The Abundance of Autumn…

Hello, my dears! I can’t believe it’s already the end of September and October is quickly approaching. The days are getting shorter, the ever-present blanket of humidity is ever so slowly drifting away, there is a brisk chill in the mornings when I go for my daily run around the lake, and the 3-day weekend trip to Hong Kong/Macau that my roommate and I have planned is rapidly approaching. I can hardly wait…

In Chinese, one of the pairs of characters one can use to describe abundance is 豐富 (feng1fu4). The way my Chinese teacher in Taipei taught me to remember the first rather finicky character was to think of a bowl of wheat on an altar as an offering to the spirits. Now, whenever I see this character, I think of cereal (weird, I know) and I think of one of my favorite seasons, fall. While my memories of Wisconsin autumns are filled with football season, apple picking, pumpkin flavored products (pumpkin spice lattes, I miss you), and sweaters, my Taiwan autumns are filled with pomelos, fat mooncakes, ghost month, and finally bearable temperatures.

As my second year in Taiwan rolled around, I made a conscious decision to make my autumn in Taiwan even more 豐富than before and look for activities outside of the realm of the Science Park. I recently re-started taking Chinese classes at Chiao Tung University  and for a girl that spent most of her Chinese school days not paying attention and chattering away with her two best friends, I’m actually really enjoying getting back in to school-mode and meeting people outside of the Science Park. Also, after a more than 10 year absence, ballet has made its way back in to my life and I have started taking classes at a dance studio near Taipei Main Station. As hard as it may be to believe, considering that I tripped over my own two feet on a morning run and now have a pretty spectacular bruise, dance was a very important part of my younger years. Whether it was ballet, Ms. Figg’s after-school dance classes, or Chinese dance at summer camp, dance played a major role in my grade school and middle school years, but I never found time to keep up with the habit once high school started. When I trekked to Ximending two weeks ago to buy my first pair of ballet slippers in more than a decade, I was more than a little nervous. However, once I put on those slippers, stepped on to the marley floor and placed my hands on the barre, the nerves melted away and a tingling sense of happiness found its way in to my heart. Every plie, releve, and pirouette felt like home in my muscles and I left class happier than I’ve been in a very long time. Now, if only I could find a piano studio to solve my pent up musical stress…

I hope everyone’s fall is as 豐富as mine and that you are all well and happy, wherever you are in the world. Stay tuned for more (including my upcoming trip to the lands of dim sum, shopping, egg tarts, gambling, and almond cookies)!

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