just_like_alex

Taiwan Fact: There are "r" and "l" sounds in Chinese that are similar to ours, so they don't tend to have any confusion between the two like Japanese speakers can. However, I have heard people say "brah brah brah".

Another Fact: English has the greatest number of redundant/unnecessary/superfluous/extra words of any language, or so I hear. This kicks ass for a few reasons. Firstly, being a native speaker, I have already mastered the tricks and subtleties of the language with no effort. Secondly, we get a huge selection of shades to choose from for anything we may convey. Also, because there is just so much English to learn even if you get all of the rules down, you could keep learning almost indefinitely, making teaching English a very sustainable profession.

So lets play choose you own wordventure!

I haven't had a chance to write an entry because too much has been happening. Where did I end/finish/leave off/terminate/cease last time?



Oh yeah- I uh, I have no facial hair.



Last Wednesday, Mark and I went out to Jiu Fen (said like Joe Fun!) to find gold. The town is in the hills by the coast which helps make it completely beautiful/gorgeous/spectacular/breath-taking/wonderful.





These were taken a stop before the gold museum/park. There was a lovely marketplace that snaked along the hillside between the buildings clinging to the slope. We found a teashop in a 100-year-old building which sold stoneware made by a Taiwanese artist who had a gallery downstairs. In addition to works of clay, he had paintings with price tags up to $800,000NT, which is something like $26,000US. A little much/ridiculous/absurd/crazy/unreasonable.

We made it to the touristy gold park place thing as it closed, which was a bit of a bummer. But there was a shop that was still open that sold some rocks with a bit o' gold on 'em for pretty cheap. I brought my hand-lens and made myself out to be an expert. The rocks were super cheap and had some cool/sweet/badass/nice/awesome/neat calcite crystals. Then we sort of went around the park, found some puppies.



Mark gave them some tea. They followed us as we went down towards a stream we had the intention of panning in. There were little spillways all along the stream which we had a good time climbing up.


40ft drop into shallow water and big chunks of urbanite? Good plan!

We played in the mud, but the sun was starting to set and we were in a kind of shitty spot so we found zip/nothing/jack/zilch/nada. We climbed out of the stream quite a distance from the bridge we'd used to get down to it.


The bridge is visible in the middle of the lower half of the photo.

We emerged into what felt like quite a jungle.



After a 15 minute trek/journey/march/expedition through brambles and grass that cut like paper we stumbled into the now long-closed park. We wandered around until we spotted a security guard and headed back towards the bus stop. We passed a handful more guards and avoided eye-contact and (thus?) interaction of any kind. We also passed a bug


the size of my pinky. And so many frogs Mark accidentally kicked one.

After the hour and more bus ride, we grabbed some MOS Burger and parted ways. I went straight to Roxy 99 while he wisely went home. Have I mentioned Momo before? As I'm sure her name has already painted in your mind, she is a pretty petite Taiwanese girl who is friends with Bevis (Andy's boyfriend). She's got a rep as a bitch which by all appearances seems not to be inaccurate. Jeff and I have arbitrarily decided to put her on a pedestal and have started to refer to her as "the Unicorn". Last time at Roxy I had to remind her of my name. This time I bought her a drink and had a conversation with her. It went no where, I'm convinced she doesn't exist outside of the bar in fact, she's always flirting with guys, but always for about 15 minutes and then she vanishes/disappears/departs/vamooses/expeditiously retreats. She had what seemed to be a protegé/apprentice/ward/pupil with her who did a "talk to the hand" kind of a gesture when I tried to talk to her. What a bitch. You have to think you're pretty hot shit to do something like that.

My last day of summer was a little sad. No more cooking, no more laid back days, no more loose curriculum and no more dinosaurs. I printed out a picture of a coelophysis skeleton, blew it up and taped it to a wall of duplos. I then cut the paper so the blocks could come apart, took them apart and buried them in wooden blocks. Then we dug them up, and thought about what each piece told us about the dinosaur (ex.: pointy teeth = meat eater) and tried to put it back together.


It ruled.

And here's a picture from my bus stop that I thought was pretty? You can see Chad and Paul waiting for their buses going the other way.



My other class on Friday is winding up and I will soon have a weekend that really feels like two days. I was sitting writing up my lesson plan for it when Sandra, the boss lady or whatever, came up and told me that my class was going to get split because they kept adding students to it and it was cumbersomely/awkwardly/burdensomely/irritatingly/copiously large/big/populous/crowded. "For the last two weeks?" I'm thinking. At the beginning of next semester, she continues. I wonder why she's telling me this when I realize that she's expecting me to stay after the Summer. So I says plainly that I'm not going to keep teaching after the summer. She looks completely shocked and asks why not and why didn't I tell her and so on. I reminded her that I'd told her that before the class had even begun. She asks if I can come on Mondays instead, just as she'd done almost three months ago. I didn't budge and, sounding defeated/vanquished/beaten/bested, she says something about how new teachers are so hard to find. It would have helped if you'd started looking when I first told you instead of trying to manipulate me into staying.

After class I went out with some of the Banciao teachers (including Pat) to a cool place that had hookahs, live music that at first I thought was open mic because it was kind of bad. But it was the same people the whole time. The beer selection was quite good, but I've noticed that it's always Belgian beers and maybe German or English, I think the most obscure American beer I've seen has been Coors... And the service was so bad it became more like entertainment. I almost let myself get dragged to karaoke, but I was out of money, the karaoke here is not that much fun and I didn't know most of the people very well. More importantly, it was my last Friday in the old place and I had to stop by Bob Wun Daye. And so I did.

I came in and everyone was all "Hi Alex!" and convinced me to have a beer. The trio of cute bartenders was there with Valentina actually on duty. Her boyfriend was behind the bar with her "helping" and being very drunk, he was pretty funny but pretty passive aggressive about foreigners. I also saw George the German, James the Aussie, Teacher Sarah and her boyfriend, and invited them all to our "house cooling party" which was to be the following day.

In the morning I made preparations. Got salsa makings from the market. I couldn't find avocados because they are out of season so I was going to go to the supermarket. Mark said he wanted to come and he has an amazing ability to make anything take for-fucking-ever. And then he thought it would be a good idea to teach me to drive his scooter. I gave it a shot and immediately slammed it to the adjacent scooters, scraped up my leg and damaged the accelerator so it wouldn't go any more. I managed to avoid damaging the BMW parked by it though, woohoo! That was a lot of fun, especially with an audience of locals.

Anyway, I got to the store the safe way and finished making some salsa and bean dip as guests started to arrive. Gillian and Mark had bought mint plants and limes to make the freshest mojitos in this hemisphere. The party was pretty well attended, I would guess maybe 30 people came by and during the peak they were scarcely contained by our living room. Apparently Gillian had told Meg that the party would be done at midnight, which was unrealistic/unlikely/fantastical/comical. So Meg came home at midnight and was actually moving stuff in through the party. Anyway, my snacks were a hit, we went through countless mojitos, beers and white russians, had a squirt gun fight, and made ourselves a very irate/angry/disgruntled/pissed-off roommate. And actually, Gillian and Mark pulled me into the kitchen at about 1am and asked if I thought we should ask people to leave. I was like "not really" and Mark was totally behind me, and, to my surprise Gillian was right with us too. It was a mean move, but Meg was invited and snubbed us. In the end, the only thing it could have cost her was 3 hours of sleep and she'd feel more justified in being so anti-social towards us.

After almost everyone had left, Gillian realized that we needed some documentation of the first, last and only party at our place.





Pertinent/Important/Apposite/Relevant Aside: A couple of days before Sarah had told me about a friend of hers she was trying to find a guy for. She was beautiful, smart, well-educated, fun, traveled, etc. and Sarah couldn't find anyone good enough for her. I was quite offended of course. Yet she insisted that Lillian was way too good for me. Of course I pointed out that, even if that were true, I'm still the best guy she's ever met, so better me than anyone else, right? Lillian and Gillian turned out to be friends so, to Sarah's surprise, Lillian was at our party.

Anyway, when 3am rolled around, I let myself be convinced to come out to a club. And then another club. I found Lillian at the second club and, at like 7am, we took at cab back to my home. We talked for a long time, she'd lived in Canada for six years, been to Tibet twice and all kinds of interesting things. We made out a little. I actually fell asleep while she was talking, but we were both drunk/intoxicated/inebriated/trashed/wasted/lit/smashed/blitzed and exhausted so I don't know if she even noticed. That was the last time I slept in that apartment. She continued to sleep after I got up and helped clean up the awesome mess we'd made the night before.

A lot more has happened since then, but I don't have time to write about it now.

Next Time:
The Move, Fall Semester, Lease Release and (with any luck) Totally Sexy Adventures: Featuring Judie?

Tags: dinosaurs, gold, jiu fen, lillian, move, party, wordventure