My new room, and other surprises

The before and after pictures of my room, as promised. I did this with my bare hands and about $30USD:


I've been to the doctor here about my (stupidly) fractured elbow from a snowboarding accident, and he believes it is healing well from surgery. It's a bit early for physical therapy, and I don't think he wants me to do it in any case. Eek.

But I did manage to do some hiking in the mountains in between the nearly constant downpour of the rainy season. Last weekend Marc and I, and his friend WenPing, took a long bus-ride to JuMing Sculpture Museum way out in JinShan (on the other side of YangMing Shan). It wasn't raining, although it did take a very long time, and JuMing's work is really wonderful and kind of humorous:

From the Mosh Pit

Which is basically how the last few weeks have been, and how I expect the next few weeks to go. I'll be flying in soon, February 14th, and staying for just over 2 weeks, and if y'all would be so generous as to grace me with your presence, I've missed you. I'm in the process of stripping and repainting my next room, and I'll put up some before/after photos of that when I finish it and can take some after-photos. Until then, roughly my week is a school-based stock, with a spritz of applying for fellowships next year and some large blocks of manual labor to fix up my room. Plus I've been getting around to quite a few places, including the famed hot springs of Bei-Tou, the traditional market of Bei-pu, in XinZhu, and the New Year markets in Taipei. They're all brilliantly exciting and all thanks to Erica, who first took me to Qing Jing Farm, and is as of today making her way to LA (and later to Detroit for snowboarding).







When we went to QingJing Farm, we stopped for a night in Taizhong, and then proceeded on to the farm, where we stayed in a really lovely B&B, and then proceeded to PuLi, XinZhu, and home on to Taipei. It was in XinZhu that I first caught a glimpse of the delicate young ladies who sell beetel nuts, which is a long story that deserves further explication.

From Christmas

These lovely photos were graciously provided by one of Wu-Ling's friends, and I wanted to make sure the parents noticed how obediently I read the word of God in Chinese.

"Merry Christmas" from the God of Fortune

This weekend has been the strangest Christmas of my life. For one thing, there was hardly any Jesus involved.

On Friday the school had this big outdoor Christmas party for the students, with lots of free food. There was a show, with karaoke, and Santa passed out candy while the Chinese God of Fortune passed out red envelopes full of... butterscotch. There was also a raffle with some really good prizes including an ipod and a new bike. One of my Russian friends won a stereo, which had him excited all night and turned out to be a chick-magnet. Saturday evening I went with Wu-Ling to a church on the fourth floor of an office building. This was an interesting service, entirely in Chinese, and it was nice to go and meet the 35 members of this tiny church.

Christmas Eve, Margot took me to the meditation center's Christmas party and we did some qi-gong, meditated, ate turkey and watched "It's a Wonderful Life." This was a little surreal, although fun and delicious. And someone made hummus. And then of course on Christmas night I had some people over for a big dinner, which is still stuffing my fridge. We played games and watched a Christmas movie, and generally enjoyed ourselves.

But the best is going to be next weekend, when I go to Qing-jing and Sun-Moon Lake with my new Taiwanese friend Erica on a roadtrip. More details to come, of course....

Boycott Taiwanese strawberry farms!

I went up into the mounatins this Sunday after moving, because my friend wanted to check out some strawberry farms. He thought he saw an ad online that said if you go to this farm, you pay 50NT (US1.30) and you can walk out with as much fruit as you can carry. He was mistaken.

The mountains were beautiful. The air is wild and there are enormous tropical butterflies and gigantic scary spiders bigger than your hand. We walked into this farm, and caught a glimpse of the strawberry patch. It's in a big greenhouse. And that's only the beginning of how silly it is: first you get a box about as big as your hands, about 1.5 pounds of strawberries will fit in, and to fill this box will cost 10 US dollars. Then you enter the greenhouse which is filled with small rows covered in gray plastic, with holes where the strawberry plants pop through. You take the tiny scissors given to you and snip the strawberries off at the stem, placing them carefully in a box. You may not "try" them. No eating of strawberries allowed in the strawberry greenhouse.

We didn't do this. It was too ridiculous.

We instead went into the clementine orchards, where you can eat as many clementines as you want, and if you don't want to pay...OK! But the clementines are cheap. There's a stream running through the orchard full of young salmon making their slow way to the ocean, and the water is so clear it's like looking into a fish bowl. The mountain was covered in a misty rain, and from the orchard you could see mountains upon mountains, shadowy in the distance. So it was good to come, anyways, but I don't recommend the strawberries.

My new digs

While I was in Jin Hua with Michael I decided I was suffering bad energy in the house I have with Wang Lao-shi, so I had to move.

Jin Hua was great! Everything was cheap and Michael's house was huge and very very clean. We ate these fancy little pancakes that have spicy meat inside from a couple on the way to the grocery store for lunch and snacks. And we invited over friends for some kind of Thanksgiving dinner, with chicken drumsticks, California Zinfandel, broccoli, pomegranates, a big pot of mashed potatoes, homemade applesauce, and some expensive stuffing I brought from the 101 building. It felt great to eat these things again for the first time, it kind of slid down comfortably into my stomach.

So the first day I got back to Taipei, I was absolutely convinced that I must move. I called a couple people I saw in ads online, and set up some appointments with them. They were both friendly, and both houses were colorful and warm, but the one I'm moving into has two great advantages: a. it's practically IN the Shi-Da night market, and b. It's in the family! I live with an engaged gay couple that, if I'm lucky, fix me Aveda tea and cinnamon rolls. I love them.

This is a picture of my new house. Notice that the living room is orange. This was a selling point to me. Others include: the kitchen is big and clean, the balcony has a view of 101 (sort of), my bedroom is green, there's an espresso maker and a toaster oven, a clean bathroom with unlimited hot water, no bugs, friendly rooomates that I can have long conversations with in squashy chairs. And what a relief that was to find

YangMing Shan, and other adventures

Because we had skipped a class over Mid-Autumn Festival, Saturday we went on a field trip to the zoo. I have already been to the zoo, but it was pouring rain at the time, and crowded with thousands of people. This time was better, and after that we went to XimenDing for Korean barbeque. This was an incredible restaurant, with tons of raw meat and fish that you get to roast yourself in a pit full of coals on your table. These kinds of kaorou restaurants are pretty common, but this one was really great because it had a buffet with unlimited Haagen-Daz ice cream! We roasted manically for four hours, and then went bowling.

Bowling was not my idea. I said, "Bowling is for old people," and Sasha said, "You're such a small small child." So I bowled, and it felt nice and familiar, with the same smell of smoke and sugary beverages, and the same music.

The next day I had to wake up to go to Yang Ming mountain. This is one of the tallest mountains in the Taipei area, and it really is beautiful. The mountains here are covered in tall grasses, taller than people, and the winds from the ocean hit their crests. The forests are tangled like jungles, and full of enormous snakes and fancy birds, and the trails are stone stairs.

We hiked over 7-Star mountain to a special hot spring called the Cold Water Pit. It wasn't really cold, just not scalding. The water was a sulphuric milky white, and seperated by sex because it was a naked bath. At first I was a little nervous because the bath was full of these old women speaking in Taiwanese and watching me settle in. But a woman with sparkly red jewelry smiled at me, and after I relaxed this hot spring turned my body into jelly.

Later on the way back, we would go to a small restaurant near the MRT station, and it would be surprisingly delicious for a Taiwanese attempt at Italian pasta. And over the balcony you might catch snatches of girls giggling, but on the bus ride back to the city the best part was the deep blue of the mountain's twilight.