Having no secular work is wearing me down. Apart from a sense of impending doom, the end of my savings, I have become comfortable in a surreal life. School is certainly hard, learning Chinese here is maybe the hardest thing I've ever done. But there are those moments in between when I'm not in school and I'm slacking and playing around. Yesterday I spent almost 8 hours in a swimming pool fighting over a big blue plastic ball.

A couple from Finland and Canada had returned after being gone for a few months, their return was celebrated by many of the English congregation by having a lunch and dinner picnic. The gathering was held at the pool of the apartment of two of the couples in the English hall, far far north of where I live, at the second most northern stop of the mighty MRT subway system. Far from the masses of humanity that crowd the streets of Taipei. The apartment buildings are still tall, but they overlook the soft green forests on the edge of a national park, high up on the side of a hill. Half a dozen palm trees lean in towards each other over the swimming pool so that I could see them when I looked straight up into the blue sky while floating on my back.

I didn't bring my trunks, so that I was swimming around in my quick drying zip-off hiking shorts. But it did little to dampen my enjoyment of the cool water, it was so hot that afternoon. I think there were at least 15 in the pool fighting over that big blue ball. We had enough fun that we were asked to keep it down by security, all before dinner time. I don't think the residents of the buildings use the pool very often and weren't used to hearing people screaming war cries with 10 different accents. Our second game had an "if you yell the other team get's a point" rule, that rule was mostly respected, at least for the first half of the game. Today I have only 3 small nicks and a sore shoulder joint. At meeting today I was proudly shown a few elbow bruises, and I'm sure there were others with bruises that I didn't see.

Being from the chilly part of the world, life around the swimming pool seems exotic and something that only happens in movies or maybe on an expensive vacation. Especially the part where all the guys disappeared without telling me to play some new game, leaving me with a dozen beautiful women in a swimming pool. Although this was the point where, instead of finding some sort of playful splashing game, I floated on my back and looked at the stars framed by palm trees lit from the pool lights below, the women ignored me and took turns trying to balance themselves on a kid's inflated duck. Why does everything turn out not as you'd imagine it to be?

So after a night stuffing myself with Pizza, Oreos, and fresh papaya, swimming for hours and hours, I found myself standing an a crowded MRT train. Eventually the others that I traveled with got off at their respective MRT stations, and soon after I was dodging betel nut spit and cockroaches on the familiar narrow sidewalks leading to my humble little apartment, the one without a swimming pool.