… sort of. During our morning exercise this morning (Jessica walking around the park and me playing on the exercise bars), I met up with the kung-fu teacher again. (He’ll get a profile post later with pictures and all that.) This guy has huge callouses on his knuckles, and breathes through his kidneys and intestines. He decided to tell me what’s up.

You’re not supposed to breathe with your lungs. How do you know that you’ve breathed out all the used air when you breathe with your lungs? You could poison yourself. Plus, breathing with your lungs puts pressure on your heart and makes your face turn red when you exercise. Therefore, you should learn to breathe with your kidneys and your abdomen. Eventually you can just not breathe at all. That last part I believed… it’s called death. But he said that’s the stage he’s working on… underwater. I didn’t argue: he does knuckle push-ups on the pavement with his feet up on the exercise bars. And he teaches kung-fu for a living. And he’s a nice guy (three good-enough reasons for me not to get into an argument). He demonstrated the breathing and got me to try it – it’s like he has balloons behind his belly button and kidneys. While I was at, I tried laying down on the tires like everyone does… it’s not as uncomfortable as it looks, though I’m not entirely convinced it’s good for the spine. Is it? Anyway, that’s the adventures this morning. Gotta run to work.

This’ll be a short post, but I HAD to share these scooter slogans that we saw recently.

Kiwi: Whenever you see it, you get happy!

FOVEP: You get to fool the harriness of rioing! (I’ve seen others that say “Fever: you get to feel the happiness of riding” so I assume that this one is a knock-off of the “Fever” one, or the decal guy in the “Fever” factory had a bad English day.)

And (this one may be one of the best, or at least strangest so far):

Dio: Shuttle in the city jengle, the new, speedy snail clan.

See pictures here…Enjoy!

This is from a page from one of our Mandarin text books, a text written for teaching foreigners at Peking University. “Seventh Lesson: I like to drink tea.” Can you guess which of the three people are supposed to be Westerners and which one is Chinese?

This is a follow-up to the How ‘They’ See ‘Us’ post from a while back.

“Teacher! Why your nose SO big?”

“Because. In America-”

“And Canada!”

“Yes, and Canada – very good – …”

(Jessica walks into the classroom.)

“… they take the children when they are small and put their noses in a special machine that pulls them until they are really long.”

“Really?”

“Ask Teacher Jessica.”

“But why?”

“Because it looks good.”

“But for us waiguoren nose is so ugl- I mean, strange!”

“Do your homework.”

I wonder how long it will take before these kinds of conversations start to become annoying. It appears I’ve reached the sarcastic/facetious response stage. If I ever get around to it I’ll post some pictures from some language text books the kids have, or from our own that come from Beijing. The have little sketches to go with the conversations, and the foreigners always have sharp pointy noses.

Photos from Taipei 101 are up on the photos page.

Busy day off. First to the radio station, where we recorded the latest PEI radio ad for the English Summer Camp in Vancouver. We originally had kids from the school doing parts, but the clips we recorded at school weren’t good enough for the radio station people. So Mingdaw and Zhi-ling pretended to be kids and we re-recorded at the studio. It’s a little… well, you can hear it for yourself on the video page.

After that, Mingdaw and Charles took us all to Taipei 101. It was raining. But there are still some interesting, if not foggy, pictures from the top of the world’s tallest building. I’ll get those uploaded soon (it’s too late tonight).

After Taipei 101 it they took us all to a fantastic restaurant serving dishes from Shanxi province in China. We met up with Angel there (Charles’ wife) and had some of the best food we’ve had yet.

There are a ton more pictures on the photos page. We added some new galleries and updated others (see the dates by each one). Among them, a labelled satellite map of our neighbourhood showing the places we frequent, shots from the park, and more (including an audio recording of the infernal musical garbage trucks). Next up will be some profiles of local characters we’re getting know, and the Taipei 101 photos.

We’re trying to become “regulars” on our street, where we know the people we see everyday by name and can stop for a visits whenever we’re coming or going . And now we have time. Saturday we went in to work early and left at 5pm. That gave us the whole evening to run around. (We’ll have pictures up soon of all this stuff, except Old Zhao’s drunk friends).

We stopped in at the Ling Family fish soup place to visit Lao Zhao. He had three rich friends visiting. They were apparently in the mood to (loudly) bless Old Zhao and anyone else with the evidence of their wealth, which in this instance means sharing some bites of the “most expensive fish in Taiwan – from Thailand” (our chopstick proficiency exceeded their expectations… which must not be that high), admiring a diamond-encrusted Rolex (“cost ten-thousand one-hundreds”), a couple dixie cups of red wine (to which we’re attributing some of their extra-good mood), and a question about something to do with any sisters I might have. A good time was had by all, largely owing to the fact that the particulars regarding the question about my sisters were entirely lost in translation. It’s nice to have locals we can drop in on and hang-out with.

After that we took off for the local night market, which we hadn’t visited yet. It’s smaller than the Shilin and Keelung, but only about three blocks off the opposite corner of the park. To get there we practically walked right through a temple – the same one that Old Zhao and I sat outside when we were looking for someone who would cut a waiguoren’s hair for $200NT. Pictures will be up soon. We had dinner at the night market, which this night was corn on the cob roasted in sticky spicy sauce, sushi, bao-zi (steamed stuffed bun), fruit juice blender drinks (kiwi, starfruit, watermelon), and fruit-on-a-stick that you pass under a chocolate waterfall.

Taught our first Sunday morning English class (part of our contract), which is our only adult English class. We used The Message for part of the text, and that seemed to go over really well. We’re contemplating eventually joining the choir as a means of extra Chinese exposure… it would only mean an extra hour or so on Sunday, and we already stay for the choir lunch anyway.

Pictures are back-logged severely. If you haven’t checked out the photos page in the last week or so, then there are a bunch of new pictures, and I will have a ton more probably Monday night (your time).

Now, no one expects the average North American to know the difference between “PRC” and “ROC,” but just fyi: If you are ever Commander in Chief of the world’s only (but not for long) superpower, and you decide to host the President of the People’s Republic of China and honour the occasion with a public ceremony, it is generally a good thing if you don’t confuse China’s national anthem with Taiwan’s (the self-proclaimed “Republic Of China.”) The whole Taiwan-China relationship/national identity thing is a rather sensitive topic. Taiwanese are scrutinizing the visit for future implications regarding their relationship with the Mainland. But this was funny more than anything, esp. to our Taiwanese friends.

…[China's] National Anthem was introduced as that of “the Republic of China” – the other name for Taiwan – the part of China that has rebelled and broken away from the mainland and sought security from the United States. (full article)

I know we’re all big nose foreigners but geez people – do your homework! =)

I had one day off, it’s getting hotter and humid-er, and I couldn’t stand going another week with shaggy hair. It was getting like what my old roommate Greg Estrada used to call his “Mexi-fro.” But how do you find a place to cut your hair when you can’t read the signs, and the place one of the 8-year-olds in your English class showed you last week is closed?

There’s an old guy at the fish soup place on the corner named 老趙 (Lao3 Zhao4) – “Old Zhao” – who just hangs out all day in the family business reading. He has a little English and he’s really friendly, so I figured he wouldn’t mind giving directions. He decided to take me for a little walk instead. We had a great time.

Old Zhao has lived in this neighbourhood for 20 years. He likes to read Buddhist philosophy and English books. (His sister has lived in the States and written books on Chinese/Western cultural differences and has excellent English – more on her later.) It seemed like one out of every three scooters had one of his “old friends” on it who would yell and wave at him. We walked down some streets I’d never been – away from the park, school, and MRT station – and down into the Taiwan I’d expected to see from movies and pictures: narrow winding dirty alleys lined with low-roofed Taiwan working-class dwellings, little temples scattered everywhere, none of this fancy high class high profile urban stuff. In a way it was like going back a decade or more into Taipei’s history; the ‘economic miracle’ hadn’t completely rebuilt these places. It was a little strange to go so deep enough into a residential neighbourhood that it got quiet… the main streets were far enough away that the apartment towers blocked out most of the noise. I have no idea how big that maze of winding alleys between apartments was, but I sure felt like we were two lonely little ants. Usually experiencing the Taipei Main Station at rush hour is plenty adequate to induce feelings of living in an ant nest. That’s the best way I can describe it, especially on an upper level looking down: we all just run in cramped-yet-moving lines every which way through two or three levels of underground escalators and subway platforms. But being dwarfed on a quiet path by apartment buidings that went on for who knows how long reminded me of those traditional Chinese landscape watercolours, where the mountains are huge and there are tiny little inconsequential people lost somewhere in the foreground.

We ended up down this little back alley looking for some more of his friends who would know where to find someone who would (a) cut hair (b) of foreigners (the traditional hair places sometimes don’t like to do foreigners because our hair is different and they don’t know how to cut it, apparently). We passed several temples, and one was sort of ‘open’ at an intersection of alleys beside a main sidewalk; you just walk up to one of several very elaborate altars and leave your offerings, shake a few sticks of incense, and go on your way. We sat on a bench right there for a little while waiting for Lao Zhao’s friends, so I watched. Some people stayed praying for a while, some merely deviated slightly from their destination toward the nearest altar, shook their hands in prayer, and kept on going. It was all very elaborate.

We passed a lot of stuff I’d love to show everyone with pictures, and I’ll retrace those steps with a camera this weekend sometime. After all the walking we ended up in a corner of the wet market with Li2 Mama1, who’d been cutting hair for 30 years and had apparently handled a foreigner or two in her time. She didn’t seem too intimidated, so long as the cut was “same style and short.” I didn’t care. 200 NT dollars is the best price to be had ($6USD). Jessica says I look like one of our students, but it sure beats the shagginess in the heat.

Now…don’t be too quick to assume that I’ve had no clueless moments since “Clueless…pt. 1″. I’m certain that I have had many, but people are probably trying to help me “save face” by not clueing me in to how clueless I am.

The other day, however, I had a new one. My first thought was, “Oh…there’s a clueless post to share!” :)

We had just finished skyping with Ruth and family and our PTA meeting with the parents, and we were hanging out at the local Thai restaurant (which is SO good!) with our boss (Mingdaw), his wife (Iris), and his mother (Yang Mama). Yang Mama has been away from the school for awhile, as her mother (Mingdaw’s grandmother) has been really ill and in the hospital. She is better now though, and was released from the hospital a day or two before our big Skype event.

Yang Mama doesn’t have much English…but she takes such good care of us, and I really want to be able to talk to her more. So, for about 10 minutes I tried to work out how to say “Your mother went home from the hospital?” in Chinese. Then, for maybe another 5 minutes, I tried to work up the courage to actually give it a shot.

Finally, I decided to give it a go and said (or thought I said): “你的媽媽 去 的 家?” ni(3) de mama(1) qu (4) de jia(1)? But evidently, I really said “你的媽媽出 家?” ni(3) de mama(1) chu(1) jia(1)?

Yang Mama looked a bit confused at first, but then smiled and said “對” (dui4). So, I doublechecked with my boss to see if I’d said it right.

He just started laughing, and then explained why. It seems that, “出 家” (chu1 jia1) is a phrase that means “exit the family.” Apparently, this expression is usually used to indicate that one has become a monk.

So, basically, what I said to Yang Mama was not, “Your mother went home?” but “Your mother became a monk?” :o :o

Like I said…we’re clueless. Fortunately, everyone is really gracious about our attempts to speak Chinese. But really, in my opinion, this newfound ability to make everyone (including ourselves) laugh is not such a bad thing. :D

One of the nice things about not having homework is that I have more time to talk with people in park during my morning exercise; I don’t have to hurry back to get in a couple hours of studying before work.

If you don’t mind waking up a little early and you’ve got the time, early mornings in the park are a great time to sit around and yak, and maybe get some exercise while you’re at it. That’s what everyone else is doing, unless they’re doing tai-chi or a musical choreography routine. Morning exercise is a social event.

Today I got to talk with Wang Xian-sheng (Mr. Wang) and Zhang Mama (Mrs. Zhang). We went through the usual stuff about where we’re from and how long we’ve been in Taiwan and all the people they know that have been to America and how I am so tall and my hair is curly and Americans are so big and Chinese are small – all in a humourous combination of my very sparse Mandarin vocabulary and Wang Xian-sheng’s slightly larger English repertoire (Zhang Mama has zero English); just barely enough to get the info across. These are the things they (people in the park) bring up almost every time, but the repetition is good practice so we don’t mind.

Then Zhang Mama asked if I was Catholic, or at least said something about praying to Mary, which a first I mistook for asking whether I was Buddhist/Daoist because the praying motion she made looked like how they wave the incense in the temples. I got it when she asked again while crossing herself. So we had a little exchange in Mandarin (with very bad grammar) about, ‘No, I don’t [praying gesture while vaguely parroting the word I thought she'd used] to Ma-li, but my xi-wang (hope) is [someone else].’
‘But in America everyone goes to church.’
‘But in America most people’s xi-wang is in money, not [someone else].’ After another 15 minutes of ‘conversation’ both myself and Wang Xian-sheng had to go, but it was fun, and they said if I bring paper next time they’ll write some words down for me.

Another guy – one of the sword tai-chi guys – showed up right before I left with a bag full of weapons. He hung it on one of the chin-up bars and started stretching. He wasn’t very talkative, but he did show me his sword (wouldn’t let me play with it though). Maybe he’ll warm up and I can get my hands on it one of these days.