About this blog

I am terrible at using chopsticks, no matter who shows me, and no matter how hard I try. I was born left-handed but the nuns beat me until I learned to write with my right hand, and anything requiring a lot of dexterity remains a challenge. Maybe months and months of living in Taiwan will help me get it... or I will lose lots of weight and probably will accidentally leave behind a few forks. It's all good.

Tuesday, September 14, 2010

Not the way to lose weight

I've had two days in a row now that do NOT represent a way to lose weight. C'est la vie! Sunday, I got up and had the normal breakfast offered by the suites.
I'm going to stop taking pictures of this breakfast pretty soon. It's damn boring, is what it is, though I am grateful for the free meal.

Instead of laying around all morning, I had a MISSION... get to the RT-Mart to go grocery shopping! This involved a five-minute walk to the MRT, a three stop ride to the end of the Xindian line, and then a longish walk in the sweltering heat of the noontime hour. I'd say the walk was about 20 minutes long, given that I walked five minutes in the wrong direction before realizing that the lane numbers were going down, not up, which meant I was going the wrong way. (Street numbering here is amazingly logical; I love the system here as it makes things VERY easy to find!)

I saw an interesting sign across from the Xindian MRT stop:
Note the swastika, used in the old cycle of life meaning, I"m sure, though I can't confirm that since I don't know what the Chinese says. However, it was in a tiny little park.

The RT-Mart was great; kind of a K-Mart/Fred Meyer hybrid. Some of everything, very cheap for the most part. I bought a juice strainer for draining small quantities of ramen for NT$19 ($0.59) and a vegetable peeler for about 30 cents US, for example. I also got some carrots, a bunch of yogurt drinks, Hey Song diet sasparilla soda that is quite frankly, AWFUL, some of my favorite Orion Choco-Pies, some imported Prego spaghetti sauce, and a few other things. Grand total about US$30.

While there, I perused the extensive Oreo selection and thought of Lisa:
But I didn't buy any. The one snack I did take a chance on proved to be EXCELLENT:


Golden Cheese Doritos. OMG they are SO good and I will miss them when I come home.

I lugged all my groceries home and put things away, then quickly changed out of my sweaty clothes and rounded up the games I'd brought, so that I could go up to Witch House to meet up with the Forumosan game players at 2 pm. 

I took the MRT towards town to Gongguan exit 2, National Taiwan University exit, and walked to Witch House, again, easy to find thanks to the brilliant system of roads, sections, lanes, and alleys. Inside Witch House, there were tons of people playing games; clearly, this was The Place if you wanted to play games! Unfortunately, my bravery ran out after introducing myself to three separate tables of people playing games, none of whom spoke English. I didn't bother with the guys playing Magic, because I had no interest in playing Magic, to be honest. It seems that the Forumosan game crew is flaky and probably nobody was there that day, but I left feeling pretty bummed out.

I walked back towards the MRT; it's a great lively neighborhood right across from the university, so it has everything a starving student needs... and staggered into Yogurt Art, deciding if I was gonna feel sorry for myself at least I shouldn't also feel hungry (it was 3 pm already!) While eating my yummy frozen raspberry yogurt, I heard a family speaking English with their three year old and chatted with them a bit. Then I walked back to the MRT via the university grounds.

They had these really groovy street pavers; see how sparkly they were in the sun?


They are cooler in person, as each little glint from the sidewalk is unbelievably bright. On the major road's sidewalk next to the MRT station is truly the largest bicycle parking lot I have ever seen.

It stretches on for blocks, literally, with bikes parked as close to one another as possible. Closer to the MRT station itself, the bikes are actually parked double-decker, another thing I've never seen before. Am I sheltered, or is this kind of unusual?

Do you see the big mean looking clouds? Yeah. I jumped on the MRT and hurried home to Qizhang. I walked directly back to the suites, and two minutes after I walked inside, the sky opened up and it rained really hard for 20 minutes, Georgia-style. I was glad that I left when I did!

Supper was the usual... cooked then drained ramen with spaghetti sauce.

Yesterday was my Monday... and it was a Monday. I didn't set an alarm because I've been getting up on time, and that was a mistake. I woke up at 7:41, way too late to get dressed, eat breakfast, and make the 8 am bus to work. So I set my sights on the 9 am shuttle instead, and had breakfast. You know what that looks like. I didn't bother to photograph it again.

I drank my protein shake on the shuttle on the way to work, and then had a Choco-Pie/Coke Zero snack mid-morning. We all went down to the cafeteria for lunch together at 12:40; it was unusually crowded but we queued up for the NT$65 buffet. I got chicken(?) in tomato sauce, a piece of roasted chicken, some white rice, and what looked like beef stew. I didn't like the chicken in tomato sauce and I'm still not sure it was chicken, the piece of roasted chicken was tasty but hard to eat with chopsticks (people just pick it up and rip off pieces with their teeth but I haven't been able to make myself do that, yet), and the beef stew would have been great if it wasn't so overloaded with five spice. Oh well. I picked at everything and it's not going to kill me to be a little hungry after a $2 lunch.

Back at my desk, I worked away diligently at the style guide I'm creating for my project from all the feedback we've received from that customer over time. The fourth PM, Richard, who I hadn't met before, stopped by with a piece of Starbucks cheesecake. It's amazing how that hits the spot at around 3 pm, but I can't make a habit of it. :-)

At around 5:30, Elen invited me to go with the crew for the daily 7-Eleven dinner run. The company gives us each NT$75 to spend there or in the cafeteria for working through dinner. OK. I discovered something delicious, and it will keep me fat if I make a habit out of it... LOL
The aforementioned Doritos are part of this dinner, but the best thing here is the Hot Snack fried chicken at NT$45, heated by one of the 7-Eleven workers (they were microwaving food for nearly everyone, in a bank of five microwaves!) That breaded fried chicken is awesome. I could eat that twice a day... especially at $1.50 a go... but I will never lose any weight while here if I do. Still, it is awesome to have some easy, cheap comfort food identified.

I worked for a while longer and then packed it up to ride the bus home with Joe, Jamie, and Hugo. Once home, I was still hungry and made myself the standard-issue ramen supper, and tried one of the little strawberry things I got at the grocery store for dessert. I thought they would be nice pieces of cake with strawberry gelatin frosting like we get at Mandarin Buffet, but it was just strawberry jello. Yummy anyway.

Grand total lost in two days after this orgy of eating: 1 lb. Oh well!

6 comments:

  1. The sign in the park seems to have a "sauwastika" on it rather than a "swastika". (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sauwastika). Seems that the swastika and the mirror image, sauwastika, have implied religious meanings, but what those meanings or differences are is unclear.

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  2. It means the restaurant is vegetarian.

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  3. The swastika in the picture is a Buddhist symbol. The words at the top is the name of the Buddhist temple. Next line down is the swastika. Next line down (black characters) tells everyone that this temple has adopted this traffic island in order to "green" it and that the temple is responsible for the vegetation planted on it.

    BTW, all this talk about food is making me hungry. And Hey-Song sarsparilla is one of my favourite soft drinks (but not the diet version)!

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  4. this is mind blowing post thanks for sharing

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