Yesterday morning Lee asked if I'd checked the weather report and we both chuckled since the weather report is always the same. Even before we got here I'd check and it was always mostly cloudy with the chance of rain showers, highs around 90, lows around 80, humidity around 80-90%.

But yesterday was actually different. It rained most of the day. Everyone on their scooters had on ankle length rain ponchos. Did I mention everyone rides scooters? There are cars too but there are something like a million registered scooters in a city of about 2 million. As a pedestrian you better keep your eyes open because they are crazy. They're on the sidewalks, routinely run red lights, weave in between the lanes of traffic. And they're everywhere!

Most of the teachers at KAS have one. I'm pretty sure Lee and I will get one once we've gotten settled. Lee said I can sit in back and navigate but I told him I'd have to do it with my eyes squeezed shut. Maybe riding the bikes around will get me used to being on the roads and I won't be quite so terrified of the scooters.

We've been here a week, feels like a lifetime. The school sponsored happy hour at a local expat bar overlooking Lotus Lake this evening. I think I was sweating out the liquid as quickly as I was taking it in, but it really was nice to kick back and relax after a pretty exhausting week. Tomorrow is our first day off since we arrived. We're going to buy bikes. Photos to follow.

Turns out I may still not like the taste of liver because that's not what I ate last night. I ate duck's blood. Would I have eaten it if I'd known ahead of time what it was? Maybe not, which would have been too bad. It really did taste delicious and I won't have to worry about being anemic anytime soon.

Today was a lesson in learning how to buy street food. There are tiny little restaurants all over the place that cook food to order and you either eat at a tiny table on the sidewalk (which is more like sitting at the edge of the traffic, the sidewalks are so narrow) or carry your food home in a little plastic bag.

For lunch we walked down to the local favorite for the Kaohsiung American School crowd but we kind of cheated on figuring out what to order. One of the school secretaries wrote down in Chinese what she likes to order and that's what we got - the Taiwanese specialty, beef noodle soup. It's outside my norm to have boiling hot soup on a hot and humid day but that's the norm here. It's also unusual for me to have soup served in a plastic bag.

For dinner we were like old pros at the noodle shop by our apartment. Calling it a shop is a bit generous, more like a cart on the sidewalk. We picked up a basket and filled it with veggies and noodles then chose a couple protein choices - beef, seafood, tofu in many different forms - and handed the basket to the cook. He cooked it up for us and we had a fresh, healthy, delicious dinner for about $5 for the two of us. We couldn't have cooked it cheaper and it wouldn't have tasted as good.

We just got back from the most amazing dinner and I even remembered to take pictures, although they don't do the meal justice. Two blocks down the road from our apartment is the best hot pot restaurant in Kaohsiung, maybe even in all of Taiwan. Until a month ago I had never heard of hot pots but I am now a huge fan.

The center of the table is recessed where a pot of boiling broth is placed on top of a heating element. Then you order platters of thinly sliced meat, pieces of seafood and/or cut up vegetables, all of it raw. You put pieces of food in the hot liquid and cook each piece, one at a time. It's kind of like a fondue pot but without the cheese and chocolate.

The broth on the left side was spicy while the one on the right was a more mild chicken broth.

Shrimp, cellophane noodles and edamame.

I have never liked liver but this was incredibly silky and delicate. 

The best things about the meal are that you have to take your time and everything is fresh and cooked to perfection. It was a relatively big investment of time (though not of money) so it won't be a nightly occurrence but I'm thinking maybe once a month. We didn't try the pork or the squid or the mushrooms. This could take awhile. Good thing we've got a couple years.

Yesterday we went shopping and I told Lee I needed to grab a couple thousand dollars to have enough. After spending NT$2,000 (New Taiwanese Dollars) we came home with three bags of groceries and a mop. It's about US $66.

I'm still getting used to the exchange rate. Everything seems so expensive - NT$50 for a dozen eggs! - when in fact most things are pretty cheap. We had dinner at a sushi restaurant, conveniently located in our apartment building, and spent $30 for the two of us. Back in CT the same dinner at Feng's Asian Cuisine would have been twice that. We may become regulars at this place.

This is the Taiwanese money. The bills come in $1000, $500 and $100. The coins are $50, $10, $5 and $1. I'm getting pretty good at picking out of my pocket the money I'm looking for.

This morning Lee found our mailbox. We'd been looking for the label that looks like the one outside our door, apartment 10-F 3. Turns out the F doesn't refer to the tower we're in but that we're on the tenth Floor. Anyway, we got our mail:

Junk mail in Mandarin is even more junky than junk mail in English, considering all I can glean from this is that somewhere in Kaohsiung someone makes pizza.

I am beginning to realize what a wonderful location our apartment is in. We are about 10 minutes away from the school by taxi, a half hour on foot. We're right next to a beautiful park and there are lots of small shops and restaurants close by. So we're getting the convenience of being close to the shopping we need, pretty close to work and not in the middle of too much commerce. For any of you who come to visit, you'll see what I mean.

 

Let me point out a couple of highlights from the view from my balcony. This is the park across the little street behind my building. The center of the track usually features people on roller blades doing short track racing. There have also been soccer games. The playground gets a lot of little kids in the evenings and a few people early in the morning doing tai chi.

On the far left is a white roof over the MRT (Mass Rail Transit) station. The subway system in Kaohsiung is just two tracks in a big x-shape though the city but it gets to many of the interesting places in the city, or so I've been told. We haven't had a chance to check it out. Maybe this weekend.

This is today's sunrise. It was beautifully clear so you can see the mountains off to the east of the city. I've been enjoying the sunrises but wouldn't mind sleeping in a bit later. I'm almost on Taiwan time, but not quite.

Yesterday the new faculty took a bus up into the mountains and visited Taiwan's Indigenous Peoples Culture Park where the 14 pre-Chinese aboriginal tribes are celebrated. We each made a glass bead, with help of course, and lunch was a fabulous variety of local dishes. I should have taken a picture but I'm not used to photographing my food. I'll work on that.

We also attended a performance of tribal dances which was amazing. The men in particular were incredibly athletic. It was a bit of a striptease show in that they had less and less of their outfits on until the last dance where they wore just loin clothes. It was a little like going to an opera where you don't know the language but I really enjoyed the music and all of the dances were entertaining.

Lee made a beautiful polka dotted bead.

The mountains of Taiwan run along the spine of the island and reach as high as 13,000 feet. We were just at the edge of the mountain range, about an our north of Kaohsiung by bus.

Hanging out at the culture park. The things hanging behind Lee are giant replicas of the beads we made.

One of the suspension bridges over the river.