My name is Olivia. This is the wild and the wicked, as well as the lovely and the passionate, dreams and realities from Taipei, Taiwan and worlds beyond. These are my stories, this is my world, live it and love it with me.
Guys, I’m sick, snotting like one of my 2 year old kindy kids, I’ve no doubt caught hand, foot, and mouth disease and will require quarantine for 4 weeks, possibly surgery, and my right foot will require amputation. I’m accepting flowers. Anyway, my rambles are quite obviously lacking my best crude humor. Next time. For now, a love story about dumplings and coca cola.
Dumplings are my kryptonite, goddamn. Do you know what a dumpling is? Well, if you don’t you should immediately come to Asia if only to have 1 dumpling. Every second stand sells dumplings, you get 6 for less than $1 CAD. I could eat for an entire day on $3, actually. I get pork, mainly because it’s what I learned to say in Chinese first. In Chinese, pork sounds like jew ro. And you remember that because Jew’s don’t eat pork. I picture these little elderly Taiwanese women waking up with the sun, gathering on a street corner with their milk teas and sporting their newest rice hats, sitting themselves in front of giant blobs of seasoned pork with onions, and rolling thousands of these teeny tiny so goddamn adorable little dumplings, just for me. They’re served to you with this soy sauce concoction; flavored with garlic, ginger, green onions, chili peppers, and vinegar. Beats out poutine when you’re hammered. Deep fried octopus (not to be confused with squid/calamari) with hot sauce is a close second. Frank’s hot sauce and it would most definitely be first.
Last night I went to this bar, Copa. Just opened. Logo uses almost the same font as Coda in Montreal, so this warms my heart. To get to Copa, you go into this pizzeria, which is a trip all on it’s own because finding Pizza in Taiwan is an elaborate mission comparable to finding a slushie machine in the Sahara, and finding it without corn and raisin toppings is triumph even more great. In the back of this pizzeria, you approach a Coke machine..this is when you start to question your friends. THEN YOU PRESS THE ORANGE FANTA BUTTON AND THE MAGICAL COKE MACHINE EXPLODES WITH GLITTER AND FIREWORKS AND OPENS AT WHICH POINT BEHIND IT A STEEP AND NARROW CANDLE LIT STAIRCASE IS REVEALED. Holy Nancy Drew. Guys, I’m not kidding, well the fireworks bit was a bit much, but still. Follow these stairs down and you enter this swanky hip little club playing funk and retro, where you wait twenty minutes to sip drinks with fancy names like Mai Tai or martini’s with a cucumber garnish (cucumber’s are green like olives, so it’s all the same in Taiwan, right?). Much fun. I tested out my Chinese getting home after Copa last night. Lou-ess-e-fou (Roosevelt) the cabbie got, but the easy part, Shi Da, not so much. I had to call my Taiwanese friend and hand the phone to the cabbie so she could tell him how to get me home. She said Shi Da and the cab driver hollers Oohhhh, Shi Da, Shi Da… How she said it differently from me, my foreign ears can’t pick up.
I named my first kid this week. Chinese kids get family names like Shao Hay, little guy might have trouble blending within our English world, right? So every kids first English teacher gives them an English name. I named this wee tot Maddie, because she has really big cheeks, for Madeline Armstrong.
Kid say the darndest things, the ones that can talk, that is. I’m tutoring this boy, he is 10 and his name is Leon. Smart kid, without a doubt my most enjoyable student. He’s recently been to California, he tells me, his brother was born there so to gain American status. I guess this a quite common happening here. He continues to tell me how his English needs to be perfect (remember, a 10 year old boy with the most grave and solemn expression I have ever seen on a kid is telling me this) so that as soon as China attacks, his family can relocate to America with out any trouble. I fucking died, choked on my lychee, kumquat, and watermelon blended I don’t even know, and died.
God bless.