Dumplings, Singapore, and Planes That Bring Me Home

I'm back in Alaska! With the moose and the bald eagles and the sunshine and the carhartt's. Feels good. Except that I keep waking up far too early in the morning, despite my best efforts to sleep in. Oh well. I'm sure it will pass. As always when I come home, I get the chance to reacquaint myself with old friends and past-times, while looking for a new niche in my hometown. I've started practicing my violin again, looking for ways to infuse swing dance into Alaska, and seeing my theater people. But this summer I now feel a need to do something activist, something social justice-ish. I'm sure Anchorage has something like that going on... now I just need to find it. Also, in the way that I like to immerse myself in activity, I applied for a job helping with HIV/AIDS Prevention in Alaska, which would be awesome to help out with. I'm also looking around for a way to continue to use my Mandarin, so we'll see how that goes.

Before I left Taiwan, I made friends with a guy who makes dumplings. He makes tasty vegetarian ones, and him and his assistant are always nice and talk to me when I walk by, so I made a point of buying some of the cabbage or leek filled buns on the way to or from class. One day I told my dumpling vendor that I wasn't sure if I would come back to Taiwan because I wanted to find some work in an area I like, and he offered to teach me how to make dumplings. Awesome. Although I am still not anywhere close to being able to make pretty veggie buns, I did get to hang out at the shop and roll out dough and watch his impeccable skill at closing the dumplings and he even told me how to make soy milk... If I ever go back to Taiwan, I wonder if he really would give me a part-time job helping make dumplings...

I went to Singapore! My Taiwanese visa expired 5 days before I wanted to leave Taiwan, and to avoid over-staying and generating bad relations with the Taiwanese government, I took the opportunity to visit Song Toh and his bride-to-be, Grace! My experience in Singapore was a lot less up-tight than I expected... or at least, they don't make lines on the MRT nearly as well as people in Taiwan and Hong Kong do. And don't have the crazy spikes and perms of fashionable hair in Taiwan and mainland China, or the tailored clothes and American retro-80's fashion look (at least, that's what it reminds me of... :). I also got to hang out with a tango-dancing Singaporean friend I made in Argentina, and even Jon Pflug, flashback from freshman year, came to dinner! It seems that the Singaporean government has done an excellent job in marketing, as there are many theme-park like exhibits, each with their own narrative. Song and I went to learn about the history of Singapore, where evidently the Malays, Chinese, EuroAsians, and Indians got together in peace and harmony and constructed a community... until the Japanese came and there was war... but I think the story brought them back to peace and harmony and hopeful visions for the future. I'm not sure how that's all working out, but the Indian food was very tasty. I also learned, although it may have been recently appealed, that oral sex is illegal in Singapore unless it leads to intercourse... I wonder how that rule's enforced. Although, when I told my parents this new-found knowledge, Mom informed me that oral sex is illegal in several states in the US... uh-oh.

After successfully supervising Song and Grace's new purchase of a refrigerator, sampling their wedding banquet (why the shark fin Song?), and discovering that my stomach sweats when it's really hot, I returned to Taiwan. I flew in Sunday afternoon, and Sunday evening I went out dancing with my recently-met friend Willie, and an awesome group of his friends. The salsa dancing was fun, but afterwards, the club put on reggaeton, and my new Latin American friends started singing along and the happy dancing began! Makes me look forward to the hippie outside dancing in Alaska that will have to happen at some point this summer...

The next day, Monday morning (ohh... too early...), began our final presentation, and last day of class. My class wrote a play about our experiences in Taiwan. Each of the five of us wrote a story about something that happened (or could have happened) to us here in Taiwan, writing in different characters to our story - I wrote about getting ignored ordering food because I'm too used to making lines, Roget talked about a cab driver shuttling him free of charge to school, Bao Zhu told of how people often think she's Taiwanese and ask her for directions (she's Vietnamese), and so on... Then we assigned parts, built a cute taxi and bus out of cardboard, and began blocking our play. We set it within the classroom, before class begins. Usually when we arrive early to class, we start talking, so we visualized our short plays as performing parts of our before class banter, with little sitting-around-the-table scenes between each play (to re-assure the audience of where we were talking). We performed for the other intensive class at our level, teachers, friends, and a video camera. Eventually I hope to get the tape of that performance, but I don't imagine I'll get it anytime soon. Afterwards, the revelry continued, and we went out to drink tea and then to dinner. After dinner our teacher said that one person would get to eat free (buy 10, get one free)... I suggested that we split the difference, but my old teacher mischievously said her heart was not nearly as good as mine, and we played a pin-ball like game to determine the lucky individual... and I got the highest score.. free pasta!

Tuesday I made Fish carry my box of books to the post office and back again (hey, postage is more expensive than I thought), went shopping with Roget and Fish to buy tasty Taiwanese treats for the whole family (dried squid, seaweed, pineapple cakes), and successfully crammed all of my things into an ever-fattening suitcase. Nothing to complain about, but people kept giving me stuff, including a whole calligraphy set, complete with a heavy ink-mixing-in rock, my name in Chinese on a stamp (chop?), and a globe clock where a space shuttle flies around and around to mark the time. And I didn't even break anything on my way back to the US.

Wednesday I head out of Taiwan, successfully arriving in Los Angeles before I left Taipei (time zones are weird), for dinner with the relatives and Chris Loken, and some quality sleep before going to Stanford to dance, discuss, and eat an enormous variety of pancakes with Chris, Ali, sparkly sexy deca folks, and anyone else around Stanford I remembered and could find in my short time. Then on the plane again, and here I am with the sun still out!