Gotta scoot!

I finally got my scooter about two weeks ago. Yes, long awaited for, and then I didn't even blog about it immediately (as I'd planned).

It didn't take too long to narrow the field down to 2 choices, but I hemmed and hawed about that decision for a while. And then it took me even longer to decide between faint gold (like my beloved Acura) and silver. Retarded dilemma of the decade.

Anyhow, after many J-K flipflops, I eventually settled on silver. Since I don't have a camera, yet (that's next on my list), I've borrowed the official website's picture. Of course, I have a black seat, not the Louis Vuitton purse.

I haven't ridden my shiny new scooter much, because I don't yet have a scooter licence, but I use little trips to the store as practice. It's quite exhilarating! :D

Today I rode the scooter to work for the first time. Exciting, and not that difficult, really. Just follow the stream of other scooters. Whee! :)

Friendly Faces, Part 2

I had just decided to which company I would sign my life away. Mom and I were having dinner when she told me, "You have a cousin at CompanyM. His father is my godbrother."

Excuse me??

And she proceeded to tell me about this godbrother of hers, of whom she had never spoken previously. I didn't even know of his existence until that day. She didn't find out my cousin's name until after I had started working. Looking him up in the company directory, I discovered that he was in the same group as I was!

I hadn't met him yet, but it was interesting how I changed that day. Each time he sent an e-mail, I took notice of it. Each person I passed whose name I didn't know, I wondered if they were my cousin. Whenever I walked through the cubicle farm to talk to someone, I looked at all the names on the way to see if I could find his seat. I wondered what this faceless cousin of mine was like.

It wasn't until the company group dinner that I finally found out when fellow employees were toasting with wine and my manager called his name out. A face! A face to the name!

So then I had to find a chance to approach him and introduce myself. I didn't think that, "Hi! I'm your cousin!" would cut it; I wasn't even sure if he knew of my mom (it's complicated). Between lack of opportunities (he was often out of the office at customer sites) and me being busy with work and forgetting, it was over a month before he approached me when I was talking to someone else! His parents had told him that weekend of my existence (revealed through my aunt).

So we've been exchanging a few e-mails, just gathering bits of information to get to know each other. Very nice person, quiet. He's the youngest of three, but still older than my brother; not surprising since his father is about 10 years older than my mom.

His parents have just moved up to Taipei county, so I may finally meet them sometime. It's like finding out I have a whole new family. Can't wait.

It's a miracle!

Yikes, been on a bit of a blogging hiatus. It's a miracle that I finally got off my duff and started this blog.

In fact, it *did* take a miracle. More specifically: miracle fruit. Something I'd heard about in passing once, while sitting at a travel agency with my mother, flipping through a magazine. But this is real, and I got to try it over the holidays last month.

Miracle fruit is an oval red berry, no larger than an almond, whose shrubbish tree rarely grows higher than 5 feet outside its native tropical west Africa. The pit is rather like a small peanut, and the berry itself is rather tasteless.

It is always served with lemon or lime.

This is because sour turns sweet after eating a miracle fruit. Yes, I'll say it again: after having a miracle fruit, the lime wedges I ate tasted sweet. The citrussy flavour was still present, but its sourness was almost completely gone, resulting in a yummy limeade fruit!

Apparently, rubbing the flesh of the berry over the tastebuds causes this change in sensation, and limes and sour key candies will taste sweet for some 30 minutes.

Trippy. It's almost like being on drugs.

Here are some miraculously fruity facts.