Christmas

Christmas has always been a strange time of year for me. Being that I'm Jewish, when I was a kid and even my Jewish best friend got to celebrate Christmas with her mom's side of the family, I always found December 25th cold, lonely, and boring. It was like a happy made for tv movie; everyone around me was starring in it, and I was the production assistant who brought sandwiches and cookies to the director and the crew and then went to get them coffee and got locked out of the studio. This is no longer the case - I am definitely a big part of Christmas now, and Christmas is a big part of me. I look forward to going to Andrea and Darin's house every year to exchange gifts, avoid eating sauerkraut, and be witness to how good Anna and Aidan are becoming at serving John beer.

Last year I started to become fascinated with how Christmas might be celebrated in other parts of the world - a strange fixation for the little Jewish girl from Montreal to adopt, I know. In Vanuatu it's surely very different, I thought, because it's much much too warm there for Santa to wear that big red suit. Do they even know who Santa is? Do the children believe in him? The Hallmark holiday that it has become in North America, do they exchange gifts, or maybe just pigs? Where do they buy their cards if all that is sold at the co-op is canned vegetables, rice, and individual Peter Jackson cigarettes? These are all things I hope to find out one day.

In Taiwan, Christmas isn't a holiday. Technically December 25th is "Constitution Day" (also, yet to find out what this means) and it used to be a statutory holiday but it is no longer. Buxibans such as mine have the option of giving their teachers a day off. My students are all very well trained to sing carols such as "We Wish you a Merry Christmas" and "Jingle Bells", but none of them know what the words mean. They came to class on the 24th all decked out in red and green and white and sparkles, but in all essence the 25th is a regular day for them. They go to school, they go home, they don't get presents and they don't have big meals with their families.

We, on the other hand, celebrated Christmas as if it was our job. On Christmas eve we gathered at my friend Sara's house with turkeys and stuffing and mashed potatoes and wine and vodka and presents. We stuffed our faces with Christmas goodness and exchanged silly gifts - I received a giant ceramic monkey bank. We had a big sleepover and no one woke up alone on Christmas morning. We moved our party over to another friend's house where we spent the day continuing to stuff our faces, this time with brunch food and champagne, and sitting out in the sun on the roof enjoying the view of the Kaohsiung harbor. I know that we were all missing our families, and the snow, a little bit, but getting to spend this day with our Taiwan family was a damn good second prize.

Tell Santa what you want for Christmas.

Hanging out on the roof.

Christmas sunset.

An Ode to my Cell Phone

Oh, how I miss you, my pretty pink phone,
Without you by my side I'm so very alone.
I never intended for you to get hurt when you were in the back pocket
Of my very small skirt.
It took me a minute to know you were gone
When I emerged from the taxi and it was past dawn.
No alarm clock, no stopwatch, no texting, no calls.
No one to talk with, I'm climbing the walls.
A week without contact can make one go crazy;
Or, even worse - antisocial and lazy.
Now I've paid to replace you and it wasn't so cheap
And I'll pray to the cell phone gods that this one I'll keep.
My new phone has GPS, it's fancy, it's black -
But I'll always long my first pink phone back!

***

In a drunken fit last weekend, I got so caught up in trying to distinguish "turn right" from "turn left" in a taxi that I was not aware that I left my phone in the backseat when I got out. Or at least I think that's what happened. In any case, it was a devastating experience and I thought I would try my hand at poetry as a medium of expressing my feelings about the loss of dear Motorola. I'm not very good.

Important answers to Important questions.

Answers to some questions about my life courtesy of my Auntie Margie. Feel free to add questions, and I will try and come up with mildly interesting answers.

1. Have you made a Taiwanese friend?

Most of my friends are Canadian - there are so many Canadians in Taiwan and I think the majority of them congregate in Kaohsiung. There's even a neighborhood called Little Canada. Having said this, I have some American, British, and South African friends as well, and also some Taiwanese friends. One of my close friends is Rose, a Taiwanese woman in her early forties who doubles as my Chinese teacher and who can party like it's 1999. She is the best thing to have happened to foreigners in this city in a long time because without even having to ask her she will help you with anything you could possibly need. I think she reads minds. My other Taiwanese friends include Casey, a rocking chick who works at another big English school, and Lulu, a travel agent slash waitress who works at my favorite bar. My school consists of half foreign teachers, and half Chinese teachers, but we don't really kick it after hours because they're very Christian, and I don't want to go to baptisms, even if they are on the beach.

The lovely Rose Sullivan.

2. What is the content of your classes?

I teach a wide range of students; my babies are about 4 years old and still don't know how to ask to go to the bathroom, and I have 17 year olds in my highest level class. I teach all sorts of things. The curriculum is standardized by the language school I work for but I have some degree of flexibility. In the lower levels we teach a lot of vocabulary, phonics and sentence patterns: "What is it? It is a blablabla..." In my higher level classes we get to cover some interesting topics and I've chatted with them about everything from sex to politics to reggae music. Last week we covered character adjectives and they described me as "outgoing, sociable, strict (pfft!), disorganized, and absent-minded. They are smart little fuckers.

Some of my kids on Halloween.

3. What do you eat if not stinky tofu?

There are many interesting things to eat here. Not eating meat or seafood can be problematic at times and the rest of the time it just makes me feel pretty stodgy. The coolest things I have seen people eat here include, but are not limited to, fish eyeballs, cuttlefish on a stick, jellyfish, and "sea tongue" flavored empanadas. You can get most of these things at the night markets. My diet consists largely of beer and fried things - rice, noodles, vegetables, eggs, and cheese, and in the three months that I have been here I have lost ten pounds.

On one of our first nights here, Ben, Rachel and I ate at Lai Lai, this quasi outdoor eatery near my school that has become a regular hangout. They insisted that instead of having the friendly wait staff barbecue their food for them, they would do it themselves. The chicken was dead when we put it on the grill. The shrimp was not.



4. What kind of bed do you have?

Perhaps you are all imagining me sleeping on the ground, Japanese style - that would be pretty cool, but sadly there isn't much of interest to say about my bedroom. It consists of a twin bed (which is small even for me, but for the most part I am sleeping in it alone so I put up with it) a desk, an air conditioner, and a closet. We had quite a bit of trouble buying sheets because despite the fact we have Ikea, Ikea is still in Chinese, so we both bought two top sheets. I cut one of mine up to make my Halloween costume.

5. What is the weather like at this time of year?

Funny story. Our friend Robyn, who just arrived in Taiwan two weeks ago, was eager to take a trip to Kenting (see earlier post) this weekend - and when she mentioned it to us, everyone told her that she best wait until the "cold spell" passes, because the beach is nicer when it's warmer out. Today, it was a solid 24 degrees out. Sometimes it's chilly at night. The other day, I had to wear socks and shoes - insert horrified face here - and a hoodie at night. This is as bad as it gets.

A note about pictures.

So, in case we hadn't figured this out already, I am almost, if not completely, computer illiterate. I am trying to find a way to integrate pictures into my posts in a cohesive kind of way but am not quite there yet. I can't even figure out how to insert a photo into my profile. So, having said this, if anyone wants to help me, you know where I am.

This post is supposed to mildly excuse why my posts don't look as pretty as I do.