Happy Thanksgiving!

It couldn't feel less like my favorite holiday around here. The weather is wrong, there are no familiar late fall smells, no turkey and stuffing, but mostly no family (except for Lee, of course. I'd be lost without him!).

I'll be skyping later this morning to "help" with the pie making and tomorrow morning I'll be joining the Amherst folks for their post-turkey are-we-really-going-to-eat-dessert part of the meal. Since there are none of the trappings that go with the holiday around here it's easy to forget it's happening, so I miss it less than I expected. Seeing family without me later today may change that. Expect some tears.

This is only the second time in my entire life that I haven't been home with family for Thanksgiving. The other time was in 1980 when I spent the fall backpacking with NOLS and Thanksgiving day I was in the middle of a two-week skiing expedition at Yellowstone. Now that was a lifetime ago!

I can't really say that there are no signs of Thanksgiving here. Yesterday the PTA put on a feast for the KAS community at lunchtime. There were turkey, cooked just like at home, and all the sides, every one of which had a Taiwanese twist - shrimp in the rice, five spice with the corn, unidentifiable (yet delicious) mushrooms in the mashed potatoes. Tasty and heartfelt, yet a little bit off.

And now we have two extra days off. It's a far cry from the ten days Lee is used to but fabulous nonetheless. We can really use some time off. The woman who cleans my room speaks only two words of English - hello and sorry - and yet we both understood her suggestion that we all spend the long weekend catching up on sleep.

At noon today we fly to Taroko Gorge for a few days so I'll be posting lots of photos soon. In the meantime, happy Thanksgiving-prep!

Last Sunday we explored yet another city park, this one at the northern edge of the city. The route took us 45 minutes of biking on the streets, most of it in a dedicated scooter lane, which is much nicer than having to share the road with both the scooters and the cars. Even after nearly four months I'm still amazed at how we can find quiet, secluded, beautiful spaces in a city of 2 million people.

This park is called Municipal Park and it is, like all the parks we've visited, filled with sculptures.

First we walked around the older, established section of the park - baseball field, playgrounds, benches and tree-lined paths:

Then we crossed the bridge into the "second phase" area and had the paths all to ourselves. Like so many places, if you're willing to walk a little further, you find less and less people. This part had wide open meadows and hilltops overlooking the northern edge of the city and we imagined we could see the ocean at the edge of the horizon. It was hot (this is November? Really??) but there was a nice little breeze and the paths were quite nice:

It was an easy way to spend a Sunday morning, less than two hours on the bikes plus an hour walking, and you're still home in time to beat the crowds at the market.

Shopping right now is a bit of a challenge because our fridge isn't working properly. It's gradually turned itself into a freezer. At first it was just freezing the lettuce in the crisper but this morning the entire container of orange juice was a frozen block. We've got Daisy, the miracle worker, on the job but the real estate agent is dragging her feet. She seems to think waiting for a month for a part is perfectly acceptable. No fridge for a month? I don't think so. Stay tuned...

Lee and I are now sporting new accessories for our bike commutes:

In addition to the hope that it'll block at least a little of the pollution I also hope to intimidate some of the scooters. I'm thinking of embroidering a skull and crossbones. (I guess when you start talking about embroidery you lose some of the bad-ass cache. Oh well...)

When I was walking on the sidewalk this evening a woman on a scooter nearly ran me over. I looked around with my arms in the universal what-are-you-thinking pose and a man walking by just shrugged and said, "This is Taiwan." She made me cringe, he made me laugh.

Last night was the KAS potluck Thanksgiving and it really was lovely. As the host of the party said, this is our family in Taiwan and it's important to celebrate this eclectic group of people and share a glass of wine and some turkey every now and then.

The apartment we went to is at the base of Monkey Mountain and has the most incredible deck of any apartment I've seen here.

It's not like any view I've had for Thanksgiving but I could say that about pretty much everything in my life now, but it's all good. We've made some good friends here and I felt like I got to know everyone a little better by seeing what recipes people shared. I'm not sure what raw vegetables and mashed potatoes says about me, other than I am an unimaginative cook.

Here's Lee with Kevin and Maurice. Kevin is one of the middle school science teachers and lives in the same building as us. Maurice is married to one of the 4th grade teachers and occasionally substitutes at KAS but mostly just enjoys retirement.

Dinner was everything you'd want for Thanksgiving - turkey, stuffing, gravy, cranberry sauce, sweet potatoes and pumpkin pie. (And carrots and green beans, just to add a little color.)

This morning I woke up at my usual ungodly hour and had been awake for awhile when Lee got up so I ditched him while he had his coffee and went for a bike ride. I spent an hour heading south on the bike path to the harbor then came back north on another path that I discovered. Instead of hugging the banks of the Love River this one follows the old train tracks at the base of Monkey Mountain. It doesn't come as far north as our apartment or the school but it was a lovely path along the edge of some of the old neighborhoods that used to sit right along the tracks. Now they over look this lovely sinuous park.

Many of the apartments had potted gardens with herbs and lettuce and it seemed like a sweet little neighborhood. The bigger sections of park had groups of people exercising together, a common occurrence around here.

There's yoga, tai chi, ballroom dancing, jazzercise, and every combination of them, especially in the early morning and in the evening. I prefer my biking outside and my yoga inside.

Later this morning we discovered a massive produce market, mostly wholesale but they also sell to little people like us.

We went in search of potatoes and carrots because this afternoon is KAS Thanksgiving and we're in charge of mashed potatoes and veggie sticks. It'll be fun but it just doesn't feel like Thanksgiving. Maybe once I'm eating turkey and stuffing I'll get more in the November mood, but right now it just feels like a potluck dinner with friends, which is a fine substitute for Thanksgiving when you're halfway around the world.

There was an earthquake near Kaohsiung this morning. Well, not really near. It was 200 miles off the coast and pretty deep. How did I know there was an earthquake, you ask? Because I was in the IT office at the time and one of the people in there noticed that the image on her computer screen wobbled and she said, "Hey, we're having an earthquake." The non-Taiwanese in the room were quite skeptical, yet the government issued their earthquake report moments later, proving that you should never question a local when it comes to earthquakes, or at least you should never question Lena.

So that's my first earthquake.

Last night's dinner was much more interesting. Our friend Pearl is giving us the grand tour of local cuisines and this restaurant did not disappoint. It served traditional Hakka food, not unlike the aboriginal food we ate outside the city a month or two ago.

This particular restaurant is popular among the Chinese tour bus crowd and often has a line out the door. The server likes to tell you about a particular green they cook with that is unique to their cuisine.

It was quite tasty and pretty much the only thing that was served that wasn't brown. We also had bitter melon, cabbage, squash...

and really delicious fish...

One of the tastiest bits with the fish were these little peppercorn/olive-like things that were divine. We ate pork, noodles and tofu too but we ate them too quickly for me to take their pictures. For dessert we had glutinous rice with peanuts, delicately flavored jello you suck through a straw and tomatoes steeped in flower nectar.

The food here is always intriguing and nearly always delicious, although I'll skip the tomatoes next time. Eating with Pearl is especially delightful.

We saw a one-scooter accident this morning that restored some of my faith in humanity. The young woman driving the scooter seems to have taken a corner too quickly, went into a skid and slid into the concrete barrier that separates the lanes of traffic. The good humanity piece is that at least four people stopped to help her. Mostly that involved talking to her and getting out their cell phones but that qualifies as help, in my book. We had heard story after story about people in Taiwan not going to people's aid when there's an accident so it was good to see that disproved, at least in this instance.

She was pretty shaken up but at least she had on her helmet, which is the law, and she also had it buckled, something plenty of people don't do.

While I'm on a downer subject, let me tell you about dengue fever. We're supposed to be at the end of the season but it's been a tough one around here. There have been something like 10,000 cases in Taiwan, 9500 of them in the Kaohsiung area. The PTA has switched away from the fear of chicken pox to the fear of dengue. The water pipes at school have been flushed with salt water, the city has been spraying for mosquitoes (I would have thought all the chemicals in the air from the smog would be enough to kill them all, but apparently not), and anyone with a slight fever is getting rushed off to the doctor's. At this point there are no cases at KAS but the parents would like to see it stay that way. Can't say that I blame them!