Nesting Day! (June 2, 2011)

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!

Moving Day! (June 1, 2011)

After slogging a few kilometers in the rain with all our belongings, we were so stoked to finally be able to take our first nap on our new couch! I can’t even remember the last time we were able to have a couch nap. Maybe February?

Once recharged, we headed back out in the rain to Carrefour for some essentials ... namely tons of cleaning supplies, cockroach poison, mite repellant, garbage bags, and bed linens. Most of the stuff we found without any hiccups, but we were stumped once again by the linens. As I mentioned before, IKEA has a confusing array of bed linen combinations. Carrefour was no different. We found a package that seemed large enough to contain two pillow cases, a fitted sheet, and either a top sheet or duvet cover. I approached a saleswoman who spoke no English and after an extremely disjointed attempt at Mandarin, along with lots of nodding and encouragement from the nice lady, I came away from the exchange feeling proud of myself and confident that we had what we needed.

When we got home, we scoured the apartment. Every surface was covered in thick layers of dust and grime, some of which I believe blew in from the construction site across the street. By the end of the night we were exhausted and ready to make the bed up. Alas, our “complete package” of bed linens contained only a duvet cover! We ended up using that as a bottom sheet (though it didn’t even cover the entire bed) and had sleeping bags on top of us. We used T-shirts as pillow cases. It was basic, to say the least.

IKEA: Kaohsiung

Today Brett and I went to IKEA to start doing some price comparisons for things to put in our new apartment! It was exactly like Canadian IKEA (super cheap hot dogs included) except for the Chinese signage, of course. It's going to be a little tricky figuring out how to buy bed linens as none of the packages confirm in English what's in them (is this a comforter? a fitted sheet? a set of pillow cases?) but we'll get there eventually.

Last night we found a really huge night market next to the Kaohsiung Arena, and we're definitely going back there soon to take lots of new exciting food photos for you all to see! There were actually lots of things we both thought looked edible, which is a change from the usual night market fare we've become accustomed to seeing and smelling. I saw quite a few pretty things I wouldn't mind going back for, either.

Another exciting shopping-related news item, for the girls anyways: I bought shirts today for only $100 NT each (about $3 CAD). Also I was allowed to try the shirts on before buying which is usually not the case around here! It was a lovely experience.

Tonight at dinner we were at one of our favourite eateries when we overheard/eavesdropped on four girls doing what seemed to be an English/Japanese/Spanish/Chinese/confusing language exchange. This was really exciting for us as we've advertised ourselves on Tealit for a similar thing and we've been getting a few responses! We're really looking forward to meeting some local people and learning how to do things like order tea in Chinese without insulting anyone.

That's all we've really been up to the past couple of days! We're getting the keys for the apartment on Friday or Saturday (depending on when a typhoon hits this week) and we're looking forward to showing off our new digs!