It’s now about 2am on Saturday night/Sunday morning.
I just realized I’ve had a grand total of 4 hours of sleep since I woke up Friday morning. No wonder I’m beat.
The Ethics seminar is now over, thank goodness. While I appreciate the importance of stopping and thinking about ethics (I didn’t want to say “learn about ethics,” because can you really “teach ethics?” Maybe, but probably not in a 2 day seminar), it’s just kind of a drag to spend your weekend sitting in a classroom debating hypotheticals.
After class, I made the mistake of not listening to Yoshi (who told me “Don’t get on the 10 freeway! There’s a Dodger game right now”) and sitting in more than an hour and a half of traffic on the 405 and 10 to get to the San Gabriel Valley. This mistake had been followed by the mistake I made of drinking 4 cups of coffee in one day to stay awake during the seminar… this coming from someone who generally doesn’t drink coffee at all. I felt nauseated after being stuck in stop-and-go traffic for 45 minutes and I could feel the caffeine coursing my system. I could actually feel the blood pumping in my head! (Note to self: coffee is not a substitute for sleep!) Needless to say, I was grateful to finally get to Grandma’s house (meeting place for me and Mom). I was also grateful to my friend Jim from high school, who listened to me rant for 50 minutes while stuck in the car. And I was grateful to Yoshi again when I called for more company for the last 25 minutes of my drive from hell.
I met up with Mom to take care of the stuff I’d worked on late last night, went to the hospital to visit Grandma (she was sleeping), and then go out to a late dinner.
My Mom had been busy all day today, too but we got to Grandma’s house at about the same time. And after visiting Grandma, we realized neither of us had eaten dinner yet. We wandered around Monterey Park a bit in the car and ended up at a Taiwanese “deli” (casual kind of diner-type place) called “My Way Deli” (味佳冷飲小吃). Turns out that the place is owned by a close friend of one of my Mom’s close friends so my Mom ended up chatting the folks up a bit. We ordered waaay too much for two people (click the links for pictures): deep fried pork intestines dipped in salt and pepper (don’t judge! they are soooo yummy), an order of small steamed “dragon” dumplings (“xiao lung bao”/小籠包), thin vermicelli/rice noodle soup with goose meat (found this picture just posted on flickr with the comment “NT$50/US$1.51. More expensive (usually these go for NT$30/$0.90 at a nightmarket stand or maybe NT$40/US$1.20 in a bigger shop) but not more tasty. It was okay.” I think it cost NT$180/US$5.45 here… cheap for L.A. Astronomically priced vs. Taiwan!), and a “ba-wan”/肉圓 a kind of a meat “circle” (see the wiki on “ba-wan”).
I can’t believe the two of us almost all this food at one sitting. I don’t think it was so much that we were that hungry. It’s that we wanted to sit and talk and taste some authentic Taiwanese flavors. We reminisced a lot about our family in Taiwan, about trips we had taken there (it’s been almost 10 years since I was last there), about all the different things I broke in Taiwan (including something –I forgot what– at Nina’s Dad/Grandparents house in Taiwan and a glass table at my grandpa’s house I cracked as a fat toddler when I stood/jumped on it), about how my Grandma (Mom’s mom)/Grandpa met each other, and also (of course) about Dad. It was nice to just sit and talk to my Mom and feel close to my family and Taiwan for a little bit.
I didn’t get home until past 11pm. Though I was tired, I knew it had been totally worth it to go out and spend time with Mom/Grandma even after the long couple of days I’ve had.
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