Tales of Expat Living, Teaching, and Tramping in Taiwan and Beyond.
Wow. This has been a crazy couple of months. It’s been tough picking up and moving to a brand new city, but well worth it. Dom and I have been in Taiwan less than 2 months, and already we have jobs, an amazing space to call our own, and can already say a handful of […]
The full moon has been known to make people do crazy things. Good thing the final day of the Chinese New year is always planned to fall on one. It’s my theory that the spell of the moon is one of the reasons the Taiwanese have the balls to jump into a sea of fireworks […]
Day 10 of Chinese New Year doesn’t really have any specific tradition one must follow such as lighting fires, offering sweet foods to bribe the gods, or eating your first born child. Okay. Just kidding about the last one. Today is simply a day to continue praying and to be with family (assuming you are […]
Jade Emperor, they say it’s your birthday. And by they, I mean the industrial sized fireworks that went off by my building this morning at 7 am. My boyfriend and I (in our half- asleep state) surely thought we were under attack. One would think we would be used to it by now, what […]
The seventh day of Chinese New Year is known as Renri (人日, the common man’s birthday), and many believe this is the day when human beings were created. So today my friends, we are all one year older. Another interesting fact I discovered, is that most Asians add a year to their birth date because they […]
To be honest, day six of Chinese New Year is absent of special rituals. We are at the part of the New Year where things have hit a lull. The middle days are a time of quiet (minus the fireworks) when families feast and spend time together, leading to the final day celebration blowouts. Shockingly, […]
Day five of Chinese New Year is the God of Wealth’s birthday. And what does one do on the God of Wealth’s birthday? Well obviously feast on dumplings, duh. And Karaoke. Yes, you gotta have karaoke. Dumplings (餃子, jiǎozi) symbolize wealth because their shape resembles a Chinese tael, an old school system of Chinese weight […]
Day four of Chinese New Year is somewhat uneventful compared to the last few days. The fires have dwindled, the firecrackers are fewer and further between (but make no mistake they are still going strong ), and people have slowly started to make their way back into the cities from holiday. Most importantly, the trash […]
Day Three of Chinese New Year is known as the Chìkǒu 赤口, which directly translates to “red mouth”. It is customary to burn more paper offering over trash fires, but I have witnessed none of this in Kaohsiung. I have been told it is still practiced in rural areas. I guess people in big cities […]
Home is a tricky concept. These past 6 months I have been living in Honduras. And before that I was living in Indonesia and South America. So yes, I was born and raised in Texas, but I really haven’t been able to call it my “home” for some time. Going home for Christmas is always […]
Nomad Notions 