Wednesday 10/2/02 Visitors at Work and Patient Bartenders
Gary and Kate came to ShiDa after my class to meet me for lunch, we went
to a Korean place on YongKangJie.
It wasn’t super, but then I’ve never had good beef here yet and maybe
I’m just not used to it; it’s tougher.
My cooking teacher says beef in Taiwan isn’t as tender since they don’t
kill the cow until it works until it’s old then dies. As opposed to the U.S., where they shoot the newborn calf up
with hormones and force-feed it so it blows up into a full-sized cow in three
days and is fattened well from sitting around a crowded pen all day with no
room to walk away from its own feces.
Yum!
We
walked down ShinYi to catch a bus and suddenly Kate yelped and pointed and Gary
did too, “Look!” They pointed at a
sign over a store that I couldn’t read so I said, “What?” They said “Electronics!” I said, “Don’t you love how you guys
point at signs waiting for my reaction and I don’t have any? Because I’m illiterate!” There were three electronic stores in a
row and at one we found a really small Philips iron for 1390, but I’ve never
bought an iron before so I wouldn’t know a good deal. Tried to bargain but the girl said no and Kate said you
can’t at these places, even though Gary had said to try anyway. She rang me up and we looked at the
receipt, said 1300. Kate said
“Eh?” looked at me, grabbed me and
said “[Quick, let’s get out of here.]”
They came with me to NTU hospital to introduce me to her cousin Johnny
who works in a lab there, he’s on the 7th floor working in a
microbio lab so he was mixing chemicals that smelled bad in a depressing looking
lab with tiny space. They all came
up to my floor which he said is much nicer and said wow, he doesn’t have his
own desk and PC like I do. JiauJu
didn’t look so happy to see them come in because she was preparing for her
lecture in 1 hour, but she still brought us all chairs, and HsiangGiun brought
us all cups of really strong SuanMei juice that everyone but me forced
down. I let them use the internet
a bit, Kate was still looking for plane tickets online but doesn’t know yet if
AIT will have her visa done in time. Those idiots. Gary wondered if he should go there waving his American
passport and try to argue for her.
I agreed Yes, and definitely use English.
When they left I gulped down coffee and went to the SAS/SPSS class,
still dozed off badly, and tried to edit an English paper by a PhD student,
LeHsin, who Dr C had brought over yesterday. He warned me her English writing was really, really
bad. I read the abstract and it
was very good, but I realized he must have edited that already, because after
that it abruptly shot downhill.
Returning
from class, I looked out a window walking down a different hallway on the 14th
floor and saw a jogging track and field outside, and tennis courts. Hm! I asked JiauJu about it, she said they’re all the NTU
hospital’s and we can use them, but doesn’t recommend I go when it’s too dark.
I’m
getting really out of shape, flabby, and gaining back the fat I lost.
Gary
and Kate dropped by my apartment around 9:30, just then Stella called and said
“Hey it’s Wednesday, chill out drinking night,” as if this was just common
knowledge, though it was news to me, and reported that they were all going to
an all-you-can-drink for 400NT place.
Yikes. THAT was considered
“chill out”? She called a couple
minutes later and the venue was changed to People (a.k.a. Shintori with the
weird door), I said I’d call Ginger so we could maybe go together, but I wasn’t
sure. Gary and Kate were not up
for it. When they left, I wavered
but I convinced myself I should go, and be social.
Ginger and I shared a cab over, and Stella and Chris were waiting
outside. We went in and I expected
a couple of the guys she’d mentioned, but it was a huge 8-person mob crowded
around a table. Ginger and I were
like Whoa, but I said we shouldn’t be surprised, really. After all we were talking about Stella
and Christina.
We took small seats at the corner and Stella said she felt like going to
the bar with just us, so we did and after awhile Eric and Asian John came
over. Eric said “So we talk less
in class than we do at bars.” I
said Not true and asked why he wasn’t drinking, he said he’s been studying GRE
all day. I commented he was
studying pretty hard, I don’t think I studied half as hard for it. He’s taking Princeton Review for one
thing. I think I remember buying a
Barron’s book a month or so before the test, then finally opening it about two
weeks before the test, and doing some practice problems and playing the games
on the CD. Anyway, he said it’s gotten
harder, and that the reading passages are so “convoluted.” We chatted about our class, and we
agreed it’s got an interesting dynamic and the cliques are forming.
Stella, Ginger and I stayed at the bar to ask the bartenders what drinks
they recommended, they gave Stella a purple ice drink (DzeShueiJing) and Ginger
a very strong-flavored Kahlua with peppermint liqueur (the strong part) and rum
which they lit on fire, put out, and then it looked like soy sauce. We watched each person try it and grimace. Stella kept egging the bartenders to give
us free drinks, finally just flat out asked them, in both English and Chinese
and even told me to ask them in Taiwanese. They were very patient and humored us but wouldn’t give in. One even let Stella talk on his headset
microphone. She said, “Hello? Hello?” and we saw a waitress on the
floor asking into her mike, “[Who is this?]”
Finally we wandered back to the couches and looked at the bathroom,
which was full of mirrors (I said it must be a pain to clean), Stella claimed
she was very drunk and Ginger now buzzed.
When they realized I was fine because my screwdriver was weak, they quickly
told the bartenders, who then added as much vodka as was OJ left. We stopped back at the bar to take a picture with them before
leaving, one’s BauNan (25) and the other Jason (24).
It
was a good time. Again we were the
first to leave. How do they all do
it? I guess when I was younger I
was like that too, and I can’t imagine it anymore—staying up all night, getting
by on hardly any sleep. Well, I
think I am one of the only ones here doing anything else besides ShiDa classes…