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

[highways]

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.

Comments

[tinypinkmouse]

I've never seen cat food with recognisable bits in it and I've seen a lot of cat food. I mean there's usually chunks of something, but it could be anything really. You might be right about the reason too, because most cats wouldn't really mind... though they do learn to be picky about their food depending on what they get used to.

[highways]

I don't think these cats will be picky about it, because they're strays and I guess they can't really afford to be. But I'm sort of worried that if I come back here more long term and bring my cat with me, which I'd sort of have to, what I'd be able to feed her? I'd probably be living in Taipei in that case, probably I'd have more options... I hope so, all those meat chunks would gross me out so much.

[jae]

You are so awesome for buying food for stray cats! Aw.

-J

[highways]

Haha, I'm not so sure actually, I couldn't stay there long enough to see if they like, fought over it and stuff, I was sort of worried about that. Also one like totally bolted instead of staying around to eat anything, I guess I freaked it out, so I was all :( about it.

[travelingmonkey]

You have Newsies in your interests. This means I love you, and we must be friends. Got it?! ;P hahaha. OK so really, I saw your answer thingy here, and thought it sounded like maybe we'd get along well? Plus, you feed stray cats, which means you rock. Even more than if you just loved Newsies. ^___^ LoL. Sooo, are you still looking for more friends? ^_^


One of my good friends speaks Mandarin and Taiwanese, but of course, she is Taiwanese[-American], haha. She and her parents and people speak both all the time - they own/run a Chinese/Taiwanese restaurant; her mother apparently told her I ate like a mouse when I was there, lol.

Also, I think it's really awesome that they don't process the cat food so much there. It might make it look more gross, but it is presumably tons healthier. The processed junk available most places is actually kinda crap, it's made with all sorts of grain and small quantities of nasty leftover meat bits processed like mad and stuff, not healthy for animals. Sounds like this stuff is a step closer to raw, which is great. ^^