virtualberta

I felt an incredibly sense of accomplishment today because last night I took out the trash, a task that when finished left me quite relieved. "So what," you may think to yourself. "What's the big deal?" Well, in Taipei, every day (except Sunday) is trash day. The tricky part is, the trash truck comes only once and you have to meet the truck. So if you miss the truck, you have to wait another day. In Angela's neighborhood, folks gather around the corner near the apartment at 9:30p.m. Garbage collection trucks play either Bethoven's "Fur Elise" or "A Maiden's Prayer" (by whom, I don't know) in that tinny, ice-cream truck way (my brother Galen and I were really confused when we went to Taiwan in 1990 and heard the garbage collection music for the first time). Anyway, I hauled ass after my Chinese lesson yesterday so that I could pick up my drycleaning, dispose of the trash (which, as you know from reading this blog, is full of funky stuff), and the drop off more dry cleaning.