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.