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 :)