Atelman, Nooooo!

Well, here it is, after months of watching Terrace House and scheduling around Tokyo’s weather, I arrived in Japan and it was…cold! Well, not really cold cold but anything around fifty degrees is too cold for me. Within the first few days I’d already bought three warmer weather tops: a hoodie, a cotton duster, and a denim-ish jacket. My light packing — lighter than even my previous two trips — was completely ruined. Also, my friend hated my orange New Balance shoes so much that after a few days of harassment, I turned those in for some fresh white ones. Of course, these newfound beauties, Clearweather Donny , cut into my heel so I had to keep the orange ones around anyway until I could break the new ones in. And that is the extent of anything bad about Tokyo. Everything else is exactly as everyone says. The people are wonderful, the food is terrific, the transportation seems easy, there’s a bajillion places to explore and familiarize yourself with. And the two things that people t...

With two weeks in-between trips, I was back in Taiwan for the end of March and beginning of April. We celebrated Qingming Jie, Tomb Sweeping Day, on the fifth, a holiday I’d never participated in. My maternal grandfather passed away late last year, and apparently you can’t actually pay your respects in the traditional way until a year past. We did visit Shandao Temple to say hello to his ashes, bow to my grandma, and shuffle in and out with the procession of people doing the exact same thing. It was all very quotidian, with no pomp or circumstance. Which I guess, is both more or less what I expected. In another cultural event, I went to go watch a local professional basketball game. There are seven teams in Taiwan’s Super Basketball League and I’d been waiting to attend a game after finding out that one of the teams was called Taiwan Beer, with a logo that features a fierce Formosan black bear. My friend got us tickets, allowing use to sit as close as we wanted -- also the stadi...