More Learning

I wanted to start by saying - never learn English in a foreign country. Most people don't have much choice, though, which is very unfortunate.
After a while, you stop noticing the mangling of your native language. Signs that you might have laughed at before barely catch your interest. Only the exceptionally bad, or the unintentionally hilarious, will be noticable. I would give you an example, but I've been making a conscious effort not to remember the horrifically bad signs I've seen, for fear that it'll degrade my English even further than the destitute state it already is in. It's like being poor, but knowing that you could be living in India, scheming about chopping off your children's arms so they'll be better beggars.
Hmm. That was kind of ghastly. So....

This morning I was riding the bus to school, like every day. It traveled the same route, like every day. Today, though, I was sitting (a rarity) by the window. I just chanced to turn my head at a sign I hadn't noticed before - it read, "Just do eat." For the first split-second, I thought nothing of the artwork below, a piece of bread, and assumed it was just one more atrocity committed against my favorite (and admittedly only) language. Then I really noticed the shape of the bread. It was the Nike swoosh. On a bakery. "Just do eat", right? It's far too clever a use of English to fit in here, so I might have to stop by that shop and see how that happened. Maybe they could change it to "Just Dough Eat" - do you think so? That'd probably be too much. Even in America.


Anyway, as I ended my last post, I was worrying about God's having a sense of humor. I woke up the very next morning, thinking of ways to re-write my post (like usual, I was unhappy with it as it was (and as it is)), and dragged my way through my morning preparations. I was running late, and, what's worse, I needed to copy some music I'd downloaded the night before for a class on Western music. So I was rushing around. And let me say now, yes, God does possess an a keen sense of the comical. I'd said I'd like something differently painful to keep me humble.

Ask and ye shall receive.

It's not really important that you know this, unless you come here, but there are almost no dishwashers in Taiwan. Instead, people wash dishes by hand. Then they put them in this sissified wanna-be oven that hangs over the sink, where they drip dry (no one has ever used the heater feature, so far as I know). The important thing to note, however, is that there is a door that, when open, sticks straight out. And it's directly at eye-level. My eye level, anyway.
So here I was, rushing. I went to the kitchen to clean my dishes, quickly. And, as my foreshadowing has almost certainly clued you in, I had good reason to notice that open metal door - I slammed my face into the corner of it. As foreshadowing also revealed, it hit right at eye-level. Very hard.
For that first surprising instant, I thought I might have just blinded myself. It would fit my pattern of getting stupid, and somewhat embarassing, injuries, but actually it hit a whole third of an inch below eye level.

So I was not blinded! It did get my attention, though. And some of my skin. In return for my attention and some skin (I do have some instinct for business, after all), I got a bruise and an inch and a half long bloody line at a 45 degree angle from my eye. So, yet another thing to keep me humble - I am still clumsy and pathetically frail. Just as a side note, I am constantly surprised that we aren't all dead - by all rights, as easy as it is to die or be badly injured, we should be. Of course, being constantly surprised may also be a sign of idiocy, so the situation might not be as mysterious as I think it is.

I've been walking around with that injury since Wednesday, I think. The students and other teachers all tell me it looks kind of cool, though, so I guess it's not a total loss.


Of course my narrative doesn't end there. No. That would be too easy. And God has only had all of eternity to work on amusing situations (I asked if he would kindly stop burning me, which has actually happened...of course, I'm also taking some steps to avoid that). Now, lest you think he is unneccessarily malicious, remember that I did tell him I was getting kind of arrogant, and needed a little help.

As I mentioned at the terminal end of my last blog, though the sun had gone down, the curtain hadn't fallen on my evening - yet. After the ending that's written, I went to a mall to meet some of my students. They 'forced' me to go to an arcade, and even paid for me to play some games (thank you all, if you're reading this), so I retaliated by losing. A lot. Well, except at air hockey. No one could withstand my mighty airynes. heh. Well, I also played this punching game. You wear a boxing glove. A thing comes up, slowly, and then you punch it. Pretty easy to understand. If you read Chinese. I thought I was supposed to punch that sucker first chance I got, like you would in a real fight, but that's apparently not how it works. You're supposed to wait for it to get completely vertical, then punch it, which really is stupid. Ah, well. Anyway, after the first two quick jabs, my students told me I was supposed to wait. So I did, and clobbered that inanimate metal rod real good. I guess I won. I'm still not clear on if/whether you can win, since the game ended right after that.

I was enjoying myself, except for the sunburn, and except for being exhausted. After some time spent at the mall, we went next door, to the nightmarket. Like most nightmarkets, it was crowded, noisy, and chock-full of goods of questionable value and desirability. And food. There's always food.
My students kept paying for me to do all sorts of things (and I did try to pay for myself, or pay them back, but was only successful on one or two occasions when they weren't looking), most of which were fun. Of course, we also ate a whole lot of food. (And I learned that "yubyubyub", which sounds as hilarious as it looks, means (maybe) something like "sound you make for eating food with chopsticks when you're stabbing the food and you're really hungry.")
I guess they were concerned I wasn't having fun, but I really was. It's just that I was burned, tired, and couldn't hear anything they were saying (nightmarkets are noisy).

On Monday, when we met again (this is going somewhere), they told me they wanted to take me and some other teachers to dinner on Wednesday. I agreed, of course.
It was Korean, and it was good. In Taiwan, though, it is very difficult to get enough water, especially at restaurants. And I ate the food of several people who couldn't finish their own. So I didn't get enough to drink. I thought it'd be no problem. I'd just get some water at home. Then it was decided we'd go to get pictures at a photo booth.
If you've never seen one, think of it like this - there is an incredibly tacky, and loud, plastic and metal tent/box, which you go inside of. The inside has all sorts of flashing lights, pink frilly...things?, and at least one camera lens and touch-screen.
People here tend to be somewhat shy and reserved. If you were to somehow enter Taiwan through a magical photo booth, however, you would not believe me. Everyone is expected - no, required - to make a fool of themselves. Different poses are struck, and the more ridiculous the better. The photos are also taken at somewhat random intervals (you usually don't control it directly), and you have to last through at least 10 or so. At the end you go to a central terminal, review your photos, pick the best ones, then desecrate them with lots of bubbly/frilly/fancy pink/orange/pastel/girly colors, and hugely inappropriate phrases like "kind love". Then you print them out as stickers so small no one would ever know what's supposed to be happening in the picture.
Oh - I didn't mention that this all happens inside a vinyl tent thing, did I? With no ventilation? And lots of people crowded inside? In a building open to the air? You might have guessed - it gets warm. So I'm thinking, why pay for a sauna when you can use a photo booth instead? You even get pictures out of it.

So we were there an hour and a half or so. I still hadn't had enough to drink. It was only towards the end that I realized I was badly dehydrated. And by then it was too late, of course.

So all of yesterday I spent in misery - with burning throat, aching head, and the occasional overwhelming urge to empty my guts through the proper channels (or proper channel, I suppose) because I'd gotten dehydrated. I should also mention that bathrooms here come with neither toilet paper nor soap, so if you don't have quite enough of your own, things are...uncomfortable.
I still taught, of course.

I have to say it's hard to think very highly of yourself when you're afraid you'll crap your pants.

So, moral of the story: God sure does listen. Ask and ye shall receive.


Oh, and I've recovered now.
I'll write more later, how about that? For now, though -

Well, for now, I wish I had a clever ending line, a tagline that would make you say, "wow". But I don't.
Bye!