Overestimated legs

Went hiking on Saturday morning as my first practice for going climbing Yushan (玉山) next month. I didn't plan to do any special training until recently some friends and relatives tried to convince me that jogging or cycling only do little help to hiking or mountain climbing. And even with going jogging or cycling at least three times a week, I'll still need to experience and get used to the different pain that hiking will bring to me.

With the eager to proof the "threats" from my friends and relatives were not applicable on me, there was not even a pore for a tiny sleepy fairy to stand on my eyelids when I heard my alarm. I met my uncle and aunt precisely at 6am at the bus stop.

Despite sitting at the last row on the bus with my uncle, a glance at the faces of other passengers was unnecessary. I could tell undoubtedly I was the youngest person by merely looking at those almost bald and gray heads.

45 minutes later, Yangminshan (陽明山) was getting bigger and bigger. I expected her to be familiar and hospitable as usual since my friends and I had spent countless evenings and nights enjoying the night view with beers or coffee and sharing tears or laughter in our recent life with her. But she didn't look exactly the same and I also found during the daytime she wore not only a different colour of her outfit but with a fresher face.

When you go hiking at Qixing Mountain(七星山), you will get enough chances to practice saying "Good morning!" in Chinese to or back to people you don't know and may never see again in your life. But almost every one did the practice, even the two westerners we met.

My aunt, uncle and I were only trying to chat with each other in the very beginning of our hiking. Cos we knew it was very rude to interrupt the fervent conversation between birds, cicadas and other insects. Besides, think even without our own manners, my heart beat would still violently remind me.

A billionaire must drop and scatter some teeny diamonds on his way hiking. With the diamond-like water drops, the leaves and grass at both sides of the trail were shining. The dust carried on our shoulders were blew away by the natural A/C while the dark green window shutters blocked the stalk of the sunshine for us.

I don't know it's my seventy-year-old uncle or me trying to show "I am still young enough", my aunt said she couldn't keep up and wanted to give up going to the top with us. (Ok ok, I admit after feeling the gentle ache of my knees, it flashed through my mind for a few seconds that I wanted to stay with my aunt.)

It took us slightly more than an hour to stand at the highest spot in Taipei area, 1120m high to be exact. Due to the coming typhoon, the strong wind made me walk like a drunk person. And with its violence of rolling my eardrums, I had an illusion of riding a roller coaster.

Although I brought my camera with me, think it's the muscular pains of my lower legs mainly took the job of recording the whole trip for me. Now great, my friends and relatives do successfully make me start to worry if I can finish climbing Yushan in less than two weeks.

Practice will make perfect (hopefully)

Bought a cooking book a few days ago, which is about recipes of making a dough for Chinese cooking. After rehearsing with some flour and water for several times in my mind, today I finally got a whole and quiet evening to hear the word - "Action!"

The scene for this evening was about me in my black cotton shorts and white vest reading the cooking book in a small kitchen for five minutes in the beginning. Then after some mixing, kneading and dry frying, I should show to the invisible camera about my speckled-brown 蛋餅. (蛋餅 is something similar to tortilla. It can be used and presented in many different styles.)

I followed the recipe successfully until I needed to cut the big dough into equal pieces and rolled them out to very thin pancakes. It was easy to make them oval, square, or other unidentified shapes but somehow they refused to look like a full moon. The best one I got looked like a three-year-old kid's butt.

I know it requires a lot of techniques to make a nice dough, but it just never came to my mind that to roll it circular does, too. It looks easy!

However, the feeling wasn't completely strange to me. I remember the first time I tried to learn how to serve in tennis. My excitement quickly turned into puzzlement when my coach told me to put my racquet down. I tried hard to hide my puzzlement and not to ask him, "I have never watched Roger Federer serving without a racquet. Why should I put my racquet down?"

After showing me the serving pose, my coach wanted me to throw the ball high and then caught it with the same position and at exactly the same place. I was thinking, "Oh, come on. I've watched plenty of tennis players doing it on TV. And it is just throwing a ball. How hard can it be?" But for the next 20 minutes, I felt I was dancing Cha Cha with the ball. I just couldn't stop moving back and forth to catch it.

Even with a perfect circular shape, think the cooking was still doomed since I used a different kind of flour. Although the texture was different and the shape wasn't quite right, it didn't bother me at all. Isn't it what cooking about? Fun and full of experiments.

Before it stops looking like a butt, my dear family and friends, please be patient!

Generation undecided, still

Cinema is one of the pretty good shelters I would highly recommend if you feel you are going to melt or vapor soon from this small island during this season. Today I went to Shin Kong Cineplex in XiMen and watched another film from Taipei Film Festival 2009.

The film is called Generation Undecided, directed by Elmar Szücs, who suddenly found out that apart from having a new born baby, he was in the middle of nowhere with his coming 30th birthday. I was immediately intrigued when I read the introduction of the film from the program booklet - Isn't it also about my story in a certain way?

Guess many people were as interested in generation classifications as I was. The seats were almost occupied with different sizes of butts. Without any unreasonable and fancy scenes of digital effects or a sexy actress in her lace tank running with her breasts counting beats, (Go watch Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. You will understand what I'm talking about.) the film was rough and plain in a very friendly way and I enjoyed my visual travel in Germany very much.

But don't know if it's because I didn't pay enough attention to the film, I left the cinema without any enlightenment and still carried the same question with me on my way to the cram school.

Special moments in our life

Got an email lying in my inbox this morning with a subject - "Want to share this special moment with you." "The special moment" had nothing to do with any romantic atmosphere, but a special (well, at least, to my friend it is) combination of numbers.

The email said, at 12hr 34 minutes and 56 seconds on the 7th of August this year, the time and date will never happen in your life again! (123456789)

Although obviously I would not only share the special moment with my friend but also with at least 30 unrecognizable recipients, I still appreciate his time clicking my email address from his contact list.

I am just wondering : How special was the moment? Doesn't it also make "at 10hr 10 minutes and 10 seconds on the 10th of October of 2010", "at 11hr 11 minutes and 11 seconds on the 11th of November of 2011" and so on special, too?

Maybe there is an implicit message in my friend's email that some special moments indeed will never happen again in our life, but some special moments are still there, waiting.

Priceless egg fried rice

It was almost five o'clock when mum and dad got home this evening. Usually if the kitchen still remains dark after five, it means my sisters and I should probably start to decide later in the evening - turn left or right? Shida night market or Yong Kang street?

As the cheap but delicious Thai restaurant on Yong Kang street and the Japanese style roast chicken in Shida night market were still trying to fight for the championship in my head, dad knocked my door and asked me if I want some egg fried rice for dinner.

"errr...ok", I answered with many question marks on my face.

Don't get me wrong. I have no bias against egg fried rice. I was just googling in my head if I had tried any delicious egg fried rice in Shida or on Yong Kong street.

I tried to find out which food stall or restaurant we were talking about. But, "No, I am gonna cook it for you all myself." That's the answer I heard from dad.

From kindergarten to high school, no matter how early I needed to get up, I often had my breakfast at home which was made or at least prepared by mum. Even for Taiwanese women, it's still not that common to make breakfast for your children in the morning. I have many classmates that their mums were still sleeping when they went out to school.

I remember when I was about 10, for a child who seldom had any chance to eat outside I used to envy some classmates who could have their lunch box ordered from the school. But after trying it, I immediately realized I was just charmed by the colourful pictures outside of the lunch box.

With a really good cook in my family, sometimes it's hard to show how much cooking talent I have, let alone dad. The only memory of dad cooking for me that I can still scoop out now is about twelve or thirteen years ago when mum went travelling to Canada for around two weeks.

Even though curry and chicken noodle soup took their turn to be my sister Ruby's and my dinner for quite a few days during that period, we never complained about anything. Because after seeing dad trying to toss the pan like a chef to give us a tasty fried egg for breakfast, but ended up with the egg clinging passionately on the wall, it's hilarious enough to convert our attention of the constant attack of the curry and the noodle soup.

As a thoughtful daughter, I asked dad if he needed any help when he was heading to the kitchen. He said, "Oh, come on. It's just egg fried rice! It's easy." Well, he might be right since eggs and rice were really the only ingredients he used.

Not like the good egg fried rice we have tried, dad's rice didn't separate from each other completely enough and without any supporting characters, the only two leading characters were clearly recognizable.

But, believe it or not, the bland food was very delicious.

Chinese idioms with animals

After learning some idioms from my dog-tired friend Gary this morning, it kind of reminds me when I was a little girl, a comic book about idioms related with animals used to be my bedtime reading for quite a while.

We have a lot of idioms about animals/insects in Chinese, from a tiny ant to a big elephant, from animals with no legs to animals who need plenty of shoe racks. Below are some I find interesting. (And literally translated by me.)

A cat crying for a rat (貓哭耗子)
showing insincere sympathy

A three-legs cat (三腳貓)
doing something clumsily, especially because of not having enough knowledge or skill

Playing piano to an ox (對牛彈琴)
talking about something to someone who can't understand it at all or is not interested in it at all

Looking for a horse while riding a donkey (騎驢找馬)
looking for something you have already had, or keeping staying with something you're not that satisfied with while looking for something better to replace at the same time

Add legs after drawing a snake (畫蛇添足)
doing something unnecessary

Roars from an east riverbank lion (河東獅吼)
shoutings from a very angry wife to her husband

After watching the great match played by Andy Roddick and Andy Murray and being struggling in which Andy I am going to root for during the whole match, I am dog-tired, too. Bed time.

Sometimes maybe it should be as simple as that

Cathy was a colleague from my part-time job at school. I don't know if it's because her funny and silly problem of keeping walking straight on a pavement amuses me very much or it's because she also has the height of a hobbit as I do. I usually forget she is actually three years older than I am. The two hobbits became good friends.

During the past year, Cathy had always been a supporter of having black and straight hair as her DNA suggests. She usually ties her hair into a ponytail which suitably meets her simple and quiet dressing style. But about two weeks before she quit her job, she walked into the office with a romantically curled hairstyle which also carried a comfortable red-brown shimmer.

Cathy explained that since she is going to move to Japan soon and gets married in July, her mum thinks the new hairstyle might become a fashion shield which can keep her safe from any possible attack from those stylish Tokyo girls.

For Cathy's own safety and beauty, she changed her hairstyle, but the rest of her still remains. She's still the girl who thinks it's unnecessary to spend any money wearing her wedding dress and take photos before the wedding ceremony. In fact, if it were not for the wishes from her fiance's family, she even wouldn't want a dinner reception.

The spark between Cathy and her Japanese fiance was lighted in the first year while they both studied for their master degree in America. From then on, together for the following two years they took some courses which are not only about English teaching but also about dating.

After leaving America and respectively going back to Japan and Taiwan with a diploma, they advanced their learning about dating by taking another two-year, long-distance and cross-culture course.

Even though they saw each other every six months in Japan or in Taiwan and texted each other once or twice a day, they seldom chatted on MSN and only talked once every two weeks on Skype for usually less than 40 minutes during the past two years.

I thought I have already been well aware how few I can recognize the faces of love. But after knowing Cathy's story, I found out that when it comes to love, I was more ignorant and uneducated than I thought - Do you know in a long-distance relationship the temperature from a lover's hand can last for six months without any frequent help from Skype or MSN to maintain the heat?

Cathy usually walked with me to buy my coach ticket back to Taipei. Once while we walked along the calm and beautiful lake in our school campus, she told me she felt uncertain about quitting her job to start a new life in Japan. I asked her if it's because she is still not so sure he's the right man to marry and feels the two of them should spend more time living together before they get married.

She slightly bit her lips and gently shook her head while two baby pink clouds floated through her cheeks. "Never. We have never doubted about it.", Cathy answered bashfully.

I believe sometimes it's very important and necessary to show how much our love is and how hard we can try for the one we love. Even though I seldom question about how brave and defiant I can be for love, Cathy's story reminds me maybe it's equally important to learn that sometimes it is not the harder the better and it might be perfectly enough to try with the efforts it just needs.