Wednesday, February 11th

At work we went to two meetings:
A Women’s Group of international women, most of whom are expats because their husbands are working here or they are married to a Taiwanese man:
An expatriate (in abbreviated form, expat) is a person temporarily or permanently residing in a country and culture other than that of the person's upbringing or legal residence. The word comes from the Latin ex (out of) and patria (country, motherland). (thank you Wikipedia!)


The meeting was on the top floor of Hotel One, the tallest building in Taichung!

Our second meeting was with Miss Liao at National Chung Hsing University, who is going to help us with host families.

In between the two meetings we went to lunch at this mall-like place where we went to a huge Chinese food court! When we walked around, it was very easy for Armando and I to pick something out because they have plastic displays of all the food they make! Each place was small and only offered about 6 or 8 things on average. I ate rice cooked with soy sauce with shrimp on top, seaweed soup, and some sort of vegetable.
The parking garage was the coolest part! Here's what they did with the cars:


Armando and I matched in red and black so we took a twin picture!

For dinner, Aunt Christina (now I've started to think it's "Christina instead of Christine") cooked again. I’ve come to realize that we eat the same things every day for dinner:
o Soup (hot water) with cabbage, shrimp balls, pork balls, and pig joints (like knees)
o A thing that’s really hard to explain, but kind of: mushy rice that is steamed with radish slices with mushrooms mixed in; it becomes solid and shaped like a loaf of bread, so u slice it and eat it with a sauce of thicker soy sauce and garlic (and endives I think, if I am thinking of an endive correctly… either way it’s a cool word)
o Some combination of:
 Cooked onions and little pieces of beef with a lot of pepper
 Red/green tomatoes cut up cooked with egg  Sliced mushrooms
 Steamed cabbage
o White rice (of course!)
o Nothing to drink


After dinner, I went to a night market with Paul, Jeff, Linda, and Jennifer. They fed me all sorts of things there: Cherry tomatoes covered in hard sugary syrup, ice cream tea (black tea with ice cream), and chicken on a stick. Linda and Paul, NOT ME, ate chicken skin and chicken hearts!! AAHH!!
There were shoe stores EVERYWHERE!! And they were like $15 USD and under! We went to an arcade and tossed basketballs... I was actually pretty good! It was very fun =)