Getting Adjusted, or Less Travelling, More Living

Yes, Taiwan's starting to feel less like a foreign country, and more like the place where I live. (Though, this morning I woke up absolutely positive I was in Costa Rica.) This may translate into less frequent blog posts, and hopefully a higher incidence of Chinese characters within each post. Or perhaps as I discover the intricacies of this little city (it is smaller than I thought when I arrived) these entries will just become exponentially more interesting.

I don't know if it's the heat, humidity, or lack of a rigid schedule, but I cannot get myself to sleep before the early hours of the morning, and I tend to sleep in quite late. Perhaps I am just permanently jet lagged, but blame may be placed on the internet as well. I still have quite strong ties to some in Seattle, and Seattle just isn't in the same time zone as Taiwan.

Speaking of heat and humidity, I am under the impression that Tainan is experiencing an abnormally mild summer. According to wunderground.com, the humidity and temperature tend to hover around 70-80% and 28-32°C, respectively, as opposed to the seeming norm of 85-95% and 30-34°C. On a recent day Seattle was hotter and more humid (though I'm sure that is an anomaly). Lucky me, I guess.

But what this post is really about is food. I just wanted to share some standard fare with everyone:




This is from one of many 素食 (su4shi3) or vegetarian houses. Basically, to be a 素食 you need a husband at the cash register and a wife cooking hell of food, and two rice cookers always filled to the brim, one with white, the other with brown rice. And then you need a scale, to decide how much money to get from people. And some 白人(white people - you can pronounce that, yeah Roy?) to eat more food than anyone else.

I pay about twice as much as everyone else every time I go to one of these places (every day), not because they're scamming me, but because I eat about twice as much food as everyone else. It's amazing what people subside on. This was a particularly large and expensive (as things go) meal, running me NT$130, or a bit over US$4. I thought about not finishing it, twice. (The picture was taken during one of my breaks.)

That is all. I was just excited about another picture. Oh, and there was supposed to be a typhoon today, but I think it did a bad job, because it was just sunny and a little breezy and I was under the impression that typhoons are not very sunny and more than breezy. Next time, eh?