Calla lilies

Fun fact: pull up a search for my name, 百合, on Google, and you get this. Literally translated, Baihe means White Lily. And what did I do today? Went to go look at white lilies.

Calla lilies, to be specific. On a recommendation by a friend of Chialing's, Karina, Analicia and I went up Yangmingshan to see the calla lily fields. The journey there was anything but easy, and may or may not have involved us missing our bus stop and having to walk a couple kilometers down a windy mountain road with no footpath, but eventually we got there. And it was gorgeous!

Our walking route...

The fields had dozens of resident dogs--all black, for some reason. This one was the cutest.

These are, of course, just a few of the many MANY pictures we took up on Yangmingshan. The fields reminded me somewhat of the tulip fields near Seattle: there's just something about row upon row of flowers that is irresistible for photo shoots. We had a lot of fun.

After the lily fields, Karina and I went to meet Tom for dinner--an embarrassing hour-and-a-half later than we said we would, thanks to our bus mishap--and then went back to the hotel to grab our stuff and head home. So our last Taipei trip went much like (one of) our first: a Yangmingshan trip with transportation issues. But this time, unlike our failed summit, we did at least get to see what we came for.

And with that, farewell, Taipei. It's been great.

Pairings

I don't know why, but I do love it when I come across a pairing of two that seems to suit in some way or another. Maybe it's a subconscious human instinct, to join two things to make a single one complete. In any case, I've been noticing plenty of pairings lately, and thought I'd go ahead and share them with you.

Kids' Names:

The best part here is that I have a pair of pairings, or actually a trio of pairings, taken from both of my schools. I notice paired names most often when kids sitting next to each other have appropriate names, or their names are next to each other on the roll call.

Take, for instance, two of my 5th graders at Hanmin who sit in the same row: Amos and Andy.

And then there's the two 6th grade girls at Qingshan whose names directly follow each other: Penny and Candy.

The best one, though, is a tidbit Maggie passed along to me today on the walk to one of our classrooms. She said that one of the teachers at the school has twins, a boy and a girl. Their family name is Li, and the twins are named Li Ke and Li Le. (李可 and 李樂.) Yes, Chinese speakers, that's right--the kids' names are made of the halves of the word 可樂--cola. According to Maggie, people ask the dad how his drink is, and things of that nature, all the time. And I have to say, he deserves it!


Smaller Pairings:


My most pervasive frustration with traffic here comes out when I am most fully taking advantage of traffic here. It's a perverse pairing. Essentially, when I'm running late and I hit traffic, I get quite annoyed at the cars, scooters, pedestrians, bicyclists and pushcarts--yes, pushcarts--in my way. Stupid Taiwanese traffic, I say, why is this person pushing a cart by hand down the middle of the street? This would never happen in America... 

I then rev my engine and find the best way around the problem, weaving and making marginally legal turns as necessary. That is, I drive in such a way that, if I were in America, would get me in massive trouble. It's a catch-22: the very order I'm longing for is the order I am more than happy to thrown to the wayside to get me to my destination quicker.


Another pairing: The Hunger Games and Sour Patch Kids. I like to eat sour candy when I go to the movies. Taiwan has a serious shortage of sour candy. However, Kaitlin brought me some like the gem she is, and so today I got to relive one of my favorite essential pairings from America: candy and a great movie. Nothing not to love!


So those are my pairings from the day. What are yours?

Official Business

Since I got here, I've been wondering when it would all sink in. The answer, as it turns out, is today.

Today, we applied for our ARC (Alien Resident Card) and opened bank accounts at the Bank of Taiwan. Pretty boring stuff, if you think about it, especially when you consider that we began these two apparently simple processes at 9:30am, and didn't finish until after 2pm. Apparently, marching into official offices with 12 people all needing the same thing takes a VERY long time to coordinate.

Still, as I sat in the sticky vinyl seat at the immigration office and the officer passed me my temporary permit with my Chinese name printed oh-so-officially at the top, it hit me: that IS my official name here. I DO live in Taiwan. Later, as I typed in my new PIN and received my bank card and bank book, I envisioned depositing money at the BOT ATMs.

The process, of course, was still incredibly long and boring. We had along wait in the overheated basement of the immigration office to get pictures taken, and once  in the booth, the lady running it spent a good while poking and prodding me so that I perfectly fit the regulations, and trying to get my bangs to stay out of my face using only her fingers, repeatedly shaking her head when I held up the bobby pin I had, choosing instead to plaster my bangs down using the natural grease on her hands, I guess. Let's just say I am NOT fond of the greasy-looking picture it produced, a picture which will now appear on my ARC, health insurance card, and drivers license. Ohhhh joy.

But the worst was the wait at the bank--there was only one clerk working the counter for opening accounts, and even though the process did not take very long, it took probably 2 hours for my turn to come, during which time I had time to change my Hong Kong and US money for NTD and sit around for ages playing cell phone games and talking to the other ETAs. And I was just seventh of the 12.

We took public transportation home, at rush hour, and I was incredibly impressed with it. The bus was pretty empty, and the MRT was amazing. It's fantastically clean, cool, airy, and, even at rush hour, relatively empty--none of the crowds I expected after my experiences in China and Hong Kong. In fact, lack of crowds has been a major surprise for me in Kaohsiung in general--a wonderful development, and one that may even coax me onto a scooter at some point.

Look how empty!

Also, here's a picture of the "Dome of Light" in one of the subway stations--famous Kaohsiung sight, apparently.

Once we got back, went out for fried dumplings tonight, and they were DELICIOUS and fantastically cheap--for my 8, which completely filled me up, I paid $36NT, or about $1.20US. I can get used to this.