What Do We Know????

WHAT DO WE KNOW?????



This blog is going to share some of our "What Do We Know?" experiences!! Living in a foreign country, one needs a certain willingness to acknowledge that you cannot control everything and you most likely will not understand everything, especially if you do not speak the language!! So, here is just a sampling of some of those adventures for us!!

Food: Yesterday, we went to the local market near our villa (thereby avoiding THE STEPS) where I had decided we needed some sort of vegetable, for we had run out of our fresh produce and we had not had time to go to the traditional market in the morning. Suddenly, I spotted a bag that said garlic-seasoned green peas!! Dummy that I am, I assumed that when we got home, I would open the bag, pour some peas into our one saucepan, add a little water and steam the vegetable du jour. Wrong! When I opened the bag, there were lots of tiny, individual size packets of dried, nicely seasoned peas that one eats, presumably, as a snack, like a package of nuts. Ted and I looked at each other and the now oft cited refrain we say to each other, "So what do we know?" was uttered by us both simultaneously!

Another example is one without an accompanying picture, but Ted can describe the sound: barfing outside our villa window on a Saturday night! This is indeed a college campus! That sound was one we could say, "Hey, we know!!"

One of the disadvantages of the warm weather is its conduciveness for some of the biggest cockroaches we have seen (although Ted says he has seen some big ones in NY City too!) This was also an adventure, since very little English is spoken in the nearby market. We had asked our Taiwanese friend Cynthia to write the Chinese characters for ant and roach spray, which we dutifully showed the clerk. (We knew we would never be able to gesture well enough to ask where that might be in the store, if they even had it!! )The clerk snickered when he saw our request and took us right to the correct aisle. Lo and behold, there was RAID!!!

Tonight, we decided to splurge for dinner, not wanting to buy any more food for the ants and cockroaches (Michelle, you would go nuts!!), since we are going to the Kenting National Park for the weekend. So we went to the nearby cafe, for the dormitory students, where basically again, no English is spoken. We pointed to what looked like a good meal, by its picture, but "what do we know??"" For an enormous price of $3.44 , Ted treated BOTH of us to dinner out. It actually was very good and filling: crispy fried chicken pieces (sort of like chicken fingers), a large bowl on noodle and vegetable soup, and a large glass of cold green tea! Thinking we were doing extremely well with our chopsticks, and actually starting to congratulate ourselves on same, suddenly, a man appeared at our table to show us how correctly to hold our chopsticks. So, what do we know??? We both tried his way and could not do it!! We have gone back to our incorrect way to hold them, so that we could get food down!!

Undaunted, returning to home,we now decided to try that artichoke-looking fruit, that we had been told would be ripe by today! Lo and behold, when we went to "open" it, it fell apart. The insides were very soft; had it gone bad? Was it at the correct stage to eat? What do we know??? Ted was far more adventurous than I, and ate it. I finally took one piece (oh, it has pits, but what did we know?) and is very sweet, almost more than what I like. Ted compares it to a ripe, sweet pear.









Many other such adventures come to mind, but fortunately, we have Janet to save us from ourselves. With a phone to each ear, you can see just exactly how efficient she is!!