Last night as I was waiting for my fake-meat sandw…
Last night as I was waiting for my fake-meat sandwich to be put together by the gals down at Subzone, a tall foreigner with a baseball cap and a ponytail walked in. When he began to tell the charming ladies behind the counter what he wanted, he spoke slowly and carefully in a voice I could swear I knew from somewhere. “We’ll be having German sausage on that one….and ham on the other,” he was saying. “No, not sauce, sausage. Sausage. Ok, sauce.”
I stared at him for a few seconds. Surely I would have remembered someone like him, but I couldn’t place him. So I turned to him and said “Your voice is really familiar.” It turns out that he does a lot of the spots for ICRT, you know, things like “We rock Taiwan” and the highly original “More music, less talk” etc. Small island. He’s been here for seven years and still can’t speak Chinese. Maybe he’s afraid an accent might creep into The Voice and embarrass him on the air.
I was feeling pretty bad this morning by the time I got to work, so I grabbed a taxi and went over to the Taiwan Adventist Hospital to see a doctor. I was given an EKG or whatever, heart thing test, and a chest X-ray, but they couldn’t find anything wrong, so the doc said I must have some sort of virus or throat infection and prescribed some medicine for me. On my way out I saw some blind masseuses doing their thing in the lobby, so I stopped for a 20-minute massage for NT$200. Not a bad mixture of tickling, pain and chatting for the money.
Unfortunately, I had over twice my normal workload at work today, so that kept me busy all day, so busy there was no time for any breaks or rest. In any case, while the central weather bureau is predicting rain for this weekend, I’m predicting lots of sleep, plus intermittent coughing mixed with occasional sputum.