I won the lottery...again!

Good thing I waited till now to blog. See, earlier I was mulling over my entry:

"Nothing to report! So why bother?"
"It never fails that seven days is too long to keep one of these meaningless posts off the front page of my blog." "Sometimes daily blogging sucks."

And then, I remembered: the March/April receipt lottery numbers were up! So I pulled out my (very thick, thanks to contributions from Kaitlin, Alex and Melanie, and Grace!) was of receipt, and started checking. And, voila! Not one, but TWO receipts with matching last-three-digit numbers. Magic 200NT notes, thanks to nothing more than a little grocery shopping and a dinner stop at Subway last month.

Let's see here...last time, one win, at 200NT. This time, two wins, at 200NT each. If it keeps doubling...I like my odds for May/June! Except--I won't be here to redeem them. Anyone want my receipts? I seem to have good luck with them...

...makes me wish I never threw all these out last August!

*Caveat: turns out, only one of my numbers won; the other matched the special prize number, which apparently doesn't work with the last-three-digit thing. But still!

I won the lottery!

Well, sort of. I mean, I did, but I won't be going out and buying a yacht with my winnings anytime soon. I might, however, go out and buy a pair of workout pants or something.

Remember when I said the Taiwanese are obsessed with receipts? Well, I decided it was an obsession worth hopping on board with, once I realized that the lottery it is based on can yield as much as 10 million NT (~$338644USD). Of course, that's if your receipt happens to match all 8 digits of their chosen number, and the chances of that happening are infinitesimally small, but it's still a possibility.

As is the chance of winning smaller amounts. And I did! On Dec. 11 at 8:17pm, I bought something for 80NT and unknowingly won myself some money. (For the life of me, I have no idea what I was buying--我看不懂--but it's still cool.)

Whereas the big prizes go to a full 8-digit match, I won on the "bonus" numbers, two series of three numbers that they give you 200NT for matching at the end of your receipt. So, in this case, 680 won me 200NT!

My reaction if I had won 10 million NT with this receipt...

...and my reaction having won 200 NT with it.

So that was cool. Now I just need to fill in the back and take it to the local post office/bank (they're combined here) to redeem it! Now, to pray that my odds of winning big in the future aren't hurt by my previous winnings...

Farther up, further in!

For those who don't know, the title of this post is a reference to The Last Battle, the last book in C.S. Lewis's "Chronicles of Narnia" series. (If you haven't already, GO READ IT!) In the book, it's an admonishment not to stay on the edges of something, but to plunge into its center, full-force.

I'm kind of in love with the expression, actually.

It also happens to be the best thing I can think of to say about my time in Taiwan right now. I've long since gotten over the initial culture shock and established a daily routine; even my language skills have evolved to the point where I can at least get around okay. The challenge now comes in not staying at the edges of my world here, but to drive forward to experience it at greater depths.

The depths I plumbed today: the non-compatibility of US-made DVDs with Taiwan-made DVD players (I think I was as disappointed as the kids that we couldn't watch Up...); a scenic route home complete with the discovery of a cute shopping area behind the main one at Central Park (amazing what you can find in search of Burger King!); the impossibly long task of checking receipt numbers for their bimonthly lottery (no wins, after sorting my fat pile of receipts by month, then first digit, and then checking to see if all 8, or even just 7, or 6, or 5, or 4, or 3 numbers matched. They didn't.).

So, not exactly the sort of profundity Lewis usually inspires. Pretty mundane, really. But the little mundane things pile up on each other and build into life itself. So I say, farther up and further in!

Obsessions

Another uneventful day--which is not altogether a bad thing! The only moment of productivity today came first thing in the morning when, at 9am, we met up to go get physicals for our drivers licenses at the local hospital. After that, it was a nap, then some studying for said license test (which we will now be taking next week, since we didn't today), then reading and TV-watching for the rest of the day. It was glorious.

But, all that to say, not much to blog about. So, instead of an update on my day, I'll use my favorite little content-building technique: a list. And I shall call this list...

Taiwanese Obsessions I've Noticed Thus Far

1. The people of Taiwan are obsessed with plastic. Plastic bags, plastic seals, plastic straws, plastic bottles--it's everywhere.

This is just a very small sampling of the bottles I've used since I got here--the ones I finished at home and been too lazy to take out to the recycling right away. Also worth noting is that I go through one of the large water bottles about once every two or three days. You do the math.

Anytime you order iced tea or juice here, you receive a plastic cup topped by a plastic seal which, together with a plastic-enshrined plastic straw, come nestled inside a plastic bag. Anytime you buy a beverage at 7-11--which you do daily, often in plastic bottles, and often water, thanks to the non-potable tap water--you receive a plastic straw. Today at McDonald's, I saw them put three paper bags full of food inside a larger plastic bag before giving it to the customer. From what I can tell, this phenomenon stems in part from the fact that most people commute via scooter, and the one storage capacity scooters always have (besides room in the seat) is a hook for bags. But still, this plastic obsession is odd when combined with....

2. Their obsession with recycling. I'm quite glad about this obsession, given #1 on this list, and the fact that until recently Kaohsiung was one of the most polluted cities in Southeast Asia, and the most polluted city in Taiwan. They used to say you could write calligraphy with the water from the Love River. This is, fortunately, no longer the case; now, the emphasis on recycling makes me feel like I'm back in Seattle, with many restaurants having multiple trash cans for different types of waste. It is a bit annoying, though, having to rinse and sort everything, including food waste, all the time--after lunch each day, we have a whole ordeal of scraping out our (cardboard) lunch boxes which we can never finish into one bag, then putting the boxes themselves in another bag, and putting our used napkins and disposable chopsticks into a third bag. Our plastic drink cups/bottles do, I think, go in a fourth bag after they are rinsed, but I've never quite been able to figure that part out.

3. Another thing I've not quite figured out is the Taiwanese obsession with receipts. You get a receipt with absolutely every purchase and, as I've mentioned with the whole drinks situation, you make a lot of small purchases. And each and every receipt you get is long and thin and about three times the size it needs to be to contain all the information. I know that, with 7-11 at least, they have a lottery based on your receipt numbers, but I haven't been able to figure out yet whether or not that system is universal, or how and when you find out if you've won. So I just throw mine away, but somehow they still seem to show up constantly clogging my wallet and falling out of my purse. It's obnoxious.

Again, a very small selection: those receipts collected after I found out there was a lottery and before I realized that I have no clue how that information can be of any use to me and began throwing them away again.

I know the point of this program is to spread cultural exchange, so I have the feeling my lists will proliferate with more little amusing quirks of Taiwanese culture in the coming months. But for now, I'll leave my list at this: two ways in which Taiwanese people use a lot of resources, and one way in which they deal with the leftovers.