Monday 9/23: A Real Gym

For lunch we went back to a familiar place up ShiDa Rd where we had to get two separate tables to fit everyone; JiaLan came with us this time; she’s in the 8AM class with Christina and John which is higher than ours in that they started at chapter 11 and JiaLan said she had to learn all those words right away. They have a test every day, and the teacher is weird; she doesn’t have anything electric at home, no phone, no TV, no air-con, etc., wears large baggy T-shirts, has a bowl haircut that’s shaved below the bowl, and apparently looks down on Taiwanese people, being from the mainland.

The bus 15 took so long I almost gave up and walked to the MRT, after 20 minutes it came and I didn’t get into the office until 1:50. Dave was still on but the cams were not working and the IM was slow and frustrating and he had to go sleep quickly so it wasn’t much of a conversation.

At 6 YuJung (who I’d been calling Patricia until I realized her English name is Jenny, and JiauJu’s English name is Patricia. Finally got it down when YuJung printed out a chart with everyone’s Chinese and English names on it) brought me to see her gym. YuJung is cute and fun to talk to, she always says “umm…hmm” thinking of the words in English she wants to say, and has big doe eyes and is small and sort of round.

She has nice clothes though not my type—flowery stuff. I learned she LOVES to shop, is afraid to go to department stores because she’s out of control like an addict.

The gym was nice and the aerobics class looked fun, the equipment all familiar, American stuff, same brand names. The saleswoman gave me a tour as YuJung did the class and I learned that 1 year is the shortest contract and I can’t transfer my last 2 months to anyone, as I suspected, but after going over my budget, I decided it’s worth doing, because it’s not much more expensive than the pool/weight room at ShiDa and open more hours and locations, has everything I like, and if I join I’m sure to make myself go almost every day. But the woman looked at my MTC ID and said she’d have to see if this qualified as a student ID for me to get the price (16000/year, which would come out to be ~$48US/month for me). I knew Ginger was paying $75US/month for California Fitness, so this sounded good.

YuJung came out and as I was about to ask her, she asked me if I wanted to go eat. I said You’ll laugh when she asked me what I wanted. She was the first one I felt comfortable telling. I said KFC or pizza, like Bellini. She didn’t laugh, said we’ll go to KFC and next time with her boyfriend, we’ll go to Bellini, since their portions are so big we can’t finish it all. I claimed there’s no way they’re bigger than in US and I’m sure I could finish it, but she didn’t believe me.

The KFC was near school at Guting station. She just had a salad and watched me wolf down my chicken and said, Happy now? I grinned and nodded. I’d been craving it, though it still wasn’t the same (think the oil and water here make everything taste different) and didn’t come with biscuit or mashed potatoes, just fries and drink. They also have DanTats (small egg custard pies) at KFC, strange.

She asked what I do during weekends and I mentioned Room 18 and Mega 19, and she made faces and said be careful, don’t go, and police often bust them and if they find drugs (she kept saying “medicine”) they take everyone to the station to test your urine and no one can leave until everyone’s tested. I’d also mentioned I’d gone shopping at ShiMenDing and she said she didn’t like it, it’s not a good area, has lots of prostitutes, though I hadn’t seen any.

She said her boyfriend was getting tickets to the Taiwan baseball championship series and asked me to go with them to the first game, I said sure. She said the fans there get really crazy and it’s fun. Yay! Something new.