White Noise

Someone once asked me why I like living in Taiwan. Of all the dozens of reasons I could have named, I responded, "Because it's quiet."

Even though the subway, the buses, the streets, the food courts, the restaurants, etc. are usually rammed with people, as a foreigner, I still find peace and quiet in all of these places. My brain hasn't been programmed (yet) to understand the Chinese language, therefore it doesn't ask my ears to do the useless task of trying to listen. After about a minute or 2

Strawberry Fields

As a rule of thumb, I'll eat just about anything that's pink. Candy, cake, bread, you name it. The chances are it's strawberry flavored.

Last year, the word got out that strawberries/strawberry flavored foods rank somewhere in my Top 1 Favorite Foods list, and my students brought me tons of strawberry food items for my birthday. If it was customary to give kindergarten students letter grades, of course they would have all gotten A's.

Last weekend

100 Years*

A bit of history to make up for the posting drought? Why not?

As witnessed by TONS of people (just ask Karen) on the streets in Taipei, there were some pretty impressive fireworks to celebrate the opening minute of 2011.

Worldwide, the eve of 2011 was just another night of partying in preparation for another year for failed resolutions.

For some, 2011 was more significant.

The Life

Here's a little video I made, mostly from a first person point of view. It's bits and pieces of a typical week day working in the salt mines. Enjoy!

Animals, mostly

Here are the answers! If you didn't get a chance to guess yet, click here first.

Direct Translation / English

"oak mouse" / squirrel

Open Heart Nut

In the year and 8 months or so that I've been here, I've been through a lot of "phases." I go through 3- or 4-week spans where I start doing something productive with a head of steam, such as exercise, focus on learning Chinese, writing, reading, doing things on the weekend, etc. It has been inevitable, for the most part, that these runs of productivity come to a end, due to any variety of reasons.

Turkey Day

It's what you do,

Not who you were, or what you wear, or where you've been.

So...

The end is near!

Who are we blaming everything on these days?

For those of us who can't keep up, why not just make a list of everything that's wrong with the world these days, then print it on a pencil case, then sell it in a stationary store in Taiwan?

Mortgage!

World Depression!

Arrogant!

Anxiety!

Stock Market!

Emergency!

I love arrogant!

Fear!

News!

The humanity!

This is awkward

I'll start off by easing the tension with a joke:

What do you say to a woman with 2 black eyes?

Zen ma ban?

"Zen ma ban?" or "怎麼辦" is a pretty common expression used in Taiwan, literally translated as "how to do?" As far as I've been told, it is basically a semi-rhetorical way to say "Now what?" or (with a cocked head and eyebrows and shoulders raised) "Welp, what can we do?" It is sometimes, in a way, implying that there isn't actually anything that can be done.

Dora-Fearing Students

Recently at my kindergarten we had our Parent/Teacher meeting. This also consisted of a 40 minute demo lesson, in which the parents were able to sit inside the classroom to watch me teach. Does anybody else find this concept ridiculous? As a teacher of 3-year-olds, it's my job to set the foundation for classroom behavior. Therefore, most of my efforts involve getting the children to stop screaming out for Mommy and Daddy, sit still, and listen to me. Now they want me to do that with Mommy and Daddy in the room??

Nothing in particular

Allow me to fill in the missing pieces between the last post and this one with fluff pictures, until I come up with something interesting to write about...

Peanuts and Cracker Jacks

If a Taiwan professional baseball game is your first baseball game, you probably won't like the MLB that much. Just sayin.

A Material (Under)World

Today when I was driving my scooter home, once on the little alleys and lanes near my apartment, it became necessary to start weaving and zig-zagging around clusters of people watching paper burn in metal wastebaskets.

Enter "Ghost Month," or the 7th month of the Lunar Year

Target Audiences

Watching a sporting event on television in the U.S., you'd be likely to see advertisements for Axe, Old Spice, Miller Lite, car wax, and Viagra in between innings, periods, halves, quarters, etc.

Right now, I'm watching a baseball game between two Taiwanese teams, and

Back in Action

I'm back in Incheon International Airport in Korea's capital city, smack dab in the middle of a 7 hour layover. After spending 14 hours on a place in a middle seat (limiting my arms to T-rex style usage only), I arrived here at about 3:00 in the morning Korea-time, then had to wait about another three hours until anything in the airport opened. Oh, the joys of travelling.

Hello, My name is...

JOHN is the most popular 1.st name in USA (... 1.john , 2.david , 3.michael , 4.robert , 5.james ...). One in every 25 Americans are named as JOHN and popularity of name JOHN is 39.93 people per thousand.

If we compare the popularity statistics of JOHN to USA's population statistics, we can estimate that as of August.02.2010 04:40there are 12,372,824 people named as JOHN in the United States and the number of JOHN's are increasing by 104,925 people every year.

Usage of John as a first name is 72.86% and its usage as a middle name is 27.14%. The sum of alphabetical order of letters in JOHN is 47 and this makes JOHN arithmetic buddies with words like Elated. Add "Courtesy of PokeMyName.com' tag and feel free to distribute, copy, republish this interesting, accurate and also useless report about name JOHN. :)

To balance these statistics out, hardly any Taiwanese people choose that name when browsing for an English name.

Apparently they are sick of hearing the names John and Mary because they are used in every guided conversation in every English text book distributed in Asia. Two times in as many days, I've heard someone mock this conversation:

"Hello, John, how are you... Hello, Mary. I'm fine thank you..." and so on and so forth.

Sorry, Mom. Apparently we have boring names.

(what does YOUR name look like in sign language, morse code, marine flag language, and barcode????)

PS. I'm in Korea!

Celebs?

For the most part, I've gotten really used to daily life in Taiwan. The scooters, the sugary bread, the questionable street-side cuisine, the signs I can't read, the lot of it. For the past 14 or so months, I've come to terms with it and I'm hardly phased.

Some of the Taiwanese, however, can't meet me half way on that front.

Trips to the supermarket, certain restaurants, and just about everywhere in Taipei are hardly ever uneventful. I still get that paranoid feeling that everybody is staring at me because I'm a foreigner. By definition, though, it's not paranoia. I don't have a baseless or excessive suspicion of the motives of others. They are actually staring at me.

Eyes of children are locked on target with mouths stuck open as I walk down the aisle at the store. They creep to safety behind a parent's leg without ever disengaging their curious stare.

On the subway, children peer through limbs down the car at the strange looking man with no hair and whose skin has a pinkish hue. I've seen a child whisper something to her mother while pointing at me, and her mother gently slapped her hand. I can't even imagine what she was saying.

Another encounter with children involves them being forced by their parents to come and say "hello" to the foreigner to practice their English. Then it's time to throw on a quick smile that I thought I had abandoned at 3:30 on Friday afternoon.

I get it. Kids worldwide are ignorantly shameless when it comes to pointing and staring. In all fairness, compared to a place like the U.S., it doesn't seem like Taiwanese kids get exposure to as diverse a population at such an early age. It's just that I kind of wish they would grow out of the fascination...

"Ah-scuse me. May I take picture wiss you?"

I'm walking through the subway station with Mike. Two high school aged looking Taiwanese girls come up to us with that question. We look at each other with identical puzzled expressions. We say "sure." The girls giggle, turn around and about eight other girls appear from the crowd and surround us. Once the camera appears, pinkies, ring fingers, and thumbs instinctively fold down due to years of conditioning. The giggling continues as they walk away, passing the camera around and inspecting the pictures, which I'm sure contain a Canadian and an American with "What the (expletive) is happening right now?" looks across their faces.

Without exaggerating, I'd estimate this happens on a monthly basis (twice in 10 minutes at a museum one time). It's always the same routine: send the cutest, most confident one of the group, and after compliance, swarm the foreigners with "peace sign" two fingers already glued to their faces in "cute" pose.

One of my favorite things to do is imagine if something like this happened back home. A group high schoolers (girls and boys alike) see an Asian person at the train station and run up to them to take their picture. Will somebody please try that and let me know how it goes?

(the lack of "peace signs" in this picture is almost creepy...)

Free money

How great is it when you put on your coat for the first time since last winter, only to discover you left a $5 bill in it? That's essentially free money. You just got paid to wear that coat.

Having an extremely optimistic attitude towards everything helps grasp this crazy "free money" logic

When it rains

With just about two weeks to go until I come home, the seams of my life are starting to show signs of wear and tear.

Last weekend, my new(ish) camera, that had been battle-tested according to the previous post, didn't survive a beach music festival. The "waterproof" tag on my camera holds true only in the sense that there is proof that it's been in the water.