A little slice of Taipei heaven

Oh how to begin.  Beasts.  We have been working like beasts.  Here is a typical day:  Wake up at 7am.  Fail.  Try again at 7:30am. Almost succeed.  Finally emerge at 8am. Stumble to the bathroom/shower (the shower is actually just a hose and drain in the floor - economical, or sketchy?  You decide.)  Abulations performed, I depart in a shamefully cheap cab at 8:15am.  I purchase various rice-y breakfasts, then stumble into SAT class, where I proceed to make self-deprecating jokes until my students laugh at me with a mixture of affection and pity.  I smile, confident in the scientifically proven correlation between adorable SAT teachers and SAT score improvements.  Suddenly realize that I may not be as adorable as I think I am.  And correlation still doesn't equal causation, dammit.  Smile falters. 

12pm.  Lunchtime.  Preptime.  Naptime.  Our midday meal is usually purchased from the food truck lady or the 7-Eleven.  Just for the record, 7-Eleven is the healthy option, but food truck lady is the delightful option.  Also, our colleague Connie translated the food cart menu so now we can knowledgably order such dishes as "fatty awesome pork noodles", "trouty rice", and "magical makes you skinny soup".  Coniferous, we miss you dearly, but bau-bau lives on. 

1:30pm.  TLA class.  Aka, a bunch of teenagers practicing English in between their packed flirting schedules.  It's a rough life, kids.  Early on I expressed my devotion to dumplings.  Now, everytime they have a free writing assignment, guess what it's about?  Dumplings.  Always, dumplings.  I don't mind, but I feel that I'm getting a reputation.  Seriously, there's more to me than dumplings.  Like cheese.  And wine.  And wine and cheese.  Why does no one appreciate me for the complex glutton that I am?! 

5pm.  Dumpling dinner, because those damn kids brainwashed me into dumplings agian.  I never would have done it otherwise.  Really.  I swear.  It doesn't help matters that we have an amazing underground dumpling/potsticker place right outside our door.  5 kimchi, 5 garden vegetable, roughly a $1.50 USD.  But the heart disease?  Priceless.

Next up?  Tutoring.  At this point, I'm delirious.  I start holding up signs that say, "Read the question.  No, I wasn't kidding.  Read it again.  Really."  But I also liberally reference comic book movies, so our tutor-student bond remains in tact.

8pm/9:30pm.  Work is done.  Andi is tired. Andi says she's going to go home and sleep.  Or veg.  Or grade essays.  Or take over the world.  But definitely not go out.  Because that would just be crazy.  Crazy, I tell you.  Crazy.

I won't do it. I won't go out.  You can't make me.

No, I will not wear sunglasses at swanky bar at night.  That would just be ridiculous. 

Friends, this will all be over in a week.  Then my posts might start to make a bit more sense.  At the very least, they will be more food-oriented.  And the word on the street is, trips out of Taipei will happen.  For now, I leave you with the emblem of my month of July:  money, essays, and dorm beds.

  Mo' money, mo' problems.  Or mo' essays.  Or mo' dumplings.  Christ, I'm tired. 

"Oh, it's too over!" *Insert Asian giggle here*

Allow me to take a slight pause from rapturous descriptions of organs and bodily fluids to share my thoughts on the Taiwanese.  All guidebooks and reputable websites had informed me that the Taiwanese are some of the nicest people on earth, and that I should basically expect smiles and hugs wherever I go.  And while I certainly met my fair share of exuberantly happy locals, the saucy nail technicians and terrified children must be mentioned as well. 

I am not known for my "girly-ness".  I like a mani-pedi as much as the next person, but i won't go to extremes to make it happen.  And what with my crazy schedule and meager Chinese skills (not to mention initial poverty), suffice to say that my toes were looking a little ragged.  A bit wolf-like.  To tell the truth, my nails had grown into talons, and I had taken to climbing the palm trees at night for a little exercise.  (Of course, this is nothing compared to the Slavic-ness that my eyebrows have unleashed.  Seriously, my eyebrows have become sentient beings that reach out and attack innocent passers-by.  There may be multiple Taiwanese children stowed away up there.  Which would explain their potent fear of me.  But more on that later).  Anyway, it was clearly time to take action.  And so, with roommate in tow and Venus as my Chinese-speaking, trusty guide, I stepped into Cinderella nail salon.

Perhaps I should point out that all of my New York pedicures have occured in sketchy storefronts that vaguely resemble Taipei eateries.  I never go for anything fancy.  No nail art for me. Just make me look less like a werewolf, please, and that'll be that.  Cinderella nail salon had chandeliers, purple velvet, and individual TV's.  I should have realized then that I was in over my head.  I confidently instructed my friend that I wanted the cheapest pedicure possible, and then settled in to watch some Chinese soap operas (which are hilarious, by the way.  More poorly edited than Telenovelas, but perhaps not as shockingly awful as Indian music videos.)  My toes were then washed, trimmed, buffed, and perhaps drilled (there was a mystery tool involved.  Maybe they were sanded?)  As my fearsome nail technician was about to embark on the color phase she paused, held my foot up for the general assembly to see, and began chattering away in horrified Chinese.  I believe the rough translation goes something like this:

"Jesus Christ, you hairy white devil, what the hell is wrong with your feet?  You have dead skin on here from the cretaceous period.  Seriously, I can see a trilobite fossil right here on your heel.  Do you see this?  Do you understand?  Something must be done.  For the sake of my countrymen I cannot let you leave here like this.  My nail technician soul screams in protest.  Please, let me right this horrible wrong!"

This was then followed by a girlish Asian giggle and the English phrase, "It's too over!"

What could this mean?   Were my foot callouses actually beginning to cover the rest of my healthy, living foot?  Would I soon look like an extra from a Zombie flick?  (shout out to the Zombie Apocolypse!)  What exactly was "over"?  My pedicure?  Because of her revulsion?  My goodstanding as a female?  My life?!  My Chinese-speaking cohort calmly explained to me that this was a cute phrase used to describe anything that has gone to extremes.  Like my hunger, perhaps.  Or my unholy love for Kurt Weill.  I was not being kicked out of the plush paradise, but I was being informed that a serious foot scraping was about to happen.

Back my feet went into the fuschia foot wash.  When she felt that my skin had softened as much as could be reasonably hoped for, my ninja nail technician began to scrape, expoliate, and scour with a passion I have only heretofore seen exhibited by my tremedoudlsy clean roommate when faced with the crawling black mold in our shower/bathroom.  At my tiniest flinch she narrowed her eyes at me, clearly communicating that if dared to move, fidget, or otherwise interfere with this monumental task I would soon find that foot knife held to my throat.  Soon, sweat beaded her brow.  A tear in her own nail was dealt with by a summary ripping and spitting of the offending item across the room.  She flexed her arms to demonstrate her swiftly-developing muscle tone to her astonished co-workers.  Finally, she was done.  She grabbed my hand so that I could feel the new skin that had been excavated and gave me sly look with a slow nod which was clearly meant as a comment on my foolish lack of belief in her Asian foot prowess.

Now came time for the color.  She asked my friend if I had worn sandles. Of course I had not.  I had worn my slimy, nasty mary jane crocs, which were probably what had gotten me into this mess in the first place.  Ninja Nail Technician shook her head in disgust.  I would not be allowed to exit her establishment like this.  Someone would have to be sent out on a sandle run.  Of course this someone was my long-suffering roommate Linnea.  I offered to borrow her shoes and go myself, and she gave me a look that implied that not only would my horrific feet never be permitted to sully the sactity of her footwear, but that I would most likely awaken that night to find the offending extremeties soaking a preventative bath of bleach.  So off Linnea went on a hunt for the cheapest, least garishly offensive flipflops available at 11pm on a Saturday night in Ximen.  I was left to ponder my various sins. 

Though I certainly did not deserve it, the Taiwanese Goddess of the Foot smiled down upon me, and Linnea returned 15 minutes later with a pair of delightfully classy $6 flip flops.  The kind I would have bought myself under less pressured circumstances.  And so, trembling with gratitude, I walked my baby soft feet out of there, and headed directly to a club where they were trampled and covered with beer.  Here they are, slightly worse for wear, but still immensely improved thanks to the ministrations of one Ninja Nail Technician:

Yeah, they still kind of just look like my feet.  And I've rambled.  You'll have to wait until next time to hear about my coworker Dave's amazing family that insists upon buying us food anytime we enter the town limits of Taichung.  Or the children of Taiwan who watch in mystery, heads cocked to the side, food hanging out of their mouths, as I roll my sticky albino body down the street.  Until then, I leave you with:

Grilled nightmarket oysters covered in wasabi and happiness

A tranquil Taichung teahouse

And a noble goat.

I was horribley remiss in not posting last week.  It shall not happen again.  And next time, I'll share something more exciting that the saga of my gross pedicure (hopefully.  if not you'll just get a rant about GMAT students).

I will do anything for food, but I won't eat liver

It had to happen eventually.  I'm only surprised that it took this long.  Yes, after roughly a month of street food adventures, I finally had a bad meal in Taipei.  Up till now I've been remarkably successful in my campaign of "point and eat".  I wouldn't always know what I was in for, but things usually turned out alright.  And then I went up against the Vietnamese street-cart restaurant around the corner.  This was not my first visit.  I had previously enjoyed a lovely meal of grilled pork with my roommate Linnea, during which we noticed a diner next to us enjoying a vibrant curry.  Naturally I wanted to return to try it, and we thought we had identified the picture on the cart that would lead me to curry shangri-la.  Reader, it was not curry.  Not by a long shot. 

Let me set the scene: a sweaty, hungry, pasty white girl wanders down a dark alleyway, determined to feast on curry goodness.  Stray pets languidly walk by.  A small child is almost hit by a scooter, and his mother apologizes upon seeing that I almost went into cardiac arrest (apparently my delicate western sensibilities were the only things in danger).  I brush my gooey, wet hair back from my glistening, salty face as I arrive at my destination - the random Vietnamese hole-in-the-wall.  I should explain that the line between street food and restaurant food is extremely thin here in Taipei.  Your standard eating establishment consists of a sticky, poorly outifitted room at the back, and a food cart of varying dimensions at the front.  This is not a problem, as the food is usually excellent and cheap, and apparently I have very fluid standards of hygiene.  So I approach the Vietnamese cart-restaurant, utter one of my three Chinese phrases ("ni hao!") and with a huge grin on my albino-esque face proceed to point at the item I believe to be curry.  My smile falters as I watch the proprietor start to fill a bowl with a dishwater brown broth, some strips of something white, and huge brown chunks of a mysterious substance.  Oh well, I say to myself.  I guess I just ordered some sort of tofu and vegetable soup.  How bad could it be?  And I walked home with my bucket of nastiness. 

Once home I assembled my meal.  When ordering a noodle soup to go, it is customary to receive two plastic bags: one filled with broth, one filled with noodles.  Naturally I appreciate the concern for proper noodle texture.  I dumped the noodles into one of our two bowls, and then poured the soup over it.  Slowly my situation becomes clear:  those huge brown chunky things?  They have a slick exterior and a porous red interior.  They can be only one thing.  Clearly I have ordered liver soup.  I throw up a bit in my mouth.

It cannot be denied that I am an adventurous eater.  There are few things I don't like, and fewer things that I won't at least try.  But liver just freaks me the hell out.  It looks nasty, smells bad, and the texture is just wrong.  Squishy.  Evil.  And at the moment this textural oddity is compounded by the fact that these immense cubes of liver have been simmering in broth for god knows how long.  i "slice" into one with my chopsticks.  I try to steel myself for the first taste.  I can do this, I tell myself.  I am a strong, confident woman who has enjoyed organ meat cooked in a variety of ways.  I will not be conquered by nightmarket soup.  Really, if Abraham Lincoln could save our country from vampires, I could certainly eat liver.

But you know, maybe it would be a good idea to ease into it by trying the broth first.  And the noodles.  And the tofu.  And the vegetables.  And the random white strips of something.  Maybe the real way to prepare yourself to eat liver is to eat everything else first so that you're no longer hungry.  So I explore the other elements of the soup.  It was, how shall I put it, awful.  Terrible.  Really, really bad.  The huge hunk of fried tofu tasted like wet sponge.  The broth was simultaneously bland and yet...somehow....bitter.  And metallic.  And wrong.  And those random white strips of something?   They were reminiscent of soggy potato chips.  I could not go on.  I had to admit defeat.  I re-packaged my Vietnamese surprise and hightailed it back to the nightmarket where I soothed my sorrows in the only fitting way: deep-fried egg fritter, extra la.

This is one of my favorite nightmarket snacks: a disc of dough is dropped into a vat of boiling vegetable oil, quickly followed by a freshly cracked egg.  Egg meets dough, and the two perform a graceful, greasy dance in the tub of hot liquid.  After a moment's rest, my egg fritter was slathered with a gingery soy sauce and the requisite la.  I took my prize home and erased the memory of the terrifying liver soup from my mind.

And that would have been the end of my story, had I not wandered onto the internet looking for a picture of this horrid liver concoction to give my tale a bit more authority.  This is how I discovered that liver had no role in that meal.  No, the white strips of randomness were slices of steamed pork loaf (*shiver*), and the huge brown globs of mystery meat were, in fact, chunks of congealed pig's blood (*vomit*).  Sometimes a little knowledge can be a terrible thing.  And I may be off mystery meat for a while.