After the Typhoon

So over the weekend, everyone here was really busy preparing for the typhoon (which passed south of Hualien, so we were safe). On Saturday, we were tying everything on the playground down and moving as much stuff inside as we could so that if there were strong winds, it wouldn't be blown all over the place. On Sunday night, I stayed with the family of one of the kids I tutor. They were kind enough to take me in so I wouldn't be alone and terrified if the typhoon hit our house. Actually the apartment Steph and I stay in probably wouldn't last long in a typhoon, but the concrete school below it could, so if I needed to, I could have moved down there. Truth be told, I wasn't really nervous, more curious and excited. I've never been in a typhoon. One of the elder missionaries told me that's exactly how he was during his first typhoon. He and his companion were staying in a house with tiny windows that they were always trying to look out of to get a glimpse outside.

Steph was staying with a family that she knows really well, so I locked up everything and turned off the gas before I left. Our gas tank is outdoors, so if the wind blew the tank away while the gas was on, we would lose all of it! Me and the teenager I tutor talked during the evening and swapped pictures from America and Malaysia, where she had been during a family vacation. The resort she stayed at was a "Club Med" resort, and trust me when I say it sounded relatively cheap and amazing. When i get back to the states, I'll have to convince my folks to take a vacation there.

So the typhoon came and went during the night. I slept like a rock, but I guess the wind and rain couldn't have been too terrible. Still, because it's been raining with few breaks, the fields all around the city are flooded. I can't imagine what that is going to do to the crops. What kind of things do the farmers around here have to do to recover from really big storms?

I took a long walk after I got back home and found a biking trail up by the mountains. The clouds looked so cool that I wanted to just keep walking and look at everything! But...lemme tell you about a couple of inconveniences I've experienced while being here:

1) No trash cans. Or at least, very few. In America, there's a trash can on just about every corner. Not so much, here. There are recycling bins around the 7-Elevens and Family Marts, but most of the time, you have to carry your trash around for ages until you find something.\

2) Where the heck are the bathrooms?! I was trying to find one during my walk, and I asked around (in Chinese, yay!) where I could find one, but there weren't any in the restaurants or 7-Elevens! What do the workers do if they have to go to the bathroom? Are there bathrooms in the Buddhist temples? The preschool has lots of bathrooms, but that's understandable since we can expect the kids to have bladders the size of walnuts!

Oh well, I'm still enjoying everything else there is to experience here. I took a couple videos of the waves when they were getting really high along the shoreline. I will try and post them here. There were guards everywhere and they had blocked off the paths to get to the ocean. These people don't fool around!

Sometimes when you walk around, you'll notice paw prints in the concrete. Taiwan has a ton of stray dogs. I think that some of them may have walked through the concrete after it was poured and was still fresh.

The clouds after the typhoon.
This dog started following me during my walk. It broke my heart because I wanted to pet it but it was wet and probably filthy. Poor thing. :(
Our rooftop got a little bit of flooding. It made it awkward to walk around the back so I could turn off the gas.

This bridge had all the signs of the zodiac. I found Aries and took a pic. Go rams!

I think this is a drainage ditch in case there's a landslide from the mountain. Or whatever you call something like that.

The headpiece for the trail I followed. Why does the character's head on top look so familiar?

I stopped at a Buddhist temple on the way back and got a few neat pics of the inside. They always have the best artwork!

Another temple, but I don't know if it's Buddhist. This is also a view of its back. The front view was more impressive, but I couldn't find a path from where I was at to get around to look at it. :(

To the Mountains

On Sunday, after church, Steph wanted to go up to the mountains. Never wanting to miss the chance to explore, I went with her and we took a path up near a Buddhist college, when things really started to change. If you go outside of the city, further than the gardens and fields surrounding the school, it's seriously another world. It's so green and the mountains are huge up close and covered in plants I've never seen before. We both thought it was like entering a fairy tale. The mountain village we passed through was even called Eden Paradise (spelled Pardaise on the sign).

We kept going up the path, getting more and more tired as we went, but the thought of how much fun that ride down was going to be kept us going. So we kept it up until we hit the end of the trail, which opened up to a spring where people were swimming. There was a tour that was going over a dam and further upwards, but I stopped at the spring where a group of people were barbecuing. They wanted to give us fish and shrimp (they taught me how to chew on places like the head and the legs so you got the flavor; you spit out the shell) they were catching. They had shrimp, mushrooms, pork, fish, fish, and more fish. Steph went on to explore where the diving group was going while I stayed behind to talk to the barbecuing people. They were all very friendly and it gave me some great practice speaking in Chinese. Unfortunately, they kept trying to give me Heineken Beer, saying that OMG Taiwan beer is the best beer in the world. I politely declined, explaining that my religion doesn't allow beer and they grudgingly accepted it.

After that, we decided to go home before it got dark. The ride down was extremely fun and it felt great because I was soaked in sweat from the long ride up.

Fast forward a few days to today and I have more to share. Across the hall from our apartments is another pair of rooms meant, I guess, for more teachers. One is used for school storage and the other is an empty room. The door to that room is always locked, but I was curious, so I tried to see if I could open a window and crawl in. It turns out I could. Inside was a big pile of pencil shavings, a pencil sharpener, a bag of pencils, English pamphlets for tutoring kids, and a bunch of skirt hangers in the closet. Figuring no one would miss them, I took the pencils, sharpener, and skirt hangers. I'm practically a pillager, but at least my skirts won't be wrinkled now.

Now I'm just sitting around, planning for tomorrow's lessons so I don't wake up feeling anxious like I usually do. I always have the grave expectation that I'm going to flop when I get into the classroom, that the kids won't pay attention and that the teachers will think I'm a waste of time. I think I might be jinxing myself. If anyone has a piece of advice on how to keep the attention of 3-5-yr.-olds, feel free to speak up. We have a field trip we are going on tomorrow to a nearby festival. That should be awesome.

There's a lightning storm going on outside, not overhead but off in the distance. It's weird because the sky right above us is clear. Oh well, it probably has to do with this tropical climate.

This is an orchard of either Longan or Lychee fruit. Steph wondered how people harvested the fruit. I'm pretty sure they just climb the trunks. They have to be strong enough to withstand the typhoons here, so I don't see why they wouldn't hold up the human body.

Magnificent view of the mountains. The further in you go, the higher they rise.
A lizard we encountered. If you can't see it, it just above the gray part. There's a yellow streak on its back.

Me with the woman I was talking to the most at the barbecue. I can't remember her name, but she was awesome.

This is the dam that the tour group and Stephanie were going over to explore further up.

Saturday Outing

This Tuesday will mark my two months of being in Taiwan. It's hard to believe it's been that long. The time oozes together eventually. I've learned a lot here, that's for sure. This week school starts back up at SIUE. I know because I still get their newsletters and emails inviting me to register for classes even though I'm graduated.

Between lesson plans, outings, and student evaluations, I haven't had much time to update. I want to get to bed a little earlier tonight, but I promised my mom I would try to update, so here are some pics from when I went out on Saturday. Steph had gone out to see Taroko Gorge with a family she knows (without me, hpmh!) so I took the day as a Sanity Day (in which you have one day to check up on life and do whatever you want). I biked down by the ocean and went to the store to pick up cleaning supplies and a few ingredients to make Longan/Dragon Eye fruit juice. We got a bunch of them from someone and I don't like the taste of them raw, so I'm hoping the juice will make them better.

I ate at a McDonald's because I was craving something American and fatty to clog up my veins. I've heard that in some Taiwanese McDonald's they serve a hamburger patty between two rice cakes. Sadly, I saw no such thing. I ordered a Mig Mac, fries, and a coke and loved every freakin' minute of it!

This is the entrance that Steph and I usually take to get to the ocean. This seems to be a night market. Unfortunately, I've never had the chance to explore it at night because it's way too far away from home for me to be biking around at night.

At a fruit stand I stopped by, they had characters carved into watermelons. I'm pretty sure these characters are "liang guo," which means "couple fruit." If anyone knows for sure, correct me if I'm wrong.
These characters are "hen tian," which means "very sweet."

And of course this can't be a blog of mine without a bunch of pictures of the ocean.

I saw a closed off, rusty bridge that some dogs were using as their hideout. When I whistled to get their attention, they got up and ran off, at which point I hastily took a picture of them. I expected more from a doggie gang.

And here we have some good, old-fashioned, abandoned slums that I saw while I was riding to the store. Not many of you know this, but one of my books-in-progress takes place in some Asian-style slums so I thought taking a picture would be good for research.

In a previous post, I mentioned a tower near the coast where people could hang out and have a picnic. Well, upon closer inspection of its pillars, I noticed markings and drawings that I hadn't before. Here are a few of them:

Yilan Trip Pt. 2

You know how irritated you get when you have a tune or song stuck in your head and you can't for the life of you remember what it is? That's how I've been feeling for the past several weeks with one song in particular. And I don't really have anyone in Taiwan that I could just sing it to and have them recognize it. I suppose I could sing it for Steph tomorrow and see if that helps. The software that has you sing into it so it can recognize and tell you the name of the song doesn't work for me. Apparently I sing too crappily.

So after the concert at the water park, we rushed out so we could get to the Luodong Night Market before the evening rush set in. It was about a half hour bike ride into Luodong from Zhongshan and when we finally got there, I was hungry. We split up and I went to many brightly lit areas and stores, so don't worry about my safety. I'm one of the hyper-paranoid types who would scream at the top of her lungs if there was an attacker. Besides, the place was packed, so there would be witnesses.

Anyway, one of the biggest lessons I've learned here is that you should never release me into a night market unsupervised if you don't want me to be dazzled by the sales and spend all my money. Everything here is so cheap that it's easy to be blinded by the 100 kwai sales (3-4 US dollars) for clothes and dirt cheap food. The only thing that reigned me in was the thought that I was somehow going to have to get all those bags home and I didn't want to burden anyone else with my crap, so I stopped after a while and wandered back towards where we were meeting up.

One thing I thought was funny happened when I was ordering food from a vendor who knew a bit of English and she started asking me if I wanted "paper" with my food. I had no idea what she was talking about or why I would want paper on my baked potato or whatever it was I was ordering. It wasn't until she held up a jar of pepper that I realized what she meant and corrected her. Apparently, this is a common mistake because Yu has had a hard time distinguishing between "paper" and "pepper" in American restaurants. English vowels are tough for the Chinese as Chinese tones are tough for us Americans.

Most of what I bought was exercise clothes and socks since I've recently started going to Tai Chi in the mornings (if I can drag myself out of bed anyways) and I wanted something comfortable to move in. By the time night fell, the streets were so crowded that I had to move with the crowd to avoid getting overwhelmed. So, I finally ducked out and made my way back.

Several street views of the night market.

Down this way there was a rock concert going on at the blue stage.
So many lights. @_@ At least there's a McDonald's to light the way even if I can't read the one million signs in Chinese.
In this picture, there is food on your left and a sexy lingerie store to the right of where I am standing. Yeah, that's all in good fun.

After that, all that was left was to go to the train station and go home. We got back at around 10 PM, just about time to go to bed.

Before I end this post, I want to say a few words about the night market that we have a couple blocks away from our apartment. It's a lot smaller than the Luodong night market or the one in Taipei, but it has really good food. I've made it my goal to try every stall there at least once, no matter how disgusting the food may sound. Most of it has been delicious so far. Also, our night market sells mostly food with a small arcade area and a stand that sells hair ties, unlike the Luodong market which was a low-scale mall. Maybe that's for the best; I won't be so tempted to spend all my money in one place this way.

This is a stand where you can pick and choose ingredients to put in a small basket that will then be cooked up. I haven't tried this particular place yet since when I go it usually has a huge line. :(

A very blurry picture of onions over fried squid balls. They are sweet and very good.
A view of one of the aisles of the night market at night. On a weekend night, it will be so crowded you won't be able to see the signs.

The cook making the squid balls.

This fruit stand is a favorite of Steph and mine. Their juice is always fresh and good. It's weird that they aren't more popular. They have samples out in front and everything. Oh well, shorter lines mean more for us.