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What we're doing these days ...
we had some corn for dinner last night (along with tomato and chèvre salad).
The bounty is just raining down on us (literally - you shake the plum tree and you're sure to get hit in the head). After fresh plums and plum tartes and plum cobblers wore out, I made plum applesauce. However, I tried to de-pit and de-skin the cooked plums in a juicer with no lid. It's lucky the painters haven't started on the walls (and ceiling) yet.
We've been welcoming people a lot lately, but not perfectly at all. Tiredly. On Sunday, I left the guests at the barbecue and went to take a nap. Peanut too.
Every year I swear I'm not going to be caught unprepared again and be the only Parisian (or Paris suburbian) not on vacation. And every year, here I find myself.
When I graduated from college, I taught English in Taiwan for a year. Our visas were not correct so we were forced to leave the country every two months to get the proper stamp. For my first visit, I went to Seoul where I was too afraid to venture out by myself since I had barely gotten accustomed to living in Taiwan. Asia was still so foreign to me, and now I can visualize almost every airport.
Two months later I went to Tokyo and stayed with my brother's college friend. After that I went to Singapore and had a great time enjoying the cleanliness of it all after living in the quite dirty city of Taichung (which is even cleaner than Taipei). I remember going to Sentosa island before it was built up into a resort. I lay on the pristine beach with my friend, and sat in the gentle waves staring up at the sky with not another soul in sight. They were already beginning the construction of the hotels far off. For my last visa trip of the year, I went to Hong Kong and shopped myself lonely on GAP castoffs, staying in the since-condemned Chung-King Mansions in a room so small you had to take a shower over the toilet, and you could touch one wall with your feet while sitting on the bed against the opposing wall.
Then I went to New York. I wasted my time there for a year, before deciding to go back to Taiwan. With a proper resident visa, I only traveled once while there, again to Hong Kong, again alone.
