Happy Thanksgiving!

Greetings from Taiwan and Happy Thanksgiving! Some of you have asked if I was able to eat any turkey here, and the answer is yes! I enjoyed a full thanksgiving meal at an expat bar with turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, and yes, even pumpkin pie. It was a bit pricey at $700NT ($23USD) but it was a nice change of pace, and I met a lot of new people, including a couple of Texans! Hopefully they can make it out to the UT/A&M game watching party I organized at another expat bar tomorrow night, so I can finally get the Taiwan Texas Exes network up and running after all these months.

Christmas Creep

No, it's not some fat perv that annoys you during Christmas. For those who don't now what Christmas creep is, it's the progressive creeping of Christmas (or any other holiday) decorations, songs, ads, etc. well before the month of December (or respective month). I thought living in Taiwan, I would be immune to this. Unfortunately, it's just as bad here, if not worse. Exiting the MRT mear my house back in October, I heard some Christmas songs blaring from one of the many shopping malls. Again a soli two months before Christmas, and even a month before Thanksgiving, the Taiwanese were already exposed to the creep. A near majority of the people in Taiwan are raised Buddhist, so the meaning of Christmas is lost to them. So to find such an an abundance of Christmas decorations for sale near where I live was quite surprising, and even a bit nostalgic. Christmas is not officially observed in Taiwan, but up until recently, the day was a holiday, coincidentally because the Taiwanese declaration was signed on that day back in the 1950's. Rest assured, even on Christmas day, it'll probably be warm enough for me to wear a short sleeved shirt and khaki shorts.