pace of life

it's a saturday evening. as i write this, i'm eating seaweed and sea salt seasoned potato chips for the first time. they're quite delicious. i had a very late breakfast/lunch so i suppose these will suffice for my dinner.

i spent the last hour and a half in the library reading vonnegut's "slaughterhouse five". before that, i made a trip to taipei 101 to buy this book along with an english translation of "dream of the red chamber". in total, i spent almost $30US, about the same as what my chinese textbooks for a term cost.

i recently learned that taipei 101 is no longer the world's tallest building, dwarfed by some building, whose name i've forgotten, in dubai. i've also learned that the sears tower in chicago is no longer named the sears tower, having been renamed as if it were a sports stadium. so, perhaps names aren't really important.

we finally had a break from the rain in taipei today. the afternoon sky was bright blue. my clothes which had been hanging on the clothesline all week finished drying today. i've been living here for some five months now, yet i continue to see new things in places i would think should be pretty familiar by now. there's an apartment building on the next block with a not so interesting entrance which has trees growing on the roof. i just noticed them this evening. as i was walking down the alley, i noticed that somewhere there is a family who loves eating curry for dinner. i smell it at least twice a week. i also know there is a family somewhere, probably on the third floor of a building, who plays mahjong on the balcony after dinner, if i judge the sound of mixing tiles right.

i'm still surprised by how i feel at home here in a sea of people i can barely communicate with. yet, we humans are resourceful things. i managed to have a very nice haircut using broken chinese and hand gestures to describe what i wanted. my teacher has been teaching without using english all month. yesterday, i had lunch with my classmate and spoke continuous, if not always correct, chinese for almost an hour. i was practicing kung fu by myself this week and find i can't keep count unless i count in chinese.

not many exciting things going on. instead, life seems to be moving inch by inch, unnoticeable until i look at some substantial stretch of time and see i've done quite a lot here. it feels like just the right pace.