Wednesday, April 8, 2009

the spell of the typical

before i forget, i added 'tags' to a bunch of my posts. now you can easily find all of the posts that have chinese words or that talk about the kuo's or some other random things. today i tagged all of 2009 and i should get through 2008 by the weekend.

the sun came out today!
i was busy for most of the day so i just grabbed my camera and took some pictures from the balcony. a bunch of people hang their stuff on the clothesline because the drier costs $40NT ($1.25 US). i tried it once or twice in july, but it makes all of your clothes feel crispy and hard. everyone knows the part of laundry is burying yourself under a heap of hot, freshly dried clothes anyway.
this is the view from my window. the newest girl, kristin, was saying how taoyuan isn't even mentioned in any of the guide books or websites other than maybe a blurb about how it's an industrial town. it isn't very beautiful.
there used to be a giant pig who lived next door to us but he disappeared a few months ago.
that's the view from my bed basically. i love how the tile on the side of that tall building lights up with the sunset. i took that picture justtt before it really turned orange.
augusta brought me some rocks from bali for my collection! i was surprised she remembered. i forgot i had requested them. [yes, i'm getting a lot of mileage out of my floor mat lately for photo backdrops.]
today in chinese jerry and i learned classroom words and restaurant words.
i can remember..
cazi (tsa-zi) - eraser (like for a chalkboard)
fenbi (fun-bee) - chalk .. literally 'powder pen'
diqiuyi (dee chou yee) - globe 'ground ball' somethin. i don't know what 'yi' means there
tiantianquen (teeyen teeyen chuen) - doughnuts .. literally 'sweet circle'
yangcongquen (yahng tsong chuen) - onion rings .. 'onion circle'
maikefeng (my kuh fong) - microphone!
niujiao mianbao (ne-oh jow meeyen bao) - croissants .. 'cow horn bread'
xiguan (shee gwan)- straw .. 'suck pipe'
there are a couple of new blogs on the side
simple + pretty
jordan ferney
simplesong
love them so far.

dear anonymous from yesterday,
i asked bobo about the good pastry and she didn't recognize the name. any hints?
MEK

corey of tongue in cheek, a blog about her experiences as an american living in france, has a really nice post today about living in two places. she sums it up very well.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

if you were in taichung, there's 2 places that i get my mother-in-law to drive the 3 hours from taipei for. one is the pineapple pastry (basically, pineapple 'jam' encased in a shortbread cookie type pastry). the other one is a moon cake type pastry called 'dang wong so', it's an egg yolk surrounded with a bit of red bean paste in a flakey pastry crust. both of these my mother in law in TW agreed that it's the best she's ever eaten. ask bobo about it

megan said...

oh i almost forgot about pineapple cakes. they come in the prettiest boxes, too.

i'll look into the dang wong so. it sounds interesting.

davidc said...

pineapple cake is the best stuff on earth! oh you should try some "tai yang bing" literally "sun pancake/cake"

and I didn't even know some of those chinese vocab words!

megan said...

my goal is to out-chinese the native speakers by learning a bunch of obscure words :P

Anonymous said...

when pigs mysteriously disappear, you should look for bacon. =)