Celebrating New Year's Eve In The Port-A-Potties Of Taipei City

The last week of 2009 went by pretty quietly for us here in Taiwan. We worked, watched TV and we just generally laid low. On Wednesday night, December 3oth, we went out to Chilis in Taipei for our official New Year's meal. We knew the crowds on New Year's Eve would be crazy and the chances of getting a seat at a nice restaurant were slim (no one would accept our reservations!) so we chose to go out the night before. I got my first fix of ranch dressing in over 4 months, so I was very very satisfied. On New Year's Eve after work, me, Mel, Christine and Mark took a crowded bus to Xinpu and grabbed a quick supper at *Subway* before taking a *subway* into Taipei to watch the 101 fireworks.

The subway wasn't as busy as I had expected- we actually got to sit- but when we got off the MRT the area around the 101 was swarming with people and the longer that we were there more and more people just kept pouring into the area. We knew getting home was going to be interesting! There was a lot going on to see and do, including a bunch of tents that set up selling snacks and souvenirs.

There was a lot of entertainment including some breakdancers and this lost member of the Village People (above) who was wandering around.

The 7-Eleven and Family Mart convenience stores had wisely set up tents outside of their stores to sell warm fish ball soups, coffee and beer.

Hooray for legal public drinking! We would come to regret these stupid beers.


There was a free concert at City Hall that we went to check out. There were SO MANY people there. We watched the concert- which was pretty amusing- for about half an hour, and as you can see from the above photo, we never got very close to the stage. Why did we leave the concert? After drinking that single beer on the street, I had to pee. I'm such a girl.

And thus began an evening-long cycle of waiting in line to go to various bathrooms. There were three or four port-a-potties set up around the 101 area but with millions of people around the lines were ridiculous!! Luckily, the line for the men's washroom was usually less than 15 minutes long but at the end of the evening Mel had to wait in line for 40 minutes to go to the womens bathroom! She finally got out of there with 20 minutes to go before midnight and the line was still a mile long behind her. I wonder how many ladies rang in the year in a Taiwanese port-a-potty?

The city shut down many of the streets so we were able to walk around without the threat of any scooters taking us out. That's Mel chilling in the middle of the road in the photo above, and next to her is Christine on the phone with Nareesa finding out that she wasn't coming to the fireworks. WHAT!

When we were walking around I was stopped by a girl and a guy, who I'm assuming was her boyfriend. She presented me with a rose and her boyfriend told me that she loves me and asked if I would take a photo with her. Sure, anything for my adoring fans! But seriously... who did she think I was? Jet Li? I proudly marched around with my rose for the rest of the night while Christine made gagging sounds.

Trying to get something to eat or drink was ridiculous. I mean, at one point Christine just wanted to get a drink at Starbucks and there were over 30 people in line ahead of her. Before getting our beer from the 7-Eleven on the side of the road we had tried to go into a restaurant for a drink but we were told that it would be a 3 hour wait, which would have put us at approximately midnight. It was crazy! I'm so glad we had our New Years meal the night before. So, we grabbed some snacks at the food tents- the only place where the lines weren't so crazy. The lady in the picture advertised her tempting sausages by wearing them like a necklace and twirling them around like a lasso. I wonder if she later sold those sausages that were wrapped around her body to people to eat?

For a snack we got skewered potato chips... yum!

With 20 minutes to go and Melodie out of the port-a-potty, we ran to try and find a good place to watch the fireworks. In theory it should be pretty simple to see the fireworks because they were being shot off from the world's tallest building, but it seemed like everywhere we went there were buildings or trees in the way. All the best spots to watch had been staked out hours earlier- there were thousands of people just sitting on the street where the view was clear when we got to the area at 7pm. I've never met a crowd that I couldn't sneak my way into and last night was no exception. We found where we wanted to stand and, with about 5 minutes to go, we squeezed our way in. We were heckled by the people behind us (who were sitting) and they screamed in nasally, accented voices "sit dowwwwwn", so we sat- which really wasn't easy considering how crowded it was. Then they heckled the people in front of us to sit and before long the crowd had obediently sat down and we had a perfect, straight-on, unobstructed view of the Taipei 101.

With 1 minute to go the 101 went dark and then rings of fireworks slowly travelled up the length of the building until the whole thing just exploded. I took a video of the first minute (above) and I have to say, it was really damn cool.

It was pretty bright! This was the only time I can ever remember New Years coming without a proper 5,4,3,2,1 countdown. I assumed it was midnight because the fireworks went off, but I couldn't be certain. Happy New Year?

And then, less than THREE MINUTES later the fireworks ended and the 101 went dark- aside from the inane slogan "2010 Taiwan Up"- and millions of people rushed to get home first. This must have been the biggest build up to any event I have ever seen with the smallest payoff ever. Three minutes? THREE minutes!! We must have waited in port-a-potty lines for 2 hours and we are rewarded with THREE MINUTES of fireworks? Oh well, they were cool and at least they went off on time. In Korea they didn't set off the fireworks until 12:15. We thought they'd been canceled or something.

After that amazing three minutes we walked back to the MRT station with 5 million of our closest friends and tried to get on a train home. We got within eyesight of the station entrance when the crowd came to a sudden halt. There were police at the entrance to the station and they were only letting a certain number of people enter every 2-3 minutes. At first it was crowded, but it was bearable, but as we got closer to the entrance people really started pushing and it got kind of crazy. I wonder how many people got trampled to death last night? It could have happened pretty easily. Within about 20 minutes of our arrival we made it into the station, with Mark just slipping through as the officers blew their whistles. It felt like our family had just made it into West Germany together seconds before the wall went up. Win!

When we got into the station we were greeted with another line of people waiting to swipe their subway passes to get on a train. This line didn't take to long though- by the time I took this picture it had started to move and I had to run to catch up with my friends.

Lots and lots of people trying to get on a train home. When we got back to Xinpu we took a taxi home and check our watches- it had taken an hour and 15 minutes to get back. Usually it takes an hour, so I've really got to give props to Taipei City- even if they put on a brief fireworks show, they sure know how to get people out of the city in a timely fashion. It was a strange New Years Eve.. definitely the soberest one in a long time (don't judge!) and when we came home and changed into the fleecy hoodies that Old Father Time left us, we just sat around eating cheese and watching Cold Case Files. It was a fun night of people watching, peeing, rose-getting and hanging out, but next year I know a house party on Saunders Street that I want to go to :P

Happy New Year, everyone!

Mistaken Identity

Yeah, yeah, I know- all white guys look the same.

My students and many people I have met in Taiwan and Korea all seem to have the same compulsion: to tell me that I look like someone else. In Korea I was consistently compared to David Beckham. Week after week we'd get new students and they all called me Beckham. I'm very flattered, but I don't see the resemblance- I'm much more handsome and toned than David Beckham. In Taiwan, it's been a mixed bag of comparisons. Maybe I've aged, but the first person I was compared to here was Richard Gere, who has to be close to 40 years older than me!! I've also been told I look like Heath Ledger, and just this last Thursday my boss saw an old picture of me with longer hair and said that I looked just like BEETHOVEN. Beethoven?!! Perhaps I need to update my style if I look that much like an 18th century composer.

Maybe the most flattering comparison I've heard is that I look like Melodie. Our boss has said this several times and she's even interrupted me in the middle of a conversation to tell me that she feels like she's looking into Mel's eyes when she talks to me. My eyes aren't shaped like little blue slits, but okay. She said that in Taiwan people believe that as couples age together they start to look more like each other and I think this is kind of cool. Cooler than looking like Richard Gere, anyway.

Just for the heck of it I submitted my picture to My Heritage, a website that compares your picture to a database of celebrity photos and guess who I look the most like? Mr. Jet Li. Maybe I've been in Asia too long.

Christine Sweaters

Our neighbor Christine is the sweetest woman. When the weather dropped here she came over with a bag of sweaters because she just wants us to be warm. Each one of these sweaters has a touch of lace, a dash of glitter, or a stylish pattern that makes them special- it would be hard to choose a favorite. So, tonight we decided to try on some choice pieces from our collection, and we even took some photos to share with you.







And a video of the winter 2009 Christine collection on the runway, featuring the fiercest models in Sinjhuang City:

I don't think there's really anything else to say. Good night!

Our Christmas In Taiwan

In the week leading up to Christmas we tried to get into the holiday spirit with our students by watching Christmas cartoons (I never ever want to see Spongebob's Christmas again- I think I watched it 4 times this week!!) and making Christmas pop-up cards. The kids all seemed pretty excited to make their cards, but the award for best holiday card goes to the one in the above picture: "Blood Of Christmas". Ho ho ho!

On Christmas Eve we went shopping for Christmas dinner foods with Christine Jr. and Nareesa's mom (AKA Mom) and brother (AKA Ryan). Luckily we were able to find everything we wanted, which was a small Christmas miracle in itself, even though we had to buy boxed potatoes because Taiwan was sold out of potatoes. We blame the foreigners. We bought some champagne and spent the rest of the night watching Home Alone and waiting for Santa to arrive.

Despite having no chimney of any sort, Santa did indeed arrive. My package from home (mailed November 16th!) hasn't arrived yet, but we did have a fun assortment of gifts to open from Mel's family. The best was some Tim Hortons coffee and a dozen Tim's coffee cups with their lids- the take away kind you would get at the store if you ordered a double double. We watched "A Garfield Christmas", made a big breakfast, brewed up a pot of coffee and pretended we were drinking the real deal.

In the afternoon we had some errands to run (in Taiwan, all the stores are conveniently open on Christmas) and Melodie decided that she would try to make some egg nog so we went searching (unsuccessfully) for nutmeg. I had to teach from 4:10-5:50 and although the school told us we could leave 10 minutes early we wound up leaving 15 minutes late. Thanks! After taking the slowest bus home I met everyone at our apartment and the Christmas cooking began! It is not easy to cook Christmas dinner when you are cooking in two different apartments with 4 gas burners, 2 microwaves and 2 of the world's smalled toaster ovens. As well, we only had a limited number of pots and pans, no non-soup spoon spoons, more chopsticks than forks and a bit of lumpy gravy drama but we still wound up with a crazy amount of food: three chickens, the aforementioned boxed potatoes, stuffing, veggies, gravy, rolls, cranberry sauce, sweet and sour pork, congee, rice noodle soup and lots and lots of wine. I think the meal really exceeded everyone's expectations. After 4 months without this kind of home cooking, our expectations were admittedly low.

Stuffed and happy!

After we ate, we opened our Secret Santa presents. I didn't get a chance to take pictures of everyone's gifts but some of the presents included a Domo toy and DVD for me, a self-portrait by me for Christine Jr, and copies of Sexy Nuts magazine for both Kris and Mark.

After we opened our gifts everyone watched the awesome Domo DVD while Mel and I went to Skype call our families.

Hello families!

When we finished talking to our families we went back to Christine and Samuel's apartment and everyone was STILL watching Domo! LOL! Everyone loves Domo. After Domo, we got ready and Samuel drove us to Spark nightclub, where DJ Godfrey was hosting a Christmas party. Swoon! Unfortunately, DJ Godfrey was a popular draw that night and the line to get into the club was well over an hour long so we decided to go to another place, Room 18, instead. Christine Sr. was gutted and just went home instead of going to the next place with us. Womp womp.

Room 18 was a pretty cool place, although it was packed on Friday night. It is a nice little fire hazard in a basement and there are two rooms: a hip hop room and an electronica room. This was very convenient because when they stopped playing Lady Gaga in one room, you could go to the other room and, soon enough, you'd hear some "Poker Face".

Like I said, Room 18 was so crowded! It seemed like no matter where we stood there were people trying to push past us. We also had to wait in line at the coat check for at least half an hour to dump our coats. We had to wait a while to get drinks, so at one point Mel and I ordered 2 beers at a time and did some double fisting. As populated as the place was, we had a lot of fun and the crowd was pretty great. There was this really old guy in a sweater vest bumping and grinding like nobody's business while his wife and some other ladies climbed all over each other. It was quite the show. There were also some crazy haired foreigner ladies that spent most of the evening on stage in the hip hop room. These are girls that would be booed off the stage at home, but in Taiwan they are exotic enough to earn a place on stage. The girls tell me that one time when I went to the bathroom a crowd of guys suddenly circled them- imagine how much fun they really could have had if I wasn't there?

Our unusual Christmas ended when we finally made it home around 4am and called it a night. Even though I've been away from home for the holidays before this was still a Christmas of firsts: first time I've had Chinese food for Christmas dinner (and it was good!), first time I've worked on Christmas (booooo!), and it was the first time I've gone clubbing on Christmas. All things considered, it was a pretty fun day. Now I can't wait for New Years :)

It's (not) Beginning To Feel A Lot Like Christmas

Despite the fact that Santa is driving the bus and Christmas decorations are on display everywhere, I can't believe Christmas is in just 2 days! The decorations that I see and the Christmas music that I hear seem to be disingenuously transplanted into a country where they don't belong. Plus, many of the things that we associate with the Christmas holidays are just not applicable this year: there's no standing in line to buy last minute gifts because we mailed our gifts home a month ago, the weather has jumped back up to the low-20s so it's not even cold, and there's no long Christmas break from work (in fact, I have to work a few hours on Christmas).

Of course, I am still looking forward to the 25th- I think it's still going to be a special day... just a different kind of "special". We are having Christmas dinner for a dozen of our closest friends (AKA the only people we know in the whole country) and we'll be enjoying a mix of North American and Taiwanese cooking. We're also doing a secret Santa gift exchange, so I expect to see a few new issues of "Sexy Nuts" floating around our place in a few days, and Mel and I each have Skype dates with our families, not unlike Christmas 2006 which we spent in Korea:

Merryyyyyy Christmassssss!!!

Alleycats and Black Might

On Saturday night we went out for supper and drinks to celebrate Christine Junior's anonymously-numbered birthday. It was a frigid night so we couldn't have been happier when we got off the bus and saw several Santa Claus's randomly serving free cups of hot coffee on the street. Thank you for the warm drink, sudden Santas!

We made reservations at a restaurant called Alleycats. We'd been there before and it was a nice place. However, when we arrived at the address we realized that there are 8 Alleycats restaurants in Taipei and the place where we had reserved a table was just a wall-less outdoor patio with maybe a dozen seats total at the whole place. As tempting as eating pizza with mittens on while sitting in the freezing cold sounded, Kris called and got the reservation changed to a different Alleycats.

Yay, pizza and wine!

About halfway through our meal, Mother Nature decided to shake things up a bit with a 7.0 earthquake! Definitely the longest and shakiest earthquake I've felt so far. After the shaking ended I took a video of the lights moving over our heads... I'm sure that's perfectly safe...

The best part about Alleycats? There were REAL CATS hanging out in the restaurant. One cat slept right by our table, which allowed many opportunities for us to poke at him. I miss having a cat!

After our meal Samuel asked the band to play "Happy Birthday" for Christine so we moved to another table closer to the stage. After we sat down we noticed one of the waitresses was shaking the shit out of a little KITTEN to the beat of the music. When she saw the hearts in our eyes she brought the KITTEN over to Mel and we got to take turns holding her. Her name was Margarita and she was so purry.

Blowing out candles and wishing for a date with Godfrey.

After using the women's washroom, I rejoined my friends and we took a taxi to the Living Mall, where we were going to a club for some drinks. The Living Mall is definitely the coolest looking mall with a ball bursting out of it that I have ever visited. Unfortunately, this amazing ball-busting mall didn't have the club I'd read about online. Someone who worked there told Kris that it closed quite a while ago. Screw you, outdated internet websites!

Plan B: Mark had heard about a place called the Black Might nightclub in Ximending that he was curious to visit, so we took a quick bus ride there. This was the safest, most secure club I've ever been to because we had to go through three security checks where they used security scanners like they have at airports, they went through everyone's bags, and there must have been at least a dozen security guards just at the entrance. I was expecting to find a pretty rough place when I got into the club, but it was just your typical Taiwanese dance bar (with 90% horrible generic rap music and 10% Poker Face/Sorry Sorry).

How to build a Taiwanese dance bar:
#1- The bar should be all-you-can-drink (yay!) and it should be way more expensive for the men than the women (hissss!)
#2- There should be lots of seats but you keep kicking me and my friends out of them because they're "reserved" even though no one ever arrives to sit in them
#3- The bar staff should put on a fire/juggling act around 1am
#4- Bring out the tramps to dance on stage as soon as the juggling is finished
#5- Pull some bar stars up on stage and encourage them to strip. Make sure that you choose people who have clearly already planned to climb up on the stage and wore a leather bra accordingly.
#6- Play "Poker Face" and "Sorry Sorry"
#7- Be so smokey that our eyes burn and our clothes never lose the aroma of Marlboros

#8- Tell my friend (even though it's her birthday) that she can't sit on the stripper pole platform, even though nobody's using it and even though she just cleaned it off with her own wet nap.

Life In An Igloo

Remember on Tuesday when I went to the beach in shorts and flip flops? Well, on Wednesday a cold front hit Taiwan and temperatures dropped 10-15 degrees! We've had daytime highs of 10-13 degrees, and although that doesn't sound too cold for December, consider this: with the humidity in Taiwan the temperature feels much colder AND we have no heat in our apartment so there's nothing we can do about how cold we feel. In Canada our apartment was always kept at at least 20 degrees.

I woke up this morning and it was 14 degrees in my apartment. It felt so ICY! Why don't Taiwanese apartments have some form of heat?? I'm taking two baths a day right now and walking around with a comforter wrapped around my body... how long does winter last, again??. Okay, I'm off to buy some sweaters- have a good weekend, everybody!

The Dogs Of Sinjhuang

We're cat people, but we have a soft spot for dogs too. Sinjhuang is full of dogs- some of them are pets who live outside, but a lot of them are strays. I don't know who is sending their poor dogs to live on the street but it's not uncommon to see dogs with gashes in their fur or dogs with only three legs limping around town. One thing you never see is mean dogs. They all seem really tame and easy going and if we were staying in Taiwan forever we would try to adopt one of them. To survive on these streets the dogs have to be smart as well (to survive all the scooters!)- I've seen dogs look both ways before crossing the 6-lane road and they always wait for the walk signal light at the crosswalk. This post is a tribute to our favorite dogs in Sinjhuang.


This is Sweater Dog. We gave him that name because he's usually wearing a tight red sweater. He lives in the apartment building across the road from us and we like him a lot because he spends his days jumping at the scooters that drive by. He's on our side- he hates the scooters too!


At the end of our road there is a parking lot that we used to cut through to get to the bus stop. This dog (name: Guard Dog) lives there and usually he pays us no attention, but once he jumped at Nareesa (can't really blame him on that one) so we've stopped cutting through the parking lot. He's a little intense, but I don't think he's a bad dog- plus he's BFFs with a little black and white cat so we'll give him points for that. He used to share the parking lot with a dog that we called "Asian Dog" because he had a distinctly Asian-looking face but that dog has disappeared in recent weeks. I hope Guard Dog didn't have anything to do with his disappearance.


A lot of the stray dogs in town know that there's strength in numbers so you'll often see two or three of them traveling together. These two guys live on the sidewalk near our the Family Mart, which is a few minutes from our school. There used to be three of them that lived there, but now there's only two so we're not sure what happened to their friend. They are nice dogs but if you try to pet them or give them some food they get scared, so they obviously haven't had the best experiences with people in the past. Update: Melodie tells me that only the blonde dog has been around for the past few days- the darker dog has disappeared. She said the blonde guy looks lonely :(


This is Lucky. He's our neighbor's dog. He used to be a stray but they took him in off the street and he's been living on their roof ever since. Actually, they have taken in two other dogs as well- Happy and Shao Hong ("little yellow"). Shao Hong says hello to us from the roof everytime we get off the elevator or open our front door- he barks at every little noise. Lucky, who we actually see (and not just hear) is so cute! He dines in Christine's sisters apartment on the 4th floor so occasionally we will see Lucky walking by himself down the stairs from the roof to the 4th floor. He's a good boy who just wants to be pet all the time, and if you pet him the right way he will pee on you.