All's Well That Ends Well

Our last day in Taiwan was pretty hectic, packing up and buying last-minute gifts. Then a taxi to the airport and trying to find food near the gate for a hungry little girl (and tweaking my ankle again in the process). And then the long flight. At first we were seated in the last row of Elite, which meant that the seats didn't recline to their full extent, and since we were right across the aisle from the bathroom, anytime anyone went in or out of it, a slice of blinding light would fall across my face. After an hour or so of trying to sleep like this, I asked to be moved. They did find two seats together in the middle section, and after we moved we both slept pretty well.

For some reason, there was only one runway open at the airport, so we spent a long time on the tarmac, waiting to take off. So we arrived at LAX about an hour late, which cut our layover to two hours. At first I thought this was a good thing. Then, after standing in a stationary immigration line for about twenty minutes, I started to worry. Finally, it began to move, but it took a full hour to get through. Then we had to get our bags, and had trouble locating the car seat. Then another line for customs. By now I was thoroughly frantic. We rechecked the bags after customs, but were told we needed to take the car seat to United, in Terminal 6. Picture me, sprinting to the shuttle bus, dragging a carry-on, carrying a computer bag, a purse, and a car seat, and exhorting a tired little girl wearing a backpack to keep up with me. Got off at Terminal 6, and was told I actually needed Terminal 7. Ran up to the United counter at T minus 30 minutes, on the verge of hysteria, to be told that they were not accepting check-ins for that flight anymore. And there were no more flights that day. So, after getting boarding passes for a flight the following morning, we dragged all our stuff back to the

international terminal so that the Eva people could book us into a hotel. We shivered while we waited for the shuttle. Yes, it was cold! In LA! In the summer! We had a lousy meal with a terrible waiter, and then fell into bed.

Despite the time change, we slept like the dead. We put our dirty clothes back on (note to self, pack some useful things in the carry-on, like toiletries and a change of clothes). Check in was a breeze, and we had breakfast and coffee at the airport (well, Lillia didn't have coffee). On the way down the jetway, we met the co-pilot, who fell in love with Lillia (doesn't everyone?). He invited her to come up to the cockpit and have her picture taken sitting in his seat. Then we discovered that we had been upgraded to Economy Plus for free, by the kind United lady at LAX. Tom had taken the day off to spend with us, so he was at DIA to meet us, and we both fell into his arms.

P.S. This is not my last post about Taiwan. I still need to write about Lukang and Taroko Gorge.

Some Notes on Food

Fruit

Oh my God, the fruit here is just amazing. Pineapples, papayas, bananas, mangoes (many kinds), litchis, dragonfruit, watermelon, cantaloupes, honeydews, wax apples, guavas, all the usual tropicals. But also things you don’t usually associate with the tropics, like cherries, peaches, grapes, and plums (the last come in green, yellow, red, and purple). All of them are so outrageously juicy that you practically need to take a shower after eating a piece; a single peach will leave you sticky up to your elbows.

Fruit at the night market in Zhongli

Local plums and peaches in Tianhsiang.

The Stink

My first week here, Dan, Yen-Wen and I were strolling through the night market in Zhongli, when I was suddenly enveloped by an incredibly putrid stench. At first I thought it was rotting garbage. I said to Dan, “Boy, something smells really rank!” He replied “that’s the stinky tofu”. I could not believe it. Chou doufu, or stinky tofu, is a fermented tofu that is very popular here, and I came to Taiwan with the intention of trying it. After all, I love natto, which most Westerners find absolutely vile. But after smelling this stuff, I’ve decided to give it a pass. When Lillia first smelled it, she said, “I hope I don’t vomit”.

Su

Su means “pure” and is used to describe a very strict Buddhist diet, which is vegetarian and uses no onions or garlic. I know that sounds really dismal, but it’s pretty terrific. Yen-Wen’s parents run a restaurant, Xin Min Su Can Guan, on the first floor of this gargantuan house, and twice a day they put on a buffet with probably 60-70 different dishes. There are all sorts of vegetables, noodles, tofu, dumplings, fritters, and various meatlike products made from wheat and/or soy, which are surprisingly flavorful and succulent. I buy some of these products in Denver, but there is much, much more variety here.

Part of the buffet at Xin Min Su Can Guan

Pastries

Although for dessert, the Taiwanese usually eat some of their magnificent fruit, there is no lack of Western-style cakes and puddings, and they are surprisingly good. Every little café has fancy cakes. Cheesecake is particularly popular.

Lillia with teddy bear cake at our favorite local cafe.

Kick-ass fig cheesecake at the National Palace Museum café.

But the best pastries I’ve had were from La Famille in Taichung. This elegant patisserie/cafe had the best pastries I've had in many years. Particularly fine was the chocolate macadamia nut thing. It had a very delicate flaky bottom crust, then a layer of ganache in which whole toasted macadamias were embedded, then something extremely thin and crispy (a dacquoise meringue layer?), and then tiny chocolate curls on top. To die for.

Display cases at La Famille.

Japanese Influence

Although the food here is overwhelmingly Chinese, there is a surprising amount of Japanese influence. All of the convenience stores carry onigiri and simple bentos. Takoyaki can be found in the night markets. Lots of otherwise Chinese things can be found wrapped in nori. Most of the department stores are Japanese, and the food basements feature both Chinese and Japanese meals and products. MOS Burger is in all the major cities. All the big Japanese food brands are here (UCC coffee, Meiji chocolate, etc.). But I have to tell you about some of the offerings at the Yamazaki Bakery. In addition to their European and Japanesified European offerings, they have some things aimed at the local clientele: Fried Noodles Sandwich, Pickles Doughnut, and Seaweed and Pork Floss Salad Roll.

Hair Salons

If you had told me a month ago that I would be writing a post about hair salons, I would have told you you were crazy. I go to a cheap salon about once a year to get my hair cut, and have even been known to cut it myself. But in the past three weeks, I’ve gone to salons five times, to get my hair washed and styled. When you get your hair washed in Taiwan, it starts out with a shoulder massage, which goes from the top of your neck to about halfway down your back. At the more upscale places they’ll give you tea or coffee and a snack. After 15-20 minutes of massage, while you’re still sitting up in the chair, they put shampoo in your hair and proceed to give you a vigorous scalp massage. Then they take you over to the sink and rinse you. After that, I’ve had my hair blow-dried and straightened. This whole thing from beginning to end usually takes about an hour and a half, and my hair turns out feeling like silk and looking like the hair in shampoo commercials. The cost? About $8.

A happy customer.

Curse You, Blogger!

Unless you've worked with Blogger, you have no idea how much work this is. First of all, the text keeps reverting to blue, no matter how many times I go back to black. Also, the images will only load at the beginning of the post, so that I have to cut and paste each one. But this morning was the worst; nothing seemed to be working properly, so I decided to close and reopen it. That's when I discovered that the auto-save had failed and I'd lost over an hour's worth of work. I'd even cleaned up the desktop already, putting all the images I'd already used in the trash, so now I have to pull them one by one out of iPhoto again. Grrr!

Paper & Rain

On Tuesday, we all went up into the mountains to Puli, a small town where there is a manufacturer of traditional handmade paper. They give tours and offer the opportunity to make your own paper. We all did this and had great fun. Most of us made a single sheet, but Lillia made a fan, which required two sheets to be glued to each side of a fan frame.

A factory worker making a giant piece of paper.

Lillia making her first sheet, Aunt Lori (Da Jie) helping with her swishing technique.

Lillia put flowers and leaves in her first sheeet.

Water being pressed out of our new paper.

Further drying on the hot table.

The paper store.

Landscape around Puli.

Then we drove to the beautiful campus of a nearby Seventh Day Adventist school (!) for a little picnic. We were heading back to the cars in a light rain when I spotted a sign that said “A Secret Garden B & B/ Café Brazil open for Afternoon Tea”. I was interested in checking it out, so we went down the little path that led from the road into, well, a secret garden. We found the café in a really interesting house. The floor was suspended about a yard above the ground and in some places the floor didn’t meet the walls, and plants grew from the ground up into the house. The whole back wall was a two story tall greenhouse. By this time the light rain had turned into a full-on tropical monsoon storm, with thunder and lightning, and buckets of rain hammering on the greenhouse roof. Lillia and I shared hot chocolate and smoked chicken and apple quesadillas, which were very good. Yen-Wen ordered pancakes with bananas and chocolate for herself and her kids. Look at what she got!

Panorama of cafe interior.

The secret garden.

When the rain had let up enough, we went to a place called the Paper Dome, which was billed as a church made entirely of paper. When I saw that it was encased in plastic, I was pretty disappointed. But it was surrounded by lovely water lily and lotus ponds.

Paper Dome. Everything you see in this picture, except for the floor and the TV screen, is made of paper.

Lillia and Emily were fascinated by the huge snails there.

8th Platform Motel

We are now in Chang Hua, where Yen-Wen’s da jie (older older sister) lives. Her house isn’t big enough for all of us, so Lillia and I are staying in a motel just down the block. It didn’t look very promising when we pulled in late last night. It kind of looked like one of those self-storage places, with two rows of corrugated steel garage doors facing a wide driveway. But oh my, we had no idea what awaited us within. Our suite is the most aggressively ugly interior I have ever seen, but it is huge. It’s easily half the size of our house. The immense bathroom features a large shower stall, a giant Jacuzzi, and a regular-sized footed bathtub. All the toiletries are supplied, including condoms, which Lillia found on her bedside table. Maybe that explains the weird décor. Anyway, this hideous palace, after Da Jie’s aggressive bargaining, is costing us $63/night, including breakfast. Not bad.

The bedroom. Dig that couch.

The vast bathroom with the giant jetted tub. Notice it has its own flat screen TV, so Lillia can watch Sponge Bob in Chinese while soaking.

Our air-conditioned "patio".

Sign on footed tub saying that this is the one for taking milk baths!

More Breaking News

Lillia wants everyone to know that she lost her second baby tooth last night. She has decided to keep it, rather than let the Tooth Fairy have it (although the TF brought a Sacagawea dollar to Taiwan, just in case).

Breaking News

Well, not breaking exactly, just spraining. Last night, on the way to the wedding reception, I inverted my ankle while running downstairs in the dark in heeled sandals. Grrr.... My foot was swollen and purple when I got back, so I elevated and iced it. Now I have it wrapped in an Ace bandage and I'm lying in bed all day with my foot up. We were intending to go to Taizhong (Taichung) this morning, but fortunately everyone was too exhausted from the wedding. We might go tonight or tomorrow morning. So we sent the kids off to school and I'm just lying here working on my Taipei post. Pictures to follow soon, I promise!

Taipei (with pictures!)

Last weekend Lillia and I took the train into Taipei and went to Taipei 101, the world’s second-tallest building. The architecture is, um, interesting, to put it charitably, but the view from the top is terrific, even on a hazy day.

Here's the giant iron ball that stabilizes the building during typhoons and earthquakes:

I’ve been into Taipei three more times this week to visit sights that would make Lillia’s eyes glaze over in ten minutes. First, the National Palace Museum, to see a tiny fraction of the treasures that the Nationalists carted off when they retreated to Taiwan. There was also an amazing new installation called “Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains”.

It's a little hard to explain, although the picture helps. The original Yuan Dynasty scroll is projected on a wall, reflected in a "stream" projected on the horizontal surface below. Every once in a while, the painting gradually darkens and becomes more detailed, so that it looks almost like a black-and -white photograph. The clouds become thicker and darker.and then it begins to rain. You actually hear the rain, and you see it streaking across the painting and dimpling the water in the stream. It was quite mesmerizing.

The rest of the time I spent temple-hopping. Here are some scenes from the Bao An Temple. The atmosphere and the details at this temple were just wonderful.

Right across the street from it is the Confucius Temple.

Since Confucius was the Great Teacher, students often ask his help to pass exams. There was a rack of wooden plaques, similar to Japanese e-ma, with wishes written on them:

I had a long conversation with this friendly temple volunteer in a garbled mix of Chinese, Japanese, and English. You can tell he's been to Japan because he's picked up that goofy make-a-V-sign-when-you're-being-photographed thing.

And finally here is the Guandu Temple, a Disneyesque extravaganza built into the side of a hill on the outskirts of Taipei.

Here is the tunnel going through the hill itself:

And one of its denizens:

I recovered from this last temple at Din Tai Fung, where I had a whole steamer basket of xiaolongbao to myself. Oink, oink.

BEWARE THE TIGER

Tomorrow, Yen-Wen’s xiao didi (little younger brother, as opposed to da didi, older younger brother) is getting married, so there is a flurry of activity here. But Yen-Wen is not involved with the preparation in any way, because she was born in the year of the tiger, and tigers are bad luck for weddings. So, if the bride comes into the room, Yen-Wen immediately has to leave. She is allowed to actually attend the wedding, she just can’t have anything to do with the lead-up to it.

Taiwanese Beds

In my travels, I’ve slept on quite a variety of surfaces. Hard beds in China, futons in Japan, charpoys in India, even, once, the floor of a third-class Indian rail car on a piece of sleeping bag mat that I carried with me. But for sheer discomfort, nothing beats the bed here. Lillia and I were shocked when we first sat down on it; it is hard as a rock. I looked under the fitted sheet to see if there was a big plank of wood under there, but no, it was just a mattress with a hard plastic top. Yen-Wen’s parents actually sleep on a solid wood bed with no mattress at all!

I didn’t want to complain about the bed, but after the second night I woke up feeling like I’d been bludgeoned with a baseball bat. I spoke to Yen-Wen about it, and she got me a couple of thick quilts to pad it with. This has made a great difference, but I still miss my Tempurpedic.

Xuexiao (School)

Monday was Lillia’s first day at the Happy Bambi Children’s School, a short walk from Yen-Wen’s parents’ house. The teachers all seem really nice, and Lillia is in Emily’s class. It’s too bad that she’ll probably only be at the school for a week. It’s really a great deal. Even after paying for the insurance, and buying the regulation backpack and lunch set, it was still only $130 for the week, and she’s spending a good 7-8 hours a day there.

After the first day, I asked her if she’d made any new friends, and she said, “no, only Emily”. She also denied learning anything new. Oh great, I thought. The whole point of bringing her to Taiwan was to improve her Chinese. But the second day, she told me, “I talked with some kids all in Chinese today!” And today she said the same thing, so maybe this will end up being a successful experiment after all.

Mandarin?

Boy, am I having trouble understanding people here. The pronunciation is so different from Beijing Mandarin. The differences that I notice are that "zh" is pronounced like "z" and "sh" like "s"( I'm talking pinyin here). People seem to understand me just fine, but I only get about half of what's spoken back to me (if that), which kind of puts a damper on the conversation.

Furthermore, there seems to be no standard system of transliteration here. For example, I've seen the name of the town where we're staying variously written as Zhongli (pinyin), Chungli (Wade-Giles?), Jungli (?) and even Jhungli (WTF??).

However, the language barrier hasn't been that much of a barrier to getting around. After all, it's more important that they understand me ( I want two tickets to Taipei, one adult, one child six years old...what track number?). And people here are very friendly and helpful.

A Rocky Start

by Suzanne

So, Lillia and I are now in Taiwan, visiting our friend Yen-Wen and her kids at her parents' house.

It was a long and tiring trip here. First a short hop from Denver to LA. Then we went to the international terminal and found the EVA Airlines counter to get our boarding passes for the flight to Taipei. The ticket agent looked at Lillia's passport and said that because it would expire in less than six months, she would need a visa to enter Taiwan. In response to my expression of sheer panic, she said that we could "probably" get her a visa on arrival, for about $150- 200. Yes, U.S. dollars.

So this was weighing on my mind as we boarded our flight. But we were both very pleased with our Elite seats. There was lots of legroom, individual TV screens, good food, and extremely nice flight attendants (all very attractive young women). Unfortunately, the seat dividers could not be raised because they housed the consoles for the TV screens. I had assumed that Lillia could sleep with her head on my lap, but clearly that wasn't going to work. There were even four empty seats in a row across the aisle from us which would have made a dandy bed for me, had it been possible to raise the arms. Still, we both managed to get a fair amount of sleep in our reclining seats. We were both utterly exhausted and the frequent mild turbulence rocked us to sleep.

So on arrival at the airport (at ten o'clock at night), we went straight to the visa office. I filled out forms, got Lillia's picture taken, went and changed money, went back to the visa office, forked over 5000 NTD (New Taiwan Dollars, US$178.57), and got her passport back with the new visa pasted in. Since we appeared to be the only non-Taiwanese on our flight, there was no wait at immigration. Still, I was concerned that Yen-Wen would be wondering where the hell we were. After retrieving our checked luggage and exiting to the arrival hall, I was so relieved to find her there.

On the way to Zhong Li, Yen-Wen explained that the house was still in the midst of construction (they were putting a large addition on the house), so it was a bit dusty and chaotic. She had told me earlier that our room would be small but air-conditioned. So imagine my surprise when we were shown into a room about twice the size of my own bedroom, with its own brand-new bathroom! The double bed that we're sharing has the World's Hardest Mattress, but the air-con worked like a charm, and we were soon fast asleep.