Stamped

L: travelling from France to most places in Europe means i dont get a stamp :/
M: haha isnt tat good so u dont have to fill up ur passport so fast
L:  i have a new passport of 24 pages, it's never gonna be filled up <sigh>
M: loll 1st world problem...
L: HAHAHAHA

Phoenix, AZ

I had a rather eventful and fulfilling day today in Phoenix, quite unexpected actually.
My flight was at 8am, which required that I leave my house at 6am, which required that I wake up at around 4:30am, which resulted in me not sleeping at all the night before since I had a lot of things to do before I left. But then I ended up doing so much all day even with the lack of sleep!

• I watched Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollow Part 2 on the plane, then slept for two hours. 
• Picked up my car rental (I love Jettas!), drove to my hotel and checked in. 
• Changed into a skirt and tank, looked up places to go visit and eat, decided on a schedule, then headed to Wal-Mart.
• At Wal-Mart, I bought sunscreen, tried on a couple of hats and bought a cute one, wandered around for a little bit and then went on my merry way to the Desert Botanical Garden.
• I was at the Garden for maybe an hour before I almost died of heat stroke, despite having done everything the website told me to do before I went. I ended up resting in their Welcome centre for a good 20 minutes before I left the place.
• Drove to Downtown Phoenix and went shopping! First stop was Urban Outfitters and bought a dress and two shirts. Then went to a couple of other stores but didnt buy anything. Bought a drink at Starbucks and went online for a bit.
• Drove to Nobou restaurant, had a fantastic 3-course meal (restaurant week apparently).
• Came back to the hotel, showered, wrote some reviews, did some prep for tomorrow and now i'm ready for bed.

Coins

The office cafeteria in Suresnes, France has two coffee vending machines. If you want a coffee, it will cost you 25 centime. Therefore to have coffee, you will need change. When someone wants to break for coffee, they go around asking "cafe?"

Me: "Cafe?"

Coworker: "Do you have money?"

Me: "I have 10 cents!" picking up this yellow coin I have on my desk.

Him: "That's not 10 cents, that's 20."

Me: "It is! It says 10 cents on it!"

At this point, we were both confused...

Apparently when I went to the Carrefour (supermarket) this morning, I got a 10 cent Ethiopian coin disguised as a 20 cent Euro coin. 

Of course, after being here for a total of 5 weeks this year, I still had no idea what Euro coins look like...

Knife and Fork

Today I discovered that I use knife and fork like a western uses chopstick.
Yes, it's true.
As I watched the Europeans around me (French, English, Bosnian, American, Spanish) smoothly slice their lettuce and crepe, I noticed that my sawing is quite uncouth.
My goal this weekend will be practising the art of using a knife and fork.
Who knew it was a learned skill?

Dear Air Canada

Hello,

I just checked-in from Pearson Airport and received a really rude treatment from one of your staff. I noticed when I checked-in that my seat was a middle seat, despite that the travelling coordinator at my company paid a surcharge to allow seat selection. When I dropped off my baggage, I asked the service staff why I would get charged for seat selection if I ended up with a middle seat (who would pick a middle seat if they had the option, right?). Despite that I was being polite to her, she informed me that the reason why I got that seat was because my ticket was "cheap" and if I didn't pay that price, I would have gotten no seats, since the flight was overbooked. When I told her my seats were not that "cheap" as they were over a thousand dollars, she replied to me, in a quite condescending tone, "let's put it this way, there are many tickets that are way more expensive than yours."

I have the following concerns:
1. Whether her reasoning was sound or not, I implore you to see the problem with her attitude. Is it common for Air Canada staff to speak to a customer in this manner because she thinks they don't have money? I would have walked away without a problem had she told me politely that sometimes the surcharge is a way to ensure that you have a seat, since sometimes flights do get overbooked; however, she instead decided to demean me without a reason.

2. Is it really true that if I pay $1k for a ticket and you are overbooked, I would not be able to continue with my travel? If that is the case, I can hardly imagine that I would want to travel with an airline with operational strategies as such. I am sure that there will be plenty of airlines who would like to take my "cheap" $1500 and guarantee me a seat on the date of my travel.

Your disgruntled frequent flier,
Lynn

Coffee around the world

There's always a slight culture shock when you stay in a country for longer than a week, although it's never so much as a shock as it is just small jolt from having being pulled out of your confined understanding of normalcy (I still recall vividly my experience with buying ham in Boston). The last couple of days, I discovered something similar to how an American might feel when they come to Canada and discover that milk often come in bags.

I'm a bit embarrassed to admit this because I love drinking coffee, but I drink coffee most often with cream (most of the time flavoured) and sugar. The other day at the office, I wanted to have cream for my coffee, only to discover that it doesn't really exist. I walked into a local grocery store and found no such thing. A little confused, I went to McDonald's, thinking they MUST have cream, and not only did I find that they didn't have any, but that a girl next to me said she's never heard of "coffee cream". "Did you mean whipped cream?" She asked me in her charming English accent. Okay, fine, Starbucks should have it right? Nope, not even at their condiments counter. Surprisingly, Costa said they did when I went to ask. They gave me a small cup of it, and it was...really really creamy, but, as delicious as it was, it was not coffee cream.

Looking this up, it turns out that the cream that Costa gave me was quite common in the UK--for desserts. It's called single cream and it's about 20% rather than 12%. The most common cream here is clotted cream, which is approximately 55%-60%. Crazy.

I really shouldn't be surprised though, since I knew that condensed is the normal creamer for coffee in Thailand and Vietnam, so it's only natural that another country would use a different type of milk product as creamer. I don't think I could ever get used to putting milk into my coffee; I never liked cafe au lait and was never huge on lattes. I wonder what I'll be discovering at my next stop in Paris. Two weeks...I think I'll be really lonely.

Undertaking of Cuisine New Orleans

Checked

• po'boy
• crawfish etouffe
• deep fried alligator
• catfish
• jambalaya
• gumbo
• cafe au lait
• beignet
• fried oyster on half shell
• crawfish bisque
• muffuletta
• red bean and rice
• popeye's (fried chicken..hahahaha)
• hand grenade
• hurricane

Not Checked

• turtle soup (adam tried)
• boiled crawfish
• praline
• rabbit
• bbq shrimp
• shrimp bisque

Fall Fashion: Rain Boots??

As we all know, boots have been all the rage for a while now. I think it started with the knee-high boots, or as I recall what has been called hooker boots or Come F*** Me Boots; and then after a couple of years of all types going in and out of style, it went all the way down to ankle boots, which came back with a vengeance last year (in keeping with this whole 80s fashion that has been going on for too long now.) Oh, and not to mention, the Ugghlies, of which I am now an unfortunate owner (received as a gift...they are, however, as I reluctantly admit, very comfortable and warm.)

Come on, if you had gone to Australia, say, five years ago, you would have never thought those Ugghlies would sweep America off of its feet (hehehe). But it did, and it continues to. So if I were to tell you that these babies would come into fashion soon, you'd believe me right?

Okay, well I kid. No one I know in Toronto owns a pair of rain boots, we hardly own umbrellas. The reality is, we will never need a pair (whereas Ugghlies are pretty warm for the harsh winters there.) There is this thing called "car", which I have been pretty deprived off since I left Toronto, that replaces umbrellas and rain boots. I know it rained all summer in Toronto this year, and last year as well, but if you had to walk for a couple of blocks in the rain, the well-maintained roads (seriously, no joke) and drainage system usually will not allow water puddles or mud soak your feet or splash on you. Even in the winter, the slush is nicely shovelled to the side without problems. When we think of rain boots, we think of these:

But alas, what most of us probably failed to realize is that there are lesser places in the world that does rain all the time, where the roads are horribly planned, the drainage system sucks, the snow melts into slush and freezes again back and forth, and the roads are just not shovelled. One of these lesser places is named Boston.

As summer comes into an end and the leaves turn nicely red, yellow, and orange, rain befalls Boston, and mud befalls on us. The FIRST day I got to Boston, I had the fortunate experience of walking to the T (the Bostonian name for their public transit system) on a dirt path along the highway in the rain from home. My shoes did not look pretty. I noticed a girl on the T, however, wearing rain boots and I thought to myself, "What a great idea! I'm going to get me a pair!!" Funny thing was, I thought finding a pair of nice looking rain boots would be hard, but little did I know, rain boots are fall necessities not just in Britain, but also in Boston. Almost every store that sells shoes in Boston, sell rain boots ...even Aldo (Did anyone else know that Aldo sells rain boots?)

Apparently, rain boots, sometimes used interchangeably with Wellies (supposed to go up to your knees), or Waders (supposed to go up to your chest), or galoshes (supposed to cover your shoes), is a part of the fall fashion here in Boston. Here are some fashionable ones:

Which ones did I get? Hunter Wellington Boots in black, with red Wellie Socks for lining and cuff!!

FYI: Hunter’s Wellington boots are actually famous for its durability, comfort and performance... Hunter caters to all sorts of people from farmers to rock stars to the royalty [my box tells me it's appointed by the Queen and Duke of Edinburgh!]

*EDIT: Apparently, Eldon says Hunter boots are popular in Toronto. I ran a google search on "hunter boots toronto" and found a blog entry from last year that talked about it. According to this girl, you can find hunter boots at approximate four locations in Toronto...they are about as mainstream as Salvatore Ferragamo handbags!

My Internship Final Essay

First and foremost, I think that if the goal of this program is to attract young people of Taiwanese origin to learn about Taiwan and think about coming back to work in the future, it did have its success with me. The last time I came back to Taiwan, I had found myself feeling like a complete foreigner and believing that the idea of me coming back to Taiwan to work is almost foolish, as I felt that there is too much of a cultural divide between what I have grown up with and the customs that exist in the Asian culture. Nevertheless, the eight weeks that I have been there, especially because of the local Taiwanese people with whom I have worked and gotten to know, has made me re-evaluate my position and is seriously considering going back and hopefully find a suitable job there, at least for a few years.

My first impression with TTT was one of pleasant surprise. During orientation, I felt like an honored guest, an undeserved one at that, because the question that keeps arising in my mind is, what did I do to deserve this special kind of treatment? But what I have learned, while working in Taiwan for these eight weeks was that a part of it is, in fact, keeping with the Taiwanese tradition, where a guest is treated with extra consideration to ensure their comfort. But this also leads to my next question: am I a guest here or do I belong here? My answer was slowly revealed throughout my internship.

I think one of the most important impacts that TTT has made on me is finding a resolution for my identity crisis. I’ve always felt that I had strong ties with Taiwan. When I was 7, half way through grade one, my parents uprooted our family and went to New York. For two full years while I was there, I had refused to learn English and cried about wanting to come home. “You are home,” my mother would tell me. But I would tell her that this was not my home, my home is in Taiwan. In grade 3, when our family moved to Canada, I began to slowly immerse into the North American culture; however, when people ask me what my background is, I would always tell them proudly that I am Taiwanese; I can speak Chinese fluently, I can even read fully, I love Chinese literature. Nevertheless, two years ago, when I did come back to Taiwan and met some Taiwanese people, I was told that I am a foreigner (外國人) and, for the first time, heard my own accent when I spoke Mandarin. When I go out in Taiwan and talk to a sales clerk, they would ask me “where are you from?”  The answer “Taiwan” seems to be no longer acceptable. But can a外國人be able to work in a Taiwanese institute? Will I be able to make any contributions to Academia Sinica?

            During my internship here at the Academia Sinica, working at the Program for Historical Demography, the professor for whom I worked, Professor Yang, had put me on two major projects (and some minor ones) and each of them made me realize that I did have something to contribute. My first major project was researching on foot binding. Throughout the eight weeks, I pored through both English and Chinese books and journal articles on the subject and was able to put together a draft research paper as an aid for Professor Yang’s final paper. There were two things I felt that really aided in this research. First was that I was able to do the research in both Chinese and English and compiled the research paper in English. One of the important things that Academia Sinica wants to promote is publications of journal articles in English in order to maintain an international status in all fields. Having compiled and translated a paper with a thesis and proof all in English is an important step for this. Another thing that aided in this research was the fact that I have already written several research papers throughout my Masters degree, with one pending publication, so that Professor Yang and I could work relatively fast in terms of knowing what type of material to look for this type of format.

            The second major project I was assigned to work on was giving seminars on writing academic papers (both for journals and conferences). Having obtained my Masters in English Rhetoric (英語修辭) while having had many lessons and experiences throughout my degree on how to write effective academic papers, I was able to put together some useful presentations for the Masters and PhD students on writing English papers. This experience made me realize that I can do more than just teach English in Taiwan, but that I can provide very specific and useful knowledge in the academic realm.

            In sum, working on these two projects at Academia Sinica made me realize that I do have a place in Taiwan. While I was in Academia Sinica, I did not feel like a 外國人. I felt like anyone who was working in Academia Sinica and made some wonderful friends while I was there, with whom I am continuing keeping in touch with. At no point did my co-workers made me feel like I am not like them (though they are sometimes extra nice to me because I felt a little homesick and make fun of my accent and grammatical errors from time to time) and they all came to support me during our final presentation at the Technology Building. They told me how proud of me they were and made me feel like I really did make a contribution to the work that they are doing.

            So in answer to my question of whether I am a guest here or I belong here, I have to say that my internship in Taiwan has transformed my experience of from being a guest to actually feeling at home in Taiwan. I felt that not only was I able to contribute to a working environment in Taiwan, but I personally have gained so much in terms of learning about the people, the culture, and the history of Taiwan in the past eight weeks that the maximum words allowed in this essay cannot possibly sum up. And last, but not least, what I am missing about Taiwan at this moment, is not only the shopping and the food (which were both unforgettable), but the people in Taiwan—their cleverness, their determination to continuously improve their lives and culture, and, most of all, their kindness. The idea of coming back to Taiwan to work no longer feels foolish, but desirable. Thank you for this wonderful experience.

Very General, Non-detailed Update of TW

It seems as though I've even abandoned my weak attempt at micro-blogging, not that anyone was encouraging the behaviour to begin with. My Internet at home pretty much blows (slow as hell), though I should be grateful that my friend Bruce has lent me a USB connection stick that allows me to connect tothe Internet anywhere in Taiwan as long as there is cell phone reception.

At any rate, here is a short update with what has been going on in my life in the last few weeks after I left Toronto:

Week 1 (June 24-28th): Taiwan Tech Trek's orientation. We went to TaiChung and area, which is approximately the center area of the Taiwan island. There are about a little more than 200 of us in the program and we were divided into 24 groups. My group only had 8 people and we spent the next four days touring together. I finished uploading the photos of the orientation after three weeks (at the rate of 5 pics a day) on Facebook.

Week 2: First week of work and Adam's arrival. On Monday, I began my position in the Historical Demography Program at Academia Sinica. I am a research assistant for the head of this program and he wants me to do research on footbinding in order to write a conference paper on the subject, backed up by historical demographic data in Taiwan, to be presented at the TTT academic conference. I'm also holding Seminars on how to write effective academic papers. On Tuesday, Adam arrived. I picked him in the wee hours of the morning and from thereon, we toured Taipei whenever I'm not at work.

Week 3: Second week of work and Hong Kong. Nothing general to report except that we took a trip to HK on the weekend. I hope I will end up making an entry about how much HK sucks (IMO).

Week 4: This week. Well since it's not over yet, I will report it later. Prof. Harris and I finally finished the paper we are going to submit to the Cognitive Semiotics journal! I will hopefully upload more pics on Facebook when Adam heads home and I'm less busy after work.

TTFN!

Summer Schedule

I found out on Friday that I was accepted into the Taiwanese Tech Trek program, which involves me doing a ~2 month internship in Taiwan. My placement is with Academia Sinica in their Research Centre for Humanities and Social Sciences,  specifically for their program of historical demography, which sounds really boring, but we'll see!

Thankfully I bought my plane tickets scheduled around that time (i.e., June 24th-August 16th) early so it's only $1240!! Adam will be arriving June 28th and leaving some time mid-july. Hopefully i'll get somewhere nice to live and he can stay with me >.< 

I will be arriving in Vancouver on the 18th of August and going to Seattle thereafter....

My first ever hockey game!

I've always said that one of my goals in life is to attend a hockey game (as a joke since they are so hard to get in Toronto) but it worked out that I finally go to go to my first hockey game ever while I was in Columbus.


The Columbus Blue Jackets were playing against the Vancouver Canucks last Tuesday and the Nationwide Arena was just across the street from our hotel. My co-worker and I decided to go to the game after the conference reception and we got so lucky!While we were buying tickets, the ushers called me over and gave me a free $57 dollar ticket (lower bowl!!) so we ended up buying another $57 ticket and split the cost.

The game was really really good. We got in the arena in the middle of 2nd period and canucks were losing to the blue jackets 2:1 and the bluejackets scored another goal before 2nd period ended. Although the seats did not fully sell out, it looked about 80% filled and the crowd were really good fans. Yhey were very enthusiastic which makes everything a lot of fun. Interestingly, we were sitting next to a big group of Canuck fans holding a huge flag so we were cheering with them!
The last period was the best part, the canucks came back strong scoring a goal in the first few minutes! Towards the end of the game, they were on power play and they handled the puck extremely well. For a long time they were passing it to each other in the offensive zone and taking shots continuously. Unfortunately, the goalie was too good and they never scored.
Last two minutes of the game, the canucks coach actually took the goalie off the game and added an extra player in hopes of pulling the score even. but last 30 seconds, the blue jackets scored on their empty net.
exciting, huh?

Funniest thing, however, was the road closure.

I didn't know whether going to this hockey game would satiate me for good but it looks like it definitely didn't. I would love it if I can go to a hockey game one day.

Politics in the Swing State

If there was one thing that I could not stay away from during this trip to the States was the election. Everywhere we went, there were TVs showing news about the election. When we were in the hotel, there were TVs in the lobby and TVs by the elevators that talked about the election all the time. The airport was the same and even at the foodcourt, there would be a TV at the centre showing the news while all the vendors would have their TV tuned to the same channel. When we get into our hotel rooms, out of about 10 channels we can receive, half of them were news about the election.

You would think that with all of this publicity, everyone would be talking about it, but apparently the answer is no. While we were around the city, we saw a few Obama stickers in cabs and what not, but we didn't see much advertisement signs in people's front lawns. It almost feel like the election is really outside of their concerns. I figured since Ohio is a swing state, there would be much more action going on! Maybe we were just outside the range of the talk, which was right smack in the middle of downtown of the state capital. The dichotomy was quite strange.

However, the question seemed to be answered when we were at the Conference and all the Americans we met told us that all the non-Americans they've met know more about American politics than they do. Dr. George Grinstein, who organizes the conference, told us that you never hear students in his school talk about politics because people just dont think it's something to talk about.

He also believes that a part of this reason is because as American citizens, they are censored. He tells us that if you were to watch the news on TV, a lot of the stuff that's bad for the government gets censored it. Case-in-point: he says that Kennedy had ordered the assassination of Fidel Castro at least three times and everyone around the world knew about it, but this information was censored for Americans. Apparently, if you want real news about America, you gotta go read BBC online.

Since Dr. Grinstein's field is visualizing data, he calculated and visualized the American economy based on the GDP and told everyone at lunch that 8 months ago, they each owed a couple thousand dollars (8?), now they each owe something like eighty thirty-two thousand dollars. He believes that the last eight years, America and its reputation was destroyed. He is set that McCain gets elected, he's going to take his family and his research grants with him and move to either France, Montreal, Toronto, or BC. It's really crazy to listen to someone like him talk about American politics. He seems to think that America is on the verge of its demise--even DoD is starting to worry about the mass emmigration out of the States into Canada will cause severe brain drain in the event that the Republicans win again. Is it really that bad?

Here's one for kicks:

Population of Columbus: 0

I'm not gonna lie, despite it's tiring and a lot of work, I really like going on business trips.
Having an entire hotel room all to yourself is better than awesome (is there a word for it?)
I come home and I throw my stuff anywhere, take off my clothes as I walk to the bed and flop down. I don't have to be considerate and keep my makeup and stuff in my bag, i can just leave everything around however i feel like it.
I can get room service should I choose, I eat on my own time, with new people i meet and go bar hopping every night.

It's unfortunate the city seems as though it has a population of 0.
They had to close the road due to a Blue Jackets Hockey game last night. Their roads are twice the size of toronto and the number of ppl leaving the arena were less than toronto on any given time of the day. geez.

I did, however, attend that game. First live hockey game EVER. Will update about that later.

Presentation tomorrow! Wish me luck!

iHome not at home

Just a quick update on my excitement about the alarm clock i am waking up to.

I'm currently at the Hyatt Regency in Columbus, Ohio and there's the iHome as the alarm clock!!!! I put in my ipod nano in there and i wake up to my own music! I so want one now, but Adeel is telling me that it would be an impulse buy so i gotta think about it more.

Hopefully I'll have more time to do updates, but currently busy all the time!

Oh, That Yellow Bag!

I brought my lovely yellow bag on this trip but wherever we went, the bag kept stealing the thunder. It wasn't until half way through the trip when we went through the pics did we realize that the bag is EVERYWHERE. We had to exclude it from most pictures thereon after, though sometimes it manages to still steal a scene or two.

Testing the Water

I decided that rather than taking a day by day recount of my trip around Canada West, I'm just going to update random things in various themes however and whenever I feel like it. I am going to pretend that this is because a day by day recount of the trip is too boring and not worthwhile, but the real reason is because I have been spending the last couple of weeks being sick and getting the house ready with Adam, and i think updating by pic is a lot easier. Will update the pics of house later too.

Today's theme is me taking off my shoes and going into the icy water at almost any lake possible.

Boot Camp Canadian West

It's been a while since I updated, mainly because there was nothing for me to do while I was in Seattle and when I went down to Vancouver, I had zero time to do any updating. As a matter of fact, now that I'm back in Toronto, my time is still running short so I'm just going to have to explain what happened in the last week that cause my lack of updates and I'll do the details later!

Erm, so..On Friday, August 22nd, 2008, marked the last day of Adam's internship at Microsoft. His family drove up from Vancouver on Friday night and we spent the next day wrapping adam's life in Seattle up. We drove back down to Vancouver in the evening and woke up on Sunday at 6am to tour around Vancouver. Monday began the journey towards Rockies and it mainly consisted of x waking up every morning between 5-6am with time changes between PST and MST, sitting in the tour bus for at least 6 hours a day with intermittent bathroom breaks, site breaks and meal breaks. We did not get to choose what time we get to eat so we'd sometimes have lunch at 10am, sometimes at 2pm, and similarly, dinner can be between 4pm and 8pm. Sometimes there would be only 3 hours between meals, sometimes 6.

Our meals were eaten with the group of 54 people in the tour and was mainly Chinese food, even in small in the middle of nowhere bfn towns the tour somehow manages to find that single chinese restaurant with white waitresses to serve us the same dishes over and over again. By the end of the trip, we were pretty scared of eating nasty cooked lettuce, sweet and sour pork, broccoli stirfry, and celery stirfry.

We visited 5-6 sites a day, but usually we get 15 minutes at each site and people would run down the bus and try to take as many pictures as time would allow. The maximum time we were able to stay off the bus was about an hour. By the time we reach the hotel at night, we dont have much time after dinner because we had to sleep as early as we can to wake up early. Needless to say, the week was a blur to all of us, as we would sleep on the bus only to be awaken by the tour guide telling us to get off the bus for bathroom, food, or picture taking at some site for 15 minutes.

Nevertheless, there are some very beautiful places that we visited and lots of nice pictures. Will post later :D

Here's a sneak preview:

Yaki on the Teppan

Growing up* in Taiwan, it has never occurred to me that Teppanyaki was anything more than common. You walk on the streets and you will see 2 restaurants that offer teppanyaki for $100NT/person ($3CDN!). Sure you have the fancy ones too that cost $1500-$10000NT/person ($50-$200CDN/person) that changes plates for you and give you wet towels every time something is cooked (which, surprisingly, I've gone to at least 5-6 of them if my memory serves me correctly), but really the culture isn't that novel for me and I have never thought about how "cool" it really can be for someone who has never tried it.

A few weeks ago, Adam went to a restaurant called Benihana and told me that he has to take me there. I never asked him what it was, assuming that it was just another Japanese restaurant, until the day before we went when he told me it was teppanyaki. At that point, i felt i experienced a sudden paradigm shift when i realized what i believed was a part of everyday life can be something new for people. But even with this initial realization, I thought it was still pretty funny when Adam's roommate sat down at the grill and looked confused about what was going on.



For those of you who don't know what it is, Teppanyaki, according to wiki, "is a type of Japanese cuisine that uses an iron griddle to cook food. Although it is viewed in the western world as Japanese cuisine, it is not popular in Japan and many people of Japanese origin regard it as western food; some Japanese citizens might even feel offended to hear that it is Japanese food." Teppan literally means "iron plate" in Japanese and Chinese and yaki means "cook" in Japanese. Teppanyaki is ultra popular in taiwan and most people i know, including my dad, absolutely loves it. Usually, even in the less fancy restaurants, the chef will perform certain tricks and do awesome things with the cutlery used to make the food and light things on fire (if you ever get a philly cheese steak sandwich in the foodcourt, sometimes you might get lucky and see the chefs perform similar cutlery skills on the iron grill). Coincidentally, the chef that did our cooking turned out to be Taiwanese and used to live a few streets down from where I used to live in Taiwan.

For those of you who are interested in trying out Teppanyaki, there are a good number of them in Toronto actually. Akasaka has some pretty neat chefs with three big grills and apparently this fancy Benihana at which we ate can also be found in Fairmont Royal York.

*I use the phrase "growing up" quite loosely, evidently since I totally emigrated when I was 7. But there has not been a single time when I went back to Taiwan that I did not have Teppanyaki at least two times.

Customs Adventure

Visiting Adam is always trouble when it comes to explaining my reason for visiting to American customs.
Q: Where are you going?
A: Seattle
Q: What's your profession?
A: Student
Q: What's the reason?
A: To visit my boyfriend
Q: How did you guys meet?
A: School. He goes to school in waterloo, he's just doing an internship there.
Q: How long will you be staying there?
A: A week.

I think the answer visiting my boyfriend always raises a red flag with the American customs cuz they wanna know why you have a boyfriend in the U.S.

Sometimes you run into some weirder questions, like how are you paying for your ticket, etc. and, in spite that I'm pretty used to it, every time I go through customs, they always manage to ask a new question that makes me feel uncomfortable.

On Saturday, when I got off the little plane from Vancouver to Seattle, there were a group of customs officers standing at the airport way waiting for us to get off the plane and ask us questions (even though we all already went through customs in Vancouver).

After seeing my passport and asking me the usual questions that customs asks me, she proceeded to ask me some more piercing ones.
Q: When was the last time you were in the states?
A: May
Q: How long were you here for?
A: a week
Q: Do you work?
A: Yes
Q: Where?
A: at a software development company
Q: Are you a programmer?
A: No, I'm a technical writers.
Q: Did you go to school for that?
A: No....
Q: Then how did you get your job?
A: Erm...well i still go to school, part-time grad student and part-time employee....

I know i didn't answer her question, i should have told her through my coop position while i was in undergrad, but the question really caught me off guard, since there's not technical writing school that i know of...but regardless, the officer proceeded to ask the officer next to her whether they should check my bags.

The officer same up to us and said, "she's visiting her boyfriend?" and the 1st officer said yes. He then pulled out his cell phone , opened it so he's ready to dial, and asked me if I have his phone number. I was so surprised but i went to pull out my cell phone from my bag and explained to him that he has a seattle number. With my gesture to take out my cell phone, he said, all right, and said I can go. The experience felt so daunting. Like I felt so uneasy the whole time, which is really weird because it's not like I was doing anything wrong. Had they opened my carry-on, all they would have found was a suitcase filled with pure clothes because i put all my non-clothes in my checked-in luggage (which really included my dryer, my hairbrush, my shampoo, etc.) as I'm afraid of losing my luggage again and losing all my nice clothes. It's funny how no matter how innocent you really are, when you are put under this type of spotlight, you still feel scared regardless. Human nature?