Hosted a Halloween Party

The above photo shows the apartment's front desk's Halloween decorations. Halloween is becoming more marketed here the past 5 years or so (not the trick-or-treating, but rather there have been marketing efforts to get people to buy festive candy, decorations and little trinkets. The bilingual preschools and elementary schools also do crafts and have little parties. My tutor's explanation is that Taiwan makes all that stuff anyway and wanted a way to still get money for the surplus from exports.

Below you can see our one faithful Halloween decoration:
 giant spider who holds doomed super heroes in her clutches.

T'is the season of kid parties and so I decided to jump on the opportunity to work on some friendships. I set my plan for a low-key cookie decorating party with the only other foreign family who lives in our building (our Korean friends) and a family from our church, who both have kids who line up with Ryley and Julien. The kids played well and the 3 moms made the cookies together, a good activity which helped lessen our otherwise glaring communication limitations.
It was bonding :) 

I was able to get a hold of the ingredients I needed although I know I paid top Taiwanese dollar for the little 2 lb bag of "Gold Medal all-purpose flour" and little box of baking powder. I got them at the foreign/specialty food store in the basement of the mall close to our home. I was later told that I can find all purpose flour (and even bread flour) just fine at any regular grocery store. It's just that I wouldn't have known that's what it was until I learn the Chinese characters. So my ignorance handicap has quite the markup at this point. At least I'm fulfilling a certain target market that is making some business-minded person very happy!

I had to improvise a bit on the decorating materials, since no jarred frosting or food coloring is to be found. I made a glaze with powdered sugar (another over-priced item) with some passion fruit juice and milk. Yummy stuff. After the kids decorated the cookies, we took a plate to the apartment secretaries and cleaning crew who were about to have their lunch break. I don't know how weird that might have been for them, but hopefully the gesture was understood. 

Not 30 minutes after that cookie delivery, we reminded the apartment employees of just how much they deserved those cookies (and more) as we managed to get ourselves trapped up on the 32 floor as we were exploring with our friends. Here's a brief recap of that embarassing story:

Our elevator key is programmed to only lets us go to certain floors--common areas and the 9th floor where our apartment is. We recently discovered that we can also go to the 32nd floor and when we went up and peeked one day I noticed a bunch of signs on the doors leading to one knew where.

In my typical hesitant, risk-adverse approach to life, I told the kids we were going to wait to go through those doors once we knew what the information signs told us. Having an English-speaking Taiwanese friend with us today, we ventured up there and she said it basically said to make sure you closed the doors behind you and didn't let your dogs urinate or poo up there. Easy enough. We proceeded through the doors and found ourselves outside, on top of our building in a rather utilitarian space for hanging large bedding or  the likes to dry. It was safely guarded with high brick ledges that didn't allow for much view, but the kids enjoyed exploring for a few minutes then we intended to head back in…only to find the door locked with nowhere to scan my key or push a button.

We located an intercom button and I pointed out that my friend was the natural selection of the person to do the talking to explain our predicament seeing as how she spoke Chinese. Seeing no counter argument to that point, she tried to get clarification of how to get back in.

A long 5 to 7 minutes later, one of the secretaries had made her way up the correct elevator and to our rescue (there are several different towers in our building each with 2 sets of elavators which lead to separate lobbies and this elevator required quite the walk from the front desk) . She then showed us how to turn a knob to prevent the door from locking when we went out. Lesson learned. More cookies deserved!