Lee and I went our separate ways this evening. He went to poker night with the guy-folk from KAS and I met up with a friend for my first ever foot massage. I neither hated nor loved the massage. It was painful and wonderful at the same time. I am undecided if I'll do it again. Lee has not yet returned from his evening so I don't know yet if he'll go for another round.

Our friend Lulu took us to her grandfather's farm today. In a pretty small area he has:

avocado

banana

grapes

guava (inside plastic bags)

longan berry

papaya

pineapple

taro

But the reason we went to the farm was to pick lychees.

The season is only about a month long so everyone has to eat their fill now. And they are being sold everywhere - in the fruit markets, at the 7-11, from carts on the sides of the roads. It was quite a treat to drive out of the city and have the chance to pick our own. In about 10 minutes Lee and I had picked two grocery bags worth. This is what they looked like after I'd stripped off the leaves and trimmed the stems:

The orchard was nestled in the hills about 45 minutes drive from the city and beautiful.

Last night was the party. It was located at Sizihuan, one of the beaches in the city. Lee and I have biked there many times and swam at the beach a few weeks ago. It's a lovely spot for a party.

The trees outside the restaurant were decorated with lights and in bloom with delicate, sweet-smelling flowers. Very pretty.

There were many faculty babies in attendance (offspring of the faculty, not whiny adults) so we all got our fill of holding little ones. 

This is our Japanese teacher, Chika, holding Ociel, the Spanish teacher's son. Behind them is the beach and the setting sun.

The school provided a bus to take anyone who wanted a ride down to the venue, which was a nice alternative to taking a taxi. It was not without some glitches, however. Apparently big buses need a permit to drive down the access road, something that wasn't required last year, and our bus didn't have one. So the driver dropped us at the city bus terminal a few miles away and we all piled onto another bus. Then that bus dropped us off at the last stop before the access road and we walked the half mile or so to the restaurant. 

I'm not sure why the chartered bus couldn't have dropped us off where the city bus did, but we did make it in the end so it's all good. And the bus was miraculously waiting outside the restaurant when it was time to return home.

The party was very nice. There was plenty of beer, although the servers forgot to bring out the wine until the very end, so the security guards all took home a bottle. The had brought their own Taiwan whiskey to share with anyone who wanted shots of rot-gut. They certainly know how to liven up a party.

The food was very good and plentiful and everyone kicked back and relaxed. Now we just need to get through the last two weeks of school without strangling any of the middle schoolers.

A few experiences to add to the "love Taiwan/hate Taiwan" balance sheet.

Love Taiwan: The other day when we got mango ices Lee forgot his cell phone on the table when we left. An hour later when we went back it was waiting for him behind the counter. I've come to believe that it wouldn't occur to anyone to steal something like that.

Hate Taiwan: There were a bunch of scooters and a taxi sitting at a red light. When the light turned green most of the scooters took off but one hesitated. (He was probably on his cell phone.) The taxi plowed into the back of him! The driver of the scooter managed to stay on his bike but his helmet went flying and the taxi driver started yelling at him. Traffic here is crazy.

Love Taiwan: After I got home from school yesterday Lee and I hopped on our bikes, picked up some dinner and headed down the bike path. In 45 minutes we were having a picnic on the beach.

Hate Taiwan: At 5 o'clock this morning it's 82 degrees with a heat index of 93.
Love Taiwan: It will never snow here.

A friend of ours, Jenn, took us out last evening for a beautiful view of the city. The skies have cleared a little and we actually got some sun yesterday which meant it was a lovely evening for a drive. First stop, mango ice at the best mango ice place in the city, down by the ferry to Cijin Island. Jenn had taken us there one of the first weekends we were in Kaohsiung, way back ten months ago. Lots of fond memories.

Mango ice is one of the best foods that's unique to Taiwan, as least as far as I know. It could be really popular in other places but I've never seen or heard of it anywhere but here. You can get the ice with lots of other flavors - banana, mixed fruit, even red bean - but when mango is in season there's nothing better. The ice is shaved really thin so it's smooth and silky. They add a little sweetened condensed milk and mango sherbet to the pile of ice and ftresh mango so it's a bowl full of sugary goodness with melt-in-your-mouth chunks of mango. Yum.

Anyway, after our treat we drove up the southern tip of Monkey Mountain to the Martyr's Shrine. We've biked up there many times but always during the day. It's a great view of the city overlooking downtown, the harbor and Cijin Island. It's especially dramatic at night when the air is clear.

We spent our first night in the new apartment. Clearly we didn't think it all the way through. This morning I had to quietly slip upstairs in my bathrobe to retrieve some morning essentials - coffee, cups and a pot to boil water. But it's all good now. Except for the bed. Like many Asian mattresses, it's really hard. Not unlike sleeping on a towel laid out on a concrete slab. Okay, maybe not that bad, but not my idea of comfortable.

We had dinner down here last night - pizza while we waited for the cable guy - so we have leftovers for breakfast at least. This evening's job will be to move the kitchen down. In our previous life that would have taken many, many boxes. Now we only own two pots and a fry pan so it shouldn't take Lee more than a couple of trips on the elevator. I have an elementary school faculty meeting so I'll leave the rest of the moving to him. I'm not sure who has the better afternoon ahead of them.

The monsoon season has officially begun. That's just another word for rain, rain, rain. I get that we needed all this water but I was hoping for some sunshine mixed in as well. It's been a week of rain and the ten-day forecast has no little sun icon peeking around the rain clouds. In the past 48 hours Kaohsiung has received over 650 mm of rain. It sounds especially impressive in millimeters but even 25 inches is pretty incredible. Today's forecast calls for "extremely heavy rain" through this evening. Yippee.

We had an "every day is an adventure" kind of lunch today. We've biked by a sweet looking cafe numerous times and decided today to finally stop. It's right on the bike path, overlooking the Love River, about five minutes from our apartment. I refer to it as the cafe in a glass. This morning was very rainy so the effect of being in all that glass with the rain washing down the walls was like being in some kind of weird inverted fish bowl.

When we walked in the waiter wanted very much to help us but his English was no better than my Chinese. The menu was all in Chinese, which is not uncommon, so we did what we often do in that case and just chose by price. Lunch for NT$260 sounds delicious. There aren't many foods that Lee and I won't try and we figure the worst that can happen is we leave the table a bit hungry. I could tell the waiter was uncomfortable with our just randomly making a choice. I guess there were options with the choices we made - what flavor "sauce," coffee or tea, did we want mushrooms with the eggs?

We finally got all of the selections made and waited eagerly for our mystery food to arrive. While we waited, I got out my phone and tried to get Google translate to interpret our bill.

What did we order? "Full division 7 thermal, "fresh vegetable sticks big lesson," and "fresh whole Maishi division II." This is what finally came to our table.

T

The food was delicious and the coffee was excellent. I was, however, a bit disappointed with Google.

This blog hit a milestone of sorts yesterday - over 10,000 pageviews since I started writing a year ago. I decided to blog about our travels as a way of letting family and friends know what I was up to without having to email each individual person. I've heard it said plenty of times that Facebook is where people stay in touch but I'm not a big Facebook fan. So I started blogging back when we started packing up to come to Taiwan, way back in April of last year. I love that people are reading what I write. It keeps me coming back to the keyboard. But frankly, I'd write even if no one was reading. It turns out I like writing. Who knew? Hmm, there are a lot of things I've learned about myself in the past ten months. Anyway, thanks for hanging out with me.

In news from my corner of the world, it's raining. I know, who wants to hear about the weather, but we've needed the rain so badly and here it is. It rained all day yesterday and it was delightful. We rode our bikes to and from school and it really was quite pleasant. The air temperature was in the low 80's so the rain is more refreshing than chilly, even on the bike.

However, the rain did complicate the musical performance the kids planned for after school yesterday. But this is Taiwan and we, apparently, don't let a little rain get in the way of our plans. The high school students have a performance club that performs mostly pop songs to the delight of their peers and yesterday was their last concert for the school year. They set up on the high school courtyard but the rain started to get a bit heavy so they tucked themselves under the eaves and brought out the umbrellas.

I think they mostly perform for each other so the audience isn't crucial. (Kind of like my blog - see how I brought this post full circle?) My classroom is on the second floor, all the way to the left in this photo so I could sit in my room and listen while I got some work done after school.

I've got big news to share. We're going to move! It's not very far, just eight floors down, as a matter of fact. We had heard that the apartment next to another one of the KAS teachers was available and it got us thinking. There are things we don't like about our apartment - the hot water heater leaks, under the kitchen sink smells awful, the kitchen is way too small. There are things we like too, the main one being the location.

As teachers started making the decision to leave Kaohsiung we'd look around their apartments to see if it was an improvement over ours. There are always things that are better but the location was never better than where we are now. Then when we heard about this one we figured we'd take a look. The rent is a little higher than what the school covers but not by much and it's a much nicer space.

Lee and I met the landlord and looked around the apartment this evening. We spent about a half hour there but we made our decision in the first five minutes. The landlord is really nice and wants to rent to someone who will appreciate the space. She used to live there and put her own touches into the decorating and such and says she wants to rent to someone who will enjoy it. She got an offer from a company in Taipei that wanted to use it as office space but she likes us better.

It's got two bedrooms, a study room of sorts off the master bedroom, two baths, a big (by Taiwanese standards) kitchen and a nice little living room. There are some disadvantages of course. I'll miss the view from the tenth floor balcony and we'll be closer to the street level noise. Another issue is that we have to be moved in about three weeks. Good thing we don't have too much stuff.

Why is it at the end of the school year teachers are surprised at how busy it is? After all, it's busy at the end of every school year, year after year after year. Even in my previous life at the Children's Center there was that sense that there are more commitments, more loose ends, more curriculum to cover, and not enough weeks left to do it all. Anyway, it's that time of year.

Yesterday, though, we took a little break from all that and rode with a friend to the outskirts of the city to see a little cabin-in-the-woods spot that he thought we might enjoy. It translates to "leisure farm" but that phrase conjures up some odd images. It's more like those little motels you find in the mountains of New Hampshire (and plenty of other places as well) where there are a bunch of little cabins clustered along the road. This place is tucked in among some pineapple farms and scrubby hillsides and can be reached on bikes in an hour or so from our apartment. I can imagine us heading up there on a Saturday morning for a respite from the city and combining some biking with some hiking and coming back on Sunday morning exhausted but replenished.

The school year is winding down which means it's getting crazy busy. Time for a road trip! Twelve of us hopped into three cars and headed south to Kenting at the south end of the island where the beaches are beautiful and the air is clear. We left right after school, drove a couple of hours, checked into our hotels and were sitting down for dinner with margaritas in hand by 6:30. Not bad.

Lee and I were up early, naturally, and took a nice walk along the beach in town.

There's a street that's lined with little hotels that look out towards the water:

Half of our group stayed in one of those hotels. They didn't have room for all of us so I found another hotel one street up that was quite nice.

They adhered to the old Chinese custom of skipping floor number four.

Some buildings in the US don't have a 13th floor but here it's the 4th. The word for 4 sounds very similar to the word for death so it's a very unlucky number. Anyway, back to our little trip...

Back early in the fall we came down to Kenting and went to the nice beach outside of town for the day. We spent Saturday back at that beach.

Lee building a sand castle with Lawson.

Lee, Lawson, his mom Casey and Claire. It's nice to have kids along when you go to the beach.

The beach at 10:30 was pretty quiet. There were people hunkered down under umbrellas but not many in the water. By 3:00 the tour buses had dropped off their passengers and the beach was crowded with fully clothed tourists standing ankle deep in the water taking pictures of themselves not swimming in the ocean.

After enjoying the spectacle of watching a few of them getting knocked over by an unexpected wave (Waves at the beach?! Who knew?) we packed up, took showers, ate an early dinner and drove home. We were back in Kaohsiung in time for a nightcap and bed. If we owned a car I might be down in Kenting every weekend.

We don't own a car but we do have bikes and I'm back on mine so we went for a ride this (Sunday) morning. It was already into the 80's at 6:00 in the morning so went went early. We biked down to the harbor, took the ferry to Cijin Island and biked along the shore. There were more ships dotting the coastline than I ever remember seeing. I counted 50.

Here are some random things I made note of today.

This is what the new school building looks like from the front. Lee's classroom is on the far right, third floor corner room. He gets a lot of sunshine streaming into his room in the morning. It's great light but it's hard to cool the room down. My room is on the far side of the building. By the time the sun starts shining into my windows it's the end of the school day.

There are garden plots tucked into unexpected places along my commute. This isn't a great photo but I wanted to show you what people do to protect their fruit trees. Each piece of fruit has a plastic bag rubber banded around it. I think it's to keep the bugs away but people I've asked have given me different answers. In any case it's odd to pass by farms and gardens and see trees that are apparently growing plastic bags.

Some more attractive looking trees are these beautiful yellow-flowered ones:

After school today Lee and I went for a bike ride along the bike path and found these in one of the parks along the way. I felt like it was Mother Nature's way of welcoming me back to the biking world.

There was an absolutely beautiful sunrise this morning. We've had some rain every morning for three days which has been great. The city seems like it's had a nice scrubbing and the air seems clear and clean. In four weeks we'll be packing up and getting on a plane for seven weeks away from the heat and humidity that defines Taiwan in the summer.

I'd like to start off by saying Happy Birthday to my lovely sister Jenner. I hope you spend the day doing just what you want to make you happy.

Bike riding is what made me happy today. The low point was when I crossed Cuiehua, the street where I had my accident. It was pretty terrifying and once we reached the other side I had to stop for a second and catch my breath, but then I was fine. There was very little traffic this morning, which was nice, but it was busy this afternoon and I was still okay. Lee and I are going to try a few strategies to overcome the Cuiehua Road issue. It's an unusual road in that it's pretty busy plus the traffic can build up some speed. At the moment I'd like to avoid it if I can. Unfortunately, it's the road the school is on so I can't avoid it altogether. I'm sure it'll get easier with time.

Now that I'm back on the bike shopping for fruit just got easier. We stopped at the new market on the way home and restocked. Mangoes are back in season - yippee. In addition to the ones I'm used to seeing there are little ones the size of the palm of my hand as well as these huge ones:

Lychee season has just begun so I finally had a chance to try one fresh, not in a can or flavoring in a martini. Delicious!

We also brought home bananas, watermelon and pineapple. An excellent haul.

No typhoons to worry about after all, or at least not yet (the season's still young). Kaohsiung did get a little rain in the morning and other parts of the island got a good drenching, which is good. I don't think anyone will be filling up their swimming pools any time soon but at least the plants got some relief.

I tried to be nostalgic on my walk to school yesterday, but I wasn't the least bit sad to think it may be my last walking commute. I'm thrilled to be biking to work today. I am a bit nervous about the traffic so Lee and I are leaving especially early to avoid the early morning crowds. If all goes well with my psyche then I'll be thrilled. I'm not worried about the pain in my wrist because that's what advil is for. I know my heart's in it, I just want to know my head is alright with getting back on the road.

We're on typhoon watch here on the island. Typhoon Noul has made landfall at the tip of the Philippines and is now heading our way. We really need the rain but can do without the wind. The latest news I heard was that the storm was turning north and may just give Taiwan's east coast a glancing blow, but when I just looked at the satellite picture it looks like the storm is bigger than the whole of Taiwan. It's hard to imagine getting only a brushing with something so immense.

There's also a second typhoon building behind Noul so we'll keep an eye on that one too. We'd planned on going to the beach at the southern tip of Taiwan next weekend. The beaches there were closed today because of the current typhoon and tourists have been evacuated from the east coast islands. Hopefully we'll be able to squeeze our weekend get-away in between storms.

First, let me tell you about yesterday at KAS. There was a formal celebration of the completion of the new building and all the bigwigs of Kaohsiung came, including the mayor and a big delegation from AIT (American Institute of Taiwan), the closest to a US embassy that we have here in Taiwan. There were a lot of congratulation speeches and the lobby was filled with lovely flowers.

I didn't actually hear any of the speeches since they held the ceremony during the school day but you won't hear many complaints from the teachers. I'm pretty sure we've heard enough self-congratulations for awhile.

Friday was also the spring concert. With the completion of the new building there is now a venue for school performances. It's a beautiful space, lots of wood and great acoustics. The talent of the students is really incredible and both of the music teachers are magical. All of the students were great, from the pre-k kids singing "Head, Shoulder, Knees and Toes" to the 12th grader playing Rachmaninoff. Here is the middle and high school string orchestra performing excerpts from Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture.

Today was spent at day one of my two-day weekend workshop, but this evening I finally got back on my bike. First I biked on the sidewalks of the park next door to the apartment then I ventured out onto the streets and pedaled around the park. I was not surprised to find that it hurt my wrist a bit to hold on and to brake. What I did find surprising was the vertigo sensation as soon as I got moving. It was an odd feeling to see the world rushing by, even though I was only going a few miles per hour. I'm not sure if that's residual concussion symptoms or if it's just getting used to balancing and moving again on a bike.

Besides that, it was really great to ride again. I was so happy I even took a selfie.

I got good news from the doctor yesterday: no surgery! The bone chip is still floating around at the end of the ulna bone but as long as it's not bothering me there's no reason to reattach it. The break in the radius was all the way across the bone and while most of it's filled in with new bone, there's a split along one side that hasn't quite healed. The upshot is, use my arm, be careful, expect it to continue to hurt and go see him again if it hurts too much.

So that means I'm getting on my bike today. I have a staff development workshop all day today (and tomorrow) so I won't be able to ride until this evening but that's okay. It's been nine (!) weeks, what's another day?  I'm a little nervous about finally getting back in the saddle but I'm excited too. My plan today is to bike around the park a few times. The longer term goal is to bike to work on Tuesday. We'll see.

I went back to yoga today for the first time since my accident, which was exactly two months ago today. My teacher was great in giving me permission to go at my own pace and my classmates were very kind in welcoming me back and telling me I was missed.

I can't put any weight on my arm or wrist yet so no regular down dogs but I did okay. I was surprised how many poses were problematic because of the rib, though. Things like child's pose, where my arms are stretched out over my head, was painful. I sometimes forget that I also broke a bone there, since most of the time I don't have any trouble with it, but it's still not quite done healing. Almost...

Yippee! We got some rain today! It was pouring this morning when I got up and I can pretend that was the reason I took a taxi instead of walking, but that would be a lie. I'd already decided the night before to be lazy so the rain was just an added excuse. We got more than an inch of rain over the course of the day and it was such a relief. My guilty hope is that we get enough rain so that the apartment's swimming pool gets filled up soon.

Lee and I have faced the dilemma of finding a good fruit store close enough to walk to and today we found one that just opened. It's conveniently right on the way home from work so we stopped today and stocked up. For US$10 we got apples, kiwi, mangoes, guava and a whole pineapple. We skipped the durian...

 but I did have this nice young man cut up my pineapple...

We went out for dinner with some KAS and some Taiwanese friends to a seafood restaurant we've walked by many times. We've never eaten there before because it's a bit daunting trying to figure it out. It's the kind of place where you point to what you want, suggest a cooking style - steamed, deep fried, sauteed - and the chef cooks it up for you. That's hard to do when you speak as little Chinese as I do. Here were some of our choices:

There were little anchovy-like fish and the red meat is eel.

Lots of different fish, fresh from the local fishermen.

Whole frogs and frog legs.

We had lots of variety, including deep fried oysters, roasted oysters, pumpkin vermicelli, steamed fish, clams steamed in soy sauce, sushi, braised cabbage. It all looked great and tasted even better.