Wednesday, July 06, 2005

From Taiwan

It is incredibly hot over here. Yesterday, I went to the local big bookstore to just cool off and there were millions of people there. One cool thing about Taiwan is it seems to be ok to read openly in the store. I guess it's a sort of banal way to start talking about "my life abroad" so here's a list of things I like and a list of things I don't like.

Things I like
In Taiwan you get over a hundred channels, I get HBO, which I've never gotten before. Also there are people playing Jenga on TV and once I'm pretty sure I saw an advertisement for a dildo. There are some odd goings here apparently.

Taiwanese people are really nice

The landlord's grandchildren who live upstairs

I can get dinner for NT $20 which is about 60c.

7-11 has good food, is clean, and sells magazines and DVDs, and also apparently you can pay your energy bill there, if you're into that kind of thing

Things I don't like

Foreigners here, they are almost all men, most of them are older. Although a lot of them are nice, including my roommate, it makes for a lot of uncle-like social interactions

At work, one of the guys was telling us how in Australia some Muslims were complaining about the pool not being segregated by sex and his friend told them to go back where they came from. This was meant in a humourous way.

My students asking me or the TA "Xin de laoshi shi nan de haishi nu de." Are you a boy or girl?

Cockroaches the size of Texas

More later.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Woah, your roommate is an old man? And cockroaches...ew! When I went to visit my aunt in Florida, they were everywhere too...we rented a car and they were crawling in and out of the air vents whenever we turned on the AC, and so we stopped doing that, which just made things sticky-gross.

Sorry I stink at keeping in touch with people. :( I will try and make amends...

lovelesscynic said...

Well, if by old you mean 39, then yeah.