Comments on the comments

Someone mentioned that it looked really clean in the photos. It's about as clean as D.C. or Seattle. Which is to say, not really clean, but it's a familiar amount of clean. I also have no idea how people find their scooters in these lines of bikes. I'm assuming it involves some kind of call like penguins use to find their chicks for the first time after returning from the ocean.

And I think my brother asked if we have scooters yet. The answer is absolutely not. It's difficult to explain the insanity that scooters create and inhabit on the roads. I have now seen two scooter-involved accidents. I didn't see them happen, but one of them involved a bus, so I don't want to know what it looked like. The scooters are fine with pedestrians. It's only in the main roads that speed and many, many variables make it just nuts. So no, for at least many months, Marie and I will be sticking with metro, buses, and the occasional cab.

You do see some really hilarious things go by on scooters, like a dog riding in the footwell, looking around the front wheel. Or a toy dog perched on the handle bars like a hood ornament. But I'm definitely willing to leave the use of scooters to other, more practiced or insane hands.

We have a place to live

This's a photo of the new apartment in Taipei. And there was much rejoicing. It's a comfy 600 square feet plus, or as they calculate in Taiwan, about 17 or 18 ping. Each ping is about the size of a double sleeping mattress. That took a while to understand.

But it's got air conditioning in all the rooms, it has a couple of gas burners, so we've been cooking a little. And the landlord left a lot of odd gear that would normally annoy me, but when you roll into a country with 190 pounds (or 81 kilograms) of gear, you don't bring things like a saucepan or a funnel or trashcans. So we were really glad to have a lot of the little things that you have to run out an buy immediately for a new apartment. But most importantly, dum dididum!

We have a western toilet!

Not that these things aren't all over, but there was that fear of having to live, and learn to live, with an eastern squat toilet. I don't think I was really scared of using one, but I think I feared the short but very necessary and very embarrassing learning curve. And even better, we can even flush the toilet paper. And that is a real threat. Some places you can, maybe you can in a lot of places but they don't want people in the habit 'cause they use the wrong paper.

Hey, it's kinda gross, but it's part of the experience. You don't want us shorting you on the experience, do you?

The view from the new place isn't great. But it's really interesting. You get an odd view of a city when you see something like this. I've noticed that there are bars and gates across windows several floors up. We've heard that there is very little violent crime in Taipei, but we haven't heard much about burglery, but to judge from the bars on decks and the door to our apartment people are worried the huns will return at any moment. I'm not kidding, this's a serious door with bolts I've never seen. Not to scare my mother, 'cause (not to over simplify things) I don't know what there is to steal here. You can see the neighborhood isn't really expensive. Oh, and the security door to our building is impenetrable to anything except blowtorch or high explosives. Really. You see police with handheld battering rams going through bad guys' front doors on TV. That won't work here. Big steel doors.

And we can see the street five floors below where we can watch the people, dogs, and cats go about their business. It's kind of a long haul up the four flights with six liters of drinking water (the water is safe to cook, wash, and bathe with, but apparently drinking it's a bad idea) but that's the only real complaint. We have a long view and it's a quiet street that's near the metro stop.

It's not the view we had at our hostel, but that place was pretty crummy. Marie wanted out of there as soon as possible, and I got pretty tired of sweating through a shirt every time I made a phone call 'cause the main room of the hostel wasn't air-conditioned. So we're both glad to be outta there, even if we didn't get to keep a good view.





We also lost our good luck charm. The last day we were in the hostel this little guy went scurrying past me. We were told we couldn't have pets in the new place, but I was wondering if I could bring him along and claim he was an infestation if I got caught. It was a moot point. I saw him long enough to take a couple of photos and didn't see him the rest of the night or the next morning. Fortunately, Marie was familiar with having geckos as house guests in Arizona, where they're considered good luck, so sleeping with this guy for a night didn't bother either of us.

Good photo tho', huh?

And this's how we paid for the new apartment, with 42 of the blue 1,000 dollar notes. I'm struggling a bit with the currency here, 'cause that little bronze penny-like thing in the lower right is a dollar. But I like how the 500 dollar bill has a photo of a celebrating baseball team on it. It takes away a little of the power of money as the ultimate goal.

Each dollar here is worth about 3 cents, U.S. And like 3 cents, it won't buy much of anything. But all the staples of life are pretty cheap. Our rent is 14,000 NT (new Taiwanese dollars) a month, that's less than $500 U.S. (we had to pay the first month and two more months in deposit, so about $1,300, most of which we'll get back.)

My commute on the metro is 19 NT each way, maybe 60 cents. Dinner last night was potatoes, chicken, chilies, tofu, and another unidentified starch (all fried and spiced) from a street vendor and cost about 170 NT, or maybe five bucks. Oh, I also got three bananas and three plums. 60 NT. Not quite two bucks U.S.

I think the funny thing is how cash focused this system is. Everyone has the RFID cards for the metro, but no one takes credit cards or checks. So when I signed the lease for our apartment, I showed up with 42,000 NT. Little scary, but all done now. But everyone is almost absurdly honest. The street vendors could be taking us to the cleaners, but I think I've seen one mistake yet, and that was for three dollars. Oh, and no tipping, and no tax. You look at the price on the shelf or the stickers or the meter and that's how much you owe. Pretty cool, especially when you're trying to understand what the person just said and you can't quite believe that your entire meal for two people really is going to cost less than five dollars U.S.

A word on transportation

Marie mentioned we should get some photos of ourselves to prove that we're here, just to prove we're not faking the moon landing. But in the mean time, I took a few photos to illustrate the transportation situation here.

Can you count the scooters?













They literally go on out of sight. Same with bikes.




















The bikes are near our dorm, close to the National Taiwanese University, just outside the metro entrance (you can see the top of it in the photo). The scooters are everywhere.















I can see why a bike would be good, but I don't get the scooters, yet maybe. The mass transit system is great. There are buses that run everywhere and the payment system is tied to the metro, so you can put money on a card and use it for a bus or metro, and it even gives you a discount over cash.

So far the metro's been punctual, cheapish, and even clean. It looks pretty new. It makes even the transit systems in D.C. and Seattle look like hailing a stagecoach. Oh, and it's air conditioned. Why would you pay to use a hot, noisy scooter? Good thing it's that obvious to me, 'cause these guys drive like they're delivering hot pizzas with their bare hands. I've yet to see an accident (in five days, but it looks like it should happen every time a light changes), and they seem very deferential to pedestrians, but the speed and intricacy of traffic makes cars look like boulders in a river of scooters.

And just an extra note, 'cause I didn't publish this thing at six in the evening. We're twelve hours ahead of the east coast (we get the day first). So if it's noon here, it's midnight in D.C. (they're just starting the day), it's 11:00 p.m. the day before for those in Nebraska, 10:00 p.m. for Arizonites, and 9:00 in the evening in Seattle. We hope this obscures things when you're thinking, "what are Marie and Keith doing now?"

We are here, or there, depending

Ha ha! Peace Corps failed to stop us! We're sitting in our dorm in Taipei on our second day here. We weren't going to write anything in this journal until we actually got here, thinking that we started the blog for Armenia too early and we cursed ourselves. But we've fed ourselves, and taken the subway for the heck of it. We've shaken off most of the jet lag from yesterday and we're learning about Taipei very quickly.

First off, this place is staggeringly hard to be outside in. The locals make it look easy, but it's like 90 degrees and supposedly 50% humidity. I don't think it's that low. I'm always sweating outside, even in the shade, but it doesn't look like any Taiwanese are, ever. Oh, when we landed, at 4:30 a.m. local, they announced the temp. as 81 degrees. We knew we were in trouble. We do have air conditioning and it's comfy in our little dorm room. We even have our own little half bath, but it's right in the sun all day, so we keep the door closed and don't stand in there while we're brushing our teeth.

We met one other person here to teach, named Ed. He's from Tennessee about two days ago and must've just shaken off his jet lag. Our dorm for a few days is just over one of the school's classrooms, but it's really quiet here, even at night.

The thing I'll mention is the scooters. Holy cow, it's like they breed when they're parked. And they travel in packs, 'cause they can slide between cars at stop lights to the front of the line, so when the light turns green, it's like the start of a motocross race, but wimpier. I've seen a couple of scooter packs in Seattle, but they have no idea.

So, that's the highlights from our first day-and-a-half overseas. We're supposed to report on Monday morning, so we're on a cheap vacation for now. At least the food's cheap. But I'll get into that later. We're safe, we have all our luggage; we're kinda wondering what we've gotten ourselves into, sweating a lot, but pretty pleased so far.

And if you're wondering, I did not publish this at 4 a.m. It's about a quarter after seven in the evening in this part of the world.