ying ge with alex

these are the pictures from when alex and i went ying ge and made some pots. his camera is the same as mine but he has some ridiculous zoom lens.


(are you singing aaaaabbaaaaa, aaaba pooottterrrr.. [how does it go, maj?]).
youuu are the pooottterrrr... and i am the claayyyyy.
oh, metaphysical church songs from my childhood.

she's got everything i need

my mom got an iphone. i think this means she can't make fun of the faj for his blackberry ways. we'll have a contest for who can drive one handed the best in a few months.
(the story of this stamp is at the bottom of the page so just deng yi xia.)
today was super fun and super long, so here are the highlights..
alex and i went to yingge this morning. i really enjoy alex, and riding on the back of his scooter is so nice. we were having the funniest luck. he doesn't like to acknowledge mistakes, but our mistakes today were what made the day really interesting. we got on a train that neither of us realized wasn't the kind of local train that stops frequently, so we zoomed right by the yingge stop. then we were waiting on the wrong platform at banciao station and would have just kept going toward taipei if i wasn't so lovely and attentive.
thennn we walked through downtown where all of the little vendors were set up with their baskets of produce and fish swimming around. once we got to the top, nothing was open. it was sweltering hot and we just walked around in circles pouring sweat until we stopped for some emergency ice cream and then ended up making some ceramic cups at one of the shops. the whole town is famous for pottery, so a couple of the places offer informal classes or just the opportunity to use a potter's wheel to make your own stuff. the girl showed us how to do it (all in chinese, i'll add) and then left us to our own devices. my previous ceramics experience didn't really help much. alex did awesome though--the wheel can be really tricky.
our ying ge day ended with a tea shop where alex chatted like a pro with the tea shop woman and i did my best to catch anything i could. i think i understood about half. the most interesting part was learning the proper tea etiquette.(this is leila's picture of a tea farm (?) in the Ruili/Alishan area.)
1. put dry, shrunken tea leaves into small cup
2. steep in boiling water for 30 seconds
3. pour hot tea all over the tea pot and cups to wash them
4. refill cup with boiling water and dump out, this time to rinse tea leaves
5. refill cup with boiling water and this time you get to drink it!
6. pour from little cup to strainer to pot to little cup that your drinking cup goes upside down on top of so you can smell the tea and then taste itthe tea i bought is from alishan which is where dawn, leila and dena went for vacation not too long ago. i'll be thinking of those tea fields every time i sip that tea.

after that, i spent 10 minutes at home and headed to da chu to go swimming with mr. kuo, his sister and nephew. it's funny that we've spent hundreds of hours together but never outside of their restaurant. we picked up his [taiwanese only speaking] mom and the three of us went to his sisters. he told them i was an english teacher andd a swimming instructor which is a little more than a white lie. then they wanted me to teach the nephew how to improve his swimming strokes. luckily, my blonde-girl-in-a-ruffly-bikini trick worked well enough to distract them from the fact that i don't know how to do any fancy swimming strokes, and the afternoon was a success. we stopped at a fried dumpling place on the way home and i think i ate 14 dumplings in about 3 minutes.
after class (which was the last class with my coteacher, angel. she's going to canada for her masters. we did the QA 'what do you like about angel?' and the kids wrote their answers in a card for her. sad! fun!), after picking up dinner, i went to family mart to cash in these stickers that would get me a free stamp. this girl with blue hair was waiting to buy stuff so i said i like your hair and asked the family mart dude if 15 stickers was enough to get me a stamp. he said no, i need 20, but since i just told that girl i like her hair, and since he likes my hair, he'll just give me 5 stickers and not make me buy anything. love taiwan.
cucumber salad that tastes juuust like aunt carols.

p.s. this video is what inspired me to apply for the internship in the office of correspondence. it is awesome.

and the o'sullivans have arrived in taichung and their blog is soo fabulous. it'll probably make you cry and definitely make you laugh.

where this road i'm headed down might lead

i'm going to join a motorcycle gang. from now on, i only want to drive in packs. it is so much more fun than driving alone. 9 of us drove to xiao wu lai (little waterfall) today to swim/hang out on some rocks. jimmie's pictures are on her blog.

the drive was easy, only a couple of turns. well. a couple of real turns where you change roads. a million actual turns. the whole thing was through this neighboring city, bade (pronounced bah duh) and then over a beautiful, giant (windy like you wouldn't believe) bridge and then up a winding mountain road. my 50cc scooter wasn't totally loving it, but we made it. everyone else drives way faster than my usual 50km/hr, andd my brakes are a liiittle iffy, so i wasn't so sure how it was going to do.
(from goteamjosh on flickr).

you forget how beautiful this country is when you spend all your time in industrial taoyuan. the mountains in the north are so pretty. i was all clinched up and my abs, arms and legs were sore driving up the mountain and then i peeked over the side and felt like a dummy for spending so much energy freaking out about the drive when we were in such a pretty place.
(from radio ado on flickr).
that's where we were swimming. can't beat cold water after a sweaty drive and then eating warm picnic lunch when you're really hungry. it was like the asian version of going to dairy queen after a schlitterbahn trip (they opened one in KANSAS?).

on the way home, there was some kind of parade that went for several miles and it had something to do with some kind of .. now i can't remember if we call them gods or not. well, something that people were praying to. there was music and lights and big ornate carriages and incense and general mayhem. i'll have to get the story on that tomorrow.

tess, jimmie and i went for leg massages this evening and it was a perfect end to a really good day. reflexology hurts. and my scooter was jammed between 2 others when we finished so my massage dude had to help me get it out (which has been the case all 4 times i've gone there, for one reason or another). in the process, i smashed my big toe into a neighboring scooters kick stand. ouch.

don't forget how lucky you are, darling

these are pictures that allen and i took on sunday. he took me to ximending so we could eat a boat full of ice cream. when i saw how giant the boat was, i decided to go with the smaller bowl. we totally could have done the boat though.
i didn't know he had his camera until we had eaten most of it. it was 'milk ice' like shaved ice that's more like snow.. with mango, kiwi and strawberries. yuuuumm!
we went to the chiang kai shek memorial because we had a bunch of time. it was beautiful. they were having some kind of special ed olympics or something. it was unusually cool and windy on sunday.
that building (and the other one across from it that you can see in another picture) is the national theater and concert hall. the scale of those 4 buildings/gates is soo big.
well the 7 of you who have been here since the beginning will be glad to hear that i think i'm much more sad about leaving here than i am excited about going home. my friend patrick asked me what food i miss from home that i can't get here.. and really, i don't crave anything from home anymore. i'm just going to miss danbing, fresh tea and cong dra bing.
it makes me all teary to think about not ever seeing the kuos or my kids. i looooove my monday night kids. i love that it's enough for me to just look disappointed and it makes them stop doing whatever they're doing.

tonight in my second class i told carol i'm learning sea animals now so she told my kids to say an animal in english so i could say it in chinese. all through class, we'd be doing whatever and someone would shout 'lion!' or 'zebra!' and see if i knew it. they were totally impressed that i knew camel.
..did you ever wonder what 67,000NT looks like?! time to visit the bank.
my brother is 21 right noooowww since it's 12:31 in taiwan! happy birthday jeffy.
let's look at that money one more time.

just to see you smile

while allen was in the rest room for all of 3 seconds, i unwrapped half of my sushi triangle in the middle of the MRT and was just about to take a bite when he came out yelling MEGAN NOOO!
apparently you can't bend the no eating in the MRT rule, so we wrapped it inside a print out of the national palace museum he had in his bag and saved it until we got out.
2 hours or so later he said 'i'll tell you a story. one time, this crazy girl was eating a sushi triangle inside the MRT. i think her name was megan..'
we saw everything inside that museum today. you couldn't take a single picture anywhere inside, so you'll have to just imagine the miles of hand painted scrolls, bazillions of things made out of jade, and thousand year old ceramics. (or just click on any of those links).
it's interesting to be in a place with a bunch of foreigners in it. half of me felt oddly homesick and half of me wanted to speak all kinds of chinese and show that i'm not a visitor.

the big exhibition was this apparently very famous jade bok choy. we decided we could take it or leave it. in my opinion, the coolest thing in the museum was another food made out of jade.. a chunk of 'pork meat'. the plaquard mentioned how it was amazing because of the way the artist made the layers look like real fat.
have you ever seen a black swan before?

(these are from the garden just to the side of the museum).
after the garden, we headed to ximending. there were a bazillllion people. we stopped in this place called meet fresh that has traditional desserts. it's ice topped with herbal jelly topped with taro and mango ..what i would describe as gnochi.. i dunno, it's made of rice flour. then you pour cream all over the top of it.
i've always walked past it and never had the guts to order anything, so i'm glad we tried it out. i probably wont be headed back too soon, but it was much better than i had imagined. on a hot day its pretty nice to eat something so cold and not overly sweet.

once it started to get dark, we hopped on a train to shilin night market. it's taipei's big night market. this woman is getting her ear wax sucked out of her head with a paper cone lit on fire.
oyster omelets are one of taiwan's traditional night market things.
twbf and i had the best time. we have about a million inside jokes now including 'megan, follow me. this way' like my own personal tour guide. and we compared notes on all of the taiwanese/american animal noises.
it gets much more interesting when you move beyond the getting to know you stuff. i was a little afraid that my sarcasm would never make it through the language barriers, but it did. turns out that he has a very similar sense of humor.

oodles of noodles! waiting to be cooked.
oh! i ate soup with pork intestines in it at ay-chung flour rice noodle. it's apparently famous in taipei and there are no tables, you just stand around with a bowl in your hand. i didn't ask what the chunks in it were until i had finished eating it.. you think you can get swine flu that way? ;)
i offered up some american culture at the end of the day with french fries dipped in ice cream, a first for him. good day. we even hugged at the end.

it's no use pretending

these are twbf's pictures from sunday. we went to lunch today in carrefour and i gently prodded him to upload them. we went to a japanese place called '8 things' and it was pretty yummy. i had a fried pork steak thing and it came with a bazillion sides. fruit covered in mayo (yumm doesn't that sound appetizing), miso soup, green vegetable thing, rice, strawberry jello, egg custard, fake crab slices, salad.
we have a new kid in my first class, ricky. when i asked him how old he was, he just said 'i'm 9.' and not 'i am nine years old' in robot voice like we teach the kids. i really hope i don't liquify his brain with the memorization we do. it really isn't effective at all. today i tried to vary a question and they couldn't answer me.

our new word was 'fine' and even though when you ask 'how are you?' they automatically spit out 'i'm fine thank you, and you?' they have no idea what they're saying. it's sad really.
jaime and i have an agreement that she can take pictures with my camera whenever she wants as long as she puts the neck strap around her neck. she's really good.
i felt bad today because my favorite girl, lisa, had a birthday on friday and i must have told her i would bring her something today because after class she asked me what i brought her. i apologized and told her i'd bring something next week. she said 'ok but don't say "everyone look at lisa! i bought her something," you can just give it to me by myself'.

on earth together

it was a beautiful day in taiwan today. tess and i left bright and early to meet twbf at the train station, and the three of us traveled to a buddhist temple up in the hills of taipei county.. i think.
we met bobo and her fam as well as alex and dawn there.
it was packed and i guess someone told kristen that today is buddha's birthday..? i'm not sure if that's fact or fiction, but there were a million people there, regardless.

when i went through the gate, i was intercepted by a team of old women who were pointing at my legs. one lifted up my arms while another roped me with a wrap skirt to cover my knees so i could enter the temple area.
we had lunch at the temple. it was probably one of the most interesting experiences i've had in this country so far. we were split by gender, so i checked twbf at the door and hoped he would be fine mingling with alex and jack. i'm sure they were fine. alex speaks chinese pretty well.

at lunch there were giant, hoola hoop sized metal bowls full of various buddhist restaurant food. i had rice with squash, boiled spinach-like stuff, and some kind of unidentifiable paste of squash with something that was "good for my health" that may or may not have been hominy.
everything was fine until bobo told us we literally had to eat everything in our bowl. when dawn went to leave, they put a ladel of water into her bowl and made her drink the 'soup' of 3 grains of leftover rice. i was horrified, being a relatively picky eater, and found a way to cleverly hide the 2 chunks of mystery tofu-with-bits underneath joyce's bowl and dunked it into the water before they could spot it.

you washed your own bowl in water the color of the ganges and then put it into the 'clean' rack. i hope they wash it again before they let people use it. it defintely wasn't clean. then we went on a 2 hour nature hike up a mountain with flowering trees peppered in along the way. it was beautiful when the wind was blowing. the flowers fell down like snow.
jaime and joyce were saving the prettiest of all of the flowers to make a chain with when they got home. i think they all wilted by the end of the day. i tried to teach a life lesson about how flowers need the tree and leaves to help them live.
jaime spent a good 20 minutes trying to make the perfect rose out of fern leaves. apparently josh taught her that trick.
joyce was exhausted by the end of it.
it was a really lovely day.

the only thing that could make it better? leg massages in the evening! tess and danielle and i went over to the reflexology place and had a 20min back massage/40min leg massage. it hurts but it felt really good on my tired legs.
spent some quality time at the coffee shop with a cup of rose tea and mashed potatoes with bacon and cheese from latini's. yum. perfect day.

you can click here to see the rest of the pictures from today.
and p.s. look at my new blonde hair :)