The
loneliest and most depressing Christmas of my life. Everyone was either gone or had family visiting with
them. I spent the week, actually
what felt like the whole month, still rather sick and holed up. Don’t remember much except school,
work, tutoring. Christmas was just
like any other day. School was
pretty quiet but we still had 5 people in class. I gave Teacher a box of chocolates and card, dropped off a
2-lb chocolate tin at FSE for the staff, and gave little gifts to Dr. C, YuJung,
ChiYuan, JiauJu and XiangJuin at work.
The day before YuJung, ChiYuan and JiauJu had each given me Christmas
cards with written Chinese messages I had a hard time making out (I was able to read the last sentence of
YuJung’s which said, “[If you can read all of this, your Chinese is very, very
good!]”). Christmas cards, or any
cards, here are so cute and elaborate—little cutouts, dangling and glued-on
things and very delicate designs.
They’re cheap too, like 30 cents a card. I’d brought a bunch of now-rather-crappy looking cards from
home, not knowing they’d be so easy to buy here, and embarrassed, I hardly used
any of them.
At night,
made a bunch of phone calls to friends and family at home. It wasn’t so bad. But next year Christmas will be great,
made all the better just by remembering this lonely one.
Oh
one good thing happened this month.
I’d mentioned to Bill that I wanted to join a gym but they were all
expensive, and he said he knew someone at CA Fitness and would talk to them. He called me up one night and said they
had a special for 50% off, 1500NT/month, and I could cancel when I was going
back to the US. But I had to sign
up “right now, tonight”. That is a
totally good deal so I ran over and signed up. My first “real” (non-university) gym ever and it is
NICE. It’s basically like walking
into a club with thumpy music and flashy lighting, and all the machines are in
front of rows of flatscreen TVs showing different cable channels. The whole place is quite clean and
westernized. Going there feels
like an escape, the closest thing to home. This is the best thing that’s happened to me all year.
The only annoying thing is I’ve tried a couple classes and though the
teachers throw in some English, I can’t understand because their accents are so
bad. Like, I once joined a step
class and the teacher, a young pretty thing with the worst Cantonese accent
I’ve ever heard, kept going “Rivers dreidel!” Yea, dreidel like the Jewish top. Huh? Oh,
“REVERSE STRADDLE.” Then there was
the kickbox guy: “Airbow,
airbow!” It took awhile to realize
he meant, “Elbow, elbow!” I hate
to be mean, but…OK, I’m mean.