The Girl Who Ate Everything

I took a trip to Taipei from October 3 to 9...2011. Um. Yeah. Why am I writing about it two years late? Because better late than never? Not because I've been wasting away on a diet of Netflix and Candy Crush? Sure, let's go with that. Read my introduction here.

Rise and shine!...euh. This is the view from the balcony at my grandparent's place. It's considerably nicer looking when the sky doesn't look like it needs a hug.

I've always been a late sleeper, the kind who, without the shackles of an alarm clock, would naturally wake up sometime after noon. Few have attempted to wake me up early; it's like trying to wake up a heavily breathing sack of potatoes.

Except my dad. Many of my Saturday mornings as a kid started with my dad knocking my bedroom door, then—before I had a chance to answer—opening my door and announcing that it was 8 a.m. or some other too-early-for-Saturday hour, and thus time to get up. I'd respond with a moan of non-compliant acknowledgement or, more likely, pretend I was still deep in sleep, and continue on my potato sack ways.*

*If you're a child of the '90s in the US, you may be thinking, "But if you slept in late, that means you missed watching Saturday morning cartoons!" Truly the biggest downside to sleeping in. Many Saturday mornings started with my pajama-clad self blundering down the stairs, making a beeline to the TV in the family room, only to catch the last ten minutes of Beakman's World (one of my favorite shows), signalling the end of the kid-friendly Saturday morning line-up. I'd continue watching because as a child of the '90s it was my duty to lap up as much TV as possible (also, my family didn't have cable TV and this was pre-internet boom and I had nothing else to do because SUBURBAN LIVIN').

This is not how things went down during my vacation in Taiwan. Because I was staying with my dad, that meant waking up by 9 a.m. every morning, and because I'm an "adult," that meant not ignoring his wake-up calls and shoving my head back into my pillow.

And I'm glad my dad made me wake up early. Otherwise I wouldn't have gotten to try the breakfast shop near his house.

I've never been much of a breakfast eater because I like sleeping more than I like eating. But if I had lived near a Taiwanese breakfast shop growing up, maybe I would've felt compelled to wake up for breakfast. Because...

It's like the Chinese equivalent of a basket of baguettes in France. Sort of.

DEEP FRIED CRULLERS (youtiao)! And...

Note: This post is totally not food-related. For foodstuffs, please read this post from three days ago, especially because that post took a buttload more hours to write than this one. Yeah, two posts in one week! MADNESS.

BMO, I SHALL BECOME YOU.

Last year, I dressed up for Halloween for the first time in over 15 years. And I did it...for love.

Or, more specifically, I did it because it was the first time one of Kåre's visits to New York City coincided with Halloween and I thought it'd be a shame if he didn't experience the one day a year where it's acceptable to wear silly costumes in public and gorge on fun-size candy*. Someone's gotta guide him through the labyrinth of American customs. And that someone is me. By default.

* Alas, Kåre still hasn't fully experience Halloween because Hurricane Sandy put a damper on last year's festivities, among other far more important things. We had fun wearing our costumes to a few parties the weekend before Halloween.

We dressed up as characters from our favorite cartoon, Adventure Time, because nothing else would've been acceptable. Nothing. Kåre dressed up as Jake and I dressed up as BMO. If you're not familiar with BMO then get out of my face watch some videos and learn. LEARN:

...Actually, you may not have learned much from those videos. But maybe you can at least see why BMO is my spirit robot.

Never having made a costume before, I did a bit of research into different kinds of BMO costumes. They mostly come in full-body BMO or simpler BMO-with-head-popping-out-the-top. Deep down, I really wanted to go full BMO, but I knew I wasn't ready for that jelly. A well constructed full-body costume was too complicated for my amateur skills, and even if I could make one it would give me the double whammy of low visibility and mobility in dark and/or crowded spaces. ...And it would make it harder for me to stuff food into my face.

So I went the simple route of BMO-with-head-popping-out-the-top and added interchangeable face parts to make it less boring. It's not 100 percent true to BMO's design, but it's close enough.