non sequitor taichung

There is a pizza restaurant on my way home from work that sells pizza beagles. I tried to stop in and tell them that that is disgusting, but I don’t think I got my point across. Eventually I went away.

There is a size “F” here, which is Taiwan’s equivalent of “one size fits all.” I am discovering that “all” is an extremely relative term in this context.

I was annoyed with myself the other day because I forgot to stop by the 7-11 next door while on my way home from work to get some water. Then I realized that I could see three 7-11s from where I was standing, so really, no problem.

When I was up in Taipei, I needed to go to an ATM. I started walking over to a nearby bank, and my friend Patty gave me this horrified look (an “oh, god, you aren’t gong to eat that!” kind of look) and insisted that I go to the respectable 7-11 ATM.

There are a lot of dogs here. Just hanging out, running around in the street. This made me a little nervous at first, but it turns out that the only dogs that are barky and aggressive are the ones that are tied up. The feral ones that roam the streets are just nice, chill doggies. Dirty, but nice.

I went to the botanical gardens in Taichung, and there was a school group there. (Because there is always a school group, everywhere. If I went to the malt-liquor-and-shotgun store there would be a school group trying to enrich itself and running around after a tour guide.) Anyway, the group had matching t-shirts (always a school group tell tale sign) which were yellow and had “Good Monkey!” written on them. If the kids hadn’t all been so small I would have mugged one of them and stolen a shirt.

After walking around outside here for an hour or so, I become drenched with sweat. Doesn’t matter how hot it actually is, it is just so humid here that my body doesn’t know how to react, so, I don’t know, I guess it goes into some sort of confused emergency mode and gets rid of all the water in me. So I duck into expensive boutiques and stare at terrible clothing for long periods of time because expensive boutiques are always air conditioned.

Taichung is a friendly city. It is not uncommon for someone just to day ‘Hi!” to you as they walk by. For me, it is usually either another white person, or a little kid. I think with the white people we both feel like we know each other because we are both white, and no one else is. So we’re like, hey, what’s up? how’s it going being white? See ya later! And with little kids, it is the ones who have been taking English classes. Some little kid will just shout out “Hello! How are you?!?” as they are walking by with their parents. Which is really cute, and then I answer back, which the kid thinks is funny, because I think that for the kids, English as a real language is very distant and surreal thing, so when they experiment on a real person and it works, it is so funny and weird. As if it is so bizarre, that person speaks this foreign language all the time!

Also, kids are up late in this city. You see people wandering around with toddlers at 10 o’clock at night. I guess the parents are preparing them for the Taiwan school system. I was talking to some kids about this. They don’t really get serious about school until 6th grade or so, when they have to take a test that will determine which junior high they will go to (which in turn helps determine which high school they go to, which college, what kind of job, etc) School goes from 7/7:30 am to about 4/4:30. Descriptions varied, but it doesn’t sound like they get a lot of free time during the school day. One kid told me that they eat lunch in their classrooms. They also take a nap after lunch, which is cute, but one girl told me that she got a grade for naptime. In addition to this, a few hours of homework each evening and during their 2 month summer vacation, cram school to prepare for the school year. But the kids I have chatted with seemed pretty typical of American kids the same age. I guess you can normalize to anything.

While I was walking the other day I passed a moped parking lot. It was big and dark and dirty, and had a huge statue of Greek water nymphs in the middle of it.

There are some fat people here. Not too many, but some. I don’t know how they find clothing.

I think I am acclimating to the taxis. I took a cab home the other day, and the guy drove at a normal rate of speed, and went a way that the drivers don’t normally go, which felt a little circuitous. These things made me sort of anxious, so I kept making twitchy sighing noises from the back seat and looking at my watch and the fare meter. Then he started running red lights, and I relaxed visibly. It was weird.

Taiwanese music is sweet and nice and repetitive; usually some woman crooning about love or sadness or whatever. One of my kids told me that the term for it is “guava music.”

At the fruit stand the other day a guy walked up to me and demanded “How tall?” At first I was confused, and thought he wanted me to guess his height, but then I realized he wanted to know how tall I was. I didn’t know, in centimeters, so he walked away dissatisfied.

At that same fruit stand a few days later, I was standing in line with everyone else, waiting to buy my mangos and apples, and some guy just walked straight up to the front of the line and plopped his fruit onto the counter and expected to be waited on. I thought that maybe it was because I was as the front of the line, and I am white, or because all the people in the line were women. But then I realized that it was probably just that he is a taxi driver. The clerk yelled at him and he went, surprised, to the end of the line.

I leave Taichung today, so yesterday was the last day that I went to the Starbucks by work. I felt like I should say good bye, since the Starbucks people have practically been my social network, but I wasn’t quite sure how to frame it. I don’t know if there is an accepted etiquette for saying good bye to your local Starbucks staff. The girl who made my latte was named Purple.