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Went to the open air flower market today, which is across the street from the rather renowned jade market (which my Dad informs me is "all fake"). The plants here are lush & gorgeous-because the whole damn city is like being in a teeny glass greenhouse! There’s no need for a sweat lodge here, it’s close to a hundred degrees these last few days-punctuated by hot downpours and thunder and lightening.
Each day here I want a serious siesta. Reasons being: this persistent cold. (which BTW, like typhoid Mary I have passed onto Jolyn, who has then passed it on to her 2 colleagues, and who knows where it will go from there… thanks a LOT to P’s co-worker who started this!) Other reasons: it’s paralyzingly hot, my head is going to implode from trying to decipher all this Chinese in just 1 week, and I am eating a swath throughthe city. In that sense it is a lot like New Orleans! Hot, hot, hot, muggy,smoggy at times, wet, but YUMMY.
It also reminds me of the rain forests in Costa Rica/Belize. Except somehow I can accept the discomfort of the humidity & heat more in the "real" jungle rather than this urban one. At least in the actual jungle there are beautiful, magical creatures to distract you. And in the actual jungle no one expects you to have to make yourself presentable. For the life of me I can’t figure out how some women are wearing hosiery in this weather without keeling over from heatstroke. If you offered me a hundred bucks (and I do mean US dollars)to wear pantyhose here I would refuse!
I am going to return home about as brown & as round as a roasted coffee bean. Ah yes, another tropical product only produced in the equator belt. Hmm. Perhaps a cacao bean too? In 96 I discovered in Costa Rica that I am capable of becoming uber-dark, I can be Latina if I want to…
My sunblock here melts off within about 7 minutes of my setting foot outside, I have become one of those silly delicate flowers who uses an umbrella as a parasol in the mid day sun. Then there’s the matter of all this FAb food, and the problem of going from a schedule of 2 hrs of yoga and 10 miles per week to…zero. I walk to and fro from the MRT station (Taipei BART) & that’s about it.
In Taiwan-I am an "L". At the night market, I was buying a pair of jeans and chose the size "L". Mom kept saying that I was not an L, and the saleslady pointed out to her that "her waist is very slender, but actually she’s got a lot of meat on her butt". Chalk that one up to the multitude of things here that might make one mad but instead just strikes me as hilarious.
Kind of like the additional things Dad warns me about…now we can add getting burnt on a motor scooter pipe, getting counterfeit Evain or Volvic, getting counterfeit money, losing my keys, blowing up the kitchen w/the gas range, shopping in excess and not being able to fit it my suitcases, getting mosquito bites (although this is no joke & people do get dengue fever here) and getting substandard bread buns. I am sure more will be coming…
Bastante. Enough for now, time to get ready for class tomorrow. And we have visitors, a friend who has come over with her white Persian to come visit these 2 cats (but they are jealous and PISSED), and another who has come over to shower as they shut down the water in her entire apartment block.
I miss my husband…which is not news, but I miss him even more than I had thought I would. hah. It’s ironic since I tend to be rather cavalier about time apart. We’ve had plenty of separations throughout our relationship so I don’t think it’s a big deal-
but perhaps he is right and things are somehow different now that we are officially wed…
In a strange land, I yearn for my homegrown hunk of hombre.
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