We were tourists today, fabulously productive tourists. During our all-day tour, we visited—and here I have to foreworn you that this is an honest reckoning—in excess of three-hundred sites. Or thereabouts. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Since it is the 25th of December, Merry Christmas to those that share that opinion.

Today is my last full day in Taiwan. At around six o’clock local time tomorrow, we head back to the states. I’ll try to give overall reflections on my trip before I leave. I would have waited until the airplane ride, but the seventy-dollar airplane/car/outlet adapter I bought for my computer, which I took instead of my existing outlet-only adapter, didn’t work and my computer hasn’t been charged in days (edit: Doolies, being brilliant, realized that my laptop was a Toshiba, and her old laptop, now one of her father’s many computers, was sitting, charging in her living room. I’m happy to report that my laptop is charging contentedly waiting for me to type away tomorrow night). It now houses a few minutes of power. If not for Doolies’s father’s fascination with all things computer and his large collection of peripherals around their house—some of which actually work—I wouldn’t have been able to write any of these entries. I didn’t want to wait until I landed at some late hour tomorrow (we’re making back all the time we lost on the way here—you remember, the “Where’s Saturday?” entry), and have to write an entry. I have a feeling I’m going to be very tired when I get home and the only thing that will be running through my simple mind will be, where are my video games, where are my video games. Oh, wait. I wasn’t supposed to say that aloud. I’m trying to hide my addiction, not force people to force me to acknowledge it, or something like that.

Getting back to my day, I took a few notes and many pictures to record the activities. Since I can’t share the photos with you yet, I’ll give you the highlights. The day was coordinated by Doolies’s middle aunt and husband, which is how her family refers to her aunts and uncles: little aunt, middle aunt, little uncle, big uncle, etcetera, but in Chinese. Her mother is the oldest of six children, and she has a smattering of aunts and uncles and cousins to keep track of. I met the middle aunt yesterday at my and Jennifer’s birthday dinner (Jennifer’s birthday is a few days after mine). The middle aunt’s husband drove, and I was a little worried about his driving. His gray Camry displayed many dents and there was a part of the front bumper that was missing, as if someone had taken a large bite out of it. Their dog, a bad-mannered but surprisingly quiet Pomeranian, which they brought along in lieu of their children, was too small to have caused it. They found the dog at their doorstep a year ago and took it in. It’s a cute dog who likes the husband better than the wife, which probably has something to do with him feeding the dog. This was the second dog they found and kept from their doorstep. In Taiwan, when a dog comes to you door, it’s considered good luck to accept it. One explanation for this is that if you have a dog, you can feed it scraps. Wasting food is considered a bad thing, which, if you think about it, makes me an awful person. Perhaps it’s time for me to invest in a dog. Getting back to the condition of the car, without a mutt culprit, I figured the damage could only be caused by his driving. The story he told at dinner last night didn’t help things.

Before I tell it, I’ll set the stage. The middle aunt’s husband (he’s not the middle uncle, who is an entirely different person) was given the name Ronald by his English teacher, and I’ll use that to refer to him. (It’s not as bad as his wife, who the English teacher named Fifi—I think they give language teachers way too much power.) Ronald visited the states with his family once, about ten years ago. They’re planning to move there permanently once their papers settle in the next year or so, which is ten years after they first put them in, the papers that is. Part of the fault lies with the real middle uncle, who didn’t tell them for five years that he had made a mistake in filing the papers, but that’s another story. Ronald rented a car and drove while in the states. The first time the police pulled him over he didn’t know what the flashing lights on the police car meant. It wasn’t until the siren sounded that he figured they wanted him to pull to the side of the road. In Taiwan, Ronald claims, the driver gets out and hands his license to the policeman. If there’s one thing you don’t do in the states when you get pulled over, is get out of the vehicle. Although Ronald received a name from his English teacher, he did not receive much else, and his English is not terribly good. Ronald got out of the car and the officer ducked behind the police car door, his hand on his holster, screaming at Ronald to get back in the car. Ronald eventually understood what he was being told, and sat down, his hands grasping the steering wheel hard enough to leave marks the next day. Three more police cars pulled up, and only then did the cop approach the car and collect Ronald’s information.

It gets worse. A few days later, he’s driving with his family on a long stretch somewhere in Middle America, speeding. In the telling, his wife chimes in and defends Ronald by saying speeding was acceptable because the road was so long and straight, how could he help but speed. The police pulled behind him and turned on its lights and sirens. Ronald wasn’t sure if the police car, which was right behind him, wanted him to pull over or one of the other cars, so he weaved in front of the car next to him and accelerated—just to be sure. The police car followed him and he pulled over. After he stopped, the middle aunt told him to get out of the car to pay for the ticket. Ronald said, “No way. I’m not falling for that again.” I like Doolies’s aunts—we met the small aunt, an elementary school principal, yesterday for lunch. They’re small, thin ladies with a lot of attitude and a young outlook on life. Ronald was very kind during the tour, staying in the car when we arrived at places where he knew we wouldn’t find parking (there are many such places in Taipei, which is probably why everyone drives a moped), and acting as tour guide and ordering yummy food everywhere else.

In the end, Ronald turned out to be a good driver, but my second impression wasn’t much better than my first. The first stop we made was a coffee shop for breakfast. Upon pulling over, I opened the door and placed a foot outside the door. At that moment, Ronald decided to pull the car forward, to make it easier for us to get out. I thankfully had not put weight on my foot and I pulled my leg inside as he started to roll. Things got better from there, but there were many windy roads as we made our way up the mountains surrounding Taipei, during which I was glad I was still feeling a little sick. It gave me the perfect excuse to close my eyes, rest my head on Doolies’s shoulder, and sleep. Better than having to watch him drive the single lane, windy roads.

Unlike some places I’ve visited, such as Norway, most people in Taiwan do not speak English. Speaking English is more the exception than the rule. Doolies has done an admirable job translating conversations for me, but I’ve discovered one boon to not understanding what people are saying. I have this thing about small talk: I really dislike it. I can say that now because I did research on it. There was a time when I thought that I didn’t like small talk because I wasn’t good at it, and if I learned how to effectively participate in small talk, I would be a more social person, the world would be better, cats and dogs would live in peace, etcetera. To this end, I bought books on it and researched it. What I discovered, after finishing the research and trying small talk was (a) it’s not too hard; and (b) I still hated it. Doolies had a knack for translating only the interesting conversations, such as Ronald’s story. She skipped over the boring stuff, the small talk. In the week that I’ve been here, I haven’t had to suffer through any small talk. Small blessings are all I ask.

Intertwined with our tour today, we spent much of the day, yes, you guessed it, eating. As I mentioned before, and will probably mention again, Taiwanese people love to eat. Today, we ate at least five times. There are food places everywhere, especially in the outdoor food markets we visited. I was introduced to stinky tofu. Doolies had talked about this food for weeks before I arrived here. It’s the Chinese answer to stinky cheese, one of my favorite food groups. I am not a fan of stinky tofu. The smell is rather noxious and the taste, it’s hard to explain. It tastes like grilled or fried tofu (depending on how they prepare it) but it has this scary aftertaste. We ate at a dive seafood place near the shore tonight, which turned out to be quite tasty, even forgiving the bottle cap openers attached by a string to each table. A few of the dishes had regular tofu, and while I usually like tofu in my dishes, every time I ate a tofu dish, all I could think of was the terrible stinky tofu aftertaste, and I couldn’t eat it. Perhaps it’s an acquired taste, although I’m not sure I’m ready to acquire it.

And lastly, before I succumb to the Dimetapp I took for my cold—I started sneezing like a crazy man while writing this entry, and had to down my four tablespoon dose to continue—I spoke about a French restaurant we visited on top of the second tallest building in Taipei, and I mentioned that the restaurant did not spin. As we were driving back, the middle aunt pointed out a tall building with a restaurant that did revolve. The funny thing about the building, though, was that the restaurant was not at the very top, but slightly below the top. On the top, you see, was a large garbage incinerator. Talk about yummy dinners.