Small Chinese Civets secret special smells by their scent glands
Try repeating that 5 times! We went to the zoo last weekend and saw this on an information sheet about civets. We laughed pretty hard at that one – especially next to the picture of a civet’s scent glands.
The weather has turned hot and humid here. It’s hasn’t been too bad, as long as we stay indoors in the air conditioning! Last week, on Thursday, we joined some of A’s coworkers for KTV night at The Living Mall. Very interesting place. It looks like the whole floor has been converted into KTV rooms (private Karaoke rooms). Apparently, there are even VIP rooms that are themed, such as Vegas Room. We had a standard room, seats about 10-15 people – 3 mikes, 2 computers, 1 screen for showing the words. It was interesting. They had a small selection of English songs, most of which we’d never even heard. They would load up an English song and give the mikes to us and want us to sing, then be really surprised that we had no idea what it is (saying it was really popular in Taiwan) – pretty funny. Anthony sang a song or two – adding his own lyrics and rhythm – they really seemed to like that and cheered him on. It was a fun night, although hard to go out at first with the kids screaming as we left them at home with Ms. Wu. They freaked out and although she said they calmed down shortly after we left, it was hard to go.
Saturday, the girls both woke up at around 5:30 am and were in bad moods. I think it gets light here too early and they wake up, thinking it’s time to get up. We are looking into getting some room darkening curtains in their room so they will sleep later, we hope. They have started sharing a room now – Ashley in big bed, Liz in crib still. Ashley seems to enjoy it, Liz doesn’t really seem to care, except if Ashley has a stuffed animal that she wants. Anthony and I went out Saturday night – again, the girls screamed and screamed when Ms. Wu showed up – Anthony had to literally pry Ashley off of him and snake his way out the door. It was awful, so hard to do, but we really needed to go out – we haven’t done enough of that lately. The girls are beginning to not like us to leave at all because we are always with them. We saw Ashley in the window peering down at us as we walked away – it was so sad. We had dinner and went to see “Sahara”. Anthony really likes the author of that book, so he was looking forward to the movie. We both enjoyed it, I thought it was a fun movie. We got home to a quiet clean house and the girls were fine.
The zoo was on Sunday, but apparently, everyone else decided to go too – it was crazy busy. We only stayed for a bit, saw a few animals, then went over to the “zoo mall” and hung out there for a few hours. The kids rode rides, ate and played in a jumpy castle with slide. They had a blast. We had friends with us, so that was very enjoyable since we don’t get to see them as often as we would like to.
Last week was Ashley’s observation day and parent/teacher conference. It was nice to sit and watch the kids in their classroom environment for a bit. The conference went well – apparently, Ashley is a good student. Ms. Christy said that Ashley enjoys learning and often tries to do things that are too hard for her. She likes a challenge is my take on that. She works hard, puts everything away, interacts with others well, cleans up after herself, very independent and is learning Mandarin from other kids in the class. She isn’t really speaking much, but she understands much more. She sings songs all the time and reads books, making up her own Chinese words. Sounds like Chinese to us, but it is just made up stuff – very cute. I asked if Ms. Christy has to discipline her and she only gave one example of Ashley talking during story time. She has a friend that she sits with and they are both talkers and enjoy having conversations (in English) all the time. Ashley really seems to enjoy her friends and is SUCH an extrovert – who ever would have thought our children would be extroverts – with 2 introverts as parents. She constantly invites herself over to other peoples houses – asking “can I come over today?”. It’s cute, but can be very annoying sometimes as it makes me feel like she doesn’t like home.
Elizabeth is growing up so fast, I just can’t believe it. She has hit the potty training age and doesn’t enjoy wearing a diaper or clothes for that matter. If she could run around naked, I think she would be in heaven. I am constantly putting clothes back on her or trying to prevent her from being naked in the store. We wake up to a naked child in her crib and often have to wash the bedding. She loves sitting on the potty and is constantly doing that, but not actually using it – only once has she actually gone in it and that was when I was in Hong Kong! I wasn’t even witness to it! She’s talking more, adding one or two new words a week. She LOVES babies and will go up to them in public and caress them and kiss them. She holds her baby doll, rocks her baby, feeds her baby and tries to change baby’s diaper – it is so cute.
Our living room flooded the other night – wasn’t too happy with that. The small drain hole they have out on the balcony wasn’t working and it rained pretty heavily for a few hours and water came seeping in through the door to our balcony – at 1 in the morning. We were trying to clean it up and dumping buckets of water over our balcony. Not fun at all. It is fixed now, thank goodness.
We are starting the process of getting a live in helper (referred to here as AMAH). That’s one of the reasons the girls are starting to share a room – so the amah can have her own room. The process will take a few months, so hopefully, by summertime, we’ll have some help. We’ve debated this for awhile and it took some time before we actually decided to do it. It is so common here and women come from Indonesia and the Philippines to work. They make more money here as an amah than they would there as professionals (and they don’t make much here – a few hundred US a month!). Many of the Amahs actually have college degrees and choose to come here to work instead – isn’t that crazy? Anyway, we are trying to figure out what kind of amah we want right now – someone experienced who’s raised kids or had experience with another family or someone who is new, inexperienced, easily trainable – there are advantages and disadvantages to both. We’ll have a bunch of resumes to go through – hopefully sometime in the near future. It will be very strange having someone living in the house with us, but I’ve heard that feeling goes away fairly quickly.
I’m doing quite a bit of reading up on the culture here – trying to figure it out. There are so many places here in Taipei that we haven’t visited yet that we need to before our time is up. My impression of the people of Taiwan is that they have no unique identity and I’d liked to try and figure out why or what their past history is since I don’t know much about it. The people here are so friendly and open – I have experienced that first hand here and many others have written about how easy it is to be a foreigner here compared to other Asian areas. Not necessarily how easy it is to get around or live here day to day, but how easy the Taiwanese are in accepting foreigners. It seems though, that there isn’t much in the way of “This is Taiwan” attitude. They import everything it seems and use really cheap products lacking in quality. Maintenance seems to be an issue too – they build beautiful parks and buildings, with lovely gardens and water features, only for the weeds to overgrow and the water to turn icky brown and stay that way. Sidewalks don’t last very long – the tiles become loose (some due to earthquakes) and dirt/weeds overtake them. Trash begins to litter areas and starts to pile up, attracting rodents and bugs. The part of the city we live in, XinYi, wasn’t even developed around 10 years ago – yet the buildings, the sidewalks, the parks – they all look REALLY old. People seem to see the new stuff and then forget about the old.
Guess I need to start posting more often – this is pretty long! I’ll try to blog more often so they don’t get this long.
The weather has turned hot and humid here. It’s hasn’t been too bad, as long as we stay indoors in the air conditioning! Last week, on Thursday, we joined some of A’s coworkers for KTV night at The Living Mall. Very interesting place. It looks like the whole floor has been converted into KTV rooms (private Karaoke rooms). Apparently, there are even VIP rooms that are themed, such as Vegas Room. We had a standard room, seats about 10-15 people – 3 mikes, 2 computers, 1 screen for showing the words. It was interesting. They had a small selection of English songs, most of which we’d never even heard. They would load up an English song and give the mikes to us and want us to sing, then be really surprised that we had no idea what it is (saying it was really popular in Taiwan) – pretty funny. Anthony sang a song or two – adding his own lyrics and rhythm – they really seemed to like that and cheered him on. It was a fun night, although hard to go out at first with the kids screaming as we left them at home with Ms. Wu. They freaked out and although she said they calmed down shortly after we left, it was hard to go.
Saturday, the girls both woke up at around 5:30 am and were in bad moods. I think it gets light here too early and they wake up, thinking it’s time to get up. We are looking into getting some room darkening curtains in their room so they will sleep later, we hope. They have started sharing a room now – Ashley in big bed, Liz in crib still. Ashley seems to enjoy it, Liz doesn’t really seem to care, except if Ashley has a stuffed animal that she wants. Anthony and I went out Saturday night – again, the girls screamed and screamed when Ms. Wu showed up – Anthony had to literally pry Ashley off of him and snake his way out the door. It was awful, so hard to do, but we really needed to go out – we haven’t done enough of that lately. The girls are beginning to not like us to leave at all because we are always with them. We saw Ashley in the window peering down at us as we walked away – it was so sad. We had dinner and went to see “Sahara”. Anthony really likes the author of that book, so he was looking forward to the movie. We both enjoyed it, I thought it was a fun movie. We got home to a quiet clean house and the girls were fine.
The zoo was on Sunday, but apparently, everyone else decided to go too – it was crazy busy. We only stayed for a bit, saw a few animals, then went over to the “zoo mall” and hung out there for a few hours. The kids rode rides, ate and played in a jumpy castle with slide. They had a blast. We had friends with us, so that was very enjoyable since we don’t get to see them as often as we would like to.
Last week was Ashley’s observation day and parent/teacher conference. It was nice to sit and watch the kids in their classroom environment for a bit. The conference went well – apparently, Ashley is a good student. Ms. Christy said that Ashley enjoys learning and often tries to do things that are too hard for her. She likes a challenge is my take on that. She works hard, puts everything away, interacts with others well, cleans up after herself, very independent and is learning Mandarin from other kids in the class. She isn’t really speaking much, but she understands much more. She sings songs all the time and reads books, making up her own Chinese words. Sounds like Chinese to us, but it is just made up stuff – very cute. I asked if Ms. Christy has to discipline her and she only gave one example of Ashley talking during story time. She has a friend that she sits with and they are both talkers and enjoy having conversations (in English) all the time. Ashley really seems to enjoy her friends and is SUCH an extrovert – who ever would have thought our children would be extroverts – with 2 introverts as parents. She constantly invites herself over to other peoples houses – asking “can I come over today?”. It’s cute, but can be very annoying sometimes as it makes me feel like she doesn’t like home.
Elizabeth is growing up so fast, I just can’t believe it. She has hit the potty training age and doesn’t enjoy wearing a diaper or clothes for that matter. If she could run around naked, I think she would be in heaven. I am constantly putting clothes back on her or trying to prevent her from being naked in the store. We wake up to a naked child in her crib and often have to wash the bedding. She loves sitting on the potty and is constantly doing that, but not actually using it – only once has she actually gone in it and that was when I was in Hong Kong! I wasn’t even witness to it! She’s talking more, adding one or two new words a week. She LOVES babies and will go up to them in public and caress them and kiss them. She holds her baby doll, rocks her baby, feeds her baby and tries to change baby’s diaper – it is so cute.
Our living room flooded the other night – wasn’t too happy with that. The small drain hole they have out on the balcony wasn’t working and it rained pretty heavily for a few hours and water came seeping in through the door to our balcony – at 1 in the morning. We were trying to clean it up and dumping buckets of water over our balcony. Not fun at all. It is fixed now, thank goodness.
We are starting the process of getting a live in helper (referred to here as AMAH). That’s one of the reasons the girls are starting to share a room – so the amah can have her own room. The process will take a few months, so hopefully, by summertime, we’ll have some help. We’ve debated this for awhile and it took some time before we actually decided to do it. It is so common here and women come from Indonesia and the Philippines to work. They make more money here as an amah than they would there as professionals (and they don’t make much here – a few hundred US a month!). Many of the Amahs actually have college degrees and choose to come here to work instead – isn’t that crazy? Anyway, we are trying to figure out what kind of amah we want right now – someone experienced who’s raised kids or had experience with another family or someone who is new, inexperienced, easily trainable – there are advantages and disadvantages to both. We’ll have a bunch of resumes to go through – hopefully sometime in the near future. It will be very strange having someone living in the house with us, but I’ve heard that feeling goes away fairly quickly.
I’m doing quite a bit of reading up on the culture here – trying to figure it out. There are so many places here in Taipei that we haven’t visited yet that we need to before our time is up. My impression of the people of Taiwan is that they have no unique identity and I’d liked to try and figure out why or what their past history is since I don’t know much about it. The people here are so friendly and open – I have experienced that first hand here and many others have written about how easy it is to be a foreigner here compared to other Asian areas. Not necessarily how easy it is to get around or live here day to day, but how easy the Taiwanese are in accepting foreigners. It seems though, that there isn’t much in the way of “This is Taiwan” attitude. They import everything it seems and use really cheap products lacking in quality. Maintenance seems to be an issue too – they build beautiful parks and buildings, with lovely gardens and water features, only for the weeds to overgrow and the water to turn icky brown and stay that way. Sidewalks don’t last very long – the tiles become loose (some due to earthquakes) and dirt/weeds overtake them. Trash begins to litter areas and starts to pile up, attracting rodents and bugs. The part of the city we live in, XinYi, wasn’t even developed around 10 years ago – yet the buildings, the sidewalks, the parks – they all look REALLY old. People seem to see the new stuff and then forget about the old.
Guess I need to start posting more often – this is pretty long! I’ll try to blog more often so they don’t get this long.
posted by The Armstrongs at
5/05/2005
