flower roots.

today was a hilarious lesson in english/chinese communication.
exhibit a: i was taking the bus on the second leg from the middle of downtown taoyuan to a town called Dar Chu and i kept letting all of these buses go past me before i realized it was getting late and that i was supposed to have taken the one that said it was going to Dayuan. anyway, i decided to take a taxi. i get in and the guy says hello. this isn't uncommon. most all of the bus drivers and taxi drivers can at least say hello. but this guy just kept on talking. he asked how long i was here for, where i was from, what i was doing, where i lived.. all sorts of things. so we ended up discussing how i don't really care for the food here because i don't know what's inside these meat-filled buns unless i bite into them. he told me the name of one that i should try, but i don't remember what it is..

exhibit b: i'm on the bus on the way home and this guy looks at me and motions if he can sit down next to me, i take out my headphones and say yes. he asked if i worked at tung an because he met people last week on the bus who were going there. so then we start taking about how he studied in singapore for college which is why his english is so good. he majored in hotel management and now he's working in downtown taoyuan at some hotel with butterfly in the name of it. the best thing though is that he gave me a name in chinese. apparently 'mei' is 'flower' and 'gan' is 'roots' so my name means flower roots. i figure that's probably one of the best possible combinations. tomorrow i'm going to get a stamp made out of it so i can stamp the kids books instead of signing my name 100times a day.

other than thattt.. derek and i went to this little tiny restaurant down the street from our school for dinner tonight. i had sauteed spinach and rice because the meat looked way too frightening. the chicken didnt look normal to me and the rest was odd mystery bits of meat. i'm not brave enough for that yet. but the spinach was good. and i stopped at this little fruit market on the way home and bought a bunch of lychee fruit that i'm excited about. george told me if you eat too many, they start making you feel really hot. good information.

**added later
tonight i went to wednesday night dinner (as is becoming a tradition) with natalie, alan, josh and martyn and we had planned to go to this italian place, latini's, but it closed at 9 so we went to this place right by our dorm named Party. it was like cantonese style food i guess. i ordered 'shitake chicken soup' and it comes and it's BLACK CHICKEN. have you heard of this? hold on let me show you. http://d0.biggestmenu.com/00/00/46/c95d3b0593639cd0_m.jpg
it's like regular chicken but the skin, meat and bones are all black. it actually tasted pretty normal but a little on the tough side i guess. but the color just totally freaked me out so i also ordered a giant bowl of rice.
that was my adventure of the day.

also, dena and i saw an ice cream cart while we were waiting for the bus. it doesn't play a song like the garbage truck does, but it does have an annoying squeaky horn. AND i saw the garbage truck while i was waiting for my bus home. it plays a really loud song and everyone literally runs outside with bags of garbage and hands it to the guy. but not big garbage bags. like HEB-sized bags.