August 10, 2012

August 10th, 2012 - trip to market

Every time I add a page, where it shows up in the sidebar is always a surprise, and editing where they end up after the fact is not intuitive either, so bear with me and try to stay in order. Did have a breakthrough on the diary today though. As I was hunting around trying to figure out the sidebar, noticed that the site was 63% filled. Wasn't gonna make it to September at that rate, so figured out that the pictures I was attaching were enormous. It forced me to learn how to shrink their size without losing too much quality and got the site down to 2%. Took the better part of the morning to figure it out and replace the big with the compressed, but was pretty darn pleased and just had to jump back and kiss myself. Thought I'd take a moment to show you around our apartment. Today's installment... the office. Here is a photo of it and a couple out the window. This room would also double as our extra bedroom...super view from the 16th floor facing S / SE, and is really something when the electrical or tropical storms come rolling through. Here is another view of the street and park below from the deck off the office. If you look real hard, there is a 7-E across the street. The street is Zhongchen and was a big reason we decided on this apartment. Wide, treelined avenue that isn't too congested and has a ton of nice shops. In the park below, the ladies do what I beleive is Tai Chi almost all day long. Pretty elaborate too...the leader has a portable mic and calls out changes via portable speakers. Will investigate this more as I want to give it a twirl, but you can get the jist of it from this clip. Last night, kids and I decided to try out a burger joint, Eat Burger, that was recomended to us (decent burger...no Red Mill or In-n-Out, but not McD's either), which happened to be near the Carrefour and we needed some milk. From research, Carrefour is a French chain that is in many corners of the world, including some in the US, but is new to us. Kinda like Fred Meyer (for the PNW types) or a less antiseptic version off Target for the rest of you. Had my camera along this time and took a few snaps... Here is Black Francis' favorite sugar substitute. Tame! Never realized how similar my buddy Howie looks like Frank. I thought the spelling on this jar of "catchup" was off, but upon review...the damn Chinese invented the stuff. Then it was onto the meat department. Kinda pissed that was the only Joe Albertson commercial on Youtube...someone has got to get on that. Anyway, as with any trip to the meat department, the game of guess the body part was on. We all got this one right. With the left and right ventricles exposed, this was a gimme. We were split on what this was...guesses included, pancreas, gall bladder, and that thing from the movie Alien. OK...here is one for the Ladies only. I know you girls all got that one right. The clams are cheap ($15 Taiwan dollers equates to 50 cents US), and I remember the girl on the right from college. Like any good multipurpose store, they not only have foodstuffs, but a wide variety of other items. You can get a scooter ($50,000 TW dollars is $3,000 USD) Or you can find poisons and other devices for pest control That isn't a tennis raquet...it is a mosquito killing wand. We have one and they are a lot of fun...Betty loves it when I give her a little electric swat on the keester. And we found this in the cold and flu section. I asked our resident local, Cousin Sharon, what this was for and she said that contruction workers would down this while mixing it with some (racially insensitive) Mr. Brown Coffee. Made sense..saw this guy working traffic control just the other day. And what store would be complete without the obligatory impulse buy item at the check out counter. We got the hot and spicy kind of course. Sorry about all the innuendos in today's posting.