aborted trip to tainan

Today was officially a bust but actually was just fine, with the exception of a small stretch of time stuck in a traffic jam with a psychotic toddler. The plan was to go to Tainan, wild mama H's home stomping ground about half an hour (ha ha) north of Kaohsiung and see ye olde Taiwane (which apparently there is a lot of in Tainan) but during the two weeks between Chinese New Year and the Lantern Festival everyone and his brother wants to go from somewhere in Taiwan to somewhere else, which means that traffic is horrreeeeeble. The drive to the freeway entrance took us an hour by which time two-year-old niece was frantic with rage at being strapped into her carseat; imagine prolonged grand mal seizure plus a noise like cats being tortured).

We also managed to lose the cousins we were supposed to be following; wild papa H., who, Lord love him, is a somewhat scary erratic driver to start with, drove through a highway tollbooth that required a special ticket that he didn't have, which meant that he had to stop and wait while the tollbooth operator very nicely took his money, ran to the other booth, paid for his ticket, and then came back with his change (!), something I cannot imagine happening in the US. There was thankfully at least one cellphone per car, so we did manage to find each other eventually, but since no one knew Tainan well, and no one (as it turned out) was super clear on exactly where in Tainan we were supposed to be going, there were rather more U-turns in the middle of horrendously busy intersections than I'm guessing the writers of the Taiwanese drivers' test would have sanctioned.

We ended up at an outdoor mini funfair that was being held on the grounds outside of what I think was Taiwan's oldest Confucian temple, and the irony of calm ancient building dedicated to wisdom and serenity being used as a venue for loud crass plastic blaring pop music junk food extravaganza was hard to miss. However, the sun was shining, and we were no longer in the car, and at one point baby and I went for a little walk, and she got to be in charge of where we went, so we ended up behind the tents of some of the food stalls to investigate the tent pegs, and we met a nice man in a Japanese chef outfit eating his noodles and banana for lunch, and he and baby were VERY taken with each other (although baby may have been primarily motivated by interest in the banana). At his request, I took a picture of him w/ baby on his camera; I often wonder what all these people who snap pics of her/us do with the photos: do they have scrapbook pages labelled "Me with Random Eurasian Baby!!" that they show off to all their friends? are they a private viewing pleasure? or are they subsequently sold for vast sums to advertising companies who like to use cute Eurasian babies in their ad campaigns?

She also had a consecrated nappy change actually on the altar whatsit of the Confucius temple (babydaddy was in charge of that nappy change; I take no responsibility for any divine consequences of that one).

We tried after that to go look at some other historical site but the traffic was awful and the parking was awful and the lines were awful so we decided to just call it a day and go back to Kaohsiung. Psychotoddler had screamed herself out at that point, and had turned into sweetly asleep toddler, so we snoozed our way home, watched Djocovic trounce Ferrer in the quarter finals of the Australian Open (too bad), read some books about owls and cats (lots of hoo hoo mao mao-ing), and off to bed.