Sometime during the night, delirious with fever, I got up to use the restroom.
Funny thing about the restrooms here, there’s no differentiation between the shower and the rest of the restroom, consequently, since the Taiwanese tend to shower at night, all night long the bathroom floor is soaking wet and the air is thick and humid.
As I was sitting there I met Geoffrey. Geoffrey is the cockroach who was enjoying the nice climate and decided to make an attempt to run across my foot. He didn’t succeed, but I was too feeble to kill him.
I named him Geoffrey because I had to call him something while I was negotiating with him. You see, I wanted him to agree to my terms: He was welcome to this half of the house, just leave the bedroom in the back alone. (We’re in the back room and essentially sleeping on the floor, so I wasn’t too crazy about the idea of him crawling over us in our sleep.)
I was pretty sure I had convinced him when I left the restroom, only to be confronted with an army of them on the floor. 20 to 30 of them arranged between be and the bedroom.
Eventually I realized that the natural marble floor has a series of dark imperfections I’d never noticed before and in the dark and in a fever they came to life. (Geoffrey in the bathroom was real though.)
In the morning, I was too sick to go out and get breakfast, but we finally got out about 9:30. Irene had signed Michelle up for an art class and we had to get her there by 10.
The class instruction was in Chinese, and we’re not too sure she understood or was understood, but she played well with the others and had a lot of fun, so we signed her up for 12 more classes while we’re here.
In the evening, we first went out to eat at MOS Burger. We took the kids and we all ate there. Irene chastised me because we spent 300 Taiwanese dollars for dinner! However, when you figure that’s $US 9, it didn’t seem that bad to me. Still, prices for food in Taiwan (especially Chinese food) tend to be cheap, so I suppose it was a bit of an expensive meal. (Incidentally, we had two burgers (one of which was seafood), fried chicken, chicken nuggets, fries and drinks.)
One thing that was rather annoying about MOS: We were there for 53 minutes, during that time the in-store music system played “Theme from a Summer Place” continuously. It’s not a bad little tune, but 53 minutes?! You’d think the employees would go mad.
After dinner we left the kids with grandma and grandpa and headed out to the computer shops and the night market. By this time, my cold had come back full force – it’s strange how much worse it is after dark. During the day it rarely bothers me.
We cut the excursion short because I just kept getting worse and worse, but we didn’t leave before I had some very good food. It was “Indian” food adapted for the night markets. I’m not going to describe it in detail because, with just a little work, I’m convinced it might have commercial viability back in the states. More on that when I’m rich.