Christmas Eve Day's weather was outstanding here in Kaohsiung. Sunny, warm with just the right light quality that makes winter my favorite season. I met up with a friend for coffee and she told me about her experiences with the TOEFL exam. I don't envy her having to take another stupid standardized test. Then she gave me a wonderful book called "Formosa--A Short Story of an Island" with a lot of old maps (in Dutch, of course) of Taiwan. Cool! After I got good and juiced up on caffeine, we popped across the street to Caves Bookstore to settle a bet on the tone of a certain character. It turns out that we each misunderstood the question we were debating, and were both right, so we settled on no winner and went to dinner.
It wasn't until I was eating it, that I realized that this was traditionally the Christmas dinner time. So how was I celebrating? Eating 鱔魚麵 shan4 yu2 mian4--stir fried eel and noodles--amid the din of a night market. Delicious, as all food here, but a rather unconventional Christmas dinner. After dinner, we hopped over to a store to buy some DVDs. They are way cheap here, no doubt due to a hundred licensing laws being broken. At any rate, I picked up some of my favorite films for a song. It is hard to say no to both Rashomon and Lawrence of Arabia for about US$2 apiece. And a bonus--they all have Chinese subtitles, so I can learn while I watch! But I can't figure out why my copy of "A Streetcar Named Desire" is called "A Street Car Named Desire Cop."
All in all, it was a wonderful day off, and compares favorably with other Christmases. Of course, then the gloomy feeling hits when you are so far from your family. For me, strangely, it was spurned on by the techno versions of Christmas carols I heard in the DVD store.
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