Welcome to Venice

It has been a hectic week and I wanted to write a blog sooner but had I done that, the hecticness would've been reflected in my blog and thus, made my hundreds of readers crazy as well. Last Sunday, I went on an amazing hike with little Brian and his family (pictures will be posted shortly). We climbed Seven Star Mountain on the outskirts of Taipei. The hike started at the base of a large, natural sulfur spring which was pretty cool to see, and it smelled terrible of course. The hike began at an elevation of about 800 meters and climbed to about 1,120 meters total. It's the tallest mountain in Taipei County. The hike itself was composed mainly of steep stone steps, with of course very, very few switchbacks. For some reason here, hiking trails are constructed straight up mountains, so I guess the hike is shorter but it's much more intense. Then again, I was hiking with Brian who is 6 years old so it wasn't that difficult. I was able to hang, just barely. At the peak of the mountain, it was extremely foggy so we didn't have a good view of anything but it was fun being at the top nonetheless. There were a ton of Taiwanese people just laying around. The most peculiar thing I discovered on the hike was on the descent. While we were going down, I saw a little side trail that cut into the tall grass that was on either side of the trail. I walked down the trail with Brian for about 20 feet, and then we got to a clearing with a bunch of, hmm shall we say, remnants of human occupation in the area. So yeah, instead of having bathrooms along the hiking trail, they just had these clearings that you could duck down in the grass and completely concealed, but no attempt was made to conceal the "business" being done there. That was a first for me. After seeing this one, I noticed trails just like these every few hundred meters.

After the hike, I went out to dinner with his family. Our appetizer was tofu and pig intestine. I picked at this dish and ate one bite of each thing. Then Brian's mom said "foreigners usually don't like this food" so I guess I made it pretty obvious that I didn't like it when I only took one piece of each and then moved on to another dish as fast as I could. I got a bottle of what I thought was apple juice to drink for dinner. It actually was apple juice, but at the bottom, it had Jello-like chunks of apple flavored gelatin or something so that was a new one for me too.

I could've sworn there were some other highlights from the week but they're escaping me right now. Last night I moved out of my apartment and into a new place with Dan and Lauren, two other teachers from school. The rent is a lot less now and it's a really nice place, plus I think it will be good for me to live with other people. Sometimes in a tiny little studio apartment, the walls felt like they were starting to close in. Anyway, the name of the building is Venice and it's pretty swanky. I'll put up pictures of that too. The funny thing about moving last night was when my landlord got there, we couldn't really communicate at all so I called my neighbor Tony and had him come translate and moderate the exchange. I tried cleaning the apartment but not that much because it wasn't that clean when I moved in, but I was worried the landlord would say I had failed the cleaning test, but that was not the case. She did burp loudly about 6 times in half an hour while surveying the apartment, so that was funny. Thanks to the help of Brian's mom, I was able to get back over half of my security deposit for breaking my contract.

Ok, well I'm out of stories right now but this weekend promises to be a big one. I'll post pictures shortly and another blog in the next couple of days. Oh last thing I just remembered...because of the H1N1 epidemic or whatever you want to call it, all of the students have their temperatures taken at school a few times a day, of course using the same thermometer in all of their ears without ever cleaning it. Then after they're done, the teachers are expected to use the same dirty thermometer to take their temperatures. Even when I go to my Chinese class in Taipei, the doorman of the building stops me and takes my temperature. I've heard that about 50,000 people in Taiwan have the swine flu, so they're doing their best to prevent it from spreading more. At our school, if 2 or more kids have a fever and are sent home and later develop swine flu, then their whole class is cancelled for 5 days. So, it's not bad at our school but I guess it has the potential of getting there. I've been washing my hands after every class just in case. It is pretty crazy though that if any kid has a fever, they're sent home immediately. But at the same time, I've heard that H1N1 is transmitted through mucus, and ear wax is a mucus, so why is it that they test all the kids at school...like 200 kids, with the same thermometer and never clean it? I'll leave that to you guys to ponder.