Convey the message “If you spend NT$300 more [~US$10] you can get a VIP card worth 10% discount,” using only a calculator and body language.
Yeah, me neither. But the clerk at Burt’s Bees managed it, after we established that I speak only a few words of Chinese and she speaks scarcely more English. People here really are astonishingly nice to foreigners (even when there’s not a profit involved).
Also, yet another reason to love living in the future: I walked to the mall tonight for a dinner of teppanyaki and gelato. Try that in 1957!
(The teppanyaki, maybe, since Japan controlled this island until WWII. But with a double dip of coofee- and whiskey-flavored gelato?)
And then I sat by the fountain in back of the mall, eating my ice cream and watching people walk by. Some things translate perfectly across nations, like the anthropological interest of people-watching at a mall on a Friday night.
Tomorrow is a long erg piece, then barbeque with Dutch friends. Sunday is dragonboat practice and then beading with a Malaysian friend, next Saturday is barbeque with my Taiwanese colleagues. Work this week has been busy and intense, the last few days’ worry about my cable bills were annoying, but I’m happily at peace with my life this minute.
How does one convey the message, “I really don’t need another credit card”?
*perks up at mention of whisky-flavored gelato*
I keep meaning to mention to you that I keep thinking of you here in Prague, what with the pretzels everywhere — at the hotel’s breakfast bar, on the menu of the Olympia (local Michelin restaurant), and apparently as a motif on one of the side altars in St. Vitus’s cathedral. (The only problem is that I was too out of it to see the last for myself, much less to snap a photograph of it. Sleep keeps taking a back seat to practicing/rehearsing/writing/texting/outright work/outright slacking/laundering my clothes in the bathtub. In any case, the altar was dedicated to a patron saint of bakers, hence the pretzels in the iron- or plaster-work.)