Full

Living in Taiwan, "full" is a regular part of my daily vocabulary. In a culture whose local language, Taiwanese, says "have you eaten?" for "hello," eating and over-eating are regular occurrences. Today, however, my title doesn't refer to food--or, at least, not principally. No, I mean the day as a whole: SO SO full!

It's 1am now. I woke up this morning at 7am. In the intervening 18 hours, I...

Went to school, where I dyed eggs with the 5th graders at Qingshan amidst what began as chaos and ended in gorgeous colors and very few messes;

Explained to countless students, teachers, and administrators who Alex and Melanie were, and that Melanie was, in fact, American;

Lost the race against Alex and Melanie's taxi driver home;

Revealed the wonderfulness of Ali's burritos and the corner shop's milk tea to Alex and Melanie;

Took advantage of a few hours break from today's drizzle to eat shave ice at Siziwan, take the ferry to Cijin, rent bikes, glimpse the lighthouse, explore the fort, ride bikes, and discover that basically the entire seashore at Cijin is under construction;

Helped Chialing cook some fantastic noodles which Alex and Melanie obviously ADORED;

Took a window-shopping stroll with Melanie that resulted in some cute stationary for her and a nice little conversation with the adorable owner of the adorable Nini store down the street, together with some delicious cake despite my protestations that we were full;

Walked along the Love River with Alex and Melanie;

Found Alex some cold medicine;

Made a brief stopover at Ruifeng Night Market, where we saw some hilarious Angry Bird and "Angry Sponge" shirts, as well as some gorgeous leather bags;

Made plans to hang out with my host family tomorrow, after a stop at another stationary store and Dream Mall, and made tentative plans to KTV afterwards.

So "full" is not an understatement--this is just the outline! In other news, my plans for tomorrow begin at 10am, and I am therefore going to sleep.

Saturday school: it's not just for screw-offs anymore

Quite the contrary, really. See, as I noted earlier, Tuesday was a national holiday in Taiwan; to avoid the awkwardness of a single day separating the holiday from the weekend, many schools, mine included, took Monday off. The only problem with that, though, is that unlike in the US, that meant a make-up day--on Saturday.

So, today included a full 5-class schedule for me, during which I attempted, with limited success, to teach my kids the game "4 on the couch." In retrospect, I think it will work better as a review game; maybe I'll try it again later.

Other highlights of the day (because I'm too tired for real organization tonight):

• We received a package of pen pal letters from my mom's school in America! The kids were getting anxious and will be overjoyed once we hand them out, and in the mean time I had a great time skim-reading the paper-clipped letters the new participants sent to their unknown pen pals--some hilarious moments like a page-long description of a failed wrestling career, "What's your hamster's name? My hamster died. It was sad." and "I'm very popular and have lots of friends." (Different letters.)
• A teacher at Hanmin asked me to tutor his college-aged son in English. That's about as far as we've gotten in discussions, but I'm excited to maybe get to do it.
• Rachel, Karina, Amanda (a friend studying Chinese in Taipei) and I went to Dream Mall and rode the Ferris wheel there for the first time, conquering Karina's childhood trauma and marking the first time Rachel had been on one since the London Eye and the first time I'd been on one since I was 16. This one, as we discovered, goes terrifyingly slow and features chirpy music and Hello Kitty-bedecked gondolas, and sits in the middle of a child's fantasy world.

And that's it for tonight. A Saturday school day followed by shenanigans leads to all sorts of exhaustion...

Shopping

Today, for the first time, I visited the famous Dream Mall! For those of you who from whom it is not famous (like me before I moved here), the Dream Mall is the largest mall in East Asia, which is saying a lot. Also, as I just learned via Wikipedia, it opened on my 18th birthday. So that's cool, too.

Of course, as with just about everything I do here, my favorite part of the trip was the scooters we took there and back. Our group consisted of myself, Rachel, Samia, and Andrew from the ETAs, and Evelyn and her friend Rita, both of whom work at English Village. Between the 6 of us, we had 4 vehicles--Rachel's scooter, Andrew's motorcycle, and Evelyn and Rita's scooters--so I rode with Evelyn, Samia rode with Rita, and Rachel and Andrew went alone. Rachel's scooter was having battery issues at the beginning, but eventually we got it up and running--just took a little extra TLC at every stop.

And our first stop was...Dream Mall! We wandered around for a while in awe of it: it's at least 9 stories high; higher in many places, but you can't tell because it's structured in an artistic and labyrinthine way such that several times today we would make a complete circle and it would take me a few minutes to realize we were back where we started. Then we would periodically come across giant courtyards with escalators crisscrossing each other going up and down, and you would look up and see tier upon tier of shopping. It was overwhelming.

We only *really* shopped at one store--the others were brief in-and-out affairs--but the one store we did go into was fascinating. First of all, it had doors onto the two aisleways on either side, which was just weird and confusing. And second of all, it was essentially four stores rolled into one. When we first got in, we saw clothes, and from the styles and color palette, we were like "oh, it's like the Gap."

Then we walked around a little bit, and saw that it also had home goods. "Oh," we thought, "The Gap meets Crate and Barrel."

A few steps further brought us to aisles filled with high class stationary. The Gap and Crate and Barrel and Hallmark?

Then we saw the food. What the heck. The Gap and Crate and Barrel and Hallmark and Harry and David's?

That was basically my conclusion: it was like a high-class Walmart, except it all fit in a store the size of a standard Bath and Body Works. It was pretty crazy. Bought some "lemon water," which tasted unfortunately similar to Airborne, and left.

So after some listless wandering through Dream Mall--we didn't make it up to the famous Ferris wheel on this trip--we went down to the food court which was, if it was possible, even more overwhelming than the mall itself. Endless choices! It took quite a while for us each to get some food and sit down and eat it, and by the time we were finished, we were ready to take off.

Which we did--but not for home. Well, Andrew went home, but the rest of us went to the "Young People's Shopping" area, where I cursed myself for the thousandth time for not bringing my camera tonight. Here's a photo from the road, taken a while ago:

The picture doesn't begin to do justice to it--it's amazing. Stands everywhere for everything food-, clothes-, shoe- or accessories-related. We learned, though, that most places don't carry a shoe size above 40--this was especially unfortunate since Rachel, who is a 42 or so, was the main person actually wanting to buy shoes--and that I am a size 40, but didn't have the extra incentive to actually buy the shoes.

We also discovered that many stores carry the same things as each other, in color and style; this goes far beyond the look-alike phenomenon in the States--I'm saying they are LITERALLY the same items in different stalls. But that's okay.

Another big difference is, of course, the hours--as you can tell from the picture, they're open at night, and late into the night--we were there beginning at 9ish and they were still going strong. It's like a night market for clothes--wonderful :)

I think the best moment from this shopping experience was when we ventured upstairs to a store which looked, from outside, like a Hot Topic. Climbing the stairs, the walls were decorated with standard printer paper-sized pictures of Albert Einstein with his tongue sticking out, but each one had been defaced in its own unique way--torn, drawn on, different colored tape covering the eyes, etc.

You know what could make this better? Blue tape covering his eyes!

Anyway, the "punk" atmosphere they were cultivating with their decor and music kind of fizzled away when we began actually looking through their merchandise and discovered, alongside the standard black pants and hole-y shirts, polka-dotted dresses which would have looked at home on Minnie Mouse and neon polyester onesies that looked like they would fit right in at an aerobics class in the 1980s. Punk? Really?

So we had some fun laughing at them and moved on.

I think I'll like shopping here in the future. Pretty good prices, and clothes that--when you can find them well-made and without any neon or cartoon characters--strongly resemble offerings at great little websites like ModCloth and Ruche, an odd mishmash of retro feminine and bohemian which can look stupendous. Tonight, though, I was a little too tired and too overwhelmed. But I'll be back! It's not far from our apartment, and once I get a scooter, I have a feeling I will suddenly become very mobile.

I start *actually* co-teaching tomorrow; I'll keep you posted on how it goes!