Kaohsiung Love

After a week of constant traveling and tourist activities, it was nice to be home in Kaohsiung, enjoying everyday Taiwanese life. My parents and I all spent the first morning here sleeping in and then doing some crucial loads of laundry. For my parents, this meant venturing off to Bobo Laundromat on their own and deciphering Taiwanese washing machines. I met them at the laundromat a bit later, and we went to grab lunch next to their hotel.

The menu at the place where we got lunch was mainly just a list of different kinds of noodles, without specifying what was on them. When I asked the lady what the noodles came with (vegetables, or meat, or what), she said "oh, vegetables, meat, everything." Huh. We ordered 3 random kinds and figured we would just try whatever it was. It turns out that the lady was not kidding. Not only did the noodles have the standard green leafy vegetables and little bits of meat, but there were also mushrooms and oysters and shrimp and squid and little octopi and something gross-tasting that turned out to be liver. Wow.


My very own mother, about to eat a small octopus

After lunch, we moseyed on up to the High Speed Rail station to buy our tickets to Taipei, then came back and took a bus to Yang Ming to meet up with Patty. This was good practice for Mom and Dad, who would be taking the same bus by themselves to get to school the next day. We met Patty at school, where she gave my parents presents: a Kit Kat and a rose made of bath salts for my mother, and Hello Kitty chocolates for my father. (You know how he loves that Hello Kitty!) We got some tea and had plenty of Patty-bonding before heading back to the area where I live, where Mom slept while Dad and I tried once more to get an electronic dictionary. Unfortunately we ran out of time, because we had to get down to Sizihwan Bay to meet the Ryans and Gered's host family for dinner. We ate delicious Thai food, and then went to see some fireworks down by the Love River (it's still Lantern Festival, so there are fireworks every night). There may have been fireworks in the shape of hearts. Nothing is too cute for Taiwan!

The next day, my parents came to Yang Ming to do a little Show and Tell-type thing with my classes. They brought in some pictures to pass around, like a picture of me in 5th grade, or a picture of our house in the snow. (Patty tells me the students think 5th-grade me looks like Hermione) Afterwards, the floor was opened for questions from the students. "Your father's hair is white, and your mother's hair is black, so why do you have yellow hair?" "Did Rebekah do anything funny when she was little?" (leading to the story about the time I painted myself yellow) One class ended in a giant free-for-all when the students decided that they all wanted my parents' autographs in the front of their English textbooks. Then, in true Taiwan fashion, we took a big group picture:


On the way to teachers' class, Mom and Dad accidentally got snagged by Dragon, who invited them into his office for tea. "Your parents! Very young! And very health!" he told me. Yes. My adult students were waiting outside the principal's office, too afraid of Dragon to come in, so I extracted my parents and we went to our normal, principal-free classroom. We still got in some Dragon bonding time, though, because after teachers' class, we went out to lunch with Dragon, Jeforly, and Patty. It was a time of excessive dumplings. Dad really enjoyed talking to Dragon, who is a pretty funny guy once you get past his incoherence.

Dumplings with my silly administration:

From left: Dragon, Jeforly, Me, Mom, Patty

After getting stuffed to the brim with dumplings, it was time to meet some of my Little Angels for a tour around the school. In the afternoon, Mom and Dad got to meet my extra-precocious band class, who used their second period of English class to perform some of their new pieces for us. There was one piece that they had never played all the way through, but they wanted to try for us. The teacher discouraged it, warning them that they were just asking to lose face, but they insisted, and they actually did a pretty good job. My band kids would put the UTS band to shame.

The last place to go was my second teachers' class, where in a show of real Taiwaneseness, several teachers presented various gifts to my parents. Presuming that my parents hadn't tried much Taiwanese food, one woman brought a basket of Taiwanese fruit (wax apples, guava, or zaozi, anyone?), and another brought a box of some kind of gelatin snacks. I think Dad had already reached his lifetime quota of gelatinous foods in Asia, but he tried some anyway. Nobody brought stinky tofu or anything made with internal organs, but they definitely considered it! The most curious present was a pair of Santa Claus cell phone charms made out of beads. How...seasonal.

That night, we went to hot pot and then a night market in an attempt to get the full Taiwanese Experience. Taiwanese markets are not as stressful and bargaining-intense as Chinese ones, but they are just as crowded and even more full of delicious snacks, which we were sadly too full of hot pot to try. You have to get hot pot when you are in Asia, because America is way too litigation-happy for restaurants where they serve you raw meat that you cook by yourself. Too bad, because it's pretty fun, plus most hot pot places are all-you-can-eat. Bonus!

Beijing, Take 2

While Gered and his parents took a 28-hour train from Xi'an down to Guangzhou and then to Hong Kong, we opted to spend one more day in Beijing. We got in early in the morning...almost too early, because I was still in my PJs and quite unprepared to get off the train. We were probably the last ones off, and encountered a little difficulty when I couldn't find my ticket and they wouldn't let me past the gate out into the station. The lady was quite unforgiving, and told me I'd have to buy a new ticket for 400 kuai before they would let me out! I was sleepy and discouraged and just about to cry when I finally found the ticket folded up in my pocket. Whew. Unfortunately, all these delays meant that we were also just about the last ones to get in the taxi line.

This line was INSANE. Now I know that the Chinese government tried to train people to wait in lines politely for the Olympics, but there is no undoing a national bad habit so easily. The taxi line was cutthroat, with everybody trying to edge you out from different directions. One man waiting behind me was standing so close that he was pretty much just leaning on my back. Uncomfortable situation! Finally I turned around and snapped at him a little bit, and he backed off. This morning was not going in an extra fun way. We waited in that line foreeeeeever, but finally got a taxi and got back to our hotel.

The hotel was extra nice and let us into our room early, so we got to take showers and eat breakfast and everything was right with the world again. After a little rest and recuperation, we were off to the university district! I was on a mission to get an electronic Chinese-English dictionary, but after talking to a bunch of vendors, I discovered disappointingly that none of them include traditional characters anymore. LAME. It's funny how little mainland Chinese know about traditional characters (I think they still use them for some official/ceremonial stuff), whereas Taiwanese people seem to have at least a basic knowledge of simplified.

Since we were in the area, I took my parents around Bei Da, where we wandered around campus and my mom (of course) got a Bei Da sweatshirt. Then we headed back downtown, making a stop at Wal-Mart on the way. Sadly, we couldn't seem to find any Tasty Tuna Tidbits, so we just continued on to the Silk Market to pick up the clothes Dad and Mr. Ryan had gotten tailored. They had to fetch the clothes from somewhere, so in the meantime we went to the Pearl Market YET AGAIN, but I had to leave early to meet my friend Sarah (another U of R Fulbright, who lives in Beijing), leaving my parents to get back to the Silk Market and then home all by themselves. Go Mom and Dad!

I went to Houhai Lake to meet Sarah, and because it was the first day of Lantern Festival, everything was going nuts. I was surrounded on all sides by a constant, deafening barrage of fireworks, and everybody had come out to see them. I was worried that we wouldn't be able to find each other, but finally we did, and went off out of the war zone a little bit to a small Xinjiang restaurant. It was excellent to see Sarah, but she was like a magnet for Chinese dudes who want to make friends. Sketchy times. The owner of the restaurant was extra flirty, plus later a guy came up to our table and started talking to us a bunch, trying to get Sarah's number and asking us to come hang out. We finally weaseled our way out and went back to my hotel, where the staff brought all 4 of us complimentary tangyuan, a traditional holiday dessert that consists of chewy balls with various fillings in a thick soup. (in their uncooked form, they're those floury things that I kept seeing at the market in Xi'an) Yay Lantern Festival! Sarah and I watched some people set off sky lanterns (they just float up off into the air to who-knows-where), which seemed like a big fire hazard. I found out later that some big building in Beijing burned down during Lantern Festival. Whoops.

We went to bed as early as we could manage, but I was still extra loopy when I had to wake up at 5 the next morning to go to the airport. We flew back to Hong Kong, where we noodled around during a 5-hour layover. The best part of the layover was when we found a store in the airport selling (I kid you not) "fruity cutie wife cake." They wouldn't let us take a picture, though.

We were reunited with the Ryans for our flight back to Kaohsiung, plus fellow Fulbright Katie, who was returning from Poland and also happened to be on our plane. I took my parents to their fabulous hotel (In English: the Life Hotel and Resort. In Chinese: Las Vegas). How fabulous was it? Well for starters, their doorbell played a different Christmas song every time you press it. Now THAT is what I call fancy.

Xi'an: Wet and Warrioriffic!

Early Saturday morning, we disembarked from our train and headed out into Xi'an. Outside the station there were some people waiting with signs to pick other people up, and a lot of people waiting for nobody in particular. With our extra-touristy vibe, we immediately attracted some guys who wanted us to pay 500 kuai to hire a car for the day. We bu yao and bu yonged them thoroughly ("don't want" and "don't need"), but eventually agreed to pay 20 kuai for them to take us all to the Ryan's hotel in a van. Getting to the van was an exciting time, as we steered our suitcases around numerous puddles and crossed a busy intersection in a haphazard and fairly diagonal fashion.

At the hotel, the driver hung around, hoping that we would still take him up on his offer. We could have taken taxis around all day with the kind of money they wanted, but when I told the guy so he lowered his offer, and eventually we settled on 300. Finding taxis on a rainy day is hard, anyway.

With a car hired, we were off on the long road outside the city to get to the famous terracotta warriors. We visited a factory where they made replica warriors, and also where we ran into this fearsome character:


At the terracotta warrior museum, we checked out a bunch of kind of random exhibits on the history of the museum before making it into the actual warrior pits. I had been there 2 years previous, and I could tell that there had been some further excavation, although they do it veeeery slowly.

The warriors are pretty amazing, especially if you think about how much effort goes into making just one terracotta warrior. First you make a hollow body out of coils and coils of clay layered on top of each other. Then you mold bits of clay onto the outside to look like a person, and sculpt each one with unique hairstyle and facial features, and with different dress according to rank. After that, the warriors can be fired in a giant oven and finally, painted. Repeat this process thousands and thousands of times, and presto, your burial grounds are ready! You've got about 2000 years of nice resting time before some jerks dig the place up.



We were feeling pretty hungry post-warriors, but it was rather chilly outside, and since it was the slow season for tourists, none of the restaurants had bothered to turn on their heat. We ended up at the one oasis of warmth, where the bathrooms are clean and the food is reliably decent: KFC. After luxuriating in a bathroom with toilet paper and functional hot water taps and soap and an awesome hand dryer, we enjoyed some traditional KFC food, plus hot egg tarts for all (not available at your US KFC!). KFC also has napkins, another feature that is not exactly a given in Chinese restaurants. We were loving it.



We spent so long warrioring and chilling in KFC that eventually our driver got impatient and came to look for us. When we were good and ready, we trucked on back into the city and headed for the Muslim Quarter. (Xi'an is home to a number of Hui people, a Muslim minority group)

My idea in the Muslim Quarter was to go to the Great Mosque, but it turns out that the way to the Great Mosque goes through a bustling Muslim market, so it took us kind of a long time to get there because we kept accidentally stopping and buying things. I obtained a colorful pashmina (the only thing I bargained for this whole trip that was actually for me), and my mom got, among other things, a foot-high terracotta warrior to put in the garden. Cute. There were a bunch of funny little floury-looking balls for sale, but I didn't know what they were, so I asked a vendor what they were made of. She responded with a startlingly vehement, "NO!" After some explanation I was told that the balls needed to be boiled before eating, but still, it's not like I was trying to eat one then and there!

We did get to the Great Mosque eventually, and it was nice and peaceful and picturesque. Although it's a tourist attraction, people still actually worship there, and we were quite impressed by how well the mosque and the local Muslim community had maintained through those extra-anti-religion days under Communist rule. A nice man at the mosque told me about the people who come to pray there, and afterwards, discovering I was American, proceeded to expound at length about his favorite NBA players. This guy knew about a bajillion times more about the NBA than I do. (Just like Taiwanese schoolchildren know more about American baseball than I do...oh well)

It was getting lateish and we had to catch a train back to Beijing that night, so we only made one more stop in the market: dinner. We had to take advantage of the authentic Muslim community to enjoy some traditional Xinjiang food: spicy lamb kebabs and naan. A delicious finale to our day in Xi'an.

From the Muslim Quarter, we hopped an extra-ghetto cab to the train station. The front passenger side door didn't seem to close properly, and when I pushed on it to prove to my parents that it was secure, it popped right open as we were driving. Whoops. At least I wore the seat belt, which was missing the part across the lap.

Unfortunately, we didn't luck out into getting our own compartment on the train back. Dad was in one compartment with some other family, and Mom and I were in the one next to him, along with a couple and their little 4-year-old daughter. It was awkward at first, but then I talked to the little girl a little bit, and then talked to her mom, and they were very nice. The father came in and tried to talk to Dad in Chinese, but I informed him it was useless. "Your father's mustache is very beautiful," he told me. I passed the message on.

Summer Palace and all kinds of shopping

On Friday morning we tested our expertise at Beijing public transport by taking the subway and a bus to get to the Summer Palace, which is a bit of a ways outside of central Beijing. Once again, we barely had to try to find a tour guide to hire. The guide in question today was a nice little guy named (this is his English name, mind you) Jonvey, who was nice but didn't have nearly as good English as our beloved Dawson. Every time Jonvey was thinking of a difficultish word in English, he would squinch his eyes shut really tight like he was concentrating really hard before he could produce the word. Overall, I found the Summer Palace to be kind of whatever (having been to the Forbidden City 2 days earlier, where there are a lot more entertaining stories about eunuchs and whatnot), but we wandered around and watched a little performance where bored-looking guys banged randomly on bells and some ladies with really long sleeves danced around a little bit and then two guys acted out a Peking opera scene about people fighting in the dark. All of the performers looked completely unenthused, which I suppose is what happens when you put on the same performance for a bunch of annoying tourists taking pictures multiple times every day.

Oh my sleeves are so long, that is about the only interesting thing about this performance

Other famous attractions at the Summer Palace include the Long Hall (which they are not lying about, it is really really long) and what Jonvey cutely called the "marbleboat." Alloneword. The marbleboat was commissioned by the Empress Cixi (aka Dragon Lady), and according to my Beijing guidebook it was some kind of tribute to the navy. Jonvey, however, told us that the marbleboat was symbolic of the government, because the water is like the people, and even though a marbleboat can't actually float on the water, the water can't sink or overturn it either.


The Long Hall...it is actually wayyyy longer than it looks in this picture


Look, a marbleboat!

Unrelated note: I just managed to run over my own toes with the wheels of the chair that I am currently sitting in. Having tried this, I do not recommend it to anyone else. I do these things so you don't have to.

Was there anything else interesting at the Summer Palace? I don't think so. We made our way out, kind of hungry and grumpy, and fixed things with a delicious lunch of jianbing, a fabulous street food that is a sort of egg-crepe combo with a crunchy fried thing in the middle and some onions and sauce...it is hard to describe, but suffice to say that they are delicious. Some random man by the jianbing stand talked to me a bunch and told me that it was the most famous jianbing in the city and all sorts of outlandish things, which I doubted, but it was exactly what we needed.

Tummies full, we braced ourselves for another long haul on public transportation to get to the Silk Street Market. The Silk Market is one of the biggest and most touristy markets in the city, so it requires fierce bargaining to keep from being fleeced by the vendors who are quite experienced with foreigners and know various languages. It's key to not look like you want anything too much, but we needed to be able to remark upon which things we liked so we could stop at that stall. Unfortunately, Silk Street vendors are liable to know what you are saying in any number of the languages we all knew, so our resident unusual-language man Gered provided us with what we figured would be a fairly safe code word: volo, which is Latin for "I want." We used it whenever anyone saw something they wanted to stop and buy, and I am pretty sure that nobody else understood, although one particularly desperate salesman told us that sure, his store carried volo, if we wanted some.

I am usually a fairly amiable and not terribly fierce bargainer, mostly using humor (and my natural charms) to get a price that is decent for both parties. However, I made an enemy at the Silk Market after our moms volo-ed some pretty silk jackets. The price I got her down to still seemed a bit overpriced to me, but it was obviously low enough to make her pretty angry. We had thought about buying something else from her shop, but I just wanted to get out of there before she set me on fire with her eyes or something. Dad got a pretty good price on his own for some fabulous custom-made dress shirts for his long-armed self. Good job, Bobo! Ask him about his "risk color" if you get a chance.


So many pretty fabrics! Volo!

After the Silk Market, we went off to the Pearl Market, which is also a tourist kind of place, but not nearly as crazy as the Silk Market. Having made friends with a vendor last time, we took the Ryans to meet him and bought some things with a much nicer kind of bargaining, eschewing some of the customary insanely-high first price offers and good-naturedly quibbling over small differences.

Laden with treasures, we hustled back to our hotel and packed them into suitcases, then left immediately for the train station. We came thisclose to a travel disaster when my parents' camera slipped out and got left in the cab, but thank heaven, our observant and honest Beijing cab driver found it and ran to return it to us, leaving before any of us could even offer him a monetary reward. My faith in humanity was further reinforced by some awesome gals at a restaurant inside the station who got us the promptest meal we received in China so we could have dinner and still catch our train.

Having only taken hard sleepers during my time in China, I was totally unprepared for what our train ride in soft sleeper class was like. In hard sleeper, there are 6 people in a compartment with no door and no extra space, where you sleep with your valuables under your head at night and go to the bathroom in a squatty potty that empties straight over the tracks where you have to hold a bar while going to the bathroom to keep from falling over from the vibration of the train. I honestly don't mind any of that stuff too much (except when the other people in your compartment sit and rhythmically hock up loogies and spit them into a bag while you are trying to sleep), but man oh man was soft sleeper an improvement. Each compartment has only 4 beds, plus a locking door, and the 4th bed in our compartment wasn't occupied, so it was just me and my parents. We each had a TV at the end of our beds (with personal headphones!), plus cute complementary slippers and decently-sized, comfortable beds. My dad says the train was his favorite of all our accommodations on the trip, and I have to agree that it was pretty awesome. We played cards for a little bit, but mostly we just lay in our beds and crashed.


Chillin' out, maxin', relaxin' all cool on the Beijing-Xi'an train

In the morning: we attempt to do everything interesting in Xi'an in the course of a day. Not that unreasonable a goal, really.

Climbing the Great Wall

In the process of looking for the bus to Simatai (the part of the Great Wall that we went to), we sort of incidentally ended up hiring a car of our own. These things happen. As a result, 7 am on Wednesday found us in a little mianbaoche (lit. bread car, because they are rather loaf-shaped), freezing our toes off in the insufficient heat and eating 24-hour-convenience-store breakfast (glutinous rice dumplings and red-bean Bimbo bread...say that phrase 5 times fast!).

By the time that we got to the Wall, I could still see that I had toes, but darned if I could feel them. However, there is nothing like climbing the Great Wall of China to put the feeling back into your toes! A lot of people who haven't been to the Wall (like my mom, before this trip) have the impression that it's a kind of place that you go up and just walk around on the top for a while. This is particularly untrue at Simatai, where the word of the day is "stairs." You climb up to arrive at the Wall, then you climb up to the top of the wall, and then from there it is just more and more stairs and slopes, up and up and up.

As we were working our way up to the wall, we came upon a group of Chinese people who looked like they were waiting for something. When we came through, they started talking to us a bit, and I could tell that they wanted to sell us things. However, none of them pushed the issue too much; they just walked with us and talked about other things. In the end, the little posse of Chinese ladies that we acquired climbed every inch of the Wall with us. They told us little tidbits of trivia, pointed out good spots to take pictures, and at particularly tricky parts they would hold our hands and urge us to be careful. When we split up (the moms wanted to go back down, the rest of us wanted to climb to the end), the ladies split up too. My mother, who is not particularly fond of heights, had a little Chinese lady holding her hand the whole way down, while I had another chatting with me the whole way up to the last tower. We had a really awesome faux pas moment when she asked me how long I was going to work in China. "Oh, no," I said. "Actually, I work in Tai-" I cut myself off when I realized that she knew full well that I lived in Taiwan. Everyone knows it's part of China! I apologized a little, but she just laughed.

Of course there is a price to pay for this extended hand-holding service and general companionship. Our mothers went through it first: the ladies stopped them before they got off the Wall and started trying to sell them picture books. This was fine, because the moms didn't have any money. "Talk to the men," they said. When the rest of us got to the bottom, we were swamped with little ladies trying to sell their books. "Your wife said you should buy one," they told my dad, and "make your father buy a book" to me. In the end, we caved and got one. There was a big guilt factor.

While my mom waited at the bottom with Gered's mom and had her picture taken by curious Chinese people, the four of us took a slightly ghetto but pretty fun zipline down. One long, slowpokey lunch later, we were back in our mianbaoche for the 3-hour ride back. We all kind of crashed when we got back to the hotel, but roused ourselves briefly later for a dinner of different kinds of food-on-a-stick. Weirdest one: teeny grilled bananas.

Coming up next: the Summer Palace, plus some intense shopping, China style. Give me a little time, though; the parents are still here and I am busy entertaining them (or something).

Back to Beijing!

Disclaimer: Sadly there will be no pictures or video on this post just yet, but I promise I will put some up as soon as I get back to Taiwan!

So on Wednesday we left Hong Kong and arrived in a delightfully smoggy Beijing. I had forgotten a lot of the details of life in China, including the fact that many doorways have rows of plastic flaps hanging down to keep the air and dust from the street out. I was reminded when an escalator out of the airport took us down into a particularly flappy doorway, where our unprepared mothers were assaulted quite thoroughly by plastic flaps (not to suggest that this was humorous in any way! certainly not!). Readjusting to the thick Beijing accent was also a shock when I went to buy tickets to the train into the city. The Taiwanese accent is fairly light and easy to slip into, but Beijingers have a way of talking like their mouths are all full of marbles, or perhaps like they are all pirates. There is a lot of arrrr involved.

The first night went pretty smoothly; we only got minorly lost on the way home, and we found a delicious place to eat dinner that was full of families with hyper kids running around and taking pictures of the foreigners. The only rough patch was in the middle of the night, when we all woke up at 3:30 because the room was hot (me), too smoky to breathe (Mom), or just because of the delights of jetlag. I was up the rest of the night worrying that we would have to find a new hotel, but the situation seemed to improve the next day. Hen hao!

I thought I had misheard when they had told us that breakfast would be in the tiki bar, but it was the truth. Amidst tribal-type wall decorations, we enjoyed eggs (you have to cook them yourself though) and toast, which Gered's father spread with what he thought was peanut butter. It turned out to be thick thousand island dressing, but he ate it anyway in the spirit of adventure. Thousand island dressing: part of this complete breakfast!

Side note: speaking of things that are silly to eat, I forgot to mention: in Hong Kong there was one night that my parents and I got some noodles from a street stall for dinner. They offer a variety of things to put in the noodles, including "brine intestine." I figured my parents wouldn't want brine intestine, but before I could protest, they had added it, so I just kept my mouth shut. I didn't tell my mother that she had eaten intestine until today.

Back to Thursday: after a delicious, if island-heavy, breakfast, we made our way to Tiananmen Square. Our favorite feature of this particular location was the mausoleum of the illustrious Mao Zedong, where during the visiting hours of 8-noon, you can view the embalmed body of the late Chairman. Naturally, we had to do it.

Mao's mausoleum is a pretty high-security location, because if it were to be defiled in any kind of way, it would be a pretty giant loss of face for the Chinese government. At the security checkpoint the guard questioned my mother about her hand sanitizer gel, in the end forcing her to try some of it (on her hands, not tasting it or anything) to ensure that it wasn't dangerous. In addition, Gered had to take off his belt to get through the checkpoint, and because they are very efficient at moving people along in the ol' mausoleum, he was still buckling it when we went in to see the body. An security woman made all manner of alarmed noises at him. Perhaps they worry about streakers there?

By the way, if you were wondering how the Maoster is looking these days, the answer is surprisingly orange and kind of fake-looking. Not that we are passing any kind of judgement.

Coming out of Tiananmen Square, we started heading across the street towards the Forbidden City when we sort of accidentally acquired a friend. He was a nice young guy named Dawson, who it turned out was a student at a school of languages and tourism doing his semester of hands-on experience. His price was extra cheap, so we got a whole day's worth of Dawson telling us entertaining facts about historical locations. Here is what I got out of it:

Reasons to be glad you aren't an ancient resident of the Forbidden City:
-if you live in the FC, you are probably either a eunuch, a concubine, or the Emperor
-if you are a eunuch, well that kind of sucks in the first place
-plus they have to make sure you are extra-well eunuched (can't compete with the Emperor for the manliness!), so they cut off EVERYTHING that is at all relevant
-also, in order to be properly reincarnated, you have to have your whole body, so you must raise the funds to buy back your junk from the guy who cut it off before you die, pawn shop style

-if you are not a eunuch, you are probably a concubine (from age 13-17, selected in an American-Idol-style winnowing process), so if the signs are auspicious, you might have to sleep with the emperor, and a eunuch will carry you there naked (wrapped in a blanket) so you can't conceal weapons in your clothes

-if you don't sleep with the emperor, or if you do but you don't bear a male heir, then when the emperor dies, you have to be buried alive with him

-if you are neither a concubine or a eunuch, and you are in fact the emperor, then you have a posse of eunuchs following you around all the time bringing you naked ladies wrapped in blankets

-that doesn't sound so terrible, except the eunuchs have to write down everything that happens in your life, so they are going to stick around and take notes after the lady delivery (8:21 pm: emperor picked his nose. 8:23 pm: emperor looking a little sweaty)

fun fact: the place where the emperor goes to hang out with the concubines is called the “hall of mental cultivation.” Suuuuure.

even more fun fact: all of the doorways in the FC have a very high threshold to step over in order to keep out ghosts and vampires, who (as you all know) do not have knees. Once upon a time a European dignitary in China didn't want to bow to the emperor, so he told him that he couldn't do it because Westerners don't have knees. This is why Chinese people called Westerners “foreign devils,” apparently.

After forbidding the heck out of our city (and getting some lunch), we grooved on over to the Temple of Heaven. The Temple of Heaven is very historical and scenic and whatnot, but my favorite part was the public park outside, where a group of guys with traditional Chinese instruments were having a little impromptu performance. They played some Chinese songs, until just when we started to walk off, when they launched into that extremely traditional Chinese tune, “Jingle Bells.” I was very moved.

Later we went to a little tea shop, where we had a traditional Chinese tea ceremony in which a nice young woman told us exactly how to hold the cup in the proper traditional way, and how many sips to drink it in, etc. The dads were eying the bowls of peanuts on the table, but they held off, awaiting instructions of how to eat the peanuts in the proper ceremonial fashion. It turns out that the proper way to eat them is as follows: however you want.

We left the tea shop of expensive, non-bargainable teacups in favor of the eminently bargainable goods at Hongqiao Pearl Market. Dad made the mistake of attempting to walk through the particularly aggressive shoe section, where salesladies latched onto him like barnacles, despite all excuses. They seemed to be growing fond of him (he ended up passing through many times), calling out “hey! You're back!” and hassling him more each time they saw him coming. The Ryans had a similarly intense shoe saleslady experience, where salesladies forcibly tucked shoes under their arms, and even tried to give Gered a single shoe for free in a desperate ploy to suck him in. We finally left well-harassed, but with our wallets fairly intact. I think we'll go back later.

Post-Pearl Market, we headed off to Quan Ju De, one of the oldest and most famous Peking Duck joints in town. The chef brought our duck to the table and carved it right there, presenting us with a special card stating the identification number of our particular duck. We ate the duck in the traditional style, rolling it up in the special pancake with scallions and sweet sauce. Peking duck is by no means health food but hoo boy is it tasty! (P.S. - huge dinner at a famous and fancy restaurant in China? about US $17/person. Our most expensive meal by far.)

After dinner I had to go check on places to get a bus to the Simatai Great Wall, so Gered volunteered to accompany me. This left our four completely non-Chinese-speaking parents to get home by themselves using Beijing public transportation. It was an adventure, but we gave thorough directions, and they successfully got home without disaster. Good job Mom and Dad!

Too many things to write about now...Great Wall adventures coming later!

EVERYTHING

The problem with the blog thing is that if my life gets too eventful, I have no time to write about it. Here is some of what I've done with my action-packed past two weeks:

I had a week between the end of school and leaving for Hong Kong. I figured it would all be very low-key, but having spare time meant being able to say yes to a number of silly invitations, so it was pretty busy. Gered and I could finally relax a bit when we got our Chinese visas that we had applied for kind of last-minute, and I did a bunch of preparations for the trip.

It also happens that Chinese New Year started during this time, so my life was full of festivities. I spent one morning with Gered's host family attending a traditional dance performance, and ended up with skin a color typically associated with certain delicious crustaceans. Besides that, it was pretty neat. We sat with a large group of extremely perky people in matching white track suits who were from some Tai Chi academy. The performance was at a military school, so some young men performed a traditional dragon dance. There was also dancing from some guys in giant crazy outfits with huge colored masks that looked kind of like Lego people. One guy danced up to us on the stage and gave us cookies from a basket. Some other men did a Taiwanese aboriginal dance, and then there were a number of performances from the Tai Chi people. The performers all had matching orange jackets, wide-legged purple pants, and orange sneakers. I would estimate that each individual was as perky as 3 or 4 aerobics instructors combined. They jumped around a lot and sang a song and chanted about having energy. There was also some singing and some lion dances (2 guys per lion, and they did really neat tricks but all my photos are on my computer back in Taiwan so you can't see them now), and one song where people came out dressed as trees and flowers and butterflies and hopped around.

I find that one of the large differences between Taiwan and America is the ridiculousness that people are willing to do in public and think nothing of it. If you made an American teenager dress up as a tree and dance around in front of a huge crowd waving leaves, they would be totally humiliated. However, this is Taiwan, and things that Americans find totally ridiculous are taken rather seriously. This is a country where people take lessons to improve their karaoke skills. Giant dancing flowers? Sure!

Actual Chinese New Year is a huge huge holiday to Taiwanese people, kind of like Christmas in America. Joyce, an intensely hospitable dean from Gered's school, invited us over for New Year's Eve because we "shouldn't be alone for Chinese New Year." They stuffed us thoroughly with hot pot, and Joyce gave us red envelopes with money in them. Traditionally adults give children red envelopes for the New Year, so I guess we still qualify as children to Joyce. We tried to give her children red envelopes we had brought, but Joyce was adamant that we should not (I had to do it secretly later). Then we all went to a temple and made an offering of ceremonial paper money (read: not real money), which we threw into a fire. We were home before midnight, so Gered and I went outside to see if we could spot some fireworks at midnight. There were a few, but the showing was kind of measly compared to the reports I hear from elsewhere.

If I did other exciting things in Kaohsiung, I can't remember them, because now I am in Hong Kong with my parents and Gered and his parents! Gered and I came like 5 days before my parents, because the ticket prices were so different that it was actually cheaper to stay 5 extra nights than to fly on the 1st. We spent the time getting our bearings, collecting a zillion maps, and figuring out what things to show the parents on their whirlwind tour of Hong Kong.

I picked Mom and Dad up at the airport on Sunday night, and as soon as we got back to the hostel we got right into the spirit of things by watching some TV show in which a man with stuck-on aluminum-foil eyebrows ran a game show where people played charades and rolled giant dice and got pies smashed in their faces. Welcome to Asia!

side note: my mommy brought me brownies! SO HAPPY.

Features of Hong Kong deemed worth seeing in the 2 days my parents are here:
-the sports bar we found that was playing the Super Bowl (at 7 am our time) although sadly WITHOUT COMMERCIALS OR HALFTIME SHOW...lame, but it was a good game! I have zero interest in pro sports, but I might kind of love Larry Fitzgerald now
-the Star Ferry across Victoria Harbor
-the Central-Mid-Levels escalator, longest escalator in the world! I think this was the thing my mom was the most psyched about, and maybe me too
-the Hong Kong Zoological and Botanical Gardens, which we went to by accident because it was near the top of the long escalator and I hadn't really planned what we were going to do once we got to the top
-the smallest escalator I've ever seen (about 5 steps long), for contrast...HK has more escalators than any other city ever, I think
-the Symphony of Light, an exercise in cheesiness in which a bunch of prominent buildings in the Hong Kong skyline light up to music
-the Big Buddha on Lantau Island...not the biggest Buddha, but the largest seated outdoor metal Buddha, or something with a lot of qualifiers like that, plus you can get a tofu-intensive lunch prepared by monks
-Victoria Peak, which is really quite lovely and you can see the whole city from the top

I had gone to the Peak before my parents arrived with Billy and Shiela and Kate, but we opted for the far sweatier walking-up-the-mountain route instead of taking the tram. Since our paths coincided in Hong Kong, we also spent a day with them hanging out with Billy's uncle who lives in Hong Kong and driving around on his boss's boat, after which we went into Causeway Bay, where he pointed out all the places to eat and not eat. Billy's uncle is the man.

Other things we did before the parents got here:
-went to the Wetlands Park and looked at birds
-saw a tourist-trappy fishing village out by the Buddha, complete with more dried fish than I ever want to encounter again
-went to Lamma Island and got confused by the number of Westerners who actually live there (there was a restaurant called the Deli Lamma! no way a Chinese person made that up)
-got food poisoning, boo! (Gered only)
-tested out the Buddha and the light show to see if they were worth doing

Tomorrow we are off to Beijing! It's kind of crazy because Gered's parents just got into HK at 6 am this morning, so they just plowed through the day's sights and that's all for them in Hong Kong. Intense. Expect more adventures!