New Year's Gifts

I am not sure if it is traditional to give gifts to others but it seems that whenever a major Chinese/Taiwanese holiday comes around I get lots of gifts (in the disguise as food) given to me, it has happened to me this time and the last time I was here. Not that I am complaining because I love getting given free food (:D), I like it because I am getting free food (who can pass that up?) and I often get to try something that I may not have tried otherwise.

Last Thursday I had tutor group and when I walked in Kristy walked up and handed me this box, last time I was here she or someone else gave me a box of these Anka crackers, I didn't like them the first time that I tried them they were a little different but I quickly did like them. They make a great snack cracker, not too sweet, and not too dry.

It's a good thing I liked them as that big box came with 12! of these boxes and then each box has 6 of these packets. Because they are rather small I generally end up eating more than one at a time (good thing I have lots of them) :D

It is tradition for Chinese New Year that you give a red envelope (I think generally it's parents to children, bosses to employees, etc.) and inside I was told that you give new money. Yuling came in after our afternoon classes last Friday and handed these out to each kid in the class and then gave Andrea and I one also. She said Happy New Year and then told us not to open it until the New Year.

Inside I found these chocolates, sadly they weren't very good :( and I only ate one but they still looked really cool. This boat looking thing plays a big part of the New Year, I am not quite sure what it means--that is something I need to ask as soon as I see people that would know again.

Thursday Andrea and I went to another computer district (more about that later) and when we walked in this guy walked up and handed us these red envelopes. I didn't think that it would be polite to open it there so I waited until I got home...
Inside I found a shiny new $1NT, yeah for free money!

Freezer Down

A couple of weeks ago we realized that our food in the fridge wasn't very cold so we turned the dial up about 2/3 of the way up, then it started being really noisy whenever the doors were closed. Last week again the food was not cold at all, so we turned the dial up as far as it would go, but it still didn't do anything and the fridge really started to smell bad (I mean BAD) so we decided to talk to Yuling. The day we meant to go to talk to Yuling we forgot and hadn't gotten to it yet when a repair guy walked in and started working on it, we were a little confused as we hadn't talked to her yet but we weren't going to look a gift horse in the mouth.




It turns out that for some reason the fan or something was blocked and so it wasn't defrosting correctly so the fan/engine was running too much and went kaploop! (or something like that :D), anyway the guy replaced the part and everything was back to normal (except he left about 2 gallons of dirty water spilled on the floor and didn't put EVERYTHING back in the freezer--grrr!).


It also took us a day or so to realize that he had not turned down the dial in the fridge so it was still as cold as it could go, we finally realized it was still high when we were going to have fried eggs and we went to crack it and it looked like this :( Kind of funny but I wasn't too excited about eating a frozen egg, so I completely melted in the sink---kind of fun but your hands feel gross when you are done :D

(But I guess we know that it works :D)