Spaghetti with Squidballs

Tonight for dinner I made spaghetti with meatballs squidballs!
The kids loved it :)

Before anyone gets too impressed, here's the CostCo bag of frozen squid balls...

...that I marinated in the crock-pot for a few hours.

And topped with jarred tomato and basil marinara sauce.
But I'll still humbly accept a few points to be added to my "successful adaptation" tally. 

 

We finished of the meal with a new fruit that's in season: green oranges.

 

Lost and then Found

Today I managed to lose my wallet--with the boys' and my Taiwan resident cards, a credit card, both a US and Taiwanese bank debit card, our CostCo card, a local library card, my official proof-that-I'm-Ryley's-mother-and-can-check-him-out-of-school card, 2 local grocery stores' reward cards, my temple recommend, a couple important name cards that I keep on me as reference for when I need help, and about the equivalent of $30. 


Thinking about the logistics of replacing everything had me in a panic. Life is complicated enough here without having to figure out communication channels and reapplication processes for all of those things! I was just so mad at myself and my negligence in having placed my wallet half-shoved in Theo's stroller pouch. 
After having double checked my apartment lobby and Julien's school (including going to his classroom and looking in his bag), I knew it had to have fallen out en route. 

Still in possession of my phone (thank goodness) I typed in a few key Google translate phrases "I lost my wallet. It is black. If someone finds it please call me," and started retracing my morning walk from Ryley's bus stop to Julien's school. I let my phone tell my sad predicament to my beetle nut selling friend, to the OK Mart cashier, and then to the lady at the corner car rental shop. It was here that I was given the full help-unfortunate-foreigner treatment. 

The lady didn't speak any English but her adult son did, so after she was already on the phone doing her best to solve my problems, he informed me that she was calling the police and that they would be there soon. "Nooooo!," I thought. I didn't need that! My efforts to express my concern about not needing the police involved only led to his reassurance that they would be there in no more than 10 minutes--because "they are very fast to come in Taiwan." He also reassured me that in Taiwan people are very happy to help. So true, so true. But at this point I just wanted to get home and go look up my account cancelation numbers. Too much help was actually a hinderance at this point. And what more could the police do anyway? My address was on my resident card should anyone be inclined to turn it in. 

After the police has been summoned, and knowing that I was concerned about putting a block on my accounts, car-rental lady called my Taiwan bank to let them know. Again very kind, but not having my passport # memorized, that effort quickly met a dead end. I tried to call Ben for our US card #'s, he wasn't reachable. I used my new google voice app to call my parents at home but our conversation kept getting cut off and they only got enough info to be concerned but unable to help.


Still waiting for the police, car-rental lady wanted to take me down the street to tell ALL the shop owners about the wallet. Could this get any more embarrassing?! I mutely followed her as everyone came out to discuss the problem. Whenever someone tried to direct a question to me it was quickly established that that was a fruitless effort and they would continue talking among themselves. I would nod when I heard the word "black," but that was about it. 

Soon someone indicated that the policeman was headed our way. I understood the question directed to him asking if he spoke any English. He answered in the negative. At this point son of car-rental lady was no longer with us; he had had to go to work. So we were all on our own: a group of shop owners, the police, Theo and I, and my iphone.

Luckily it had just turned 10 o'clock and my yoga friend who comes on Monday mornings made her usual call to let me know she was down in our garage and ready for me to come unlock the door. Her incoming call seemed like a life-line: since she speaks some Chinese I asked her (without much ceremony or explanation of my current predicament) if she could inform the police officer that my wallet had my resident card in it so whoever found it would know where to turn it in and that I just needed to get home to take care of my card cancelations. Lauren did her best (bless her heart), but upon conclusion of the phone call, the police still was indicating--with a couple of English words--that I needed to come down to the police station. Arggg. This was just getting worse!I looked in my phone contacts and realized I didn't have the # for my tutor who is so good at solving all my problems, but I did have the phone number for our relocation contact person up in Taipei. Good fortune was with me and I got a hold of her, explained my need to communicate with the police officer, and then handed off the phone. In the middle of their conversation there was some commotion half way up the street with some enthusiastic hand motioning. Someone had turned in the wallet! 

The crowd of shopkeepers escorted me up there and we all celebrated the find. Policeman left. I was instructed to wear my wallet on my person and not in the stroller--which I agreed was "bu hao" [not good] and immediately demonstrated my compliance--and only then did I realize that Theo had been kept happy by some gifts of a water bottle (now half dumped down his shirt) and some dried fruits with large pits (which were quickly confiscated). 

More smiles, gratitude nods, and thank you's and I was finally on my way. None of the cards were missing, but the cash was gone. Finders fee, I suppose. I still called to put blocks on my cards just in case. Several lessons learned. One of which being that I need to make sure and contact my fretting parents sooner than later to let them know all was well. My poor mother had to take Maalox after that whole ordeal!

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!

A Moment of Compentence

I had a satisfying moment of competence today when I called the water company and ordered 8 more jugs of water...all in Chinese! This success moment required a solid 30 min of preparation and rehearsal time with my tutor, a deep breath before I dialed the business number and then my strategy was to just plow through my one-sided dialogue before the person on the other end had the chance to deviate from my prepared conversation. All went well until the very end when I was apparently asked a question about which district I lived in. At that point my teacher, Amy, who had been listening on speaker the whole time, took over and wrapped it up.  If water is indeed delivered tomorrow afternoon,
I'll have to break out some bubbly to celebrate :) 

Group Rules Regarding Weather

Look at the forecast we had today on our little subtropical island! Seeing this drop in temperatures I was so excited to slip on some jeans and head out for the morning school drop off rounds with a hope of not having to change out of sweaty clothes upon return!

My giddy glee soon was met with some dampening, however, as I quickly became aware of some group weather-appropriate attire rules that I hadn't gotten the memo about. Here were a few key moments of realization that my non-conformity was making the general populace uncomfortable:

- As we approached the apartment lobby door to exit, one secretary and the head manager both responded with concerned looks, miming about our bare arms that should be covered, and several instructional phrases about what I should do about it, all said in incomprehensible Chinese. I smiled, said my minimal Chinese phrase of "I like" while pointing outside, and continued escorting the boys out.

- Lucky for us, Julien had a little mishap at the public park restroom while using the squatter potty and got his shorts all wet (understandable). So we had to detour back to our apartment to change his uniform. All he had available were his uniform sweat pants, so on they went, and fortunately so because he was greeted at his school gate with another concerned exclamation that he had bare arms--I can only imagine the horror had he had bare legs as well!

[This is photo I snapped at the public park restroom showing the tissue paper options in the vending machine. Provided TP is not a standard public service here and people either pack their own or, in this case, choose the zodiac-appropriate packet for a $0.33 purchase. ]

- This is me doing my part to make people around us comfortable. Even though I chose not to put on a jacket myself (why choose to sweat when the option to not sweat is finally here?!) I did dress Theo as any responsible Taiwanese mother would do. I received this smile of approval in response to that decision :)

Double 10 Day!

We decided to celebrate Double 10 Day by going to visit the National Palace Museum in Taipei.
It was the most "Taiwanese" thing we could think of :)

Here's a mini history lesson:

[Thanks Wikipedia]

Double 10 Day (Oct 10th) is the National Day of the Republic of China. It commemorates the start of the Wuchang Uprising of October 10, 1911, which led to the collapse of the Qing Dynasty in China and establishment of the Republic of China on January 1, 1912.

As a result of the Chinese Civil War, the Government of the Republic of China lost control of mainland China and relocated to Taiwan in 1949.

The National Day is now mainly celebrated in Taiwan.

The National Palace Museum in Taipei houses the world's largest and most valuable
individual collection of Chinese art treasures.
Its art treasures were taken from the palaces of Beijing's Forbidden City.

It has over 700,000 pieces of artifacts 
encompassing over 8,000 years of Chinese history!
 
During the 1960s and 1970s, the National Palace Museum was used by the Kuomintang to support its claim that the Republic of China was the sole legitimate government of all China, in that it was the sole preserver of traditional Chinese culture amid social change and the Cultural Revolution in mainland China, and tended to emphasize Chinese nationalism.

The People's Republic of China (PRC) government has long said that the collection was stolen and that it legitimately belongs in China, but Taiwan has defended its collection as a necessary act
to protect the pieces from destruction, especially during the Cultural Revolution.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Our day trip to Taipei for the museum visit took less than 12 hours (proof that in fact we are living on a small island...even though we have yet to see the ocean). We voyaged by taxi-high speed train-mass transit system-bus and back again with 5 people for under US$130. Amazing! It's not something we could do every week, but it opened our eyes up to future possibilities :)

Left home at 9 a.m. by taxi to go to High Speed Railway (HSR) station.

Kids excited to see the first drinking fountain in Taiwan!

Even the train station doesn't leave the people 7-Eleven'less
(it would create separation anxiety for sure)

The HSR was incredibly clean and organized.

People actually did line up in their designated waiting lines...we followed suit.

3x the leg room of airlines!

Hopefully this video came through. Theo was hilarious as we went through tunnels :)

The bullet trains are on super high tracks that offer incredible views.

Once in Taipei's train station we managed to look lost and confused enough to warrant the help of a couple strangers to point us in the right direction of the subway. Once we got on, it was pretty easy...

...the stops were all written out in Pinyin and the announcement board would flash between the two.

I was a little nervous about what to do when we got off the mass transit system, not knowing exactly where to catch the right bus. But look at what greeted us as we walked out the station door!
Problem solved!

Again, on the bus some friendly people let us know where to get off.

Once outside the National Palace Museum, we realized we left all the food selections behind at the initial bus station. We braved the only option we found. Braver now than before, at despite our limited Chinese abilities, we pointed to some chicken (pork is off my list for awhile...need to retro-post about that soon), and then dove in with chopsticks.

Hunger helped, but it really was quite good.

Theo and I had to eat in the gutter though...no room on the sidewalk. 

And there she is: The National Palace Museum.

Feelin' the Taiwanese cultural pride.

And appreciated the unexpected free admission :) 

The exhibits were interesting, especially the intricate fruit pit carvings. We stood in line for quite some time to see the famous "jade cabbage" as well.  Theo took his 2-hour nap in the middle of it all. The boys did pretty good with their kid-version English audio guides and we visited and revisited their favorite exhibit below, where they could get their photos taken and
inserted into a cartoon rendition of the Qing Dynasty.

It's almost as hard as "Where's Waldo," but given some serious study, I bet you can find the boys.

 

 

 Once the kids had reached their museum saturation level, 

we visited the "Benevolence Garden" adjacent to the museum.

 Highlights included feeding the fish
(Julien's vending machine fish food lasted 5 minutes...Ryley's was still being given granule by granule an hour later with a threat of use it or lose it!) 

The boys also enjoyed finding trash to throw away in these oh-so-cool, artsy trash receptacles.

McDonalds Take II

If cultural adaptation were to be measured on a successful-McDonalds-ordering scale, then I have skyrocketed upward this past month! 

McDonald's take II was a beautiful achievment :) Above you will see exactly what I ordered… corresponding to exactly what I wanted. Amazing. I've still left myself plenty of room for improvement. This ordering episode involved language barriers which could only be breached via my trusty old iphone google-translate (type and show method) and the kids were still running around as a crazy side show for all the other customers in line.

This McDonald's only had a small play place--on the 3rd floor, go figure, with no elevator, which = super woman strength to carry baby+stroller+bags. But I did it. This time with the unsolicited, kind service of a employee carrying our tray. The kids had the play place all to themselves and ran around playing harmoniously crazily together for more than a half hour. Once they worked up a good sweat, they all ate happily, even without ketchup…which was not an option due to the 2 flights of stairs and the daunting task of asking for something like that.

On our way out, the manager asked Julien (in English) if he'd like to have his picture taken by their Halloween display. Julien did his eager, bright-eyed nod, and "click," we did our part to boost McDonald's PR and marketing efforts with a bonafide foreigner stamp of approval. For good measure, Ryley was asked for his photo as well. They stopped short of asking Theo. Probably because his standard greeting of strangers these days is a scowl and growl. 
Both boys were paid for their photo shoot with a mini ice cream cone.