Greetings, friends! I just spent the last twenty minutes or so of my life uploading all these photos I wanted to talk about in this blog post, thinking blogger would load them backwards as they usually do, so I started with the photos I wanted to end the blog with and worked my way up to the ones I wanted to start with. However, they did not upload backwards. They uploaded exactly in the order I chose them. Which is what they are supposed to do but have never done before. So now I have to blog backwards in time. Boo...
Well, let me begin then with the most recent happening! I may have mentioned before that in our house here in Taiwan, our beautiful friend and roommate Amy moved back to the US. She left about six hours after Aaron and I returned from our trip! How SAD is THAT?!? Anyway, it left an empty room in our house, and I offered to take one of the smaller rooms so my other two roommates could take the two bigger and far nicer rooms with the big windows. Because I don't care that much about nice windows. So when I returned my Things were all piled into this room here on the left, which was my roomate Beth's previous room. She has since moved into my old room.
I should have taken a before picture and then you would know how different it looks in these photos! I moved all the furnitures around. I'm fairly happy with the finished look, and although the room is much smaller, I like the comfortable-ness of it, and it is very nice to not have a litter box smell permanently hanging in the air. Beth has agreed to take over the care of Samson, something he is having a very hard time adjusting to... but... I'm tired about talking about Samson's anxiety issues and also tired of cleaning them up, so I will suffice to say that we're all crossing our fingers that when Beth returns from her vacation, he stops peeing on stuff.
It's drippingly humid here in Taiwan, which makes it hard, I've found, to get things to stay up on the walls. I took this photo right after putting up all the wall stuff, and then over the next couple of nights, a lot of it slid back down! The sticky squares didn't work very well. Beth had recently painted this room so I don't want to use anything that will damage the wall. Not sure how to get things to stay without heavy duty tape though... most of the hooks stick pretty well, so that.s nice.
A few nights after Aaron and I got back, he gave me a break from cooking dinner and took me on a nice date to this tea house. It's a very old traditional tea house that we pass every day on the way to work, one of those where you sit Japanese style on floor mats with a low table, and they pour your tea for you. And it had a giant Koi pond in the middle. How cool is that? Made me feel very Taiwan-y after our two weeks of full-on American culture.
I didn't cook at all while we were in the US, because we ate out most of the time, and Aaron's mom made dinner a few times. It was a little nice to have a break from cooking, but I do enjoy being in the kitchen. This is the salad I made the day after we got back, and I was very proud of how beautiful it looked. *pats self on back* I have taken photos of most of the foods I try, but never upload them anywhere. That's another blog post I surpose.
Ah, here we get into some of the photos highlighting our trip. Most of these are Facebook repeats. Here is me and Aaron's mom in front of their house. I totally thought I was uploading the one of Aaron and his mom, not me. Oops. Aaron's mom is very cute and it was so enjoyable to get to know her a little bit. She is very much like Aaron's stories of her. She has a business selling things on e-bay, and we went estate saling with her the two Saturdays we were there. Estate saling is fancy "yard saling". This is something I really miss living in Taiwan. People don't do yard sales here... :(
We took a trip to Plymouth one day to see the famous Rock and the replica of the Mayflower and all the other Plymouth-y delights. Here we're at Plymouth harbor where we toured the Mayflower II and walked around main street where I bought a t-shirt. Yay! Look at all the clean fresh air! It was delightful. I greatly miss the clean fresh air while in Taiwan. I don't think about it most of the time, but when we were in the US I realized what a blessing it is just to not be breathing smog. I'll be trying not to take that for granted next time I live in the States!
We went to this breakfast cafe called Pogo's, which is one of Aaron's top favorite places to eat ever. He told everybody in Taiwan about Pogo's several times, how they have giant portions of amazingly delicious foods for low prices. He painted a mouth watering verbal picture of their blueberry cheesecake pancakes, of which I got to try, and his description was quite accurate! This photo is great because, Pogo's definitely trumps most other breakfast places ever, but is located way out of the way in a tiny, run down plaza. Many of the locals don't even know Pogo's. It's a hidden treasure.
We took a trip into Boston for a couple of days and stayed with some of Aaron's friends. One of those days we paid a visit to the Museum of Natural Science, where we sat very close to this Thing and watched it make lightening. It was very cool.
I took this photo of a street in Boston, because it represented to me the old fashioned cuteness of most of the streets of saw in a lot of places we went.
We were out doing things the majority of our time on the Cape, and our down time at Aaron's house was spent mainly doing one of two things; watching Tv or a movie; or playing Rock Band! Rock Band is a playstation game that is like a glorified version of Guitar Hero, if you know that one. Aaron can play on expert mode for most of the instruments, and I mananged to get pretty good on medium mode with the bass guitar. We played several times with a bunch of Aaron's friends, and you can play with up to five people I think; 1 drum, 2 guitars, and 2 singers. It's way fun.
We walked a very, very, very, very long way to find this lighthouse! This was on the 4th of July in Provincetown, at the very tip of the Cape. This was also the day Aaron and I got very sunburnt, being used to the sun in Taiwan which is very powerful, but doesn't give us sunburns that often (we suspect due to the smoggy air, how gross is that?!), we happily spent all afternoon out in the sun on the Cape and realized we needed to get some sunblock.
We spent a day on the beach where we threw a football and played beach baseball, which i swhat we are doing in this picture. That's me on the left with my powerful swing of the bat.
This is our gate at Taoyuan airport, getting ready to depart for Boston. They had little wooden benches instead of chairs, and a display about Taiwan aboriginals based on the movie 'Seediq Bale'. It was very, very cool.
In a two week turn around trip to the US and back to Taiwan, I've had to get used to -being able to flush toilet paper again in the US instead of throwing it in the trash can (took me two days to figure that one out), and then returning, remembering to throw the toilet paper in the trash can instead of flushing it (again..two days..); - fishing out 10NT coins instead of .$.25 cent American quarters, both of which are similarly sized, as well as the $1NT coin and the American penny, and I accidentally mixed all my change together, so buying a coffee was like a five minute interaction with the checkout counter. - Realizing how terrible the traffic in Taiwan REALLY is after driving on the nice, wide, American roads; -strangers, in general, in the US, are far more grumpy and less happy with their jobs than people in Taiwan, who are on the whole very friendly and hospitable, and take their jobs very seriously and try very hard to make you happy; - there are SO MANY NEW KINDS OF CANDIES! in the last year since I was in an American grocery store! The States really really is blessed to have, not just candy, but an abundance of any kind of food imaginable readily available. You don't realize this until you live overseas, even a place like Taiwan that has many, many things available, there are still certain basics that you just can't find here.
I'm sure there are other things but now I am tired of typing and I have to go make falafels. Anyway, just wanted to wrap up by saying, that when I first moved to Taiwan, I had lived in the US for... nine years by then, and I was a little fed up with the States and American culture in general, especially after working in a welfare office for two years. Slowly, starting with last year's trip to North Carolina to see my brother get married, and then this trip to Cape Cod, I've realized that there are many blessings to be had living in America. I love my life here in Taiwan, and there are certainly many blessings and perks to living here as well. But I'm far more excited and happy now about the prospect of living in the States again, when that opportunity should arise. I've realized, and continue to realize, that while living in another culture is a wonderful opportunity that has it's own blessings and advantages, I'm very grateful to be an American citizen with all the freedoms, opportunities, blessings, and advantages that American citizenship brings.
Ok, I'm really going now. School starts tomorrow! Next time I blog, t'will be about my new class! What fun!
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