Don’t Go Funk with my 氣

Somebody’s been funkin’ with my qi.

Twelve days and counting ’til the end of my Taiwan saga and I’m looking at it two ways: Either someone up there wants me to leave now or he/she doesn’t want me to leave at all.

Evidence? It’s been a rather series of unfortunate events for me around here lately.

1. Lost my phone
2. Lost my credit card…again (that one hurt)
3. Got stuck on public transportation one day for much longer than I had intended
4. Stomach problems every other day…I’m scared to eat food now because of it, but I’m always hungry. Mostly annoying because it has been putting a cramp in my last-minute-to-do plans which include eating every last weird Taiwanese dish I can. I’ve also had to cancel a few outings with friends and other travel plans.
5. Searching in vain every half hour on craigslist.org for school-year housing in DC, but no renters seem to want to respond to my inquiries.

Ay caramba. Obviously, life isn’t so bad right now. Just taking it slow, like summer should be, studying a bit more of Chinese and trying to enjoy the final days here. For example, I watched a couple of Taiwanese films during the past two days: “The Wedding Banquet” (“喜宴”) and “Eat Drink Man Woman” (“食物男女”), both directed by Ang Lee back in the early ’90s. Would highly recommend both.

In the meantime, I will keep trying to get my life force back on track.

And, I thought I would share, I have also determine the two quintessential necessities for keeping cool in Taipei heat:

1. Cold noodles 涼麵
There’s the homemade kind and the super-handy 7-11/generic convenient store brand. Either, IMO, is extremely tasty! One bowl makes a great breakfast, lunch, dinner or midnight snack.

and

2. Watermelon juice 西瓜汁
I swear I must drink at least two 12-16oz. cups of these per day. Always ordered with no extra sugar (nasty), just straight-up pulverized watermelon for me. One cup will cost between $20-40NT. Extremely refreshing–and not to mention healthy–on a hot day!

3. …Well, honestly, AC doesn’t really hurt either.

Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner, or Mid-night snack. For me, this one was breakfast enjoyed at Linguang’s brand-spanking-newly-refurbished Family Mart. It’s a pretty sexy-looking establishment at the moment and best of all, it has at least seven different varieties of cold noodles!