Does it have any meat in it?

I ate pigs blood last night.

I know that sounds disgusting and impossible all at the same time.

We went out in Taipei for another teacher's birthday last night and ended up at this club called Pasoul. (Pasoul sucks by the way. Stay far away.)

Afterward we're sitting out in front of the venue on some steps waiting around to make sure we didn't forget anyone. We're getting a lot better at this whole going out in groups and not leaving people behind thing.

There were two street food stands outside: one had the best smelling sausage in the world (maybe it was the slightly buzzed appetite) and one had other stuff... including pigs blood, but we didn't know that yet.

Essentially this is a Taiwanese delicacy (as I understand it at least). Ours was congealed and then mixed with rice. It was in a little block on a stick like you would see stinky tofu or pretty much anything else you buy at a street vendor.

The funny part is that my roommate, who is a vegetarian, was the one who ordered it. She went up to the stand and asked if there was any meat in it. The woman said no.

I guess that was technically true.

People here don't seem to understand the point of being a vegetarian. You just don't eat things that generally require you to kill the animal first. Somehow, I think blood falls into this category.

My roommate bought one and was talking about how it was so good and asked if I wanted a bite.

Me: Katie, does it have meat?
Katie: I don't think so. I asked the lady.
Me: Screw it. Why not?
Katie: It's really good.
Me: It's OK except for that weird gooey texture at the end. The rice really makes it edible.
Graham: Can I have some.

Katie and Graham ran off to buy another one and were halfway through it when Carson informed them that is was, in fact, congealed pigs blood on a stick. I kind of knew it was right after I ate it, but I didn't want to say anything that would freak her out.

She seemed to take it pretty well.

Today, we're going to Bobo's for her birthday (SO MANY DECEMBER BIRTHDAYS, OMG!) and then I think we're going to Taipei. I think the idea is to eat, drink and shop our way through the city. Pictures to come!

Welcome to McDonalds. May I help you?

I took 15 children between the ages of 8 and 11 to McDonalds tonight.

Apparently after lesson 65 in the red book, we get to switch things up a bit and take the kids off the McDs so they can have the experience of speaking English to someone outside of a school. It's all well and good if the people at McDs actually speak English.

The girl behind the counter did a fairly decent job. She kept saying "big" instead of "large" when she was asking the kids what size french fries they wanted. And I didn't realize that McDs here has spicy chicken (think KFC style chicken) and you can tell them if you want a chicken wing or a drumstick...

I didn't teach the kids about that before we went so there was a momentary panic where we ended up switching to Chinese for all of 30 seconds. Luckily there wasn't anyone there to yell at me for it.

Other things to note:

My roommate makes awesome stir-fry.

I'm in full Xmas swing. We have this tiny and adorable little Christmas tree. I also want to go and buy tons of Christmas presents but I have no idea what to buy for most people.

I know what to get my nieces. What should I get the adults in my family?

Ni zai zuo shenme?

So I'm sure it may have crossed some of your minds that I haven't posted any pictures in a really long time.

I stopped being a little shutter bug when I lost the USB cable to my camera and realized that no matter how many pictures I took, I couldn't get them off of my camera. That's really just an excuse though considering my memory card can hold something like 1000 photos.

Anyway, I thought that since nothing all that interesting has happened, I would just put up photos from Thanksgiving, plus a few extra random things.

Enjoy.

Be looking forward to a lot more of these. The rest of this month (and by month I mean the next 17 days!!!) is going to be extremely busy as I get ready to go home for Christmas. We have three birthdays and tons of fun things to look forward to, including a week of Christmas parties in our classes!

Of course the vegetarian took care of roasting the turkey.

I made 7 pies. I made all of the crusts from scratch and all but two
of the fillings from my own recipes. Goodness, I love pie.

Two apple pies.

One cherry pie.

One pecan pie. (My favorite!)

One blueberry pie.

And two pumpkin pies.

We also peeled and mashed 54 pounds of potatoes.

OK, now for a couple of random photos. I've talked about the events leading up to one of them already. I bought a rotisserie chicken from Costco a couple of weeks ago when and when I was trying to cut the wing off, I realized the head was tucked underneath it.

Brace yourself.

I am so not a fan of my food looking back at me.

Then there was the day I went shopping in Taipei with Tess. When we got to Ximending there were all these people dressed in what can only the described as purple body condoms... and they danced.

This was a Yahoo advertisement best described as a flashmob.

Is it really December?

Just a real quick post since I've been procrastinating.

We had Thanksgiving on Sunday. It was a lot of work, but it was so good. It made me feel a little better too. I just love Thanksigiving so much and it was really weird not being home for it.

I made seven pies from scratch. We had two turkeys, an amazing amount of homemade mac 'n' cheese (with over two pounds of sharp cheddar and parmesan cheeses in it), 5 cups of homemade cranberry sauce and 54 pounds of mashed potatoes. Joslyn and David made green bean casserole and cornbread. Katie made sweet potatoes.

I really don't think I could have thought of anything else we needed. It was a great dinner.

But now, it is Dec. 1!

I cannot believe it is already December. Twelve more days and it will be my 6-month anniversary of getting here. Twenty more days and I hop on a plane to head home for the Christmas and New Years holidays.

I'm so excited about seeing everyone.

Right foot on what color?

I had a really crappy day yesterday. I haven't really pinned it down, but I think I'm just in a funk about not being home for Thanksgiving.

I know I have to grow up and do my own thing on holidays at some point, but Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday out of all that holidays in the world. I usually spend a good month planning Thanksgiving dinner, so this year has been quite a change.

I think I'm going to go over to the dorm soon to start making pie crusts. I guess I will actually make fillings and bake pies on Friday. Then I suppose we're going to do all the side dishes on Saturday night? I'm not really sure. All I know is the only things going into the oven on Sunday are going to be two turkeys — one at a time.

It sucks having: A) one oven and B) a tiny oven at that.

It also sucks not having all of the kitchen supplies I've spent the past few years collecting for occasions such as this. Like my pastry blender. And a food processor.

Thanksgiving aside, my crappy day continued when the visor on my helmet broke off. The bolts holding it on rusted so it just snapped off. Looks like I will actually go buy a new helmet now. I've been talking about doing it and I just haven't because the way I saw it, I had a perfectly good helmet.

Problem solved.

I was at IKEA when I finally just completely tore the visor off because it was hanging by the bolt in the middle of the helmet. That allowed it to move around any time there was a gust of wind, which there were a lot of yesterday.

I cheered up a little at IKEA. I just like going through everything. I always just take my time there. I also ate some salmon with green beans at their little cafeteria. I haven't had salmon or green beans in a million years.

I bought a new pillow and a bunch of other random stuff while I was at IKEA. I ended up spending the equivalent of $30USD and just barely had enough room to get it all home on my scooter.

Then when I got home, I was locked out of the house.

OK, locked out isn't really the right phrase. Our door handle broke a couple of days ago and we all kept saying we would go talk to the realtor about it so they could get someone to come fix it, but we all kept putting it off.

Until then, we decided we would leave that door open. (It was the outside of our two front doors. Think screen door, only it's glass and wood.)

So here I was standing outside my apartment with $1000NT worth of crap from IKEA and I couldn't get into my apartment. I had to leave for school in an hour and I was freaking out.

It turned into an incredibly stressful situation where we ended up paying for the door to get fixed instead of out landlord because our landlord lives in Canada or something so it would take time to get ahold of them to ask them to pay for it.

I'm used to being in America where when something like that breaks it's not your fault and the property manager gets it fixed immediately no worries.

This is just the most immediate of things we needed fixed, so of course I was super angry that our apartment seems to be falling apart (and because I got locked out, and because I was already mad about Thanksgiving). I ended up yelling at a Taiwanese man, our realtor, about all of the things that are broken in our apartment.

Not my classiest moment, but I honestly haven't truly vented or yelled about anything since I've lived here. I suppose everything was bottled up.

On top of all of that, when I got to work my cell phone said it was 6:50 p.m. which is 10 minutes before class starts which is when I'm supposed to get there. Unfortunately, their clocks said 6:54, so I lost my attendance bonus. I just don't know if it was the last day of the November attendance bonus or the first day of the December attendance bonus.

If it was the last day, that sucks. If it was the first day of December, it doesn't matter because of my Christmas vacation.

Here's hoping for the latter.

My night got a little better with the help of some red wine. I ended up going over to the dorm fairly late in the evening and we played Twister. It was actually a lot of fun, but I recall the mat being much larger when I was a child.

Is that a head?

I bought a rotisserie-style chicken the other day at Costco. It's pretty tasty.

Of course I didn't realize until tonight that the head was still attached — beak and all. I was carving all the meat off thinking that's easier to store than the whole thing. I pulled off the twine and started trying to cut off the wing when I began thinking that it was especially difficult.

Then the damn head came untucked from under the wing. All I knew was there was this pitiful little chicken face and I made a really awkward yelping noise and threw the knife down.

I'm not really that squeamish and I certainly don't mind eating things that I know were once living, breathing creatures. I would just prefer not to attach a face to it (or rather I would prefer someone to detach the face from it before I actually see it).

The pig hooves and chickens feet and so on at the wet market don't really bother me so much. But seeing people pick out a live chicken and then hearing someone take it into the back and "prepare" it to be taken home, not my thing. I think my imagination is just a little too graphic (or maybe accurately graphic) for me to handle these types of situations.

Other exciting things today, this guy that was stalking Megan before she left called my cell phone during class today. In case you forgot, my cell phone used to be Megan's cell phone.

Long story short, a long time ago her scooter broke down and this mechanic helped her get it home and such — it was obvious from day one he had a super crush on her. Somehow he ended up with her cell phone number (ahem, Megan is way too nice) and started stalking her around the school. He called once after she left and I sent a message in English saying she's gone.

Apparently he forgot or something, so tonight I got my kids to help me text him in Chinese. Unfortunately they don't know past tense in English very well so they had me write "Megan will go to America" instead of "Megan already went back to America."

He messaged back asking when she would be leaving and saying he wants to see her first. Finally, my co-teacher just called him and told him that Megan left already and this phone now belongs to someone else, so please stop trying to contact us.

Oh it's nice to have someone that can stick up for you in Chinese.

Before school, Tess and I went to the stationery store and went Christmas galore. We bought a tiny little Christmas tree that's pre-decorated for only 300NT.

I also bought a ton of Taiwan-fabulous Christmas cards and wrapping paper.

I'm sure those of you whole expect mail and/or presents from me are thoroughly excited and intrigued now.

Let's just say that one of my 'Xmas' cards has a tiny Asian girl with a beer on it and that some of my wrapping paper is inappropriately '80s color schemed.

Lastly, after school I BOUGHT A PLANE TICKET TO AMERICA FOR CHRISTMAS!

I am going to be doing a ridiculous amount of travel in about two weeks:

Taiwan ---> Tokyo ---> Seattle where I'll spend two days.

Then Seattle ---> Austin where I'll spend about nine days (maybe I'll try to run up to D/FW for a day or so?).

Then Austin ---> Seattle where I will immediately hope into a car and drive ---> Vancouver (well, Whistler).

We'll spend a couple of days in Whistler snowboarding and then Whistler ---> Seattle.

I'll spend the night in Seattle and the next morning, ---> Tokyo ---> Taiwan.

So much traveling but I'm so excited!

How many people does it take to stock a pantry?

Bobo took Kyrstie, Anisa and me to Costco yesterday to get things for Thanksgiving. Man, I though Carrefour was ridiculous on Sunday. I wanted to scream at Costco.

I know that I'm living in a very family-oriented society and that people here take every opportunity they can to hang out with their family, but why on Earth do people take their whole damn family to the grocery store? As if grocery shopping weren't a big enough pain, you add toting around three kids, your mother and your father?

I understand if there just isn't someone around to watch the kids for you, but why do you need seven people to go to the store? Make a list. Ask everyone ahead of time if they want anything from the store. The less people you have with you, the faster it goes (for you and for me!).

I know I'm ranting, but I have this problem at home as well.

Yesterday was like a maze, except I had an over-sized shopping cart making it even more difficult. I cannot tell you how many children I nearly ran over. Kyrstie and I started taking turns standing with the cart while the other went searching for whatever we needed.

We're lucky though. We just barely got our turkeys.

Right after we grabbed our two turkeys (which still may not be enough, by the way) a woman and her son came up and grabbed six more. I didn't see anymore in the freezer, of course that's not to say there weren't any in the back.

Now we get to spend all week prepping and baking and cooking.