Iyengar Yoga in Taiwan

I've suffered from back problems for years. My wife told me that I should try Iyengar yoga, a nice, slow, methodical way to get into yoga. She read a book about a Taiwanese that studied and traveled through India, and was now back in Taipei. "We should try to go to one of her classes." Candy says. The next day I meet a stranger on the road in downtown Taipei. We get to talking about yoga and life, and I know that Candy and her would get along great. We exchange numbers, I call Candy to tell her, and it turns out to be the same person she was talking about the night before. Love that kind of stuff.

Xiao Ying's class was exactly how I wanted to learn yoga. It was a slow introduction to the poses and the different parts of my body that I wasn't previously aware of. (You mean my sitting bone isn't just my butt?) As we reviewed previous poses, she listened and watched her students and expanded on what she had taught previously, offering deeper realms of the poses to those who could handle it (not me, except the head and hand stands), and gentler alternatives to those who have injuries to deal with (yeah, that's me, um, can I have two more bricks, another bolster, and an extra blanket please?)


I learned in Xiao Ying's class to slow down and listen to my body. I learned that my body will communicate with me if I am still enough and aware enough to listen to what it has to say. I learned that I can change my body's habits if I'm willing to commit to the discipline of giving my body what it deserves.


I had the opportunity to go to both her English and Chinese classes. It was fun to watch her grow into her role as teacher and facilitator. I think that facilitator is the best title for her, for she can only teach so much, but it's up to us individually to be able to follow the advice and suggestions of others willing to help. If you are another foreigner in Taiwan reading this, there are some great opportunities to go and meet up with Xiao Ying, her husband Andy, and their little lightning bolt, Marlowe down at their Yogi Guest House in Hualian. Trust me, check out her blog, get some friends together, book a couple of rooms, and get the heck out of Taipei for a weekend that's great for you. She may be reserved about her English, but it's great. You won't be disappointed. If you want more information, email her at yogameimei@gmail.com , or check out her blog at http://www.wretch.cc/blog/yingyoga . You can always drop me an email too if you need.


Thanks, Xiao Ying for the guidance and friendship that you have offered. Candy and I are honored to share paths in our lives with you and your family.


Kenn Loewen
qmowhite@gmail.com

Basic Survival – Foods in Chinese

So here is a list of some of the basic foods in Chinese. When I first got out here, I figured No problem. I know lots of Chinese food's names from the Dragon Fort back at home. After saying chow mein 10 times, yelling it, saying it slowly saying it quickly, I was really frustrated why they couldn't freaking understand Chinese. I mean, come on, it's chow mein. Of course, now I realize that chow mein is Cantonese, as are all the Chinese foods that I thought I knew. Chop suey, egg foo yung, and won ton soup makes no sense out here, no matter how loud you say it. I finally listened to a local order "Gee Row Fan" , and they got a nice bowl of rice with some light gravy and shredded chicken breast. I tried it, and to my surprise, out came some food. So, for the next 2 weeks, I ate this chicken rice at least twice a day until my food knowledge started to increase. Now, seven years later, I'm just starting to eat that Ji Rou Fan again, but hesitantly and only occasionally.

I put together this list of basic survival foods in Chinese. In the first column is PinYin. Many of you just coming out here won't know how to read PinYin, so I've also put together basic English phonetics to sound them out. Just read it like it seems, and it should get you what you want. Of course, I still to this day realize that sometimes you will get something totally different than you ordered. Be ready for it, smile, nod, eat, and work on your pronunciation for next time. Some of the PinYin may be a bit funky, but that's the way I learned it, the bastardized amalgamation of all the different styles that Taiwan insists on using. To see it bigger or print it, click on it, download and print it. Hope this helps.

I Get Paid To Be A Kid

Last summer, I decided to pick up some extra hours and start teaching kindergarten. I looked around for a while, and really like the fact that I'm a very sought after teacher. I applied at a lot of places, but ultimately, I was giving them the interview to decide where I wanted to work. It's a great job market to be in, but with the turn around of most foreign teachers out here being one year, a teacher with seven years of experience here in Taiwan definitely has the upper hand.

So many schools are horrible out here. I went to a couple of schools and when I looked at the curriculum, I was shocked to find that the kids would be learning around 80 new words and 12-15 new sentence patterns a week! And this was for their pre-school and kindergarten classes. I politely walked away, biting my tongue the whole way. Then, to my luck, I walked into the YMCA (go ahead, sing the song, I know you want to!). YMCA out here is the same organization as back at home, (well, basically). Their focus is on body, mind, and spirit. As I walked into the classroom, I was amazed to see the classes painted from top to bottom like a story book.

I've loved my job there, and have been learning a lot about really stepping back to the basics, when teaching the kids. It's great to work with these guys and really try to make it interesting. The other night, Candy came home to my latest project. I was teaching – I can move like a robot. , and , I go to grandpa's house by car. Check it out…

Finding Our New House

Candy and I have been dreaming of having our own house for quite a while now. Actually, it was Candy who brought me into this dream. We give up many things to live the lifestyle that we do. To travel as much as we do, the thoughts of owning a house have been out of reach in the past. I know many people are envious of our lifestyle, but well knowing that it's just not possible with a mortgage and kids. We have enjoyed and will continue to enjoy it, we hope. We want to own a home, but don't want to do it at a cost of our complete lifestyle. We realize that we will have to cut down on the travel, but we don't want to be owned by our mortgage.

Although we weren't in the financial position to buy, we would go out on our days or afternoons off and look at houses. It's a totally different market out here, and we set the goal to look at 100 houses before we bought. Because we don't have a tone of money, we knew that we wouldn't be buying a new house, at least that wasn't likely. So, we needed to spend time in the older houses, getting to know where the problems generally occurred. We wanted to see how people renovated them, what worked, what didn't, and generally, just get smarter about housing in Taiwan. Also, for me, I really needed to get used to this new style of building. I've got a pretty good idea of what to look for in Western houses, but here, everything is made of steel and concrete, and tile. So, we tackled it head on.

There's a place up behind where we are living now that we have continued to go back and look at as units come available. It's called Feng Huang Chen, or Phoenix City. It's only 1 km away from where we are now, and the more we look around, the more we like the area that we are in. There's an elementary school and a Jr. High school, a brand new hospital, a large community center with swimming pool, tennis, basketball, and badminton courts, a large outdoor track, a morning and evening market, and 2 minutes away is the Zhong He Interchange to the #3 highway. Plus, with the new hospital they have built expressways in and out of Taipei City, so it only takes about 10-15 minutes to get to downtown. These places on the hill have always caught our eye, because of the spectacular view that some of them hold.

In Taiwan, a view isn't even a real consideration. With the high density of the population out here, most places are built on alley ranging from 4-8 meters wide. That's the spacious side. On the back side, sometimes the buildings get so close that they literally almost touch. It's common to find an apartment where the back windows get no natural light what so ever. I had come to accept that this is a part of life out here that I would have to come to grips with. Candy knew that this was hard for me, and I just asked of her that we be able to see at least a tree out of 1 of the windows in the house. View hasn't really had value out here in the past either. It seems that every good view in Taiwan is reserved for the dead people. Due to Feng Shui, you want to leave your ancestors with the best view. Plus, because Taipei is situated in a basin, pretty much any view place will be well out of the city and thus, very inconvenient.

We had gone to check out this apartment about 3 months earlier with a real estate agent. The price at the time was $6.8 million (about $250,000 Can), which was way out of our budget. We loved it, but kept on looking around. Then, just recently, Candy found another house in the same community for private sale. We went up to look at it, and had a strange sense of dejavu. After a while we realized that it was the same one. With the market doing what it has been, and the interest rates falling to an amazing level, we have been more serious about the possibility of buying. I'm skeptical about where the market is going and how far down it will go, so I told Candy that I'm open to the possibilities of buying, but only if it's a sweet deal, and I mean sweet. We figured out what would be our highest amount we would spend on the place, and decided to just go and throw our number in and see if the owner would even be interested in talking with us. He was.

The middle man told us that he wouldn't even take our offer of $5.2 to the owner, and that we would really need to bring it up. We did, up to $5.4($200k Can), but told him that this really left us basically no room to move with our budget. We thought there was no way. The next day, we found out the owner, Ser Chen, wanted to meet up with us in McDonalds on Wednesday after work. We met with him and he explained that he had brought his price down to $6 million and that was pretty much all he could do. Luckily, he spoke English, so I was able to talk with him clearly. Negotiating a house sale in Chinese is a skill that I'm not quite ready for, yet. At that point, I just told him that we didn't want to waste his time or insult him, that we really didn't have that kind of money, or really much more than what we had offered. I said that we would leave him our number, and that with these increasingly difficult financial times, that if somewhere in the future our offer seemed better to him, that he could call us and we could talk then. He went of to talk to his middle man, a neighbor of his who takes a commission on the sale, and came back.

Then the dance began. He hummed and hawed and came down to $5.8. I punched numbers into the calculator and went up to $5.44. He talked with his wife and the middle man for a long time and finally came back with his bottom price of $5.6. I went up to $5.48 and gave a disappointing look to Candy and explained that furniture for the house would have to wait because we were already over the budget. He wanted more but I said I just didn't have it. We finally met at $5.5 million

So, now we have given him roughly 9% of the sale value as a down payment, and all the paperwork is into the bank to see if we can even get the money that we need. We are ready and willing to walk away from the house if we need to, and are really trying not to get attached to it, should that be the case. But, the reality of it is that every time we go up the mountain and look closer at the place, the more we can see ourselves in there for a long time. It's great going shopping for furniture now, cause it's not about maybe one day that will fit into our house, but will this actually fit nicely into our house? We just hope that the banks will lend us what we need, or this is all for nothing.

The apartment is on the fifth floor of five floors. It's about 10 years old and around 950 square feet plus balcony. The living room has large windows that look over all of Taipei city, from Taipei 101 across YangMing Mountain, over to Danshui, and back out towards TaoYuan. It's got 3 bedrooms and fantastic light (such a change from the dungeonesque light that we have in our place now). My favorite part is that up on the roof, we have about 850 square feet of roof top garden that goes along with our place, with the same amazing view. The community is great, a lot more artists and such, it seems. There's a pool and community center for those who want to sing Karaoke, and a basketball court. Also, it has a kids playground with massive dinosaurs (seriously, about 30 feet tall) that they can play on. It's a gated community, with guards at all the entrances. Our place also comes with a parking spot, which will cost us about $25K Can! Behind the community are mountain trails that I have run and ridden before. They go all over into the wilderness for many miles.

So, there's the lowdown for you all on what is happening with the house. You wanted to know, and now, one novel later, you do. Send us prayers that we will get this if we are meant to.

Coming to Taiwan

I would assume that if you are reading this you probably know me, but you never know. So let me take a step back and introduced myself for the first time. I'm a Canadian guy, born and raised just outside of Vancouver. I was never quite satisfied living in the small town of at the Abbotsford. Although I love it, and it's home, I knew that there was more out there. I have been through a lot of crap in my life, and it seemed that no matter what was thrown at me, I always landed on my feet. Not that that's a bad thing, but I was up for a new sort of challenge. How much of your strength that comes from the people around you, from the comfort of your surroundings, from the security of familiarity? What would happen if I took away all those things? How then would I react to situations that were out of my control? Without previous securities to fall back on, what would my natural reaction be? How comfortable had I got in the things that I thought I knew? What was I missing?

So I sold or got rid of everything that I had, except for four boxes of sentimental things that I just couldn't get rid of. If you knew my parents tendencies to horde, you would know what kind of feat that actually was. I had taken my TESOL course, so now the question was where to go. The idea was to go to another country, stay for maybe a year, and then move on country to country. I knew the starting point was going to be in Asia, but where in Asia I had no idea. China, Japan, Taiwan, Korea, Vietnam, Thailand...? It was all foreign and I really didn't know which one to pick.

That's when my friend, C. A. got a hold of me. She already lived here in Taiwan and heard that I was considering coming out to Asia with my then girlfriend Kate. She wanted to recommend Taiwan, saying the food was good, the people were friendly, the money was decent, there were a lot of jobs, and she had a 3 bedroom place that we could come and stay in. That quickly made the decision for us. I bought a one-way ticket to Taiwan, got my multiple entry tourist visa, and got on the airplane. It was a wild trip of faith.

I arrived in this country, didn't speak a word of the language, had about $300 Canadian in my pocket, had no job, and didn't have a ticket or enough money to get out of the country. For me it was pretty much do or die. I was able to find work quickly out here. I instantly started to learn the language, and I was completely intrigued to see this culture at a deeper level.

Kate and I took very different paths out here and soon found ourselves growing further and further apart if you ever really want to test your relationship with the person, travel with them. You will find out very quickly the real person that lies underneath. Often when dating a new person we try to keep up this level of who we want people to see us as. Leaving all the comforts and security of a home behind keeping up the façade of who we want other people to see us as becomes near impossible. All you're left with is who you really are. You find how strong your strengths really are and your weaknesses in your ugly parts become painfully obvious.

Needless to say Kate and I went our own separate ways. I am very grateful to Kate, because without her I never would've taken on this journey. I know that she had a tough time, but I'm very glad that she didn't leave after we didn't work out. She ended up staying out here for a year and doing her own thing. I stayed and lived with CA for the next while, until she moved back to Canada. It was great people around me at the right times that brought me here and kept me here.