Windy city

The whole island is covered in orange/red now.  The winds are making our windows rattle.

**Sunday evening update:  Not a whole lot more than wind today, seems Fanapi decided to head south.

Typhoon Fanapi

Looks like this typhoon will hit us tomorrow evening:

No cold water yet

Food continues to be an arena for hilarity, charades, practicing Chinese, patience and sometimes even a shower. One thing that has compounded the food issue is our lack of a refrigerator. We purchased one on Wednesday (after a lot of pointing, saying “yes yes” and “no no” along with over exaggerated nodding and shaking of our heads to ensure that when the woman was saying yes, she did actually mean yes) and were told it would be here Friday. We anxiously awaited its arrival. Then on Thursday the typhoon started to roll in. Typhoons mean wind, rain, businesses don’t open and that deliveries are delayed. No worries, a phone call by a staff member that speaks Chinese and we learned the fridge would come Sunday instead, plenty of time for the typhoon to run its course. So today we made sure we stayed home to greet the delivery people. Two o’clock came and left and after 3 long hours of feeling trapped in our apartment we decided it wasn’t coming. Now it’s hard enough to call and track down a delivery when you speak the language, think about trying to do this when your primary means of communication is by acting things out. Our trusty staff member made a call for us and reported back that they couldn’t find our order. Great. We just want cold water. We waited for someone from the store to call us, with all sorts of worse case scenarios running through my mind (granted, it wasn’t a rational mind) and when they finally did a long 10 minutes later they told us it will be here Monday at 3. Whew. I’m not holding my breath, but at least they found it!

Not having a fridge means we have to go out for every meal, eat dry goods, or buy small portions of refrigerated items from the store and eat them all. Not that this is a bad thing, just something to be considered before you get to the “I’m-so-starving-I’m-getting-cranky-and-have-to-eat-right-now” stage. I can get to this stage quickly (just ask Jeremiah who often will ask me at the slightest hint of cranky behavior if I would like a snack). I think Jeremiah loves not having a fridge because it forces us to go out, eat and interact with people – 3 things he loves and 3 things I don’t often jump up and down about. I admit though, I have loved the places we have gone and look forward to going back to. I also love that Jeremiah will go out and get me things when I don’t feel like leaving. He did learn though that rain can come quickly in Taiwan and can come down hard.

We did make a meal at home, ensuring we didn't get too much food that would go to waste. It turned out pretty great.(click to enlarge)

Tomorrow I start work with some meetings so we actually have to set the alarm clock. I'll leave you with a picture of where we write to you from:

we're ok, but morakot did wreak havoc on taiwan

this was in southern taiwan, in taitung. no one was hurt. crazy

Typhoon Day?

We learned tonight at dinner (Thai again by the way, excellent) that school is canceled tomorrow for the typhoon, which means I don’t need to go in to learn about, and help with, the admissions process for our school. We’ll see how bad it gets; I’m actually excited to see what happens. Also at dinner we met the returning teachers, two of which are our assigned “buddies” who are super helpful.

Jeremiah made a list the other day, and I think I will follow suite:

-My glasses fog up when I leave an air-conditioned building and go outside
-Sometimes, despite it being warm and muggy outside, I am cold inside because of the ac
-There are some awesome animal sounds I can hear from my office
-I love Jeremiah’s ability to (try to) talk to anyone here when I’m too afraid
-I really don’t mind living with no furniture. Our bed is our couch, table, chairs, etc.
-I like the idea of living with a gecko but still really like to know what room he is in and will search him out every time we come home.
-Everyone here, the Taiwanese people and the school staff, are unbelievably nice and helpful.
-The man who works the evening shift downstairs gave us a map of vegetarian places we could eat and wrote the characters for us to show that mean “no animal”. His name is Thomas (a name he gave himself on the spot because he knew we wouldn’t understand his Chinese name).

It’s raining pretty hard right now. I think I will read some, or maybe we’ll watch some Seinfeld, and then go to bed. Tomorrow we get to sleep in, though I’m sure 6am will roll around and we will be awake.

(PS We posted two times today. Jeremiah's is new below this post too.)

20 eyes, high fives, and two white people (and morakot?)

went out to dinner at a thai place about 2 minutes from us last night. (will post a map of where we are as soon as i figure out where we are). when we walked in, all four of the early 20s wait stuff stopped in their tracks and waited for us to do something. we froze too because we didn't know what to do, and then i smiled and held of two fingers (hoping i wasn't actually flipping them off). they seated us and we had a great meal - spicy green beans, sauteed vegetables, rice, taiwense beer (600 ml!), and some icy mango-y, coconut milky dessert stuff that was great. however, that wasn't all that happened... i definitely picked the wrong seat during the meal because allison was able to eat while making eye contact with all four people on the wait staff and the other six people eating about 73% of the time. i kept asking her if they were still looking and she said "yes" through her cute little smile. of course, i kept turning around to check, and was greeted with smiles. we both decided i definitely need to switch spots with allison next time. we were also able to have four different waiters/waitresses throughout the dinner. i'm guessing they all wanted a chance to say they waited on white people, so we had a different person seat us, take our order, serve our food, and then bring us the bill. it got better when i got up and asked where the bathroom was. after the girl told me where to go and i went in, allison saw her turn to someone with a big smile and say, "restroom!" and give them a big high five. wish i could have seen it! anyways, we ate, paid, i forgot and tried to tip, they didn't want it, and we left. loved it! hopefully they know we'll be going there at least 7 nights a week.

oh, one more thing... typhoooooooooooooon! mr. (or mrs? or ms? help me out megan) morakot is hopefully going to be visiting us tomorrow!!! we probably won't get the big stuff, but we will probably get quite a bit of rain. if we do get hit with it, allison and i will be sure to let you know how it goes. (and no, i won't make any wizard of oz jokes about not being in kansas anymore) if you don't know, we're about in the middle of taiwan on the west side - here is a satellite image of it:

ps i mentioned megan earlier in this blog post. she is THE blonde in taiwan (accept no imitations) and has been over here for almost a year. actually, i don't know how long she has been here exactly, but i'm too lazy to look right now. check her blog out!

pps allison tried to get us kicked out of a sega arcade/video gambling place today. will post video later, but she used our camera to take a video of me losing three dollars and was told to put her camera away. it was a crazy virtual black jack game. i probably would have won if i hadn't gotten flustered.