Well, Rudder’s gone for a couple of weeks. But I’ve got the Swallows and Amazons (and Peter Duck!) to keep me company tonight, along with a bag of goldfish pretzels I’ve opened as a treat. The traffic was incredibly light for my first drive home in Taiwan in a long while. (The roads are pretty chaotic here. It can be intimidating, but on the other hand drivers seem to be very alert and you never have to worry about being in the wrong lane – just turn left from the right lane or vice versa or change lanes by edging in until someone kindly gives way, just like everyone else.)
I hope to get a fair amount of knitting and reading and beading done, not to mention some shopping. I’d like another dress or two for summer. And I may break down and buy the pair of Keens I was jonesing for all last fall; the local mall has them, but only in blue. Still, the color is starting to grow on me: it’s a soft greenish blue that would be good with, for instance, the gray T-shirt and jeans I have on now.
Also, I really need to buckle down and start learning more Chinese again. I’m going to concentrate on words, not grammar; Mandarin grammar is fairly simple and the Taiwanese have the skill the Dutch lack, of being able to figure out what you’re saying even if you’re saying it very badly. I would like to concentrate on practical vocabulary, too, not the crap from our lessons about whether the pork or the chicken is fresher and how children don’t like onions because they’re too spicy. (Useful things I learned from that lesson: the words for chicken, pork, onions, and children. The rest, not so useful.) Tonight’s word, courtesy of the woman working the counter at the local fast food place, is dai4 tzo3: takeaway.