Summer Vacation Day 42: IKEA and Awestruck

Hello, Tim!

It’s IKEA shopping day!

8/11, Saturday

This evening, my uncle took me and my mother to IKEA for furniture shopping, specifically for a desk to put in my study, and a shelf to fit more books in.

The IKEA we went to was visibly large! I would say the exterior of the building has the size of a regular department store, but the whole building, in this case, is for IKEA alone!

The parking was on the underground floor, but when we took the ascending escalator, expecting to start from the first floor, only to find that there was only one path you can take after you got off the escalator: Another escalator towards the second floor. This kept happening until we got to the supposed top floor. That was the moment we walked into the realm of fancy and gorgeous household objects and all the furniture that is designed to make you drool.

The top floor was the best. Upon entrance, you are greeted with a wide path with rooms on both sides. Every room was a unique style of housing design, all featuring the pieces of goods you can find and purchase in IKEA. I think it is a very clever trick played on the customers (including us), for this placement of the items they offer, particularly the large furniture is very different from the traditional furniture stores where they put different furniture in different sections. By putting it the way IKEA did, you could see that it was a clear presentation of how their own brand of stuff, how the furniture of theirs interact with each other. You won’t have to imagine how well this couch would go with that end table, and whether the white shelves with glass door look nice for the light brown wooden floor; you can just see for yourselves. They also have those affordable designs of daily objects or indoors decorations like hooks that can be hanged on walls and those plasma TV-sized photographies of the Eiffel Tower. We all know that the place was designed with a one-way road for the purpose of making you have a look at all the things they offer, but we willingly trekked down the aisle, stopped time after time to marvel at something we would want for our house.

Clean and modern. A whole set of IKEA items.

This is it. This is the place I want to live in. No kidding.

Sleek black design. (And a tired kid whom I don't know at the right bottom)

We soon found a table I want to serve as my desk, a dark one with a sturdy metal structure. Picking out the shelves was a tougher task. There were just too many kinds to choose from! The colors, the material, etc. And given that I already have a bookshelf at home, I also have to think what kind of the second bookshelf I should choose so that it would not look weird when put together with the first shelf. I ended up choosing a dark-colored wooden bookshelf that is under the design name Billy. Now, Billy has the similar color to my current bookshelf, so that it wouldn’t seem weird if you put the two together. Secondly, it has enough space for plenty of books. It has the height, the sturdiness, and the best of all, there are optional doors you can add to it. This is the first among the most important criteria I was looking for in a bookshelf. Doors mean that there is a lower chance for dust gaining on books, reducing the frequency of needing to tend to the books. Having a glass layer on the top half of the door ensures the magnificent view even without opening them, and the wooden part at the bottom makes it look more balanced. This is the one, I said to Billy. See? You don’t even have to think of a name for it; It already has one!

(I can't believe I forgot to take a picture of Billy; Don't worry. We'll have plenty of chance to introduce him in the future.)

This is the innovative transforming lampshade! I loved it!!!

It took us seconds to understand how purchases are made here in IKEA. First, you remember all the IDs of the items you want to buy. Then you go to the first or second floor of the building and collect the items according to their systematic placements. Wagons are provided so you won’t have to worry about not being able to drag your TV stand around. You bring all your boxed goods to the checkout counter, and cha-ching! Your purchase is made. You don’t have a truck of your own to take your things home? Glad to be of service! Take your items downstairs and you will see a counter that handles your delivery needs. See? Nice service!

Every item has its unique ID. 

We started looking for Billy and the table and a chair (for my desk), but we were missing Billy’s doors. I checked with one of the clerks over there, only to find that the doors were out of stock. They don’t have a thing called pre-order, meaning that we either come back when the stocks are refilled, or we pay two times of delivery fee. I brought cookies and the chair to the check-out counter eventually, leaving the other much bulkier things behind (I’ll be back for you, Billy and Table)

We stacked up all these, only to find out we would have to do the same again next time.

This is the story of how we spent almost two hours in IKEA but ended up with only two packs of cookies and a chair. I remember the first time I went to an IKEA restaurant where everything is self-served. It got my eyes opened gapingly wide, and this experience with IKEA, too, showed me a different color of living here, on Earth. (Okay. That was a bit dramatic.)

This is all for today.

Summer Vacation Day 41: Kids and Disciplining

Hello, Tim!

Today is a day for caretaking.

8/10, Friday

So far, I am adapting to the new routine pretty well, and I certainly welcome the extra forty-five minutes of sleep every morning.

Today after school (by the way, it was the last day of our official summer course, but we still have three days of math classes), I went straight to Sophie’s house. My mother cooked me a splendid lunch of tuna noodles and told me that Sophie’s tutor said that she didn’t finish her homework as the teacher ordered, and I knew that I had to have her assignments done as soon as possible. I brought her novel/textbook and her notebook to the dining table I was sitting at, enjoying my noodles. I sat her across me, told her that she had to finish the homework or she couldn’t leave the desk (potty breaks were allowed, though) and after I finished my meal, I took out my math homework I was supposed to hand in by evening and just started writing. Like my mom usually does when she wanted me or the kids to behave, you want a kid to see reason with you, you have to give them a reason to believe that it was not a wrong thing to do. She did stop fidgeting then, focusing on finding the words in her book to write down. Aiden, still free from the whole concept of a euphemism of ‘burden’, was roaming around, bouncing up and down the sofa like a normal kid, only that he was making loud siren voices with his mouth and the deafening clanks from the pot lid he was holding. I walked over, took away the lid, and politely asked him to be quiet. Now, I know it was a foolish thing to be logically explaining, ‘you wouldn’t want to be disturbed when you have something very important of your own to do, right’ and expect him to listen, but there would be more of those later. Mom then gave him her cell phone to watch YouTube for the sake of Sophie and her rare concentration at the desk.

Sophie, homework, at the desk... My my, what a rare scene!

An hour or so later, and Sophie was down to one word left, but she couldn’t find it anywhere, so I went to her side and helped her with it, then, I heard a female shriek and some weird sound you hear when you are poking something gloppy from my mom’s phone, which at the moment, was held by Aiden. From past experiences, I knew instantly what the sound was from.

‘Aiden, give me the phone.’ I barked. When he didn’t budge, I rushed over and grabbed the phone from him, and on the screen, it showed some fan-made animation of Marvel villain maiming some random woman. The similar things happened in the past, and his parents had laid rules against that. It is still debatable whether watching violent videos can impose a bad influence on kids, but I clearly don’t approve of it. I gave the phone back to my mother, who was sitting in the corner and reading, and told him that he would not be getting some cell phone entertainment in a long while.

Aiden reacted, like any kid would, started to annoy the big people in any way possible. He started making the nerve-racking pop sounds with his mouth, and since I was trying hard to help Sophie with her work, but at one point, I snapped and said, ‘Stop it or I’ll go hit your mouth.’

At this point, you must know what happened.

He didn’t listen, and I did what I promised to do, and the instant I felt substantial skin contact, I regretted it. Kids are programmed to disobey at times, and I should have known better, even though the sister and the brother are half-spoiled kids and are often too disrespectful for anyone to bear. But still.

Aiden’s lips began to quiver, and that was the moment I panicked. I grabbed him, blabbered some sense into him, grasping on the nonexistent hope that he would see reason in such a scenario. He tried to shake loose my grasp of him, but I was afraid that if I just let him leave now, he would remember me as the ‘scary cousin who hit him on the mouth’ for years. What he did was all wrong and we all know it, but the fact that I hit him didn’t make me any better, either. He waved his hand frantically, clawed at my throat (yes, he happened to be a kid with abnormal strength. He’s only five, and he never lost a fight against his nine-year-old ), and I only release him only after he had calmed down a bit. Among the blabbering, I told him I was sorry that I hit him so hard, but he had to understand that what he did was wrong. He ran away and into his bedroom. My mom told me without his presence, ‘It’s okay. The kid needs to learn that he can’t always get what he wants. But next time, aim for the heinie.’

About thirty minutes later, Sophie walked out of their room with her brother. The boy no longer had tears, and I was a bit relieved.

Then, Sophie exclaimed that ‘He’s having a nosebleed!’ with her sharp voice.

I turned around and look at Aiden. It was true. From both of his nostrils trickled down two streams of blood. What I felt was not a surge of panic; I quickly grabbed a towel from the bathroom, soaked it with water and knelt before him. I regretfully wiped the blood off his face as Sophie, gleeful to have something to chant and chirp about. I couldn’t care about her more, for I was truly sorry that I just made my little nephew nosebleed. But then, when all cleaning was done, the little guy just blurted out, ‘I had nosebleed since morning’. ‘So that explains the dried blood at the nostrils.’ was the first thing that came to my mind. Otherwise, I was relieved that it was just a regular nosebleed instead of some parts severely damaged in the nose.

This is the end of this episode of kid catastrophe, and I think it was not only the kids, I also have a lot to learn.

Today is the last at-home tutor class. Due to the afternoon events, I was so worn out that I was only staring into nothingness sitting on the bench, waiting for the metro to come.

Tomorrow on, my home in Xindian would become a house in Xindian.

But Xindian, just like Keelung and Nanshijiao, will always be my place.

This is all for today.

Summer Vacation Day 40:Amusement Park and Dentist

Hello, Tim!

Today is an amusement park day!!!

8/9, Thursday

Several days ago, Mom told me that she would take Sophie and Aiden to a nearby amusement park, with a kid tagging. The kid, referred by all the adults around me as J-J, is actually the son of my uncle’s boss who is only back from America during summer break. That alone made me a little hesitant, and also last time I spent some time with him and the other kids watching Dr. Strange at Sophie’s house, he just felt… distant. He was nonplussed by anything anyone said. I told my mom about my slight reluctance about this (while feeling very guilty because I sounded like some mean kid who just wants to exclude someone from a group), but then, my mom told me that she heard that the kid doesn’t have many friends because of his timid personality, and his parents are apparently too occupied with their own business to put enough attention on him and that he was actually looking forward to having fun in the park. That changed my mind, for I know exactly how it felt to be lonely, and I was determined to let him have fun.

It was not quite easy at first. Not even with Eliza present.

First, I had to go straight over to the amusement park IMMEDIATELY after school, which meant that I would roam the big park with an empty stomach. Secondly, J-J, been inactive as the last time I saw him, said that he really wasn’t a big fan of amusement parks and that he didn’t really care about which ride we went on as long as it is not the spinning kind.

J-J was not very tall to start with, maybe only ten centimeters taller than Sophie, so I thought he would be at most ten years old.

Boy was I wrong. About this later. Anyway, I came up with several small talks before we arrived, just for the purpose of avoiding awkwardness, and possibly, find some mutual conversation so that we can have some real conversations, but he never elaborates, still with the passive, indifferent look on his face. I felt a little knocked down, being so helpless in such a situation like this. We went on the pirate ship first, and it was still fun, with kids and Eliza and a lot of people screaming, but when we got off the vehicle, the void in my stomach became too hard to ignore, so I went to a stall and got some fries. I asked J-J if he wanted to have some, and he (expectedly) declined, and soon stared into nothingness. I got the chance to just look at him and think. I was thinking about what exactly I could possibly do to have him open up and just have fun instead of being passive and indifferent. Just then, Aiden came around and that got J-J’s attention. I watched them while sitting at the table as Aiden dragged the boy by the hand and just dashed erratically. He let go of him and then charged at him like a bull in a bullfight (or do you call it ‘boyfight’? ;D) To my surprise, J-J did crack a smile then, and he did seem to be enjoying himself when playing with him. I said to myself, ‘Well, a kid similar in age definitely bond better.’ But again with the age thing, I was totally wrong.

The pirate ship.

Eliza and Sophie came back from their spinning planet ride and was so ready to get one the next facility that spins. We then moved on to the next area where more rides can be found. Then the two kids were talking about height and age, and it drove me to ask the question, “So how old are you anyway?”

“I’m fifteen, but I am just exceptionally short.” were the exact words of the answer.

I tried to hide my surprise, for it would be rude if I hadn’t even tried to conceal it. We reached the bumpy car, and Eliza took Sophie for some more spinning/nauseating rides while J-J, Aiden, and I lined up for the bumpy cars. In the line, Aiden kept rambling on with his small cute, serious face, about how much he wanted to be on the same car with J-J. Without asking him the question about age several minutes ago, I would try to convince Aiden about safety concerns, but now knowing that he was only two years younger than me, I had no objections to that.

It was very exciting when cars can just crash into each other knowing that nothing serious can happen, and after the ride was over, to my delight, J-J started to enjoy the amusement park atmosphere finally.

Them in a car while I was alone : [

Until the time we had to leave the amusement park, we went on several other rides that would wind the post too long to list individually and also fought some air hockey battles. I wasn’t sure, but I think I saw a glimpse of reluctance when I told him we had to leave.

Group photo! Wait, where was Aiden?

He was doing this a the moment.

Eliza left early for her friends' night out.

After the park, I went to the dentist for adjustments on my bracelets. Did I mention that I easily fall asleep during dentist sessions? Well, you know that now! I have no idea at all, how I manage to feel safe enough to fall asleep with all the poking utensils prodding at your gums and teeth, along with the soothing classical music playing, the rhythmic buzzes of the machines next to the patient’s seat, and the low, warm lights from the background….

There was actually once when during a session, I dozed off as usual, but before my senses were closed, I thought I heard the doctor said to his assistant that ‘Look, he fell asleep again.’ There was no malice nor exasperation in his voice as I remember. It was more like he was… seeing something interesting. I woke up when the session was over and when the sentence came back to me, I was so embarrassed but was not willing to ask him if he really did say that. This experience didn’t help with my falling asleep in the coming sessions, though.

This is all for today.

Summer Vacation Day 39: Allison and a Letter Cut Short

Hello, Tim!

Today… Was a rather normal day.

8/8, Wednesday

These days I have been hanging out with Allison quite a lot. I mean, we have always been close but not-so-close friends (ever heard of frenemies?)

Still, we watch a mutual French-originated cartoon called Miraculous Ladybug (maybe some other day), and now we live so close and it has become so easy for us to bump into each other at the bus station every morning. And after school, if we were going home at the same time (sometimes, she leaves as early as I do) and true, sometimes we passed the bus time with silence and no conversation whatsoever, but sometimes we would just talk about some random stuff. Something about the bus or something about the restaurants around our houses. We talk about not having our dads at home for big holidays because they both work abroad (although with completely different jobs and in completely different places). Sometimes, we just talk about topics that are so eclectic that basically came out of nowhere. For example, today, on our way home, we were talking about cell phone usage among children, including at what age should a child be given with a cell phone, and our attitudes towards letting children know the importance of being responsible adults. Allison hates kids, but she still has certain ideas about them that can be insightful while I have the first-hand experience of watching my little princess and prince, Sophie and Aiden and their usage of cell phones and tablets. We chatted and stayed on topic all the bus ride.

This is all for today.

Summer Vacation Day 38: Kids and and Early-celebrated Father's Day

Hello, Tim!

Yesterday in the midnight, my dad came home in a taxi.

8/7, Tuesday

It was one day before the Taiwanese Father’s Day, and since he was back around the time, we decided to eat out. This will be talked about later.

After school, I went straight to Sophie and Aiden’s new house, just to help my mother look over them. Sophie has an English tutor at two in the afternoon, so since my mom knows not many English words, I was the ‘receptionist’ for the teacher of Sophie.

I didn’t really ask her where she was from, but she did tell me she had parents from Italy (who weren’t taking care of her). She is a nice teacher, a stern one as well. She takes none of the clowning and the jesting of Sophie that so often drives Mom and me crazy. Nevertheless, Sophie only obliged with numerous ugly faces and a lot of disrespectful words under her breath.

The two kids, Sophie and Aiden, really can be cute when they were in the ‘good-kid’ mode. They would sweet-talk you until you would want to say yes to every of their requests, but if something drive them into the ‘little devil’ mode, they can saw at your nerves and you would be forced to maneuver every ounce of your willpower to rein in your desire to give them a big good smack. Were they not my cousin’s children, I would be taking the doors and get away as far as possible.

But they’re family. You live with their goods and bads.

After leaving the kids with their grandma who later came, we left for home and went to the department store nearby with Dad for our celebration of the Father’s Day. We eventually chose an American-Mexican style restaurant Chili’s for dinner.

The interior design included dark red sofas and kaleidoscopic pattern on the lampshades dangling from the walls. The big panel of glass provides lighting and the view of the big road.

It took us ten minutes to decide what we would like to eat: A Quesadilla Explosion Salad, Spicy Shrimps Tacos, a set of sirloin steak, and there was a dish of nachos with cheese, whose name had been forgotten (by me). The last time I had had Chili’s or any kind of Tex-Mex food was at least five years ago, and the only dish I can remember was the fried cheese sticks, so I was really forward the idea to refresh the experience.

The food, as expected, was heavily seasoned. My mom kept complaining how salty the food was, but we all ate with a small smile at the edge of our lips, for it was heavily seasoned BUT delicious. I don’t usually eat chili peppers; I only use them for adding tastes, but I always make exceptions when it comes to Mexican pickled peppers because they really go well with the other ingredients on the plate it is usually served with. It was a very expensive meal, granted, and a very veggies-lacking meal for one (even with the salad), but we are really entitled to this little bit of luxury every once in a while, right? It’s the Father’s Day celebration, after all.

The waiter informed us that there was a promotional campaign where you can get one beer and another beer for free if a father and a son is present. Well, I am under eighteen, and my dad had quit drinking a long while ago!

Well, it WAS called the Explosion Salad.

First taco of my life!

I think every dish had cheese in it. It was like pizza but on nachos. 

Now, to be honest, I can never say that I am as close to Dad than I am to Mom. Since childhood, my father had always been out there working. He was in China for my whole kindergarten phase as well as the first couple of years in elementary school. One day, he was changing the bulbs at the staircase over there, standing on a wobbly stool, and he fell off the stairs and broke some of his bones, at the same time injuring his spine. Mom, in a hurry, left me with my aunt and flew right over to bring Dad back to Taiwan for recovery and decided to stay with us later on. I could still remember the nails sticking out of his back and his arm when Mom tended to the wounds and changed clean gauze. The coming years, my parents opened a betelnut store at the recommendation of a friend of my uncle until he got his job as a mechanic on a ship. He dropped out of high school, but that doesn’t mean he pays little effort. When Mom and I were packing for moving several days ago, and I came across a large heap of mock test papers, forcefully fitted in small files that were deformed by the copious amount of paper stuffed inside. The mock test papers were for the mechanic tests, and all of them, as I flipped through them, were all answered and checked- There had to be over five hundred pages!

Now he doesn’t stay home constantly again, and that was something I had learned to live with since I was little, but there is no denying that I love him, and there is no doubt that my mom loves him even more.

Dad cutting open the medium rare sirloin steak. He was enjoying it.

Some people see me with my mom, they exclaimed about how much I look like her; when I walk alongside with my dad, people pronounced the resemblence. People, I present you: MY PARENTS!!!

People celebrate Father’s Day on August the eighth in Taiwan, but we did it on the seventh.

Happy Father’s Day, Dad!

This is all for today.

Summer Vacation Day 37: Bus Day and Ex-Home

Hello, Tim!

Today is the first day I’m taking the bus to school.

8/6, Monday

Just to save some time for everything that could go wrong on the first time riding a bus to school, so I set the clock at 6:30, an hour and a half before school. Still, it was thirty minutes later than the alarms I used to set in Xindian.

I pressed the snooze button once -ONLY once- before I practically bounced up from my new comfortable bed, got ready for school while checking the bus times on the Net.

Six minutes before the arrival of the bus, I was waiting alone until someone tapped me on my shoulder. I got company. Allison was the person I asked just the other day, of which bus to take if I wanted to go to school, and there she sent me a list of the buses you can or can’t take. It was the first time I felt how nice it feels like when you have a friend just in a literal two minutes apart.

It was incredible- It was about 6:45 when we got onto the bus and we arrived at school at 7:20! When back in Xindian, anytime after 6:35 guaranteed a post-eight o'clock arrival at school! Life here felt so good all of a sudden.

I invited Angela and Melody to my house to study and have fun for a while. I introduced to them the riceball restaurant downstairs, and Angela was in love with it. Later in the day, she bought two more home for dinner! We were watching TV, chatting, etc. Then, Melody left to meet Cathy at Starbuck, which left Angela and me alone at the desk. We studied until we decided to play some music. She listens to English, Mandarin, Korean, and some Japanese, while I listen to mostly the same language, just that her Korean is my French. We blasted some songs and sang along until we agreed that we were too distracted and so not focused on our homework. I then turned my phone into a two-hour jazz quintet, and suddenly, the desk became a quiet cafe. This kind of hanging out in my house is exactly one of those that appear on the list of dreams. I have always wanted to be a host to my friends and just chill out and spend some very happy and relaxing hours, but this was the very first time that this actually happened, for my previous houses were all hard to reach for my friends.

Angela waiting for her orders.

The restaurant with killer riceballs is called the Bahar Kitchen, which, I have no idea what that means.

Fast forward to this evening, where I was traveling on a metro, heading back to Xindian.

True, we had moved since just the Saturday that passed, but I had already gone back for the second time! This time, it was for the tutoring. Mom would be giving the house back to the owner on the next Saturday, meaning that the house would be empty with zero residents throughout the week. I thought, then, why not still have the math classes in my previous house?

I walked along the path I had grown so familiar with as I remembered myself seeing the place for the first time. Three and a half years ago when we were still looking for a house to rent, I had not once thought that we would be living in such a magical place.

I opened the door to our house. It was a number lock – you have the key in your head. It was, unsurprisingly, empty. Deserted, even. The furniture was very minimalistic since all our bought furniture was moved to our new place. The white covering paint on the walls done by me days ago was long dry.

After the class, I walked once again along the path of low-lying bushes, reminiscing and I then noticed just how serene the whole scene was. There was a man holding onto the handle of a red tricycle his kid was on. Under the dim yellow light, people were jogging as exercise. I came to a small plaza neighboring the metro station. It was empty at the time, and I sat there on one of the benches to wait for the metro to come. It was a very quiet place, and while the street we live on was comparably less noisy than the nearby areas, the quietness it provides was no match for the isolated and laid back atmosphere over there in Xindian. 

Uncomparably quiet place.

The metro -which of the only source of high volume sounds around here- roared past me, the pace slowed and finally came to a halt. I stood up and gave the community another look. (I chastised myself, "You will be here again on Friday for another tutoring class. Linger then.")

For the millionth time, I would miss this place.

This is all for today.

Summer Vacation Day 36: Relaxing Day and my Study

Hello, Tim!

Today was one of those rare relaxing days when you didn’t really have that much to do. At least, not for me and my mom.

8/5, Sunday

Today, there were people coming to our house, for the installation of the TV and the clothes hanger.

The man who came to help us with the TV also set up the Internet for the house. He asked me how I would want to name the Internet, and this is what I told him: “Maison de livres.” It’s French, meaning ‘house of books’ in English. This was the only thing I could think of that both mentioned my passion for books and actually looks quite cool.

With the spare time I had, I cleaned up my study and arranged my bedroom!

Here they are:

A bookshelf that is already full.

The Disney pillow was a birthday gift from Angela.

So, these two rooms are just about he sizes of those in the house in Xindian, making it easy to fit in all the things. In my study, there stands in the corner my precious bookshelf, while all the other corner was occupied still by some boxes with my textbooks and some Tokyo travel guide that belongs to my mom. Why I get the second shelf and my desk, the boxes would be gone.

I love my bedroom as it is right now. The size of the bed was designed to let two people sleep, but with me as the only sleeper, I get the monopoly on the whole space on the bed. Most of my clothes were stuffed into the wardrobe, and I still have enough space for some of mom’s jeans inside because I don’t really have a lot of clothes.

I’ll be sure to update when we find a right desk and a right bookshelf for my study.

This is all for today.