photos!

Additions to flickr. Hess Banquet and my birthday party in two separate blocs

Christmas Past

December got busy in a hurry, and as things tend to do with my blog it got shoved to the back burner. I’d be lying if I said I never had a single free moment to update, but time has been scarce. Let’s power on.

So what’s happened in a month?

First there was Christmas. Or at least another Christmas party. I went to Taichung again (this will become a theme) for another holiday party, this time hosted by a different English teacher. We met at the bottom of her apartment building and were ushered into an empty karaoke room. Amazingly, she cooked a complete Christmas meal and had been at it all day. We also had a round of Yankee Secret Santa, complete with the necessary stealing. My turn came up pretty late; there was a snowglobe and mug set I desperately wanted. The only problem was that the person who had it was the 12-year-old child of a security guard at the apartment. He was so pumped when he opened it, I couldn’t bear to take it from him. When my name was picked I faked as if to take his stuff. He was confused, then saddened, but I quickly made for the present pile and let him keep his loot. My reward: a bottle of Tunnel 88, only the finest in blinding alcohol. After the Christmas party we adjourned to a bar called FM that was on a rooftop over a Starbucks. It was actually pretty cool, though the Hoegaarden was awfully expensive coming in at $340 a pop. I didn’t order one that particular night. At said bar I had a lively discussion with some of the guests of the previous parties. One guy who was a little bit older was perfectly nice but perhaps hadn’t taken his meds regularly. If you’ve ever played Civilization IV, he looked exactly like the Montezuma character. If you haven’t, here you go:

He had a headdress. I don’t know why. I never got around to asking about it. Instead he went on about Sodium Fluoride and how it’s used as both rat poison (true) and fluoridation for the water supply (true) while I tried in vain to demonstrate how our body needs lots of things in little quantities. You need iron, but do you go around eating nails from Ace Hardware? He had none of it. We also talked about vaccines (they’re killing you, and not just by the one in a million averse reaction) chem trails, (killing you too) and other inane subjects. I thought for sure he was going to bring up fan death next. He was a really nice guy though and had some really lucid things to say about religion though, so it was still a good talk.

That night, at 4am, I went to eat Hot Pot. Hot Pot is not a proper noun, and I don’t capitalize dumplings, fried rice, or even pizza puffs for that matter. I capitalize it because it really is That Damn Good. It’s my favorite Chinese food, bar none. I wish dumplings were more available in the states. I wish beef noodles didn’t actually mean ramen in the US. I wish I owned a Hot Pot restaurant. Yvonne woke me up and insisted we go. Who is Yvonne? Yvonne is the girl I had met the week before when we discussed the future of Taiwan. Yvonne loves Hot Pot, probably more than life itself. At 4am she demanded we go. I resisted – beds and comforters are warm and soft, night scooter rides are cold and bumpy. Then I decided that I didn’t fly 14,000 miles to a semi-tropical rogue province just to bitch out because it was ‘late’ or ‘cold.’ No, it was time for the game face.

So on with the jacket, the scooter helmet, and the yawns. Yvonne tore through Taichung, and red lights served no obstacle. It was obvious she was on a mission. As we flew through the night I wondered to myself what on earth kind of establishment is open until 6:30AM?

The establishment god himself would dine at every night, if he’s Asian and likes spicy food.

We entered and Yvonne started regaling me with the lore about the place. Getting in is not sort of impossible during non-nocturnal business hours, you have to book ahead a week and know the maître’d on shift. I took this with a grain of salt, but then when we went my second time (I’ll get to that later) we actually had to wait for a table at 5 AM. We were seated quickly this time though, and the place had a sort of class to it. To start with, all the waitresses are super formal, using all the right honorifics and performing the low bow whenever they come by to refill tea or broth, take orders, or the like. The main attraction though is clearly the food. Fundamentally it’s like any other hot pot place. For the uninitiated, hot pot is basically a pot stuck over a massive flame in the middle of your table. The good places will have a partition for two different broths, both of which should be at a rolling boil. You have several trays of raw food at your table and you simply drop them into the oily broth and let physics do work. Thin beef strips cook in seconds, solid meatballs can be several minutes.

This place, 鼎王/dingwang/Tripod King, just does everything in a superb fashion. There is sauce available for after the broth, and that is delicious. The beer is cold, the rice is sticky, and the meat is marvelous. We also ordered fishballs, mushrooms, greens, and god knows what else. A thousand and many dollars later, I was nearly unable to move. It was the most full I have ever felt from a place that was not all-you-can-eat. (I refer not to the glorious Old Country Buffet but rather to the Bellagio dinner buffet at which I literally ate so much that for 15 minutes I could not walk without a bodily function.) I did not want to move, so I didn’t. And that was Hot Pot and Taichung II.

All that occurred over the weekend of Dec 18-19. On December 21^st, I went to you guessed it, Taichung! This time, for training. Hess does follow-up trainings at 1, 3, 6 and 9 month intervals ostensibly to teach you more about teaching. I think it’s an ingenius way to increase retention rates by getting people back together with friends forged during training, showing corporate is there for support, and giving a day off in the middle of the week. Ours was on Tuesday, so I went to Taichung Monday night. Yvonne met me at the train station and we drove off to eat. I forget where. After that we went to an indoor sports facility/arcade that had bowling, ping pong, batting cages, pool, whack-a-mole, DDR, and more. We bowled. After a few warm-up frames that saw 4 or 5 consecutive goose eggs on the scoreboard for me, I dropped the first game but won the next 4 convincingly and delivered a richly deserved beatdown in a “sport” I know nothing about but like to pretend Americans invented anyway. Sufficiently humiliated, Yvonne committed ritual suicide in the lanes while still in her bowling shoes to regain her family’s honor. Not really. She just felt silly after maybe a bit too much trash talk.

Training itself was nothing special. We reviewed culture shock and grammar. In tangentially related culture shock news, I saw a family of 5 lined up on a scooter in the past month. I’ve seen 6 riders in images online, but seeing 5 in the flesh and blood made me feel pretty proud. We learned more about obscure tenses mostly involving the word ‘perfect,’ and other stuff useless outside of my current profession. The training ended at 6 and we walked to dinner together, where we found a surprisingly good restaurant called Tapa Tapa. It wasn’t just passable, it was genuinely tasty. Taichung III was short but sweet.

From training the week passed and soon it was Christmas Eve, a Friday. Native Speaking Teachers (NSTs) are exempt from teaching Christmas if they so choose, and I chose so another NST friend and I went out to our regular neighborhood bar for a couple hours and ordered pitchers. It was a really weird Christmas Eve. Not a weird night, it was about as typical as typical nights get: going out for drinks after work then hitting up fast food (Mos Burger, google it) but it was the weirdest Christmas Eve ever for me. Not leaving work until 10pm, then doing nothing Christmas related. The next day brought Christmas, and that afternoon I went to a braai. A braai is a South African barbeque. True to the name, there were 3 Americans and about two dozen South Africans present at this shindig. I learned how to make braai brickies, which are sandwiches that are bread, chutney, tomatoes, salt, onion, cheese, bread in that bottom to top order. They were awesome, and apparently they weren’t even done properly. I also ate grilled mushrooms and grilled chicken, and it was nice to get away from something that wasn’t fried.

The braai lasted the rest of the day and then on Sunday my friend Ed came. Ed went to high school with me and is a Taiwanese-American so he was over here for a couple weeks. We went to another Christmas lunch at my boss’ apartment then played a little basketball. With work resuming on Monday though and Hsinchu not being the throbbing metropolis one might hope, he was only in town for two days and a night. The following week passed without event, and midway through I confirmed my plans. You have one guess as to my destination.

If you said anything other than Taichung, your reading comprehension may be worse than my students’, or I’ve been boring you enough to make you feel this blog is more of an obligation than anything. I hope this isn’t the case, and that’s what the comment section is for. Heck you can even post anonymously. But back to the story.

I knew I was to be in Taichung on New Year’s Eve. I knew my work ended at 9pm and if I could get out at 9:05 it would be a blessing. This was all moot however as the normal train tickets were sold out way in advance. High Speed Rail tickets were only available for the 10:27, and the HSR station is on the opposite end of town, about 30 minutes away. So I dropped off a coworker at the train station trying to make a 9:20 for Taipei (she made it) and zoomed off to the HSR station. I arrived, scanned for parking, and didn’t see any. So doing what any self-respecting Taiwanese person would do, I created some. Rather than move another scooter and risk damage, I simply moved a traffic cone. First I parked up against the street, picked up the cone on the left side of my scooter, and moved it to the right. It was precisely as easy as it sounds. I made my train with time to spare and 27 minute later arrived at the Taichung HSR station. I followed the signs to the taxi area. On my left was the normal taxi queue. On my right were two guys yelling for me to get in their taxis that were in the dropoff/kiss’n’ride area, quite illegally. I decided to go with the first guy I encountered.

Best decision ever.

This man was simply the most insane driver I have ever had the pleasure of riding with. I don’t claim to be the guru of taxis, but this man was missing something in his brain that should have been shouting “DANGER WILL ROBINSON!” First, he was a pure speed junky. My train arrived at 10:52. I was at my destination at 11:03. I beat Yvonne by 30 minutes. He was always punching the accelerator. His only brake was the friction between the tires and road, with one exception. The brake was for running red lights.

We went 0 for 2 on actually stopping at red lights. This wasn’t 4am on a random night, this was 11pm on New Year’s Eve. Thankfully we never got downtown and went basically outskirt to outskirt, but there were many people on the road. The first one I didn’t think much of; it was a T intersection and we were in the right lane on the ‘safe’ side, far away from the bisecting road. He didn’t even actually brake for that one. Then the next one blew me away. We were still on the major road we had turned onto off the highway. Getting closer to the bar though, we needed to go left. There were 4 lanes: a left turn lane, car lane, car lane, and scooter/right turn lane. The left turn lane was backed up, as were the car lanes. So my guy cruised to the empty right lane, then cut across the front cars to the front of the left turn lane and in the intersection. I liked this but didn’t think too much of it. What qualifies as a first-class moving violation in America is standard taxi school in some places. But then this guy kept going. But I shouldn’t say kept going as that implies a sense of stability and continuity. He eased into the left turn lane then put his foot on the ground.

A yellow bat out of hell, the taxi roared forward. I think I only regained consciousness when we reached the destination, the awesomeness blew me away so hard. I praised his driving abilities and paid the fare. I got out and immediately met several middle-aged women whom were looking for the same bar I was. This surprised me. We walked around, up a street, back down it, asking everyone, no one seemed to know where this phantasmal “89k” bar was which didn’t bode well. I called Yvonne who was of limited use. I convinced the women to ask a patrolling cop for directions. They balked, but I said if anyone knew where the foreigner bar was it would definitely be the police. Relenting, the leader asked the cops who kindly pointed us in the right direction. On seeing that it was more of a traditional bar and not a club (both are usually translated as bar into Chinese) they decided instead to go to one of the nearby clubs. We parted and they told me they opened up this new restaurant. 

“Cool” I said, “Where?”

“Datong street” I was told. Hmmm I didn’t know it, but might they have a business card? Searching, searching…

“No I can’t find it but it’s a tapas restau-“

“You mean Tapa Tapa!?” I interrupted.

“Yes!”

“Yeah, I’ve already been there. It was great.”

“Good! I’m Jennifer. If you go there, free coffee, whatever. Bye!”

So I’ve been promised free coffee by the owner of a sweet restaurant that I have previously visited. Nice.

Yvonne arrived at half past and we got drinks. The year came and went, as we popped the streamer things and listened to a nice cover band. Not sure why, but they covered Flight of the Concords among others. From there we just stayed at the bar for hours. Toward the end we left and made my second trip to 鼎王 heavenliness.

I’ll stop there, as I need to sleep. My next post will cover a birthday party, new roommate, homework, elementary school, and a scooter towing that actually happened in December but needs due justice. Pictures as I have time Woohooo!

soon!

New post coming in <24 hours! Of this I swear!