All is well here.

 Our roommates are moving out, thank goodness.  The girl flew out last night, but her husband (whose packing style is uncannily similar to Chris's) says he may not be out until Saturday.  Well, I guess I should say that he will be sleeping in another place, but his stuff will gradually trickle out of here for a few days.  I am awestricken at the quantity of crap one can accumulate over the course of a year.  I don't have much room to judge because Lauren and I learned how much junk (Lauren wouldn't call it junk) we had when we put it into storage, but I feel like this is a slightly different circumstance.  The Wellers seem to be oblivious to the fact that everything they get here will have to come back in two checked bags and a carry-on, or get thrown away here. 

We will be very happy once we have this apartment to ourselves.  It's a great place, and we feel like it will be a wonderful home for the next year.

The other night we took the garbage to the street, which may not seem like a noteworthy occasion, but it's nothing like taking the cans to the curb in Utah.  Taiwan is a very environmentally conscious country.  Our garbage needs to be sorted out into five different groups: metals, plastics, cardboard, paper, and compost/other.  That may sound like a lot, but it's really not as bad as it seems.  Our apartment complex collects all the recyclables, and every night a garbage truck snakes through the streets collecting the other refuse. It's easy to tell when the garbage truck is coming because it sounds like an ice-cream truck.  Once you can hear the jingle chiming up your way, it becomes a mad dash to get to the street in time.  We live on the top floor of an eleven story building and by the time we got to the ground floor we were in the most jam-packed, not to mention stinkiest, elevator this side of the Prime Meridian. We rushed out of the elevator to find about forty people waiting to toss their garbage. It was quite a sight.

I'm sure we'll have pictures coming soon... they are taking us to a place called Monkey Mountain.