History, Hiking, and Gods

I'm back in class and am starting on the second book, yay! It's green! I have a new teacher too, who's 3 months pregnant and said in class once that all her body's resources have left her brain for the baby, and I can see where sometimes that might be true... I also got two new classmates - a girl from Vietnam and a guy from Spain! The Spanish guy, Roget is fun to hang out with, and we get to mix in Spanish words with our Mandarin if we come across a topic beyond our limited vocabulary. :) I also got to keep my two half-Japanese classmates, Satoshi and Abe, who seem to have taken up the habit of late-night gaming... sounds like fun, but not so good for the homework.

I've also gotten a new "job"! There's a company called LiveABC that publishes and distributes English learning materials to somewhere (I think several countries, but I don't really know), like magazines, books, and CD-ROM's... and I get to be in the video part of the CD-ROM's, yay! So far I've gotten to make a mess in someone else's kitchen, watch a Taiwanese baker make a cake (totally, start to finish, very cool!), and cry at my computer screen because I have to write a report but my hand is in a cast. Tomorrow I get to be a Chilean business assistant with the hots for an American business assistant. And my ever-generous wardrobe assistant, Vicky, continues to garner the privilege of having her clothes displayed all over the place. For tomorrow's filming, I've borrowed a suit... her little black shorts were featured in my swing performance, and her extra shiny shirt was seen at a tango milonga. Yay Vicky!

Back in dance land, some of the foreign dancers and I went to a photo shoot to take some promotional pictures. Brook, and Magda and Olga - both Polish-Canadian, were all there, all of whom I have a great deal of respect for. We got to wear our coolest dancey costumes and pose while the camera-man told us we all looked great... and then we went outside to the green area in the middle of the road to take more pictures, where it seemed evident that the people in the cars thought we looked great too... mmm... more clothes for the outside pictures next time, I'd say.

There's hiking in Taipei! Taipei has fuzzy green mountains all around it that have tempted me since I got here, and this last Saturday I finally go to explore! Fish and I wandered up a trail in NeiHu, a district of Taipei that I read has the best hiking in Taipei, and we did indeed discover the tops of (short) fuzzy mountains, as well as lots of people fishing next to the "do not fish" signs, and a little old monk in front of a temple. It also seems that Taiwanese people like stairs almost as much as Chinese people do... Fish is learning Spanish, so he got to practice counting, and after a few hundred stairs, I think he's starting to get the hang of it. Next time I also think I should take a bag with me and pick up some of the trash... Fish picked up an extra tea bottle at the top, and we felt pretty cool, until we saw all the other bottles floating in the river on the way down.

I saw on the MRT map that there's hiking trails near where Fu lives, and I'm excited to try those out... but first I may have to convince Fu to go with me... I haven't met many Taiwanese girls yet who think the idea of physical exercise sounds like fun. I have discovered though, that hiking clothes here are ridiculously expensive here. I have my favorite black REI bought shirt that I wear a lot, so I thought I'd go looking for another one (maybe red)... and even the stuff made in Taiwan is evidently subject to an import tax because of it's American branding, making it more expensive here than at home in the States... interesting. Guess I'll have to buy real Taiwanese clothes instead.

Last weekend was lantern festival! Fish tells me when he was little his family would make paper lanterns and stick candles inside, and that was great fun, but now most people buy their kids electric lanterns... safer, but without the same excitement. I missed the big send-lanterns-into-the-sky-en-mass party because I was performing dance somewhere, but at Chiang Kai-Shek Memorial Hall there were lantern sculptures... no, maybe not sculptures... I don't know. People from different companies or schools each made a scene with metal framing and paper over it, and of course, light inside. There were lots of pigs to celebrate the pig year, as well as random cartoon characters and toys and famous buildings and such. Reminded me a lot of ice carving in Anchorage... except, not as cold. Ah, and I've been registered! Because this is the year of the pig, and I was born in the year of the pig, I'm suppose to register myself at a temple so that I can be... protected... or something. Keep the bad spirits away. What that required though, was to go to the temple, give them 500NT (what do they do with it??), tell them my name, address, and phone number, and then they registered me and gave me noodles. I haven't eaten the noodles yet, but I imagine they're not worth 500NT. I also asked some of my friends what they think of when they pray at the temple, and evidently you always have to tell whichever god you're praying to your name and address... interesting. Maybe Taiwanese gods are not as good at voice recognition as a Christian god..

I also saw a cool play last weekend, a historical fiction following a woman born just after the Japanese occupation of Taiwan, through when Chiang Kai-Shek and his crowd came from mainland China, to sometime around the present with the influence of American culture. A lot of the play was in Taiwanese, meaning it's catered for an audience of the came-to-Taiwan-from-China-around-500-years-ago crowd, rather than the came-to-Taiwan-from-China-with-Chiang Kai-Shek crowd. I got some Taiwanese-to-Mandarin translation whispered to me during the show, so I understood the general idea (but not what people were laughing about usually). I think I understand a little better now why some people still feel so bitter about mainland China and Chiang Kai-Shek... at least, the story is much more visual now, with fake dead bodies (from Chiang Kai-Shek) and arranged marriages (from the Japanese era) and mixed-culture kids (Taiwanese-American). Now I just need to see the made-for-Chiang-Kai-Shek's-followers play.