Wednesday, August 26, 2009
First Food Experiences and Important News
Food Experience #1 - I am embarrassed to say takes place at Dunkin Donuts. We need coffee. We point to "iced coffee" in English, written on the menu at the counter beneath the lacy Chinese characters and make peace signs, "two." The woman behind the counter, looking confused, pours hot coffee over ice. As we sip our lukewarm and watery coffee we have a dance/motion/point talk with her about how we get two donuts with our coffee. One donut is an in-edible looking glossy pink heart and the other a frumpy sort of cinnamon donut one might find at any street corner or rest stop in New England. We bring the coffees on the shockingly silent subway in where we find signs reading - No Food, No Drink, No Smoking. Maximum Fine 17,500NT.
Food Experience #2 - We eat a strange little sandwich in a box to sit in an air-conditioned bakery after walking around the area surrounding the Main Station. White bread filled with pieces of boiled egg and pork, mayo and soft lettuce. It sticks to the roofs of our mouths.
Food Experience #3 - is one of the best. We sit down at a restaurant in an ally-way and share a spinachy vegetable dumpling the size of a fist. Delicious. Also one dollar. We pay the wrong person - the dumpling maker, not the cashier - but as we appear to leave without paying she merely looks confusedly after us.
Food Experience #4 - At the Shida market in Kiah's neighborhood, while waiting or her to return from work and eat delicious satee - pieces of chicken fried to a golden shine on wooden sticks.
Food Experience #5 - bubble tea.
* Kiah finds us in the park near her apartment and brings us home with her. finally we feel safely tucked away somewhere. We shower and settle in a little bit, so happy to be with her in her newly green (she just painted...) apartment. She puts us to bed in her room and four hours later Sam Read wakes us up with a cruel yell, standing over us beaming, beer in hand. We meet Kiah's roommate Jordan and her good friend Alex who joins us for dinner at Kiah's home away from home (away from home). The people who own and work at the restaurant are warm and gracious and fill us up with food and drink.
Food Experience #6 - for Sophie, does not include chicken hearts grilled and served piered through a stick. Everybody else likes them. I make a promise to try one soon, when I feel less disoriented. I will definitely regret this promise when I feel oriented. I eat delicious noodles in a bowl with slices of beef and some homemade sauce and a salad of crisp pickled cucumbers. I learn it is rude to leave food on your plate. We eat up everything.
Food Experience #7 - Max and I would rather forget.
Food Experience #8 - Max and I pop into a cafe around the corner from the KOJEN main office after meeting our employer, Christine, and signing contracts. Afterward we go to the hospital for a health check. We receive a menu that lists nothing but spaghetti and assume we stumbled upon an Italian place without realizing it. For three US dollars we order spaghetti and meat sauce to share and are surprised to receive creamy vegetable soup to start, the spaghetti with meat sauce, and dessert and tea to finish. At noon Taiwanese patrons appear and disprove our Italian Theory. The servers bring out steaming plates of rice and vegetables and unidentifiable sauce-covered meats for everyone else in the restaurant.
Food Experience #9 - Kiah throws us a party. She asks her friends to bring Tiawanese foods for us to try and they are so generous! (I feel uncomfortable talking about the food they brought before talking about them, so let me just add here that her friends have been incredibly welcoming...) First, we meet Alyson who arrives with a seasonal fruit that smells like autumn to Kiah. She also brought a kind of tubular green vegetable whose Chinese name translates to "empty heart," and a kind of Japanese food of fresh and watery onions wrapped in raw salmon and splashed with lime juice. Alex makes a fruit plate of chinese pears, guava, star-fruit and the most delicious pineapple I've every tasted. We dipped "squid and shrimp" flavored chips in this homemade guacamole... We ate something like a Taiwanese shawarma, Taiwanese pizza...
Food Experience #10 - Before we go to bed, after Kiah's welcome party winds down, I remember the dessert her friend Kathleen brought for us. From the fridge I pull out a long white box decorated with a fancy gold trim and filled with four powdered balls about two inches wide and an inch and a half thick. The balls wiggle around (a bit like tame jello) and I have a hard time picking them one up. My fingers threaten to break the raw-doughy surface of the jiggling treat and some of the powder falls off. The blue or cocktail cherry colored garnishes on top distinguishes the creamy blueberry filled ones from the creamy strawberry filled ones. Our teeth sink right through the doughy outsides and the creamy insides shoot into our mouths. It tastes as sweet and strange as Taipei seems to me so far.
Important News:
Max and I are working in the same school as Kiah.
Max and I found an apartment -- more info/pics to come.
Max bought a bike and he's having a great time riding to work.
About 1 of every 10 ATMs works for us. (*update: we're up to a 50% success rate)
I'm loving the school I'm working in.
Kiah bought a grumpy old man of a scooter for a good price.
Food Experience #2 - We eat a strange little sandwich in a box to sit in an air-conditioned bakery after walking around the area surrounding the Main Station. White bread filled with pieces of boiled egg and pork, mayo and soft lettuce. It sticks to the roofs of our mouths.
Food Experience #3 - is one of the best. We sit down at a restaurant in an ally-way and share a spinachy vegetable dumpling the size of a fist. Delicious. Also one dollar. We pay the wrong person - the dumpling maker, not the cashier - but as we appear to leave without paying she merely looks confusedly after us.
Food Experience #4 - At the Shida market in Kiah's neighborhood, while waiting or her to return from work and eat delicious satee - pieces of chicken fried to a golden shine on wooden sticks.
Food Experience #5 - bubble tea.
* Kiah finds us in the park near her apartment and brings us home with her. finally we feel safely tucked away somewhere. We shower and settle in a little bit, so happy to be with her in her newly green (she just painted...) apartment. She puts us to bed in her room and four hours later Sam Read wakes us up with a cruel yell, standing over us beaming, beer in hand. We meet Kiah's roommate Jordan and her good friend Alex who joins us for dinner at Kiah's home away from home (away from home). The people who own and work at the restaurant are warm and gracious and fill us up with food and drink.
Food Experience #6 - for Sophie, does not include chicken hearts grilled and served piered through a stick. Everybody else likes them. I make a promise to try one soon, when I feel less disoriented. I will definitely regret this promise when I feel oriented. I eat delicious noodles in a bowl with slices of beef and some homemade sauce and a salad of crisp pickled cucumbers. I learn it is rude to leave food on your plate. We eat up everything.
Food Experience #7 - Max and I would rather forget.
Food Experience #8 - Max and I pop into a cafe around the corner from the KOJEN main office after meeting our employer, Christine, and signing contracts. Afterward we go to the hospital for a health check. We receive a menu that lists nothing but spaghetti and assume we stumbled upon an Italian place without realizing it. For three US dollars we order spaghetti and meat sauce to share and are surprised to receive creamy vegetable soup to start, the spaghetti with meat sauce, and dessert and tea to finish. At noon Taiwanese patrons appear and disprove our Italian Theory. The servers bring out steaming plates of rice and vegetables and unidentifiable sauce-covered meats for everyone else in the restaurant.
Food Experience #9 - Kiah throws us a party. She asks her friends to bring Tiawanese foods for us to try and they are so generous! (I feel uncomfortable talking about the food they brought before talking about them, so let me just add here that her friends have been incredibly welcoming...) First, we meet Alyson who arrives with a seasonal fruit that smells like autumn to Kiah. She also brought a kind of tubular green vegetable whose Chinese name translates to "empty heart," and a kind of Japanese food of fresh and watery onions wrapped in raw salmon and splashed with lime juice. Alex makes a fruit plate of chinese pears, guava, star-fruit and the most delicious pineapple I've every tasted. We dipped "squid and shrimp" flavored chips in this homemade guacamole... We ate something like a Taiwanese shawarma, Taiwanese pizza...
Food Experience #10 - Before we go to bed, after Kiah's welcome party winds down, I remember the dessert her friend Kathleen brought for us. From the fridge I pull out a long white box decorated with a fancy gold trim and filled with four powdered balls about two inches wide and an inch and a half thick. The balls wiggle around (a bit like tame jello) and I have a hard time picking them one up. My fingers threaten to break the raw-doughy surface of the jiggling treat and some of the powder falls off. The blue or cocktail cherry colored garnishes on top distinguishes the creamy blueberry filled ones from the creamy strawberry filled ones. Our teeth sink right through the doughy outsides and the creamy insides shoot into our mouths. It tastes as sweet and strange as Taipei seems to me so far.
Important News:
Max and I are working in the same school as Kiah.
Max and I found an apartment -- more info/pics to come.
Max bought a bike and he's having a great time riding to work.
About 1 of every 10 ATMs works for us. (*update: we're up to a 50% success rate)
I'm loving the school I'm working in.
Kiah bought a grumpy old man of a scooter for a good price.
Hazy/Calm in the Heat
I'm leaning into myself differently. I feel calm through and through. The feeling began in the San Francisco airport at 1:00 in the morning and stayed with me throughout the plane ride, at the shockingly silent airport in Taipei waiting for our luggage to loop around the kiosk, in the car ride to our temporary housing, in this city these past few days. Perhaps I'm just romanticizing jet-lag and it's in large part this sleepy haze tempering my hyperbolic emotional and analytic tendencies. Maybe the heat miraculously melts some of my edges and I just never knew (being from Western New York...). Anyway, I only hoped to feel this good. I'm living the best-case scenario so far. It is also true that I must pat myself on the back for chasing away the bad and getting a grip on the good, but I believe Taipei has come to meet me in this calm. No doubt my sense of this place will become less warm and fuzzy as time goes on, and I'll have some more specific, developed feelings to share with you about my experience in Taipei. But for now I'll paint with wide brush strokes as that's all I have to work work just now.
This feeling reminds me of making risotto, and of scenes in Haruki Murikami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle when the protagonist, a pensive man, walked around the empty ally behind his row house in search of his wife's cat. Physically, it feels like the overly anxious parts of me sit back in a rocker with a drink, letting the five senses do all the heavy lifting (living). These old traits are just sort of watching the new world pass by fast and hot and bright and crowded and overwhelmingly kind, helpful. It's a general sense of reserve that appeals to me now (and might make me lonely for home later). I don't feel pressure to "make more" of the minute/I'm not pressuring myself to "make more" of the minute (to clarify - for me, this sense of duty too often derives from negative, artificial things). I'm letting each minute be itself. It's not so much a resigned to fate attitude as a resigned to time one, or a refreshing lack of control. "We have nothing to gain. We have nothing to lose," Max tells me.
I'm hesitant to say so early on that this puts me in tandem with some kind of cultural tradition. What I'm saying is, that for whatever combination of reasons, I'm feeling good in this place. Those who know me will be glad to know this, I'm sure, and quick to remind me that I am capable of feeling so good the next time it slips through my fingers.
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