According to some routine, I went to the old market to get my (cheap) breakfast, before I would go to Louisa coffee to get something more expensive to justify my long working hours there. This time, I first went a bank to withdraw money, which worked better this time and to a supermarket to get more of this cheap but good Taiwanese chocolate. In the first supermarket, I would have got Polish, German, Belgian, Italian and Japanese chocolate but not the Taiwanese one, so I went on to that market where I had bought it last time. Then I went to the park where Amy, Lien, Eleanor and I had been on my second evening after coming back to Taichung (see day 215). The festival apparently was over, the booths, the big pigs, the decoration was stored away and the park was being cleaned.
I ate my cheap breakfast and crossed the street to Louisa. First, I didn’t get the seat I meanwhile was used to take because it is a bit farer from the vans. I am still not able to catch the idea to cool a room down so that nearly everybody there was sitting in a jacket. This time, I stopped working earlier, because I wanted to buy a Ukulele for the upcoming ship travels of 12 + 21 +24 days. Last time, with Neil and Lien I had chosen an instrument for 3600T$ what is as much as 125€. It was the best compromise between good quality and price but I thought about the risk to ruin it during travelling and wanted to find a cheaper one. At the shop, they understood my concern and showed me one for half the price and one somewhere in the middle. My ear started to cry and I couldn’t comfort it. The seller saw my dilemma and made it bigger by offering me a discount for the good Ukulele. Now I would get it for around 100€. What should I do? Risking bleeding or grumpy ears or investing 100€ in something that I didn’t really need or could ruin?
15min later I was again sitting in the park and tried to find the chords on the Ukulele that has a different tuning compared to the guitar and was still happy about that sound – it is a real instrument, like the one Arash and I saw in that music store in Shiraz (see day 082), not just some toy. At the time, I couldn’t withdraw money (in Iran impossible for foreigners, because most credit card companies are American) and was sad that I couldn’t buy it for Nikoo.
Amy had told me that her parents had again invited me for dinner, and I had asked Carrie to reserve some of her cakes as a dessert.
I came with my new instrument and tried to play a bit.
Then we had a nice dinner with a special soup where a chicken is cooked in Taiwanese rice wine (this is NOT sake, as I now know). Amy explained that it is a tradition to serve it to women after giving birth when they stay in bed (for a month!!) and it should give them back strength. But it is also a tradition to eat it on cold winter days what sounds more dramatic than it is, so no snow storms and blizzards, but the soup for sure could cope with that, too.
Leo, Carrie’s husband was also here, and I hope he didn’t regret, because immediately he was integrated in the Bürgschaft recitation.
all Bürgschaft professionals supported the newcomer
It was nice to talk with him (or did I just talk to him?) and so it was late quickly, and we had to leave, because Lien would need to go to bed. At home, Lien came up to the guest room with a stuffed horse and I hope she didn’t really mean to give it to me, because I left it there when I went on. It would have been hard to take it with me anyway, and I also didn’t like to imagine she later would regret if it is gone. On the other hand, I also wouldn’t like to give her the impression that I don’t like her present. In any case we played a bit with the horse, and a kind of curling with the cloth cover of my phone that slided perfectly on the wooden floor, and a kind of hide and seek with the walk-in wardrobe where I “couldn’t” find her several times. It is funny, I don’t know if she thinks I really couldn’t see her when I investigated the wardrobe or if this was part of the game for her, too, that I pretended it. When she finally went to bed, for a change I was busy finding my bike keys. I really dislike keys, because the like to be lost or not to be found. In this last case I remembered that they had been on the table and that we wanted to have this bike trip that finally had to be cancelled due to the rain and that I then did “something” with them, most probably preparing them for leaving. So, I now looked through (again!) my handlebar bag, my trousers and normal jacket (3rd time), my bike jacket and shirt and everything nearby where the key could have landed by accident or muddle head caused. Nothing.
At that time, I was wearing my second pair of trousers, that I normally use only inside a house because they don’t fit well and now only accidentally felt they keys in one of the pockets. There is simply no reason to put the keys there…