80 degrees in December?!

You’d never know it was December in Taiwan, today at least. It’s nearly 80 degrees and sunny. I went on a nice run by the river park near my apartment. People were out biking, fishing and playing baseball. I’ve been thinking on and off about buying a bicycle. Recently I’ve been kind of off of the idea, but today makes me want to buy one again. Tonight I went to a barbecue with some friends. It was such a great evening for it! I am trying to get over a cold though because of the ridiculous weather. One day it will be 80 degrees and sunny and the next day it will be 60 degrees and rainy. So because of the variation in weather, probably not helped by the fact that I’m around little kids all the time, I’ve gotten a cold a couple of times already. And I never get sick at home, so it’s annoying!

We have a new roommate in the apartment as of last week. The guy who was living here moved to a different part of the city, and a girl, Kaitlyn, has moved in. She’s another American teacher, from California. So now we have all girls in the apartment…Liz from Kansas (teaching English and studying Chinese), Judy from the Dominican Republic (studying Chinese), Kaitlyn and I.

We got a Christmas tree for our living room. The Taiwanese go crazy for Christmas, so there are Christmas decorations in many stores. I even saw an entire store dedicated to Christmas downtown last weekend , complete with life-sized Santas and blow up decorations. Our tree cost about $4US. All the decorations are extremely tacky here. So we got the basic lights (they’re colored and blink) and Christmas balls. It’s not the classiest tree ever, but it makes it a big more like home and Christmas-like.

Charlie comes in just about three and a half weeks. I can’t wait! He’ll be here Dec. 27-Jan. 8. We are going to take a four day trip down the island. First we’ll go to Tarako Gorge in the central part of the island. It’s really beautiful and one of the most visited places in Taiwan. We’ll rent a car (which is super cheap) and just drive around, and probably do some hiking if the weather is nice. Then we’ll go down to a town at the southern tip of Taiwan called Kenting. It’s on the beach and another of Taiwan’s most popular destinations. I’m not expecting to be able to lay out on the beach, but it will be warmer than it is in the north. It’s actually a national park, so there’s a lot to see and do.

I started my language exchange this week. (I think I mentioned it before.) The girl I’m doing it with is a co-worker of a friend of mine. They work at Sony here in Taipei designing video games. Her English is good, she just wants to practice some conversation. She has a book with different conversation topics which we’ll go through, but we always have good conversation, so I don’t think thinking of things to talk about will be hard. I also told her I would try to find some articles on some of the newspaper sites I read (Washington Post, NY Times, etc) related to art, which she is interested in. So we can read an article and then discuss it when we meet. For my end, I just want to learn some basic phrases and simple conversation. I bought two basic Chinese books, so that way I can pick and choose some of the things I want to learn. Learning languages is not my forte, but I’d really like to be able to communicate better than I can right now! The other night I saw something in a store window and couldn’t find it in the store, so I pointed to it in the window and said “where” in Chinese, and that’s pretty much what my Chinese currently consists of (in addition to “hello,” “yes,” “thank you,” some numbers, and some terms in yoga class.) I'll let you all know how my Chinese is progressing! That's all for now!