Alberta Bound

Hey, we just had our final dash around the Taipei night market, scoffed our last mochi balls and dan bing, had our last breaths of hot, humid, fumey city air, and in the morning we will be flyin over the Pacific home after three years. Can't wait to see the constellations we grew up gazing at, and wander down a street where no one is wearing a face mask. But we'll miss the delights of Taiwan, I don't suppose anyone in Canada will stop their car and lean out of their window to eagerly ask us where we are from.
We're lookin forward to seein everyone soon, we'll be in Edmonton for August long weekend, stayin with Mike's folks till the end of August when we haul all our gear to Nanaimo, BC for the next year or two for Mike's uni courses!
See ya soon!

It Thinks About Nothing and Speed Earnestly

"It Thinks About Nothing and Speed Earnestly" is Mike's favourite new"Chinglish" adorned t-shirt he picked up in a Night Market in the bustling scooter-land of Taiwan. This quirky country always has us giggling and surprised by everything, from the Chinglish we read on the shirts of old women (won't go into detail on that one), to the odd ingredients laying in the bottom of our bowls of soup (duck blood or frog eggs), to where we end up with our hospitality club hosts when we thought we understood something totally different (grandpa was just as surprised to see us as we were to see him), to the stories behind the moral murals painted on the temple walls (yes, she's cutting out her own liver to cook for her ill mother-in-law's medicine) to what pops out of the toy vending machines. I just got a keychain of a plastic fish dissected with all its innards labelled for cooking instructions. I think that might have come from Japan, but that is representative of Taiwan as well, as there are strong Chinese and Japanese influences here, as well as Korean, Taiwanese aboriginal, and south-east Asian, not least obvious in the culinary delicacies. We are still trying new things with every meal, even McDonald's serves a burger with a bun made of rice instead of wheat. Taiwan has Mike singing karaoke, Carli-Ann eating spicy Korean kim chee for breakfast, and both us hiking in white gloves with towels draped around our necks. We will return from Asia transformed!
We are now in Ken Ting, a white sand beach town in the far south tip of Taiwan, after bouncing for the first 15 of the 25 days we have in Taiwan between generous invitations from hosts within a 150km radius of Taipei. Peggy and the bright-smiling crew of her bookshop in Jhubei invited us to stay in the grassroots bookstore for a few days. We couldn't imagine an atmosphere where our needs were more completely met: 1) air-conditioning, 2) gourmet organic meals prepared by the chef in the little restaurant in the bookshop (they were all impressed with the smoked salmon and cream cheese pizza Mike prepared for them from his NZ cafe recipe), 3) the answer to every question at our fingertips on the bookshelves! Everytime there was a word we could not explain we pulled down the Chinese/English dictionary, an ingredient we did not recognize we found a cookbook with photos, a historical query there were many books to reference. And at night we had sweet dreams of learning Mandarin by osmosis as we snuggled in our sleeping bags between the book shelves. And when they were not busy serving customers organic beer and world literature, we followed the chef blazing his way through the morning market for his ingredients, through the incense burning prayer ceremonies at temples, and grinding our own tea at a traditional Hakka restaurant. Thirty minutes crushing tea leaves, sesame seeds, peanuts, and pumpkin seeds with a mortar and pestle before our thirst could be quenched; it was a bit cruel really. But our night out with them at one of the many KTV buildings was the lychee on top of our shaved ice: karaoke and a buffet in one of the 100 rooms catering to the crooning Taiwanese, an experience we couldn't leave this country without.

We returned to Jhong-li a second time at the invitation of Mary, the owner of the fabulous Thai/Chinese restaurant that Han and Ching had taken us to a few days ago, to be her guests for a delicious feast specially prepared for us in her home with the company of many friends and neighbours (our first karaoke experience), and the escort of her beautiful daughters with their charming Vancouver exchange student English skills. They took us out to their friend's snazzy club after the huge dinner, but they didn't have to get up for the 6 hour hike at 6am the next morning that Mary's neighbours led us on! There was more rapelling than walking, but the mountain and steep valley views were worth the sweat that we had to wring out of our shirts.
The next two days we recovered in the tranquility of the Buddhist temples nestled into the mountains at Shitoushan (one of the dozen temples houses guests), dining on vegan fare with the serenely smiling nuns and monks, with only their peaceful chanting floating out of the delicate phoenix and dragon decorated temples over the misty valley. Until the typhoon off the east coast came rolling in, but it was far enough out to sea that it only lashed at us with a terrific electric thunderstorm. Susana in Jhunan hosted us next, bringing us to the Lotus Festival where we dined on many preparations of the seeds, flowers, roots and leaves of this beautiful flower that blooms this month, and around the culinary and historically fascinating villages of her region. She wove the stories of murals and carvings in the many temples for us, and helped us purchase ghost money to burn in the ornate kilns for the ancestors and good luck for Mike's university future, and made sure we didn't sample the luscious food on the altars as an offering to the gods. The ancient capital of Tainan was the only city so far we explored on our own, and then Scott and Grace and their two boys, Norman (11) and Jagger (7) gathered us at the train station at Kaohsiung to participate in several days in the lives of the Peng Family. I can't spell their Chinese names, but it was fascinating to hear the reasons they chose their English names! We had a great tour of Scott's office and neighbourhood, met the extended family, and the boys were wonderful tour guides around Dream Mall, Taiwan's largest. And it is much more fun messing around in the elaborate Asian game arcades with kids than just the two of us! And Scott escorted us to the dentist for a cleaning at a fraction of the cost we would have to shell out in Canada. Now we are on our own again, but still people are so friendly and Dave leant us his English/Chinese dictionary, so wish us luck on our final 6 days away from home!
Signing off,
The Avenger, Me Got the Neutron Bomb
(that's what my new baseball cap says :)

Bubble Tea Land

It is so hot and humid here (35 degrees celcius) and we are so stuffed with fried dumplings and steamed buns and rice noodles and dragonfruit, that I can hardly wiggle my fingers enough to blog, but our host family has the air conditioning cranked and are upstairs napping, so this might be my only opportunity to get online for a while.
Taiwan has been good to us, Mike's english-teaching cousin Dave rescued us at the airport and manouevered us and and our gear back to his apartment through the vibrating hive of scooters and watermelon carts and cheap clothing stands and garbage trucks playing a jingle through a loud speaker like an icecream truck (what a disappointment that was!) in this second most densely populated country in the world (after Bangladesh). It was great to stay with someone who could offer us a good chunk of insight into new dining and bathroom and footwear etiquette, as his students have been lucky enough to have held his attention focused here in Taipei for almost a year now and he's still going strong. He knew how to spiral us slowly into the excitement of this big Asian city to avoid the claustrophobic panic attacks of being mashed in together with thousands of other people pushing down narrow alleys throbbing with Chinglish t-shirts on hangers and carts steaming with bamboo leaf rice wraps and scooters whizzing (and squeezing through the crowd with a baby in the basket and a toddler standing between mom's knees) in every direction and skinned snakes dangling from the roof. Ok, we only saw a handful of those. But it has been a brilliant experience as we can always escape the heat of the day as even the buses are air conditioned, the crowds are still delighted and smiling to see the rarity of foreigners, Taiwan is one of the safest countries we have ever visited, there are frequent dragon and phoenix adorned Buddhist and Taoist temples sparkling in bright reds, greens, yellows and blues between the tall, narrow apartment buildings (and some Confucious temples), and we can sample the best food from all over Asia without fear of tummy bugs! My list of our culinary adventures this week, especially odd preparations of tofu and snacks of glistening fruits, is already three pages long.
We have being graciously hosted by two hospitality club families already, Yuying in Taipei, and Han and Ching and their daughter, Sky in Jhong-li. Yuying and her friend brought us hiking in the mists of the mountains surrouding the city where the temperature cooled to a more comfortable 26 degrees, where the cicada song was frighteningly loud, and photo opportunities abundant: so many huge butterflies and shimmering dragonflies darting through the bamboo forest, and turtles and frogs in the lotus ponds. And we would have been completely lost in the charging markets without an experienced guide; she had us sampling from almost every bin in the Chinese medicine and herb market, an outdoor Taiwanese opera wailing in the street behind us, most of the audience seated on their scooters. In Jhong-li, we piled into the van with the other 17 children that attend Han and Ching's summer school in the morning to go to the local waterpark/spa to get hammered by "massaging" waterfalls and jets targetting pressure points in the blue or orange pools of different temperatures and herbal concoctions, and then there were the saunas, as if we weren't sweating enough outside already. In the afternoon we joined them to drive into the country to an elementary school surrounded by rice fields, and were proclaimed captains of the competing soccer teams...we didn't offer very much skilled assistance though, but Mike walked away with a good few bruises from his goal-tending duties. The air quality in the cities here is quite poor, which was the motivation to get the kids into the countryside, but our game nearly got smoked out by the farmer next to the school burning off the rice stalks. Some of the kids were laying on the ground during half-time to get under the smoke, but at least it was better than the scooter fumes of the city!
Every meal is a delightful adventure here, as we never know what we are ordering (all the signs in Mandarin characters), but we haven't been disappointed yet. We avoid the animal part carts entirely, but sometimes we are surprised what forms the tofu and mushrooms and radishes can take when prepared skillfully. Today Ching introduced us to the morning market and the art of bargaining, not our strongest point. Many people excitedly take the opportuntity to practice their English, even the squid-monger, but Ching took care of most of the business, I carried the bags of lychees and noodles and papaya salad and new clothing purchases, and Mike was busy photographing the old men peering eagerly at him over carts of chicken feet, bowls of lotus seeds, and jars of crabs, and the bald, orange-robed Buddhist monks chanting along with the sacred music humming out of the ghetto blaster in their satchel. This evening they are taking us to Jhubei to stay with another HC host in her bookstore, and the further south we go, the hotter it is supposed to get!