An email home

Sorry we haven’t written much lately. Things have been crazy. We’re getting settled into our new place, and Nick’s schedule.  If any of you want to send letters/pictures/packages our address is:

Anle District

Ji Jin Yi Road Lane 121

No 40-1 3^rd Floor

Keelung City       204

Taiwan

Alec just turned 7 months old on Sat. He has mastered crawling and is getting really good at pulling himself up on all the furniture. He can even lower himself back down, so he doesn’t fall as much. Sometimes I’ll catch him standing up without even holding on to anything, but never more than a few seconds. Still, he’s pretty impressive. He LOVES food and always wants to try what I’m eating. Even though he doesn’t have any teeth yet he is pretty fearless about foods, and I’ve found that he doesn’t need me to purée it for him. I just cook it soft  and cut it into small pieces. He tries to take bites out of sandwiches. His favorite is peanut butter and jelly which is a convenient travel food when we’re on the go. He’s just becoming more and more of a kid and less of a baby every day. It’s amazing. It all just goes by so fast.

We’ve had some visa problems, but we are slowly working things out. (Would any of you be willing to take a trip to the Taiwanese consulate for us?) There is so much I wish I would have known before we left as far as the paperwork and such is concerned. I guess that’s what happens when you decide to leave with barely enough time to get your passports.

We took a second trip to Hong Kong for our anniversary and stayed overnight. We visited Victoria Peak. It had a really great view of Hong Kong’s skyline and coastline. Hong Kong is a lot like I imagined Taipei would be before we left. It’s very modern, and has a lot of Western influence left over from the British that colonized it. It was hard to navigate though. We tried to find a Thai restaurant, and walked around in circles until we decided just to eat at Pizza Hut.. It wasn’t what I think of when I think of Pizza Hut. The atmosphere was kind of like a cheap Italian restaurant with tango-style music playing in the background. The menu was different too. There were a bunch of different appetizers/sides; not just hot wings and bread sticks. The pizza was a “large,” but that’s a joke. It was called Italian Meat Classic, but I wouldn’t use any of those words to describe it. It had orange sauce that reminded me of Thousand Island dressing. The toppings were cheese, mushrooms, pineapple, and chicken.

Other fast-food places have interesting things on the menu as well. KFC has a special spicy chicken, and apparently McDonalds serves fried chicken as well. I tried the “Spicy Whopper” at BK it was just a normal Whopper with Chinese style hot sauce on it. They have a Japanese burger place here it’s called Mos Burger. They bake the buns with rice flour. It tasted pretty close to American burgers though. For the most part we try to eat local foods, but sometimes we just need to have some Western food. The other day I told Nick I needed a break from oily food, and we ended up eating at McD’s. I’m just more accustomed to the heavy greasy than I am to the slimy oily. I don’t know what to make of that, but it’s just different. More different than I thought it would be.

We had a nice treat last night. We had some friends over and I  made pork chops, green beans, and sweet potatoes. It was so nice to have real food. Everything I eat here is “instant,” or “convenience” foods which is what a lot of the natives eat. I don’t know how they ever feel full, bloated sure :-s but never the truly satisfied feeling of being full. Anyway, we bought the meat at a traditional market (a native came with us to help me pick it out, and order it), and the vendor was proud to inform us that the pig had just been slaughtered that morning. I was more concerned with how long it had been out unrefrigerated since then, but no one’s gotten sick yet, so maybe it’s safer than I think.

Also, we went to a parade in Keelung (that’s where we live now) as part of the ghost festival. It was fun. The natives were more interested in Alec than they were in the parade, though. We also got to go to the beach to see them launch burning paper houses into the ocean. It was all really interesting. The festival is unique to Keelung. The houses are for the people who die at sea. When the first people came over from mainland China  there was a lot of fighting on the boats, and a lot of people died, so when they got to Keelung, they had a memorial for them, and built paper houses, so that their spirits would have a place to go. That’s why they send them out to sea, I don’t quite understand why they burn them though. It’s a Buddhist tradition having to do with smoke and the afterlife (says our friend Joe).