Sunday, August 14, 2005

Taibei Again

This is possibly the first time since I came to Taiwan that I have had such a busy social life. I made a new friend yesterday, this sounds like elementary school, but sometimes it is. Ellen, who is a South African Chinese woman at the school. We're both vegetarian so we had lunch and then walked up to Zhongzheng park and had a good talk. Under the influence of typhoons off the coast, it was incredibly windy. Walking back down the hill, the winds felt so strong that I almost thought they could support my body and they would actually blow me away.

Anyway, she invited me to go with her adult class to TGI Friday's in Taibei. It's apparently an incredibly fancy restaurant in Taibei, as opposed to being a working middle class restaurant in America filled with screaming children. I missed them in Jilong so I found it eventually and it was definitely an experience. Two of the boys ate all the lettuce and guacamole and sour cream on dares, their friends, girlfriends, and other people helpfully adding ketchup, pepper, salt, and sugar to them. There were two rounds the second with everything on celery sticks. Truly this is a wonderful place.

After that I ended up hanging out with Daniel and his friend Stacey, a Taiwanese woman who lives in Jilong. We ate out at a Korean restaurant and then Stacey and I headed back to Jilong where we ended up talking for a couple hours about this and that. I have a hard time understanding her Chinese, I think she uses a lot of harder words and figures of speech, but it's better for me to get used to other people talking.

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