Kî-si̍t góa lóng chai. Hó-táⁿ lí tio̍h lâi.

So if I ever come back here to stay for a significant length of time, I think I'm going to watch to learn at least a bit of Taiwanese Hokkien. The majority of Taiwan is bilingual in Taiwanese and Mandarin, which are two completely different but related languages—if you want to see a fun example of the difference, you can check out this video, in which Fahrenheit competes at reading a bunch of Mandarin tongue twisters, then makes the loser sight translate one of those same tongue twisters into Taiwanese. USEFUL LINGUISTICALLY and also cute. Anyway, with terrifying features like eight tones and nasalization as a grammatical feature, not to mention a near total lack of learning resources, it seems like it must be a bitch and a half to learn, but still man, seventy percent of this island speaks it! Plus if I knew it, they couldn't use Taiwanese for secrets anymore.

For now I should stick to Mandarin, though. I could barely speak a word of it today, because I am a giant failure.

Taiwanese cat food is nasty as fuck. I know because I bought some to feed all the stray cats that lurk outside 7-11 and I was so, so grossed out by the contents of what I was dumping onto the ground—whole fish bits and bones and chunks of mystery meat, and this was like, Friskies, or some other mainstream brand I see all the time back home. Maybe back in the States they grind it up more to make it palatable to the human owners? Because yeah, the cats didn't seem to mind.