"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