We are now in Taipei, having taken the early morning bullet train from Kaohsiung yesterday, and enough has happened that I have officially lost track. I'll go backwards, since today was more fun than yesterday :).
Taipei zoo this afternoon!! fun!!! it's really pretty nice: I was slightly braced for a depressing second-world style zoo, with listless aneemulls in concrete boxes, but it's set into the jungly hillside above the city, and actually blends fairly seamlessly into the landscape, and the animals do have a decent amount of room to run around in and naturalish habitaty areas. (You get there by taking a gondola (or a "granola" if you are Mrs. H.) with a glass bottom, which swings you above the jungle for about twenty minutes which is fun if you are in your thirties and completely mindblowingly amazing if you are under three. We spent the entire ride going WAAAAAAAH!!! (which is Chinese for "Wow!") at top volume.) Baby saw her first real live owl (we are big fans of owls in our house), and responded just as hoped by saying "Owl! Hoo hoo!" and then there was a screw in the railing that was more interesting, so that was the end of that, but we also saw tapirs (which I had no idea were so BIG: sort of a piebald cow crossed with an elephant crossed with a pig) and chinchillas and lemurs and sloths (sloths! I hummed Flanders and Swan under my breath) and a Bengal tiger and heffalumps and a panda bear and lots of monkeys of different sorts and a leopard (which are "flower pumas" in Chinese - lovely, no?) and also mosquitoes (less lovely, but they are luckily tiny wimpy Taiwanese mosquitoes which leave a vaguely itchy spot for like ten seconds, and you almost want to say, oh come on, that's all you got? )
Before the zoo we had lunch at... well, now, if you were getting together with an elderly uncle you hadn't seen for years, plus his wife who you REALLY never get to see because she's chronically ill on dialysis in a wheelchair plus her Indonesian carer lady, plus their daughter who is in her forties, and you wanted to choose a place that you could really sit down and have some nice food and enjoy each other's company, you would pick...
... yes, that's right, McDonald's. (It was (apparently) the choice of the elderly aunt and uncle, and the really weird part was because it was so jam packed, we all had to sit at completely separate tables at opposite ends of the chaotic kids' area. Elderly aunt and uncle and carer and daughter sat at one table on plastic chairs designed to look like french fry packets; wild sister & brother in law sat at another table with manic toddler; babydaddy, mama & papa H., and manic baby and I sat at another table. We parked the stroller in a puddle of some other child's making (mostly so that none of us would accidentally step in it). and proceeded to somewhat grimly pick our way through the least offensive options on the menu. (I stuffed baby full of cheddar cheese crackers, on the grounds that at least the cheddar cheese crackers are organic, and she had some bits off my salad, and then on the way home we stopped at a little to-go pasta joint in the train station to get her some veggie pasta. It was translated into English as "Pork with cheese" but babydaddy assured me that the Chinese actually said "Pasta with broccoli, mushrooms and corn," which hilariously it did turn out to be. I mean, how do you get it SO WRONG? It's not as if "Vegetarian pasta" appeared elsewhere on the menu, either, as if they'd just mixed up the translations when formatting the menu or something. The best part was that they had a little vegetarian icon next to the "Pork with cheese.") Anyway.
Bits of yesterday were fun, but I have to admit that they were filtered through a haze of extreme, extreme fatigue, as I basically hadn't slept since 1 a.m. the night before we left, and there was also an element of the previously mentioned watching-other-people-be-illogical-when-you-are-really-tired phenomenon. The most remarkable thing we did yesterday was go up Taipei 101, which is the tallest building definitely in Taipei, possibly in Asia until somewhere in Dubai - fuck, I can't remember, but it's really tall. It's sort of a cartoon Art Deco thing, which I thought was quite fun but which babydaddy thought was horrifically offensive, design-wise. At least everyone agreed the view from the top was something else. Mountains beyond mountains, city going for absolutely miles... quite dizzying to contemplate what an absolutely gigantic place Taipei is. I guess the thing about cities like New York or London, even, is that the city city part of it, the skyscrapers and the bankers in suits and what-all isn't really _that_ big, and it most cases, you could walk across whatever the central sky-scrapery bit was in a day without too much effort, after which it's really miles and miles of suburbs, but Taipei is miles and miles of skyscrapers. Here is my astonishing realization: Asia has a lot of people in it.
The rest of the day (and the evening, actually) is kind of a blur because it seemed to primarily consist of following people through train stations and subway malls and shopping malls who either didn't really know where they were going and needed to spend a lot of time arguing about where they were going, or who said they knew where they were going and then turned out they actually didn't. Papa H. has a tendency to just sort of take off, and everyone else is left standing there saying, wait, where the hell did he go, and then you have to have a half hour discussion about where he could possibly have got to, and then when you have finally delegated who's going to be in the search party and who's going back to the hotel to feed the babies, he will turn up and say, "Wah! You guys get lost! We better hurry! I fix for us to do ___!" and then he'll disappear, and the process starts all over again.
We spent an hour after dinner last night literally wandering in circles around a shopping mall that was rumoured to have a subway entrance, the baby yelling her head off and thrashing around by turns in babydaddy's arms, in my arms, in the backpack, and in the stroller (in the vain hope that switching carrying modes would help the yelling/thrashing) and me with my eyeballs starting to throb with jetlag and meanwhile the elderly uncle all of a sudden drags us into a Zara store so that he can deliver a lecture on something to do with Zara's business principles until I very quietly say to babydaddy, Taxi. Now. and he made it happen and if only for that I have his babies.
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