Upon waking up to the joyous realization that neither of us had been attacked by bed bugs, mites, cockroaches, or mosquitos in the night, we set out to tackle the rest of the apartment. We had to return to Carrefour to buy even more cleaning supplies. We hit up the bed sheets section again, and this time were absolutely positive we’d found a package of pillow cases and one fitted sheet. They clashed horribly with the duvet cover we'd already bought but by that point we were so relieved to have found what we needed we didn't care how they looked.
While at Carrefour I also checked out the snack aisles and was impressed by the huge selection of meat-based artificial flavours. Nowhere else have I seen BBQ sausage, steak, ribs, stir-fried prawns, chicken dinner, sushi, and squid flavours available on corn, potato, or rice chips. Near the snack aisle was also the cooking oil which was equally impressive. There’s no way you could find a small short-term-apartment size bottle of oil. The smallest were 500mL, and the largest were commercial-use metal drums. There were also large jugs marked “Canadian Canola Oil” ... I was very proud. It made me miss driving past yellow fields on hot summer days. By the time we get back to Canada, we’ll have missed two canola growing seasons!
We stopped in IKEA to stock up our kitchen with the bare necessities and we were approached by a local woman with excellent English to ask our “valued opinion as foreigners”. As it turns out, she and her husband are opening a casual lounge for foreigners to get together in Kaohsiung for a drink and she wanted to know where we usually looked for restaurant listings so she could find out where best to advertise. She was very sweet and happy that we still had plenty of time left here. It felt great to be welcomed to Kaohsiung by yet another lovely Taiwanese person.
We scrubbed the apartment even more when we got home. I am really pleased with how much my fear of a bug infestation has amped up my cleanliness. No garbage bag lies around untied, no beer can is recycled without being rinsed, and no bowl goes unwashed for longer than ten minutes. A fantastic feature of our apartment which makes washing up a pleasure: our electric dish dryer. We thought it was a toaster oven at first but realized you put your dishes in it, press a button, and walk away! Fifteen minutes later you can put your dishes in the cupboard without the frustration of trying to dry them with a towel moistened by your humid kitchen! I have also been really enjoying having our own washing machine and we are cranking out the clean clothes. It feels so right!
Oh, and PS - the "fitted sheet" we bought was actually another duvet cover. Back to the drawing board!
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