no man is an island: oh hey, giant panda in the movie theater. so normal.

What's new in the oh-so-glamorous world of the English teacher in Taiwan?

Me and Pony, who shares the same bday as me

A few weeks back I celebrated my 2-year anniversary of my 21st birthday. The day of was pretty normal, I went to work like usual. The weekend after I went out to dinner with a few friends at a hot-pot / all-you-can-eat barbecue restaurant. I don't think I've described the awesomeness of these places yet in a blog post, so get ready. Basically they're pretty much the same as a Mongolian Barbecue restaurant at home, where you pick out raw meat and have it grilled in front of you, except for here you have a mini grill in the middle of your table and you grill it yourself. The waiters bring out menus with different types of meat and you order as much raw meat (and veggies and other snacks) as you'd like.

On top of that, many restaurants offer all-you-can drink beer on top of that. Because most Taiwanese don't drink that much, they don't lose much money off of this. However, us Americans like to take advantage of awesome deals like that. Can you imagine the chaos that would occur if restaurants offered all-you-can drink deals back home?

Also, this past weekend was a 2-day weekend for me (I work Saturdays, remember? I usually only get 1 day off) because Monday was a holiday - Dragon Boat Festival. It's on the fifth day of the fifth month, like Cinco de Mayo, except on the Chinese year, and there are a lot less burritos and alcohol than Cinco de Mayo. Apparently once upon a time, there was this important Chinese dude, and then he died, but no one wanted the fish to eat him so they threw Zong Zi (described to me as a "glutinous rice ball". How appetizing) in the water so the fish would eat that instead of the famous dude. Now, they race boats shaped like dragons to commemorate this, which I don't really get the connection between the dead dude, glutinous rice balls, and the dragon boats, but I get a day off of work so I'm quite satisfied. I asked my students if they were going to go and watch the races but they all kind of rolled their eyes and said no. For those familiar with Holland, Dragon Boat festival is probably equivalent to Tulip Time -- awesome for anyone under the age of 8 or over the age of 60, but everyone else just ignores it and thinks it's moderately lame.

I went out to see the races anyway. They were pretty anticlimactic indeed, but hey, I'm in Taiwan, I gotta watch the festivals. I looked for the rice balls of glutin, but alas, I came back rice-ball-less. We did get some watermelon drinks (just blendified watermelon - literally, that's it) and ice cream that's about 1% cream and 99% ice (they're not huge on their dairy products like we are).