addicted

I've been discovering a lot of new addictions lately. Mostly having to do with Heroes or Ugly Betty, but it's this song. I just can't get it out of my head. It's being played everywhere. It's always on my TV, which makes sense as it's being billed as the Asian Anthem. I'm not really sure if that's true, but it's even made it on some tv commercial from Hong Kong. Anyway, the band is rivermaya and they are from the Philippines.

oh well

I should really check the class before I complain about subbing. It was actually one of my old classes that I loved so it wasn't so bad. I still have to stop saying "yes" to everything though.

oh, and I went back to the original look. The other was a little too froo froo for me...I missed this one.

a little annoyed

I have to sub a class tonight and for some reason I'm really annoyed about it. One of my teachers is at training and normally we don't have to cover classes for trainings, but apparently we do now. Of course, being head teacher means that this has fallen to me, or so they figured Friday night at 9:00pm as I was heading out the door with not enough time to actually think about saying no. Not that I would have, because you know, I have that perpetual problem of not being able to say no, but it would have been nice if the thought could have crossed my mind before I was outside in the cold reality of what I just did. I gave up my last night of getting off work at four forever. Damn them.

I don't know how I have been the type of person to give everything to my job. I love my job, I really do, but the worst thing I hate about it is that I will give up everything I am doing to go in and help them do things or teach a class, even when I have other plans. I have always done this with any job that I've been in. Why? Why, why, why, why, why???!!!! I mean, I have no problems being helpful, it sounds awful, but it goes a long way in a country where guan-shi is a huge part of their culture. It isn't really all that hard where I work though, the people are amazing, however I just don't like the last minute, "we forgot to tell you this, can you do it?" They know I will say yes. They know I will say "yes" so much that my manager actually had to tell someone "no" for me, because she knew I couldn't do it. Yeah, I'm that pathetic.

If I could learn anything in the time I have left here, it would be to say no. I've been trying, but it's just so hard. Too hard for me to be able to do it I think, but maybe it will be a good skill to put to use when I get home.

with wine, doors watch out

Last Saturday was suppose to be a quiet night. T&J and I were going to head to Taipei for something to eat but the box o' wine got in the way. This is not the first time this has happened. We had just enough that we decided to invent our own drink when the box became empty...uh, never, ever mix brandy and vodka.

We decided we wanted to go dancing but J's clothes (and yes, her hair straightener too...okay, so sometimes we like to be girly, It just doesn't happen very often and dancing requires girly-ness) were in their closet, which just happened to have locked itself from the inside. I didn't ask how this could have happened, but regardless the door was locked.

It was decided then that locks don't matter, hinges do. Take it off the hinges, I said. Yes, I said it, it was my idea. It was my idea for them to take the hinges out and then pry their door out with a screwdriver and put big dents in their door frame. It worked though, I am a genius, but all I could think of was why didn't I think of that when I was locked in my bathroom.

changes still make it boring

I've changed the look of my blog, did you notice? I've been lacking in posting lately, I know I have....it's because I really don't have much to talk about. I mean really, I posted about how much I love Costco. I'm on glue (but it's better than being on crack right?)

it treats me well, who am I to argue with fate

How much do I love Costco? It's sad really...it's probably my favourite store in Taiwan. I have many theories as to why this is, but still. Why Costco?

1. The food. It's totally like food at home that I know how to cook. It is the only place to get decently cheap and good cheese. Taiwan is not a very big cheese eating culture. If you go to the Welcome in Chidu it's all processed cheese, you can even get chocolate processed cheese. So yeah, Costco is better by far.

2. It reminds me of home. Not that I ever went to Costco at home. I can really only remember being there one time before in Canada. My parents have a Costco card but I guess I was never with them when they went because the time I remember going, I wasn't with them. I do remember them coming home from a big Costco excursion with giant poppyseed muffins (which, you can't get here, by the way) It reminds me of home because it is just like any other supermarket/superstore that you can find at home.

3. You don't run into things in the meat section like pigs feet and frogs that jump at you.

3. I don't really have another theory, I just thought 4 looked better than 3.


Today we went on a field trip with the kids. We went to Costco. Can I tell you how excited I was? I was very excited. Mostly because my fridge was empty and it meant a free trip in the school bus. Score!! I didn't actually buy that much stuff, but I did get the gigantic jar of pickles because it would be so much easier to take them home and now that I don't have house guests, they will last a lot longer. Well, maybe. The kids were especially excited when they saw the six pound bad of pretzels that I did not buy but all the kids had their pictures taken with it. It was almost as big as two of my kids. I mean, Taiwanese kids aren't all that big!

The surprising thing. None of our HRT's have ever been to Costco. The reason why we got in? We used my card. How cool am I?

it's about time

After two years of waiting, my pool has finally opened. There is a park down the street from my house in Bai Fu (like a block, seriously close) In this park they have been building a pool only now I've found out, it's not just a pool. It's got a gym (small, but a gym) you can do yoga, there is a spa where you can get massages (you have to pay extra for that though) an indoor pool and and outdoor pool.

I joined up.

I have decided that swimming in Taiwan is a great thing for these reasons.

1. so many people here can't actually swim. That's right, even though they live on an island, many Taiwanese people don't swim. Thus, the majority of the time they only use the pool facilities for the hot tubs, sauna and steam rooms (but that may just be because it's been raining the last few days. When the rain stops I'll see if that's still true.)

2. the place is so damn expensive that not many people are probably going to join up.

Okay, yeah, it's pricey if you go for one visit at a time...250NT which is almost $9CAD. They let us join for only six months since we aren't going to be here for the whole year (really, I'm not) so it is much more beneficial. It is a little more expensive than the pool at home (but only like $15 more) but the pool at home doesn't have a gym in it...nor do the gym's at home have a pool in them. Plus it's only a block away from my house and there is no snow so I don't really have any excuses not to go.

a night well spent

I'm tired. Why am I tired? Well you see, I stayed up too late last night. I stayed up too late playing video games with Travis on his computer. I stayed up too late last night playing Barbie's Vacation Adventure. seriously.

chinese new year trip part 3

Alright where were we. Sun Moon Lake, right. This is one picture that I forgot to post last time. The coolest thing by far that I saw. They had these trees all over the place and being that they are by far my favourite fruit, I was quite excited. Can you see the bananas?



After we got back we were pretty tired, so we went for dinner at a place called Frogs and sat under this....



Now can you see the coconut that was threatening to fall on us? Luckily, I wasn't sitting directly underneath it, however it did raise comments through out the evening.

So with Taichung finished we had to head to meet up with some more friends in Tainan. We got a train which took about 2 hours. When we got there we didn't have much time to relax and we were off to a fort. Now, being that Tainan is not actually anywhere near the ocean, it is more inland, we were confused as to how it actually protected Taiwan. It had a moat around it, so I guess it was just protecting itself from people trying to get over the moat. I'm not exactly sure. I was confused about it, especially when we saw all the big cannons.




After this, we discovered that the next thing on the agenda was another fort. I'm all for history, trust me...but it was really hot, I was really tired, and not really interested, so when we couldn't get over the bridge to the next fort, we took it as a hint and went back to the hotel to sleep (I know, but this is what happens when you are old and you hang out with people that like to party) So we got back to the hotel and yes, we had been there to drop off our stuff, but this particular feature was still making us laugh...



That's right, that's a mirror all right. On.The.Ceiling. Pretty swank huh.

So the next part of this story is Kenting. I'll tell you right now, that it wasn't very good and might not even get a spot in this story. The best thing about it was that Kenting actually has decent food at their night market....but that's a whole other story.

Chinese New Year Trip part 2

I was suppose to put this part earlier than tonight, sorry. This week has been crazy and I can only prove that by saying it is Friday night and I am ready to go to bed at 10pm. This NEVER happens. Something must be up. I take solace in the fact that I'm not the only one. It was a general consensus that no one was doing anything tonight.

Okay, so the second part of the trip. On our second day in Taichung we decided to go to Sun Moon Lake. So we spent the morning on what seemed like the longest bus trip ever (unknown to us, this would be hugely surpassed by the trip to Kenting, but I digress) Sun Moon Lake was really cool. No swimming though, since some of my students had told me that if you swim in Sun Moon Lake you would die. I'm pretty sure that is not true, but none the less they had signs saying you couldn't swim in the area we were anyway. We wandered around the lake for a bit and then took a boat tour around the lake. Not your regular ride a boat tour. It had the typical Taiwanese slant of stopping at everything it could, which included some fish thing (I'm not really sure what that was all about, but we got to feed fish and see catfish) and a temple. The weather was absolutely great, which was good because we had heard it was raining in Keelung (home). Here are some pictures of Sun Moon Lake.
Not quite as nice as the Shuswap, but nothing ever will be.

(these pictures are in a random order...for some reason blogger changes the order that I upload them in...I haven't figured out why yet.)

A view of the sun on the lake while we were on the boat.



The view from one of the walking paths.



If you look closely maybe you can see that these are catfish. Definitely the strangest fish I've ever come across.



This was the island in the middle of the lake. It's a little small but the boat actually stopped here for people to see it. Of course, you can't actually go on the island...you can only go on the man-made "raft" of green stuff that surrounds it so people can look at the island.



One of the tour boats coming in. Unfortunately, our boat did not look like this, ours was boring and white. We were very disappointed to be sitting on it when we saw this one dock.



So those are the pictures. Next time, the trip part 3.