Moving and Shaking

Above: Unexpected feline dining companion. The Vietnamese restaurant wasn’t big enough for the two of us.

Friends,

It is pouring rain outside of this coffee shop and I just hung clothes out to dry this morning and I’m scared of what I’ll find when I go back home. They’re under a roof but I’m not sure they’re under enough roof!

I have an overwhelming amount to tell you about. As I write this, we’ve been living in Taipei for three weeks. The first few days were in a hotel right off of Da’an Forest Park , then we spent a couple of weeks in an Airbnb near Liuzhangli MRT station , and just two days ago we spent our first night in our own apartment. It has been both turbulent and overwhelming as well as slow and tedious. Some hurrying up to wait with paperwork and apartment negotiations and such. Some very busy days and some days where I tried not to go outside and just lazed in front of a TV instead. It is sticky icky here — not actually that hot, but so so humid that I start sweating while putting my shoes on just about. If it feels nice outside that means either it just finished raining or it’s about to rain. I got a job, more on that later, and am learning several words and one or two characters of Mandarin per day. Here are your Mandarin tidbits for the day: 1) The characters for pumpkin are 南瓜, nán and guā, which when separate mean “south” and “melon” and 2) 100 is a single character (百, bǎi) as opposed to the three characters in English, but 221 is five characters (二百二十一, literally two hundred two ten one), which is why here you’ll see small numbers in Mandarin but most large numbers in Arabic numerals on signs and menus. I bit into a purple passionfruit thinking it was a plum, an experience I would not recommend. Also, we slept through our first earthquake , though I think it cracked our paint (or we are super unobservant).

While we were staying in the Airbnb, we kept missing the garbage truck. Trash is one thing that is significantly different in Taipei versus US cities. You won’t find dumpsters here, or many public trash cans. Instead, ~five nights a week a garbage truck and a recycling truck pull up to your block of the city and play “Für Elise” or “Maiden’s Prayer” very loudly to let you know they’re there and to get your butt downstairs as they leave after about five minutes. They have a set time and are very punctual, so usually people are there waiting for them. Residents then put the bags into the trucks themselves for the trash and separate out the recycling. On top of this, you can only throw away nonrecyclables in official city bags, each of which you pay for, thus further incentivizing recycling. Check out a video here .

The garbage processions are one thing that always gets written about with regards to life in Taipei, the other thing is 7-Eleven. The role that bodegas play in large American cities, McDonald’s plays in smaller communities, and the typical convenience store is all rolled up along with more in Taipei’s 7-Elevens (and a few similar chains). People sit there and chat like a cafe, and they have a coffee/tea menu that’s quite extensive. They have a few items to make them a mini grocery store. You can buy premade meals and microwave them there, or buy the stuff from under the heating lamps (includes hot dogs and pizza like the US, as well as crockpots full of tea eggs and some steamed buns, but does not include the taquitos I regret purchasing along with regretful Big Gulps at the 7-Elevens in Santa Rosa, CA). You can buy beer or liquor. There’s free wifi, and if you don’t want to stand on the street to hail a cab, they’ll call one for you. None of that is too surprising, right? But wait, there’s more. You can print/copy scan. You can purchase train tickets and add money to your public transportation cards. You can have packages delivered there and they will courier packages to other 7-Elevens for you. You can pay your utility and cellphone bills there. You can drop off your dry cleaning. They’re little 24-hour community hubs, and there’s almost always one in your line of sight.

Our new apartment is kind of on the edge of urbanness (there’s a mini verdant slope behind us covered in towering bamboo), so we’re not on the same block as a 7-Eleven, and it’s a little fancy so we deposit our trash in the basement instead of joining the garbage processions. Apartment living has its own adjustments, though, of course. No one has a real clothes dryer here — instead everyone hangs them on lines outside or if it’s too rainy inside next to a dehumidifier. Ovens aren’t found in most apartments (we looked at about twelve apartment buildings and only one had them) as baking is seen as something you mainly do for special occasions and large gatherings. Our bathroom has as many buttons as the average television remote. An appliance most apartments here have that I had never seen in the US is a dish sterilizer/dryer (no dish washers though!), however several people have told me they only use it for storage and not for its intended function. One comical thing about apartment hunting is seeing the massive amount of attention given to security in new apartments. Most have a security guard, all have security cameras, and a few of them have these massive, heavy, thick doors that wouldn’t be out of place in a bank. This despite the fact that Taipei is one of the safest cities in the world in terms of crime , including a homicide rate that’s literally a quarter of similarly sized Houston’s (68 in Taipei in 2017 versus 269 in Houston ). In our Airbnb, the neighbor left his key sitting in the lock most of the day.

I have a lot more I want to write about our move, including getting into some of the details of logistics and posting more pictures and that sort of thing, but I don’t want to overload this monthly newsletter so I’m going to throw them onto my Medium account instead. Check it out here if you want.

Further reading:

• Christine Lee with a beautiful essay on beekeeping, farming, and piercing numbness in the aftermath of infidelity (and may we all find a Saeed for our lives).
• Helen Rosner on peeling garlic.
• Next month is Women in Translation month. Need suggestions of what to read? Check out the @Read_WIT Twitter account (or @readWIT on the Instagrams).
• I’ve read a bunch of books lately, but Thick by Tressie McMillan Cottom is by far the top of the pile. It’s an essay collection, and she is a joy on Twitter as well (subjects: cultural criticism, academia, race, intersections thereof).
• Hong Kong protests have dominated my Asia-based internet feeds, but we also had a large protest against China-owned media here in Taipei. Learn all about it here . If you want a person to follow, I’m again recommending Taipei-based journalist William Yang who covered that protest and the HK protests.
• Gerrymandering .

I’ve procrastinated leaving because of rain for long enough, time to go see what damage awaits me at home. I hope summer is treating you well. I’m getting my library card tomorrow, drop me a line and tell me the best thing you’ve read lately.

-g