In ten hours we leave the house for the airport, and our time ends in Taiwan with a bit of remorse and a bit of anticipation. Does this ever happen: when you're a bit sad to leave one place but excited for the next. Usually on a trip, you're just heading back home so you're just sad to go back to work or school. Strange feeling.
We celebrated V's birthday dinner last night with some Peking Duck. Interestingly "Peking" is a western bastardization of the name "Beijing." China officially changed their romanizations to Pinyin thus changing the name. Similar situation applies for the word "Cathay." For those of you who know of the airline Cathay Pacific, "Cathay" is a term popularized by Marco Polo who called all of China by the term used to refer to Northern China, "Khitay."Anyway, in Mandarin they call "Peking Duck" "Beijing Duck." Don't be confused like I was. It was awesome. Did you know Beijing Duck (as I'm going to call it now) is basically a whole duck rendered in its own fat for days. I took an interesting piece of duck off the plate and it turned out to be the head. Ba told me that the brain is the best part, so I tried it. It was pretty bland overall, but something deep inside told me that it was not savory and not to eat it. Let me also tell you, there's something to be said about having pudding inside a cake. Thoroughly enjoyable.
I feel like I got some decent Chinese practice this time. I didn't learn too much new vocabulary, but I became much more familiar with listening and speaking. I leave here having gotten very little work done overall and ten lbs heavier. Well, it's time to move onto Japanese. Neither V nor I are especially adept at Japanese, so we're sure to get a lot of practice. Skill level and total exposure combined, I plan to leave Japan totally fluent. Yep.Our first couple days in Japan are going to be a struggle as we bounce around trying to take care of some formal business. I've already told you a bit about Japanese red-tape and I'm looking forward to it <----thiiis-----> much.
Our itinerary for tomorrow goes something like this: Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport -> Narita International Airport -> Shinjuku Station -> Hotel Rose Garden Shinjuku -> Shinjuku Ward Office (to redo my alien registration) -> Tsubasa-san of Flat-Japan (to finish the housing application) -> Diana (if she returns my facebook message; to eat maybe and get cell phones).
I think our cheapest bet is to just subscribe to a two-year contract and then cancel it after six months. It costs 10,000 yen to cancel, which will be much cheaper than paying 100 yen a minute on a pay as you go plan. V has already picked out a Hello Kitty phone because we're trying to be as stereotypically Japanese as possible and also because she loves Hello Kitty. I'm thinking about a smartphone + data plan since having the ability to map things out on the go could be invaluable.
That's all I got. Bye bye, Taipei. We'll be back before you know it.
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