinyin aside from street signs. I don’t know how much Chinese I’ll be able to learn, but it seems more useful to know how to read the characters.) Anyhow, this past week I was actually able to read a few short and very basic conversations in Chinese! And I can recognize a couple characters on my TV’s subtitles! Granted, I’m not sure how much of the conversations I just memorized versus how many of the characters I actually know, but it’s a step in the right direction.

On Saturday, some friends and I moseyed on over to the night market. The night market is full of just about anything you might want. Household necessities, clothes for you, clothes for your dog, all sorts of food, and a ton of people. I went for the tame Mongolian BBQ and passed up on the grilled squid, fried squid, and stinky tofu that I got last time. I also skipped on the dried fish scales, dried squid, quail eggs, and who knows how much other stuff that I am unable to identify or remember, but will make an effort to try at a later date.

I spent Sunday afternoon in Taichung looking at computers with a couple friends. Taichung is an hour and a half train ride north of Chiayi. I didn’t see a whole lot outside of computer stores (Of course, I now want a miniature laptop even though my computer works perfectly fine. Effective advertising? Oh well, I’ll get over it.) However, Taichung has a Chili’s, so went there for dinner. The only western restaurants in Chiayi (that I know of, at least) are McDonalds, Subway, and KFC, so Chili’s was a fun treat. Especially when it was followed by ColdStone! Yum!

Blue Skies and Mountains 10 November 2009

Why, hello again!

I have to start by reminding you guys of how smoggy it is here. It’s pretty intense. It’s smoggy enough that you can trick yourself into thinking it’s just cloudy or that the sky itself is really really pale all the time. Then there are days like today. Today I walked outside (and got on my new scooter!) and was reminded that there is indeed a mountain range not too far away. It’s so pretty! I wish it was visible more often. Today’s only the second day I’ve been able to see it. You can see them if you look down the street I live on, but there was a really good view on my way to Chinese class today.

Yesterday I got my very own scooter! How exciting! Now I can go to places that are uphill all on my own! Granted, it’s more fun to go places with people but it’s still nice to be able to go wherever I want whenever I want. And it’s wonderful to not have to ride my bike around in the warm weather anymore.

Now I’ll go back and tell you about my weekend adventures, but I’m afraid I don’t have too many to tell for the past weekend. I ended up not going to cricket and taking lots of naps on Saturday. It was quite lovely. I did meet up with a bunch of people who were going out after the cricket tournaments, so I did feel fairly social for the day.

Sunday wasn’t too exciting either. I went out to lunch with a friend and ordered a pizza.

You may notice something odd about this pizza. That’s right. There’s a cherry right in the middle. How odd. I’m sure the Chinese think that American Chinese food is a bit odd, too.

Other than that I spent the day helping my friend get ready to decorate her classroom. I was in charge of making jungle-like leaves. I’m happy to inform you that I can now cut out jungle leaves like no one else.

I made the mistake of looking at a friend-of-a-friend’s pictures from their 5 month journey around Southeast Asia. Guess who thinks she has to go to China, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Australia before she leaves? I’m going to see if I can work in a trip at the end of my contract. (Sorry Mom, Dad, and anyone else who misses me terribly. This may mean I’ll be gone a little bit more than a year. But only by a few weeks! Promise!)