Christmas Eve, part 2

Tomorrow strangely came a week late.

Alright, as I said: I was on my way to the party when I met the organizer. I don't remember his name at the moment, though I should: this was not our first meeting.

On the Friday before, I, Susan, and Bryan had been walking out of class, talking, and I'd noticed some foreign guy hanging around the gates. That is not unusual; however, I recognize most of the foreigners here at school - not him.
As the three of us were talking (Bryan and Susan were retrieving their bikes), he interrupted, coming from behind, and said he wanted to know if we'd like to go to a party with Free Food.
You know that stopped the conversation.

It turned out the others had already signed up, so they reconfirmed. He was pleased. He turned to me. I said I didn't know if I could make it (the plan was that I'd be at 家寧's house on Sunday), but that if I got back early, I'd try to come. Free food is free.
The group calls itself "the waiguorens" (外國人s - "foreign people" (I hate that unnecessary 's')) that meets every week, Sunday nights, and "studies Eastern philosophy" and practices Qigong (氣功 - of which taiji (太極拳)is a particular style). I decided free food trumped whatever misgivings I had - among other things, I automatically disliked the guy who was talking to us. He seemed pretty gay, for example (not necessarily enough to provoke my dislike, but he was a bit overly chatty and happy to see me), and one of those mush-headed "Eastern Wisdom" sorts.

He talked to me especially after the others left, and probably would have been glad to go on for some time, but I had to get going. I had important things, like sitting in my room, to do. I left. (I am not necessarily as cruel or deceitful as that - I really did have to prepare for my next class, which was coming up soon. But then again, I would try to portray myself in a positive light, wouldn't I?)

Friday night, though, I saw him again. As I entered the bookstore, I saw, back turned to me, a foreigner deep in conversation with two others. I guessed it was the him again, decided that was unlikely, then decided against my decision and decided it probably was him after all. I passed by without announcing myself (I tend to be somewhat invisible...heh...I know, I should be hard to miss, right? I'm tall, blond hair, blue-eyed, etc., but people really don't seem to notice me much most of the time.)
I pointed out this guy to 家寧 when I went to buy my book. I hoped he wouldn't reciprocate.
You might wonder why I seem to dislike him so much. It's that vacant, lost, neo-hippy gaze and gauzy, cottony thoughts that I can feel plugging his head - stray thoughts and sayings are trapped in the absorbent mess of his mind, where they lodge and solidify.
Well, if that's not enough, or if you wonder how I could possibly know that, then let's just agree there are people one might instinctively dislike at first glance.


He noticed me.
He wanted to talk again, but when he realized the girl beside me was a friend of mine, and not a random stranger, he seemed somewhat deflated. "Hah!", I thought. Still, he asked again if I'd come.

Alright. Long digression.

So, here I am, back at meeting him again the night of Christmas Eve. He seems surprised to see me, asks if I'm coming to the party, and I tell him I'm on my way there right now. So I walk with him and the four or so other people to the MRT station (MRT is yet another name for "subway", apparently), where we are to meet the rest of the group.

We wait; various others show up. Two of the more interesting ones: Merril (sp?) and Erin, whom I'm not sure, but, might be married (I forgot to ask, but I think they're only boyfriend and girlfriend). They're from Canada, real nice, came to Taiwan to teach; they wanted to get some traveling done, both recently graduated, would like to make some money and see the world on the cheap, maybe pick up a little Chinese. They just arrived a week or so before, so they'd be celebrating Christmas in a strange new country.

My classmates Phonshia, Susan, and Caroline showed up, and we talked (though it's difficult to talk to Susan - it seems like no matter what I say, it either comes across sounding dumb, or she just assumes it is dumb).

7:15, and we finally leave. We arrive very soon; it's just down the road. We turn into a perfectly ordinary looking apartment building, walk up to the second floor (and I worry that we're going to cram into some tiny apartment), and then discover there's a good-sized studio there. It's laid out something like a dance studio in the midst of a Buddhist temple.
We all take off our shoes, and, not long after I enter, my suspicions are confirmed: I overhear one of our organizers say to someone: "sorry, no pictures are allowed. This is a private space."

The only reasons I can think of:
1. Some of the stuff inside is very valuable; they don't want anyone outside to know it's there.
2. Some of the stuff inside is not actually theirs.
3. They don't want people to be self-conscious when practicing (it's pretty hard to look dignified when you're doing the exercises), though that's no reason to refrain from photo-taking at other times.
3. They are just damn weird.
Your guess is as good as mine, though I suspect it's a combination of 3 and 4.

There are, of course, no chairs.

Everyone sits around another twenty minutes in awkward conversation - and we all stick to our own little groups.
Finally someone gets on the mic (someone's got to keep the Irish down, right? pun!), and tells us the schedule. First: qigong exercises for 45 minutes, followed by 10 of meditation. Snacks. "It's a Wonderful Life." Then, finally, unashamedly and manipulatively last, a free turkey dinner.
(In this time: I said there are no chairs, but there are benches. The three girls were sitting on one, and, during the speech, a lady came to them and said, "you can't sit there, you're covering up the Buddha." It were true, if they were all four feet taller. There was a Buddha poster behind them. Honestly, I don't think Buddha cares about much of anything at this point, since he's not only dead but supposedly free from all concerns. Plus, intelligent policy would not put a bench in a room, at a convenient place, and then tell people they can't use it because some arbitrary item has it reserved. Hell, I'll start start carrying Buddha posters around so I can put them in seats everywhere. I'm hoping it'll seriously inconvenience overly-serious Buddhists.)

My classmates realize what this means: dinner is not until sometime after 9:00 at the earliest, and they have to work to get it. They are not dumb. Two of them have been sick all week, and still are, and have to make up a test the next morning - which they feel they haven't adequately prepared for.
They leave.

Fortunately for my story, I lack their common sense. Also, I was stubbornly resolved to get food. I don't mind a little weird exercise, either, so I stayed.

I don't feel like writing about the exercises; you can look those up on your own. They are a good leg workout, though.

Meditation time.
Everyone is slightly tired and warm from the exercise, and sitting down on a cushion, in a darkened room, sounds pretty appealing. At first they have everyone concentrate on breathing and sitting quietly, which is fairly relaxing, though the same could be said of most sorts of rest when your legs are tired and you're kind of hot.
After a while, once they're satisfied that some arbitrary goal has been reached (number of breaths? the time it takes a kitten to cross a street four times? pairs of shoes in the cupboard?), the lead guy asks us all to concentrate on an image. He asks us to imagine we are empty and clear, hollow, and that a single drop of water falls on the crowns of each of our heads. I enjoy the image of empty-headed people and their empty-headed followers, all that's left of them being flooded out by a single drop of water. I sit quietly in the dark with my smile all the same.
The drop is described slowly falling through different regions, including regions I'm pretty sure I lack (no, not a heart - chakra points and things); slowly, it is gone. Heh...but from whence does it exit? We are seated on our cushions with our legs crossed in front: the lowest point it could exit from is left to your imagination, but further amused me.

Then we repeated that.

It was already around 8:50 when we finished: something about tranquility and emptiness was spoken, and the peace of the Buddha, and then, jarringly, "MERRY CHRISTMAS!". Snacks were immediately available.

I was one of the first to the table (I know my priorities), and I enjoyed the spread. The banana bread (of which there were two kinds) was better than almost any I've ever had. Everything else was not quite its equal, but good. A fair number of m&ms disappeared in my vicinity, also. I had to consider the strangeness of the celebration: would Jesus recognize his own birthday?

I talked to more people: most were teachers. Merril and Erin made connections; Erin got a few good leads on jobs. The majority of the people seemed to enjoy themselves.

Most of these people were also weird. Sure, it takes one to know one and all that; I certainly have my own quirks. But not only I think so: my classmates had the good sense to notice immediately after arrival (and Bryan had the incredible precognition to not show up at all, though this might have had more to do with the fact that he probably slept through it).

Prime example: Fabio.
When I first heard it, I thought he was being mocked - but it is his name.
Let me tell you about Fabio. Fabio likes to sleep in the nude. Fabio does not like to shower...properly. Fabio does not like deodorant, Fabio does not approve of air-conditioning, and Fabio does not negotiate. Fabio, in September, went through five roommates. Fabio makes inappropriate and forward moves on girls he has just met, and that they do not want. Fabio is socially awkward, and Fabio does not 'play well with others'. Fabio does not talk to other males. Fabio also likes extremely tight pants, and Fabio is extremely, skeletally, thin. Fabio is also obsessively worried about wasting water, to the point that he often breaks shower knobs (and thus they leak, wasting more water than the drips he tried to save).

Thus is Fabio.

In the qigong session, Fabio demonstrates that he is familiar with taiji - by doing it while the rest of us are doing qigong. He also does it only with his legs: his arms are wrapped tightly around himself, as though he was hugging himself, or as though he were remembering the straigtjacket he might have worn only 50 years ago. This is accepted; some of the other obviously new people give him second glances and more space, but those who have been there longer accept him (even though this is his first time).


There is something wrong with the people who stay here a while to teach. Taiwan does something to them, and it had done it to many of these teachers. I'm not sure exactly what it is, but if you come here, you'll see it, too.

Anyway. I talk to a couple of girls; one is from Malaysia, the other from Indonesia (or I think that's right). They're fun to talk to, and fairly normal. The movie starts around 9:15, and I decide not to stay for dinner. I'd rather not eat that late, and I don't feel like watching "It's a Wonderful Life" again. I also don't especially want to hear Master Wang (or whatever his name was) talk, as I've been told he will.
So, knowing this, I fill up on snacks, and then leave. The two girls also leave, and we decide we'll go back to school together.

They have bicycles; I don't, and they want to ride. So they say we should ride together (everyone does here - half of all bikes have two riders). I'm concerned that I'll be too heavy, and so I offer to pedal.
I have not ridden a bicycle in something like 5 months, and then only briefly; before that, it'd probably been ten years. Also, the bike was sized for her (she was ordinary sized, maybe 5 foot or so).

The result was comical.
When there were not people in my way, I would push down on the pedal with my leg, as everyone does while riding. Unlike everyone else's, though, my bike lurched violently to one side or the other because of the imbalance - my legs stuck out several feet to each side. When there were people nearby, I nearly collapsed the bike on them.

heheh. The girl riding behind me (wasn't her name Vera?) kindly offered to take us the rest of the way home. I let her. I think it was difficult for her, but at least she only got a workout, and not bruises. Once we returned to school grounds, we parted ways, and I thought I might not see them again (but did a few days later).

That was one day. I even skipped some parts.
I didn't tell you about how I gave 家寧 the present, but that can wait until later; it was the next day.

Thank you again for reading, and I hope you don't mind the time distortion I seem to be suffering from! My next tomorrow shouldn't be so far from yours next time!

Happy new year!
(新年快樂!)

Christmas Eve

It's been a full day. Not that many days are half days...except perhaps the solstice. Which was recently - but not today. (Okay, so grant me this one pun - here the sun still shone for the majority of the day, I think).

I'm sure you're just dying to know the narrated details of my day. They would be long and tedious. As long and tedious as I am far from home. Heh. But, I have to do a little listing and narration.

First things first: I wake up around 11:50 - my phone is telling me I have a new message. I consider ignoring it - the message will still be there later - and I do for about ten minutes, but I can't get back to sleep. I think it might be 家寧. I'm right, too. She wants to meet - and when I text her back, I learn she wants to meet...now! So I hop in the shower, and out, thankfully getting clean in the process, and I'm on my way.

I meet her in the usual place, which for some reason I don't feel like disclosing. Maybe I'll keep it just between us.
It's a beautiful day, too.

Oh - I should digress for a minute.
On Friday night, we were near the zoo, right next to the river. We've been there before: it's very nice. We walked and talked for a bit, then decided to go back towards town to get some things - I was going to make chocolate chip cookies the next day (it's almost impossible to find them here, and everyone likes them.)
We found the ingredients (mostly), though it's surprisingly hard to find brown sugar. And they only had Hershey's chocolate chips, nothing else. We forgot the vanilla, but that's another story.
Anyway, she said she had to get something in the bookstore upstairs, PageOne (which is really nice, by the way), so we went there. Not that I minded at all. I started following her, but then she said what she was getting was "sort of embarrassing", and that she'd rather I didn't come with her. So, since I'm pretty dense sometimes, I had no idea what it might be; I looked at some other things, and what do you know - they had a sci-fi and fantasy section (none of the other stores have anything worth mentioning, except in this self-referencing aside). They had something I wanted, too - a book called "A Feast for Crows." It's part of this surprisingly good fantasy series (most fantasy is crap) that I like - and I've been waiting for this one for a while. The previous one was published in 2000. And the sequel was supposed to come out soon after. But then there were delays. A year went by. Another. Then another. And another. And another. In the fall of 2005, it was released, in hardcover of course. I wanted it. But, it cost nearly $30, so I didn't buy it. I thought the paperback would be out soon.
It was, geologically speaking. Nearly a full year later, it came out - at the end of September. And I was in Taiwan, and looked for it, but couldn't find it, and Amazon doesn't ship everywhere.
But there it was!

So 家寧 found me ogling this book. She'd already bought what she came for, so I bought what I hadn't knowingly came for, too. Then we left.

Alright, back to today.
So, she said she had something for me. Like I said, I can be pretty dense. I had no idea what it was. So she gave me my gift - and it was "Norwegian Wood". I hadn't read anything by this author, Haruki Murakami, until just a few weeks ago, when I read "Dance Dance Dance". It was by no means the best book I've ever read, but it was entertaining, interesting, and the guy is a good writer, even in translation. And strangely enough, the way he writes (and the type of character he writes) reminds me of me. Is it egotistical to enjoy that sort of thing?

Of course she'd bought it that night, without me ever realizing.

I was surprised, of course, and I'm happy to have it.
This also set me to the next part of my day.

After having my first meal (I hesitate to call it either breakfast or lunch), I decided I should get her something in return.
Actually, I'd already been planning that, but hadn't gotten around to it. I thought I'd do it on Sunday night (today), since I thought I wouldn't see her until Monday, but some school stuff brought her to campus, and she preemptively struck with gift-giving! I hated not having anything for her, and decided I must make up for it.

I headed for the Taipei 101 area.
I was walking past it when something caught my eye - the exhibition hall there had a jewelry/jade show. I figured I might as well have a look, so I did, and I took some pictures. I might post them later if any turned out well.
While I was walking around, I noticed a very attractive lady in a red dress (with a cape thing on the back that attaches to the sleeves - I have no idea what that's called), her back turned, talking to some guy in a goofy tux. They were there to promote jewelry, I suppose. I went back to looking at things, but when I started to move on, I came face-to-face with the lady...and though I can't say for sure how old she was, her face looked every bit her age. Heheh. She had to be at least 40. I intended to keep moving, and she said hi. So, since I usually do talk to people here if they make the effort to talk to me, and because it usually turns out somewhat strangely, I decided I might as well talk.
I expected she would try to promote her company. She did give me an advertisement, but she made a lot of small talk (asked where I was from, if I'd be around long, etc), and asked for my name, and my e-mail; not once did she mention her company. I figured, hey, why not, so I wrote them down on a paper. She actually didn't try to promote her company at all, so far as I can tell. Then she asked for my phone number. E-mails I can ignore (and do accidentally, as many of you are no doubt aware), but phone calls are harder. So I told her I didn't have a phone yet. She just kept smiling away the whole time, getting up close to me. Was I being hit on? I'm still not sure.

heh. Anyway, I went to the mall in the 101, got a gift (I won't say what right now, since a certain someone might, though it's not likely, read this before I can give it to her), and kind of wandered around for a while. I also managed to buy myself another book, since it looked interesting. I'll tell you if it turns out to be...heheh, assuming you want that sort of thing, but, I AM THE AUTHOR! I WRITE WHAT I WANT! (Though, unfortunately for all authors, and fortunately for you, your sanity, and your free time, only you choose what you'll read.)

Then I took pictures.

It was really crowded, too. I thought Christmas wasn't a big deal here, but, for reasons that I can only attribute to it being Christmas, there were hordes of people. Traffic was backed up down the road and out of sight when I arrived, since so many were trying to get parking. The cops directing traffic let as many cars go by as they could, but, as they did, throngs gathered, and you could see the numbers of the crowd were worrying them - many of the people wanting to cross the street were impatient. When everyone did finally cross, the intersection (this is a big intersection - at least six lanes of traffic in every direction), and the 10-20 feet in every direction from it, were covered.

So, after all that, I came back home. That took time, and I didn't get here until about 6:20. That would be fine, except there was a party at 7 I had decided on going to. I relaxed for about 15 minutes, talked to my classmate, Phonshia (I think that's how she spells her name...), and left. I met the organizer on my way there.

But this is already long enough - it will continue tomorrow!