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!