Thoughts on Moving... Again

Admittedly, I shed a few tears in bed each night at the prospect of winding up my two months of leisure and leaving this warm, sunny land, where bananas are for sale on every street corner, haircuts cost $3, and I have a brother I can rendezvous with for lunch every day.

Though the testimony of my tracks may indicate otherwise, I don't like to move around. I like to open new doors ahead, but I hate to close the ones behind. Leaving Taiwan is sad for me: I don't want to go, but at the same time, I'm eager to see Honeychild and eat nachos at Block 15. Going home this fall, as exciting and necessary as it is, requires me to leave Oregon, which is also sad, because there are people and places and things I will miss. Going home is both heart-breaking and heart-mending. I tell myself sometimes I've got to draw in my feelers and concentrate on sinking my roots instead. I like to believe I have a sedentary nature. I see myself as a farmer rather than a wanderer. I like the idea of investing in one place, and of fostering relationships that are generations old.
I live in a privileged time and a privileged place. I can travel back and forth across countries and even continents many times in a single lifetime. I can go to faraway places without bidding a permanent goodbye to my homeland. I can stay in touch with people in other places while I travel. I can live in several places at once. I can shift my life three thousand miles and take more than a bundle of belongings. Generations past faced infinitely more challenges. Generations ahead may, as well. Love it while it lasts? Or don't spoil myself?

The answer to the riddle is go home. Go home for a while to recup and regroup. And then, when the wind blows, see if my roots are strong enough to hold me firm or if it blows me away again...

Build the Fire Higher, Dear

I'm working on a paper-cut of a hummingbird right now. I was flipping through photographs of hummingbirds online when one photo suddenly jogged my mind home.

We have a screened porch on the front of our family's home in Pennsylvania, and my mother keeps filled hummingbird feeders on the open deck leading to the porch door. The hummingbirds have been coming to these feeders for years. When I was eight or nine I spent a summer dressed in red and pink standing beneath the feeders with my fingers outstretched. It took some patience, but the hummingbirds eventually accepted me and sat on my fingertips to rest when they came to feed.

After a few days I became convinced I could distinguish between the hummingbirds (all ruby-throated). I knew there was a particularly bold male who liked to sit in the oak at the top of the clearing, and I thought he was larger than the others. I called him King something-or-other; I don't remember what. I kept a logbook and wristwatch nearby so I could take detailed notes of all activity. I must have been writing poetry that summer, too, because I remember one poem in particular that I wrote about the hummingbirds and our lilacs.

Another summer a hummingbird got caught on the inside of our screened porch. He pushed his beak through the screen and became stuck; that was how we caught him. Holding a swooning hummingbird in your hands is an act that requires the same degree of breath-stopping gentleness as painting Starry Night on a fly's wing (such painters synchronize their brush strokes with their heartbeats). This is how carrying a hummingbird feels: if you so much as blink your eye, you might involuntarily crush him.

When I held him in my hand I saw he had skinned his beak when pushing it through the screen. A small curl had been scraped back and was hanging near his nostril. A hummingbird with a skinned beak.

But the real memory that looking at these photos jogged is from three summers ago. I was home for a month preparing for my ride west; I suppose it was May. As I was hurrying in through the porch door one morning, something caught my eye, and I abandoned my course to look more closely. Held against the screen by the flow of air, down low near the handle, were two infinitesimal feathers. Hanging in the shadows, they looked charcoal gray. I pulled them carefully away with the tip of my finger and carried them into light. Held to the sun, they crashed and exploded the scarlet light waves with an intensity I've never witnessed in any man-made reflector. They were the red neck feathers off a male ruby-throated hummingbird. Brought back into shadow, they changed back to solid gray without even hinting at their previous brilliance.

Didn't the Aztec kings wear cloaks made of hummingbird skins? These men must have been blindingly radiant in sunlight. There was a huge market for skins in Europe during the mid-1800s. Hummingbirds were so fascinating and beautiful and incomprehensible that they were being caught and slaughtered by the thousands -- or, actually, make that hundreds of thousands.

This brings to mind a quote I read recently in the beginning of a book. I cannot for the life of me remember where I came across this... only that it was last summer. The passage essentially made the observation that some men, faced with nature or wildness, are so overwhelmed with love or passion for it that they can think to express themselves only by firing guns into it. (If anybody can tell me where I read this or where I can find it again, I'd be thrilled.) Is a similar compulsion at play when women demand avian genocide in the name of hat ornamentation? The desperation to possess beauty, I think, is the same.

But back to the radiance of yesteryear: I read in a recent novel (The Kingom of Ohio by Matthew Flaming) that when people began installing electric lights in their homes, women complained that their diamonds didn't shatter the light as well and appeared dull. Diamonds are most brilliant by candles and firelight. I suspect women appear more attractive by firelight, too; nothing hides the flaws so well as shadow, and what warmer light exists than candle-cast? Replacing our fires with wires has probably done a lot to dull our passions across the board; our diamonds weren't the only ones to be sedated.

The feathers I found on the front porch lived for a time in a dish on the windowsill above the sink, where I could move them between sun and shade at my whim. And then I moved them to a more secret place, where they remain -- another token of wildness stolen away into human possession.

A Taste Of...

A few nights ago I finished reading "Alone in the Kitchen With an Eggplant: Confessions of Cooking for One and Dining Alone," a collection of essays edited by Jenni Ferrari-Adler. I borrowed this book from Joe, who recommended it highly, and who received it himself upon high recommendation. I recommend it highly, too, particularly if meals are anything you ever take note of, or if you enjoy or hate or simply ever experience eating alone. We all do, I think.

I love to eat alone. Sometimes eating alone is really awful -- I hated it most when I was in India, because I ate in so many restaurants and was already a point of attention -- but most of the time, when I have the time to exploit my solitude, I love it.

I love to cook alone, too. I love to be cooked for (though I've committed the cardinal sin of taking it for granted) and I love to cook with somebody else who loves to cook. I love to eat in big groups or in very small ones, particularly if I'm eating with people who love to eat and who love to notice what they are eating and who love to acknowledge that they are noticing what they are eating. I also love to eat slowly, and I love to eat slowly with other people, because then I can be doubly sure that the meal is serving its full purpose and is nurturing more than just our bellies.

My favorite food to eat is food that is identifiable. I can tell what it is, how it grew, or where it came from (air? earth? water?). I love to eat simple food. I can revel in those complicated Indian curries, don't get me wrong, and I can delight in those dishes melded of endless lists of ingredients. Again, I know I have, in my life, complained about these "ornate" dishes, as I have called them, but they have their place on the table.

I love food to be well presented, attractive, and aesthetic on the plate, and preferably the table, and preferably in the entire room, including the window and the view. But that's getting idealistic.

My favorite food of all time is the unassuming sweet potato. I could write 10,000 words in jubilation on the tuber, but I won't. Because I didn't eat sweet potato for dinner tonight.

I'll tell you what I had for dinner tonight, but only because I just read "Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant" and it's full of confessions from respected people about some of the scary, strange (and delicious) things they prepare for themselves when left to themselves.

And because I believe that what precedes a meal is relevant (it is always relevant to me), I'll tell you that this meal followed a good, hard, encouraging run (despite the fact that it involved two dozen tedious circumambulations of a running track). And a long drink of cold water preceded it, and some pleasant, if rushed, stretching. I was hungry.

Yesterday I went to the grocery store and I waffled for a good five minutes in front of the canned fish section. If I don't eat enough protein, I start getting Charlie-horses in the night. And I wanted something that wasn't deep-fried. Most of the labeling was in Chinese, but here and there I caught "tuna!" and "sandwich!" in English.

I began thinking about Orchid Island, off the east coast of Taiwan, and how it has several tens of thousands of barrels of radioactive waste leaking into the ocean making people and fish sick. I thought about how the poor tuna have devastated populations and how they eat fishes that have already eaten smaller fishes and how they end up with mercury accumulated in their fat. I began thinking about how the oceans are connected, and began wondering where "American" tuna comes from anyway, and whether it's all the same tuna in grocery stores all over the world.

I decided I should eat smaller fish, like sardines or herring, as I always conclude when examining cans of tuna. I suppose I'm always looking for that label that will say "mercury free! Fished from an ocean with too many tuna! Extremely healthy! This fish wanted to die for you! Eat it and make the world better!" But I never see that label.

I found the familiar square tins - they looked like my kipper friends - but wait, these were all roasted eel! No kipper, no sardines. I went to the dried fish row and got a bag of shiny, dried, very stiff whole fish. They were so stiff I couldn't break them in half. They were mixed with slivered almonds and were about the same size. Very small. With hard, stern little faces. That was something.

And then I thought about my stiff calves again, wuss that I am, and how I wanted to run further tomorrow, and so I went and bought the cheapest can of tuna and thought about my future children and how I was endangering their health by exposing their tiny developing bodies to mercury my own body might be accumulating. What a sell-out.

I pondered vegetables for a good long while and ended up with three enormous and sparkling clean carrots (I think they power-wash them here before scrubbing them with brillo pads) and a bag of four long, thin cucumbers. Then I got some tofu, with a blessed label proclaiming NON GMO!, and soymilk, and hoped that my skin wouldn't turn white and my hair wouldn't start to fall out (isn't that what a high-soy diet is supposed to do to you?). I bought some fruit and crackers and was finished.

So what did I fix for dinner, you ask? Oh, it hit the spot. So I was tired, limber, freshly showered, and hungry. And I cut up half a carrot, and sliced up a whole cucumber, and then I dumped my can of tuna fish on top (which, unfortunately, was canned in some kind of oil), and then I poured raisins on top of that, and then, to top it off, a scoop of yesterday's cold brown rice.

Ahhhh. That was an hour ago and I still feel full, full, full. Aaaaah. Fresh food, fresh food, fresh food. My calve muscles are celebrating in a very laid back, relaxed kind of way. And I enjoyed eating alone because I knew that not many people would ever enjoy eating such a meal with me. And so, in my privacy, I could relish every bite, and didn't have to be embarrassed about such unseemly combinations.

Oh -- and I had some of those little dried fish for breakfast this morning. Pretty crunchy, and they seem to be sweetened with something, but they're alright, as long as you don't look too closely.

TAKE MY POLL

Right over there ---------> -----> ------->

Too Difficult?

Perhaps my readership has a patchy history with poetry. I just consulted google analytics to confirm I wasn't the only person reading myself, and I'm not. So I'm revising my assignment. How about ANY kind of writing?

Here's a draft of my own poetry-that-fed-me chronology chart... Beginning with Wordsworth when I was, what, eight maybe? and going up to present, with Booth...

I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud - William Wordsworth
Ode to the Storm - Pablo Neruda
Grits Ain't Groceries (first verse) - Little Willie John(?)
Butterflies Under Persimmon - Mark Jarman
Bucolic (eek, the moss one, which number?) - Maurice Manning
Wild Geese - Mary Oliver
From Blossoms - Li-Young Lee
The Peace of Wild Things - Wendell Berry
First Lesson - Philip Booth

Of course, to include stories, nonfiction, the whole gamut, hm, that would be a very different list. I'll have to think about that.

Novels that fed me... the books seem strange to me, now. Some I have reread and haven't appreciated so much the second time. But which ones have fed me, at least once?

Miss Rumphius - Barbara Cooney
Anne of Green Gables - Lucy Maud Montgomery
Narcissus and Goldmund - Herman Hesse
To the Lighthouse - Viginia Woolf
The Summer Book - Tove Jansson

There -- the slimmest list possible, representing childhood, youth, high school, college, and post-college.

Nonfiction.... this is the hardest list. But of the dozens petitioning me for a spot, one stands out head and shoulders above the rest: The Good Life by Helen and Scott Nearing.

So there. There's mine.

Your First Assignment

(Continuation of/elaboration on my comment on the previous post...)

I’m thinking about this now. I’m thinking about the poems that rise up and speak to us, poems we may have even met before but didn’t see at the time. The poems we fed off of for weeks or months or years. Poems we lived on as children or teenagers or adults, poems we lived on and left or poems we lived on and kept.

Can you remember these poems? Can you list them? Do you remember the order they fell in? Do they form some sort of narrative on their own? Can you… DO anything with them? (I don’t mean the last question in a futile sense, rather, an awed sense of possibility.)

Can I please pose this question to the world? Or, at least, the people I love who I’m interested in who read poetry? Or the people I’m fascinated by and wish I knew? Or a class of students somewhere as an assignment?

I want to see the list alone, first, alone for a good long time -- just titles and names, and then I want a list with commentary, prose, whatever, photographs, anything – some personalized links.

I want lists. Distilled lists – not the 100 poems that fed you. I mean THE poems that were your staple foods. Five. Ten. Fifteen. Twenty, if you’re voracious. The ones you memorized so you wouldn’t have to spend a day apart. The ones you rewrote in five journals. The ones that were in your mind even in sleep.

I’m working on my list. Some of the poems, of course, were obvious to me right away. Others, I fed off of once, and they’re buried now, but they’re coming back, I’m remembering them.

(((Note: I laughed like a crazy person when I finished typing this post -- and then realized my windows were open and my floor mates probably suspect my sanity now)))

Water to me Now

First Lesson
Philip Booth

Lie back, daughter, let your head
be tipped back in the cup of my hand.
Gently, and I will hold you. Spread
your arms wide, lie out on the stream
and look high at the gulls. A dead-
man's-float is face down. You will dive
and swim soon enough where this tidewater
ebbs to the sea. Daughter, believe
me, when you tire on the long thrash
to your island, lie up, and survive.
As you float now, where I held you
and let go, remember when fear
cramps your heart what I told you:
lie gently and wide to the light-year
stars, lie back, and the sea will hold you.

Too Much Hospitality!

This morning art class was held in Talin, a city about a half hour away. During every break, I am given as many cups of tea as I can drink (and sometimes candy, boiled ears of corn, etc). During one of our breaks this morning, one of the students told me that she had prepared a special rice ball for my lunch. She would send it home with me and I could eat it with any vegetables I wanted.

After class the teacher explained to me that I would be riding back to Chiayi with a different student since he had to go teach another class in another city. I was sent off with a Chinese wedding cake.

Then, the students invited me into their house. I was given a bag of nut candies. Then they took me out to lunch and ordered a platter of goose, three plates of sushi, soup, and the Taiwanese staple of cabbage sauteed with garlic. When it was time to go, they had the cook package the left-over goose for me to take home, and then ordered another plate of sushi so that I could bring some back to my brother.

This was the biggest meal I'd eaten in some time. The students didn't speak English, so I couldn't really refuse. When I got home, I fell over onto my bed and slept solidly for at least an hour... I still feel dazed. I brought most of the food over to Joe's to share with him and Fiona.

I'm discovering that it's much easier to just accept generosity than try to wave it away, which is exhausting and typically futile, anyway, and maybe just plain American, I don't know. And, as Joe pointed out, it makes them happy to be generous. So now I just accept the gifts and offer thanks.

Usually I'm not even asked if I want anything I'm just asked WHAT I want -- after class I'm asked "what do you want for lunch, rice, noodles, sushi, or blankety-blank?" And I say "oh, I'm not hungry" and they say "which is your favorite?" "Rice," I say, imagining a small bowl of rice (a completely sufficient lunch) -- but, no, "rice" actually means rice and vegetables and soup and meat.... Just as "noodles" means noodles and eggs and meat and greens and broth and a plate of sliced tofu...

"Wo bao le, wo bao le" I sometimes cry -- I'm full, I'm full. "Ah!!" They smile, pleased, if I say this after a meal.

Good thing I live right next to a running track (which, yes, I often visit twice daily).

Last Night

I had a dream last night that we had an earthquake. First it was up and down, which I remembered was bad, and then it was side to side, which I remembered was better. I was in my room, a nice white box, and Joe was there, too. The movement was dizzying, and the building swayed side to side further and further until suddenly I realized we were going over sideways, and I was looking down at the wall which was becoming the new floor.

I was sure the room would rip apart, collapse: we would be buried, or Joe would fall to one side and I would fall to the other. So I grabbed onto his hand so we wouldn’t be separated. But the room stayed intact, and things didn’t even fall into a jumble. It kept turning-- walls were ceiling, ceiling was floor, floor was wall – and we were spinning as if suspended in outer space. I lost hold of Joe but that was okay, because we weren't falling; we hovered in the middle, because there wasn’t a direction to fall down to anymore. “April,” Joe said, as if to wake me, “look - we’re floating.”

Fond Recollections...

Of Vermont and the Bread & Puppet Theater!

Garbage Success!

A continuation of the previous post...

I visited Joe this evening but made sure to leave for home in time to meet the garbage truck. I couldn’t bear my trash another day. I took my trash out to the curb fifteen minutes early so I would be sure not to miss the truck. As I stood waiting, a woman on a scooter hauling a huge dolly swerved to a halt in front of me. The woman leaped from her seat and began jabbering to me in Mandarin. I shrugged and gave her my “sorry, I’m a confused foreigner” face. She ignored me and kept hollering over the noise of her engine as she began to poke through my trash bags.

“Just trash,” I tried to explain, “no recycling!” She found a flattened cracker box and brandished it at me for several seconds before tucking it back into my trash bag dismissively. I picked it up and offered it to her. She accepted it merrily and tucked it into a bag hanging from her handlebars as she hopped back onto her scooter.
“Thank you!” she called out in English as she swept away.

I waited for another five minutes and then the woman on the scooter came by again. This time she stopped in front of me and cut off her motor. She pulled down her face-mask and began delivering a long monologue, periodically gesturing to me and my trash bags.

“I’m sorry,” I said “I don’t understand.”

She leaped down from her scooter a second time and came over to stand right in front of me. She pointed to my trash again and gave me a long explanation in Mandarin.

“Garbage,” I said in English. “Eight thirty” I said in Mandarin.

After several more extended monologues, much gesturing, and my continued efforts to explain that I had absolutely no idea what she was talking about, the woman decided to help me learn Mandarin. She tapped her handlebar and said very slowly and clearly three words that must have meant “motorbike.” I repeated and she corrected. I repeated and she corrected again. After five or six tries she moved on.

She pointed to my hair. “Taaaang tou fa!” she said. “Taaaang tou fa,” I said. She shook her head no and said it again. I repeated it until she was satisfied enough to move on. She took off her helmet and pinched her hair, which was cut short. “Doooudin tou fa,” she said. We repeated the phrase back and forth as we had the others, and she seemed very pleased. “Shie shie,” I said, in thanks. She stepped back indignantly as if insulted. “Shie shie!? Shie shie!?” I was afraid I had upset her, but then, grandly, in proud demonstration, she said in English “Thank you! Thank you!”

“Uh, yes,” I said, “thank you.”

At that moment the door behind me opened and three fellows from my floor walked out with their trash bags. She scurried over to intercept their bags of recycling. One of the fellows hadn’t sorted his garbage, and the women stood over his bag scolding him loudly as she pointed out the items he could have recycled. Then we heard the garbage truck approaching, and she hopped on her scooter and sped away, hollering a final “thank you!” over her shoulder.

As the trash truck made its way down our block, rolling doors cranked open and an odd mix of men, women, and teenagers issued forth bearing sacks of garbage. An open box truck trailed the garbage truck, and it seemed they were accepting recycling at the back door. A garbage man hung to the back of the singing yellow trash truck, and he took my bags from me and tossed them away into the chomping depths.

Liberation – at long last.

The Issue of Garbage

The garbage system in Taiwan has been a great puzzlement to me.

I’ve had no choice but to consider garbage very carefully because it has been accumulating in my room for four weeks. I don’t know what to do with it: I haven’t figured out how to get it off my hands. I have three tidy grocery bags full of trash awaiting disposal beside my front door. But dumpster there isn’t, public trashcan there is not, and dispersal by balcony-tossing is simply not a resort I’m willing to accept.

What does one do? I’ve considered sneaking my trash out of my room one piece at a time and casually depositing it in public trashcans, but even those are hard to come by, and such a method would take weeks, at best. Even the 7-Elevens, which seem to grace every third street corner, rarely offer a receptacle.

Some people keep a collection of their personal trash for a period of time as an exercise in waste-awareness. The extremists in this lot will even carry around all of the trash they accumulate during a certain period of time, perhaps a month, so that they are sure they fully understand how much waste is passing through their hands. Also, the people around these practitioners are subjected to the dirty evidence of wastefulness, even if they’d rather ignore such truths. This is a great exercise and I admire those who pay attention to their trash volume: kudos.

I, however, did not intentionally begin saving up my garbage – it’s just been the by-product of my living in an apartment building for the first time in my life compounded with the fact that I can’t speak or read Chinese. I don’t want all of this trash: I just can’t get rid of it. Information about trash collection is indubitably posted somewhere in the building, but, written in Mandarin, it’s of little use to me.

It is true that I could have asked a co-tenant about the proper garbage disposal procedure (and I eventually did), but until the problem began to infringe upon my delicate psyche, I was too shy to broach the subject with anybody I saw wandering in or out of my apartment building. I rarely see other people in my building at all, and I was concerned about initiating a relationship based on garbage. What if this person didn’t speak English? Would I have to imitate a garbage truck? Make garbage truck noises and sing the garbage truck song?* Show him my trash collection? How mortifying!

So I held onto my garbage and decided to conduct my own research. I began collecting clues, compiling observations, assembling evidence, and otherwise scrutinizing the mystifying and, in my mind, inaccessibly complex garbage-disposal system.

*The garbage truck song: Taiwanese garbage trucks blast a very distinctive tune that sounds very much like an American ice cream truck. But don’t get your hopes up: although the streets are packed with garbage trucks, ice cream is almost impossible to find.

Observations Gathered:

1. People will take your refuse and sell it.
When leaving Joe's apartment one evening, he asked me to carry some cardboard down to leave next to the small garbage can in front of his building (why doesn’t my apartment building have a trash can?).
"Just sit it there?" I asked.
"Yes," he said, "you know those people riding around on bicycles loaded with huge trash bags? One of them will take it."
"They’ll just pick it up for you? Why? They don’t look like they work for anybody. Do they get paid?”
"I think they sell it," he said.

2. Joe might be right. Several blocks from my apartment building is a refuse sorting area. It's kind of like an empty lot between buildings, but it has a concrete floor and a roof and is filled with mountains of trash. Whenever I pass during daylight hours, the place is bustling with activity. Men and women come in and out on bicycles and scooters with dollies or carts welded behind. Most of these little vehicles are carrying such towering loads of bottles, cans, cardboard, and other recyclables (on the handlebars and rear rack in the absence of a cart), that they’re about the height, width, and length of Indian elephants. I suspect that these private garbage gleaners might, in fact, be selling their recyclables to the sorters, who probably act as middlemen and resell the sorted sundries to larger recycling operations.

3. Trash cans are hard to come by in Chiayi. I pass about twice as many recycling receptacles than trashcans, but even those are scarce. Thus, I carry most of my trash home with me. I can't just easily chuck it and forget all about it as I can at home.

4. Garbage trucks will accept your trash but will not pick it up. I came to this conclusion after observing a garbage truck at close range. On this particular day, a trash truck and I passed each other in opposing directions. As the trash truck trundled slowly down the street singing its song, shop owners rushed out to throw garbage bags into the back of the truck. No garbage man. No assistance that I could make out. Just shop owners throwing their trash into a truck that could have been remote controlled or following magnetic strips beneath the pavement. The loud song, then, alerted people that the truck was coming. The slow pace gave them time to collect and present their trash.

5. Amendment: Garbage trucks will pick up your trash. Yesterday, while sitting at my desk, I heard a garbage truck approaching. I ran out to the balcony and saw a truck creeping down the alley. This truck had two garbage men and they were picking up bags of trash that had been laid out on the curb. No residents were in sight; only garbage men and the garbage truck. So garbage collectors do exist.

What to do with this information?

Four weeks of frustration and mystery.

Today I heard a truck coming and FLEW out onto the balcony. I really needed to get rid of some trash. The truck was, again, going down the alley, but already it was out of range. I had begun keeping a log of local visits from garbage trucks in an attempt to identify some sort of schedule or pattern, so I added my observations and the time of day.

And then I was blessed -- a fellow down the hall came out of his room and leaned his head out of a window, apparently looking for the garbage truck. I approached.

"Excuse me... do you speak English?" He looked a little startled and nervous.
"Only very little... not well."
"I don’t know what to do with my trash," I confessed. He looked confused. A second fellow came out into the hall and they spoke in Mandarin.
"Is that our garbage truck?" I tried, pointing to the alley.
"No no no," they said, “not ours.”
"What do I do with my trash? Do we have a trash truck, too?"
"Eight o’clock pm," the first fellow said, writing it on his palm with his finger.
"In front or in back?" I asked, gesturing toward the front of the building.
"In front," they told me, nodding, “eight… eight…” They switched to Mandarin and told me the truck would come at eight thirty, which, thankfully, I understood.

"Do I stand there and throw it in the truck when it passes by, or do I just leave my trash on the curb?" I wanted to be prepared, but this question was too complicated, and they shook their heads and shrugged apologetically. I moved on to a new question.
"Does the truck come every night?" They counted days on their fingers and held up various fingers to indicate days of the week, but I didn’t understand.
"One, two, five… Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday...” they told me. “One, two three, four... Six days, six days, eight thirty!"
"Okay," I say, "thanks. Thank you very much." I gave them a big smile and went back to my garbage-laden room, slightly confused but enormously relieved.

Thank goodness -- I would finally be able to free myself of my garbage – I had a date with the garbage truck.

Back in Chiayi

We spent the last three days in Taroko and Taipei... a few images...

Sunrise above Tiansiang (Taroko National Park).

Flowers outside Longshan Temple (Taipei)

Gouldian Finches caged in a store along "Bird Alley" (Taipei)

A table of fresh birds in a morning market (Taipei)

What Just Happened?

Joe and Fiona and I decided to take an evening art course at the Cultural Center in Chiayi. I thought the course was in traditional Chinese landscape painting. Maybe I was wrong.

Chris, who flies back to the states on Monday, decided to come with us to listen in on the class. The instructor was shocked when he came in and saw three white people sitting in the front row. He began asking Joe and Fiona lots of questions in Chinese; I have no idea what their conversation was, but the other twenty people in the class seemed fascinated and would periodically erupt in giggles (staring at us the whole while). It was rather awkward for me, I must admit, for I couldn't understand a word.

The instructor began to sketch a photograph of a building as a demonstration, but our presence was too distracting. After about five minutes, he asked Chris if he could paint his portrait, instead. Chris agreed and the class seemed thrilled.

Down Chris sat on a stool, and the student body swarmed around the professor to watch him sketch and then paint. The students asked if they could take Chris's picture. Fiona translated and Chris agreed. Students whipped out cameras and began taking Chris's photo from various angles. One woman took a long video. Gradually, a likeness of Chris began to emerge on the professor's paper, complete with shoulder-length hair, signature skull and crossbones headband, and sunglasses at the collar of his shirt. Periodically the professor would make a comment or explain something he was doing and Joe or Fiona would translate for me.

"Our nostrils are round," he told the class as he added detail to Chris's nostril, "but theirs are rectangular."

When he began adding color to the face, he noted that Chris's face was a little sunburned. "Aren't they afraid of the sun?" he asked Joe.

The class was two hours long and the professor finished the portrait just before it ended. Joe and Fiona came up with a Chinese version of Chris's name so the professor could paint it on the portrait, then he gave it to Chris to take home.

The professor asked if I was available to model for the college figure class he teaches on Tuesday mornings and I agreed. I will get paid! Joe and Fiona told me I get paid more depending on how much skin I show, but I'm not sure if they were serious or not.

Chris and I are heading to Taroko Gorge in the morning and then to Taipei for the weekend (with Joe). Hopefully no more earthquakes! We had three today and one was large enough to be quite terrifying. I hope Mama Earth will hold off on the shuddering for a while.

Love.

Alishan Rocks (and is full of stairs)

Lantern Festival

I'm still recovering!

The Lantern Festival, which takes place on the last day of the two-week Chinese New Year celebration, is hosted by a different city each year. I believe that Taipei originally hosted them all, but at some point during the past decade or so, the other cities put out the holla that they wanted the chance to party big, too. Lots of towns (all?) have their own lantern festivals, but the government helps host an official one each year. This year, lucky us, Chiayi was the city chosen to host the official festival.

[One town nearby is renown for shooting fireworks directly into the helmet-clad audience; another celebration in the north releases a mass of candle-powered lanterns into the night sky.]

We decided to walk to the festival from Joe's apartment (several kilometers) but were intercepted about half-way there by a fellow on the sidewalk. He had a walky-talky and began yelling into it just a moment after flagging us down. He had a little folding table, too, set up on the sidewalk, which was bare except for two juice boxes. After relaying what seemed to be fantastically important and urgent information into his walky-talky, he lept into the closest lane of traffic and began waving a flashlight frantically over his head, something like an excited airplane signaller.

Fortune was on our side: a towering bus with lime-green satin window curtains swished to a halt just a few feet from our delighted faces. We climbed in and settled into the extra plush seats and rode in luxury the rest of the way. The ride was free and we were soon deposited in the notable** downtown stadium next to the Festival HQ.

The rest of my tale is rife with armed troupes of boyscouts; wheeling television cameras mounted on cranes; a country's worth of illuminated tigers, pandas, emperors, and lanterns; R-rated puzzles; masses of pressing attendees; and a bounty of food ranging from stinky tofu to taro popsicles (yum!) ---- but I have to go to the grocery store now to buy more toilet paper! Awww man!!! Yes!!! You'll have to wait!

**This particular stadium (arena?) is notable because it's painted in a sort of holstein pattern. Or maybe dalmation -- the black blotches are rather spotty than... blotchy.

To see pictures from the Lantern Festival, check Chris's Flickr link here -- it should take you to a slide show. If you exit the slide show and just visit his general photostream, you'll see lots of other photo albums from Taiwan.