I’m not quite sure about the significance of it, but this Monday marks Chinese Valentines day here in Taiwan. Due to Monday being a craptastic day for hanging out with your significant other, the bulk of Taiwanese people celebrate their Valentines day over the weekend.

Having been seeing a girl steadily for about a month now and completely missing February’s Valentines day due to being single, this time around I had no excuse.

When you live in a country where you can barely read anything and you’re at the stage where speaking to people is still mostly a chore due to language barriers, trying to organise anything remotely romantic is an uphill battle.

Asking other guys for help seems a bit weird, asking other single girls is a no-no because you leave them feeling depressed and asking taken girls is a waste of time as you either make them insanely jealous and cop flak from their boyfriends, or they’re too busy organising their own day.

In the end I settled for some good old fashion flowers. On the day however I realised I had no idea where to buy any. My foolproof plan on relying on roadside vendors to pop up over the weekend fell through due to the utter lack of aforementioned roadside vendors.

No shit, when Chinese New Year rolls around every guy with a blue truck is out there peddling fireworks. The rest of the year you can buy edible organs from animals you’ve never even heard of prepared for you out the back of a truck, but try find roadside flowers on Valentines day weekend?

That’s crazy talk.

With time running out I launched plan B. We’d agreed that due to my complete lack of knowledge of what to do in Taiwan romance wise (and the personal acknowledgement of still very much learning the Taiwanese girl psyche, romantic or otherwise), she’d organise the bulk of the day. I later found out she’d already gone ahead and organised what we were doing before I suggested it, so at least we seemed to be on the same wavelength about what the limitations of my planning skills were.

Still, manners wise I had to contribute something and Plan B was a post dinner bubble bath. I’d originally wanted to do it with candles but couldn’t find any nice smelly scented ones. That and I’m not exactly sure how our fire alarm system works… but I’m pretty sure that setting it off wouldn’t be romantic.

You can burn half a forest of lucky money outside your door, that’s cool – but burning anything inside your house in Taiwan is generally frowned upon.

Her side of the day went quite well. We had a late start to the day due to sleeping in, dinner was awesome, we shared some great views of Taipei from way up in the mountains somewhere and then finished up with a stroll through one of the nightmarkets (I forget which one).

After we got home I surprised her with my idea and it seemed to go down really well. She’d never had a bubble bath before and got all excited.

Whilst she munched on some of the fruit we’d bought from the nightmarket I began to prepare the bath. Fifteen minutes later or so it was done.

At this point I called out it was ready and did what any normal person would do, I started to undress.

About halfway into getting my clothes off she came bursting into the bathroom with a horrified look on her face.

‘WAIT WAIT WAIT, you haven’t taken a shower yet!’ she blurted out in an accusing tone.

‘uh… what?’

‘a shower, a shower! You can’t get in the bath you’re all dirty!’

‘what do you mean dirty, we didn’t do anything today. We just had dinner and went up to the mountains!’

‘doesn’t matter, you went outside. Have to have a shower! You can’t have a bath dirty!’

‘The bath is supposed to replace a shower! That’s the whole point!’

‘No no no, the bath is clean. You have to have a shower first!’

At this point she started to undress in front of me and for a moment I stood there next to the bath, silently weighing up my options.

…with the smallest of sighs I reached for the portable shower head and began to wash myself down. Despite the absurdity of her logic, standing there naked infront of me was a pretty convincing argument.



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