International Apartment Hunters

After we arrived in Tainan on Saturday, we met with a real estate agent and started looking for an apartment.  I was so excited about this because along with looking for a place to live, you also get to see how others live and it is just a huge piece of culture that I wanted to learn about.  Well, ugh....the first place was awful!  It was dark, dirty, and stunk.  The appliances were old and the refrigerator was duct taped because it was broken.  Aaron and I took notes and acted enthusiastic about it because the owners were there and still hadn't moved all of their belongings out!  As soon as we got into the car, we had to tell the lady that this was not what we wanted and expected to see more in the top range of our budget.  The next 4 apartments that we saw were okay, but definitely not what we wanted.  The furniture was old and nothing was clean.  I just couldn't get over that--just cleaning the floors and furniture would have made a big difference!   So, Saturday's apartment search was a bust. I would have taken pictures to share with you, but they didn't let us. We were so tired that we fell asleep at 7pm without dinner.

Sunday's apartment search went MUCH better.  The first place we went to was sort of a Sex and the City meets Taiwan theme--very cool!  I know Aaron liked that it was more modern, but it was small and really girly!  It was like right out of a magazine. So, we told the lady that we would look at the other two apartments we were scheduled to see, but thought we'd take that one.  Man, are we glad we looked at the second apartment!  It's beautiful and spacious and in a great part of the city.  It even has a dryer and an oven which is unheard of here!  Even though we loved the 2nd apartment we wanted to take a look at the 3rd.  But it wasn't in as nice of an area and it wouldn't be move-in ready until December.  Again, I haven't taken any pictures yet, but I'll send some as soon as we move in (hopefully next week)! 

Breakfast is the hardest adjustment so far.  It has been an adventure in and of itself.  The Taiwanese (and I assume Chinese) eat salad type foods for breakfast.  They also eat congee (rice soup) that I have pictured in another post. They put all different types of seafood in it or pickled vegetables. The current congee soup at the breakfast buffet today was 'milk and fish congee'.  Umm..no thanks.  I feel that I can identify about 20% of the food on the breakfast buffet.  I'll be honest, I like trying new food but some of the breakfast items make me sick to my stomach.  I wonder if I am just so far removed for raw and natural foods that seeing a whole fish on a plate makes me queezy. 

I'm trying to be adventurous and taste new things so for lunch I ate this:

Again, I don't know what everything is, but this did taste good!  The meat was pork and the miso had shells in it.  It was served with chilled green tea.

Last night we went to an American restaurant that was recommended to us by Aaron's colleagues.  It was sort of like a country saloon and had things like steak and burgers.  Aaron ordered a steak and I had a chicken burger.  Well, I honestly don't think it was chicken.  How do you mess up chicken?!  When they brought us our food, they brought Aaron a  burger, so he corrected them and asked for a steak.  She took his back and brought out the steak within in a minute.  He steak was raw---chewy red rawness.  and I think the waitress messed up my order and gave me the ostrich burger.  Now, I've never had ostrich and I would have been okay with trying it, if I knew that that's what I was eating.  Neither of us finished our meal.

We might try the German restaurant tonight, so I hope we have better luck with it!