Pronounced: f?i j?
Traditional: ??
Means: airplane

Okay, so from a cats-eye view, there’s been a whole lot of WEIRD activity going on around here lately. The big cats have been extra busy…the weirdest thing has probably been all the cleaning! That’s when I really knew that something was up….usually, they’ll do the dishes a few times a week and sweep the floor every once in a while. But not this week….noooooo. They’ve been moving around furniture, doing extra laundry, sweeping, scrubbing, mopping….they even brought in this orange scary monster with a trunk like an elephant to help out with the cleaning. That thing reached under the bed and the dresser and sucked my dust bunny collection into oblivion.

So I started eavesdropping and paying closer attention to see if I could figure out what was behind all of this unusual activity. Here’s what I found out…and boy are my hackles raised!

The big cats are taking off to some wonderful magic place called “Cat-nada” for a few months and they’re not planning on taking me with them. I don’t get it…with a name like that, it seems like the kind of place I could enjoy.

But that’s not the worst of it. They’ve made arrangements with “The Boss” for me to stay at his house. If they think I’m living with Doo-doo, the hairless wonder cat, for two months….they’re off their rockers. He may be some kind of fancy-schmancy show cat, but he wouldn’t recognize a good haiku if it came up and bit him on his hairless rump.

So, I’m devising a plan. Actually, I’ve already devised a few…and the big cats have already foiled a couple of them.

Here goes:

Plan A – “Fake Sick”: Help out with the cleaning. “Accidentally” ingest some of the cleaning products. This should make me sick enough that the big cats will feel bad, cancel their trip, and stay here to nurse me back to health. And beg for forgiveness for trying to leave in the first place.

Unfortunately, they foiled this one. They noticed that my paws got coated with the cleaning stuff and that I was starting to lick it. So not only did they wreck my plan, but they also subjected me to the ultimate humiliation…they bathed me!

Plan 2 – “Look Cute”: I discovered that my apartment won’t be empty while the big cats are gone. Some other big cat is moving in and was scheduled to bring her bags to the apartment today. So, I planned to look extra cute (I even washed behind my ears, and pretended that I was sleeping on the couch when she arrived), calm, and cuddly in hopes that she might offer to keep me while the big cats are away.

Unfortunately, this one was foiled too. Apparently, the new big cat is “not really a cat person.” She likes DOGS and BIRDS!!! and she doesn’t like cats because they kill birds. In a way, I’m glad this plan didn’t work out…I’m not sure I could live with someone loony enough to prefer a brainless bird over a cat.

Plan C – “Sneaky Stowaway”: This plan is simple. Climb in the suitcases while they’re packing, and hope they don’t notice. Then when they reach Cat-nada — Surprise!!! Chou chou’s here!

Foiled again. Not only did they notice when I tried to hide in the suitcase, but then they proceeded to pack the suitcases so tight that there’s no room for me. Dangit.

Plan 4 – “Nine Inch Nails”: (haven’t gotten to try this yet, but I think it’ll work) It seems to me that if the big cats don’t have suitcases, they can’t fly anywhere. After I finish this post, I think I’ll test my claws on their luggage and see if I can shred it to smithereens before dawn. Wish me luck.

I’m not sure that I can handle going to live with a cat that has a mullet. But if plan 4 doesn’t work and I’m stuck with Doo doo…I can take comfort in several things which are definite advantages in the competition for attention.

1. I’m cute.
2. I’m still a kitten.
3. I have all of my fur.

Pronounced: xi� y?
Means: rainy

The last week has been hot and super humid, meaning we sweat the second we step outside. The 5 minute walk to school is bad. But your sweat dries whenever you go upstairs in the school where the A.C. works and the classrooms are, so it dries on you repeatedly throughout the day. My forehead broke out a couple days ago.

We were at the after-meeting lunch today, standing around with a crowd from the young people’s group and the adult English class. One girl started a conversation – in front of everybody – with, “Oh where did you get so many pimples?” (pointing to her forehead). I told her (and everyone else) that it’s been hot, blah blah blah, and she kept on about it, asking me for more explanation before ending the conversation with, “Well, then maybe when you come back from Canada you will be handsome again!” (with a warm, sincere, friendly smile). She really didn’t mean anything by it at all.

It was rather funny. It’s not the first time someone has asked us something point-blank that you would never expect to hear in our culture (little kids and funny old people aside). And they do it with totally innocent expressions on their faces. It’s hard not to look surprised at the time; we don’t have as-ready responses to questions we never expect to get, even though we were warned long before stepping foot in Asia.

So here’s your fair warning: in Taiwan, acne, age, weight, body/facial features, income, why you don’t have children, and when you’re going to have children are all fair game for public dinner table conversation.

熱 (热) means hot. The heat index today was 42 (that’s 107 for you Americans). We leave here for the airport Wednedsay morning and arrive in Canada… Wednedsay morning, but 5 hours earlier. We’ll be teaching more Asian kids English in Canada for a month, have three weeks off, and then return to Taiwan. We’ll miss a lot of people and things, but not the heat!

Pronounced: sh?ng r� ku�i l�
Simplified: ????
Means: Happy Birthday

Chou chou here…

I’m forgoing my nightly routine of shredding toilet paper and chasing dust bunnies around the apartment. Now that the big cats have wandered off to bed, the computer is mine, so I’ll take this chance to post some birthday greetings!

During the hours when the big cats disappear every day, I mostly sit around with my eyes shut thinking up new haiku to pass the hours. These are for the tallest big cat:

Fluttering, cats melt.
Eagerness melts the woman.
A hunting spice walks.

Happy hostile cat.
Calm blue oceans create waves.
Psychology nut.

Happy Birthday!

Someone made a joke in Chinese and we actually got it. It only involved one word, so that helped. We were with the young people’s group at Zhi-ling’s family’s apartment, and they played this game where everyone tapes a piece of paper to their back. Then everyone writes the qualities of each person on their paper (like ‘caring,’ ‘leader,’ etc.) and after each person shares what the group had written about them. It was all very warm and fuzzy. We were about half-way around the room when we got to one guy who looked at his paper and said, with a straight face “帥” – which can mean “handsome” or “hot” (帥哥 is the noun). He then acted like he was reading his list, saying “帥” for every other word. He pulled it off well and everyone laughed and we did to, and I realized, “Hey, we actually got that!” One word down, a couple dozen-thousand more to go.
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No doubt you’ll walk away from this paragraph a changed person. We get white carrots, called 蘿蔔, in every other bowl of soup. They’re not bad, and are apparently full of vitamins. But it seems there’s a cultural disagreement in the produce section. We call luó bó “white carrots,” but they call carrots “red luó bó” (紅蘿蔔). Who’s right? I hope this doesn’t keep you up at night.
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Wai-guo-ren’s New Groove. In Taiwan, when people clap to music they clap on 1 and 3, not 2 and 4 like Westerners. We’re so used to drummers hitting the snare on two and four so we clap with it, but not here. It’s weird because it’s so automatic, but we are regularly thrown off our groove several times every Sunday.
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This is my seventh day in a row without coffee. We have it – I’m just trying to prove to myself that I don’t need it to function day to day. That, and I want the caffeine effect on my system to be good and potent right before our next term papers are due.

Pronounced: d� b� zi w�i gu� r�n
Literally: big nose out country person
Means: big nose foreigner, as in, “Look at that big nose foreigner!”

Just for fun we had a little “what did you do today” conversation in class on Wednesday.

This is Nini (click here for her blog). She’s one of our Level 4 students and just turned 10 in this March. Aside from regular grade 4 and three nights a week at PEI, she takes piano, clarinet, flute, Japanese lessons, and I forget what sport. She usually shows up at PEI two hours early to do her Chinese homework before scarfing down some food and starting our two-hour English class at 7pm. She is perpetually exhausted and gets mediocre grades. Last class she slept on her desk during break instead of playing with the other kids. She hopes to get reincarnated as an American. Although I find that appalling (the American part, not the reincarnation =), I can hardly blame her.

Her parents were both famous actors in Taiwan. Her father is now a politician and her mother is a radio personality – a high profile and upperclass family. Our other students have seen her mom in TV commercials. Most people in Taipei know their names.

Her father wanted boy, but he got three daughters instead. They named Nini’s youngest sister 娣娣. She’s named this because 娣娣 is pronounced exactly the same as the affective term of address for “little brother”: 弟弟 (siblings often call each other “older sister” or “younger brother”). The only difference is that the symbol for ‘female’ (女) is added to the characters for ‘little brother’ (弟). When her name is written you can tell it refers to a girl, but not when spoken.

Like the woman who was passionate in her belief that the father in The Parable of the Lost Son was wrong, Nini and her sister are more blips on the cultural radar; just the first few strokes of a massive picture we’re slowly painting in our minds of what it’s like to live here.