New Years Eve

A very exciting action-packed day today for everyone: it's nearly 11 o'clock at night and I only just put baby to bed (!) yikes...

We went first thing in the morning to the street market (different from the night market: this market is where the Taiwanese ladies go to do their hardcore pre-New Years shopping for meat/fruit/vegetables/rice etc, rather than the night market, which is where you go to buy food on sticks to eat as you comparison shop for your turquoise leopard-skin print polyester matching bra and panty set). It was packed with ladies doing their last minute hard core shopping, and some fairly dramatic items for sale: whole plucked roosters, heads, combs, feet etc intact; a zillion different kinds of fish, many still flopping around on their blocks of ice; carrots the size of my arm; stem ginger so potent it turns your face inside out, etc. There were lots of near misses with death-by-moped, since (a) mopeds are definitely the preferred mode of transport and (b) traffic laws are, like the pirate code, more of a guideline than a rigid set of rules so lots of people weave in and out of the market stalls (mopeds loaded up with groceries, pets, children, etc). The diesel fumes are something else. We had "Chinese breakfast" out, which is sort of a self-serve cafeteria style deal (or, in babydaddy's sweetly wonky translation, a "self-help restaurant," which conjures up images of being served by Eckhart Tolle and Dr. Phil) where you line up with a tray and pick out whatever selection of filled bun/dumpling/fried donutty thing appeals to you, and plonk down at a table; wild brother-in-law and I committed the grave faux pas of sitting down a table that belonged to a neighbouring business, and the shop owner had to ask babydaddy "are the white people with you? and if so, can you tell them they need to move" eesh. oops.

My goal for the morning was to purchase a New Year's banner: a long strip of red paper on which are written your hopes for the New Year. We stopped at plenty of shops selling unbelievably schlocky versions of this (think pre-printed, with bug-eyed cartoon dragons and lots of glitter) but we finally hit a stall where a guy was doing it the old-school way, with a calligraphy brush and ink pot). We didn't have time to wait in line for him to write a special one for me, so we picked out one he'd already done, which (I think) requested wisdom, kindness, self-improvement, and good health for the household, which seemed right on the money. Babydaddy even rubberstamped the posting of it above our doorway in SF for two whole weeks, even though it does have flecks of gold on it...

Then to Lotus Lake, which is to temples what Las Vegas is to casinos: there are a lot of them, and they take them to new and deliciously vulgar heights. There is one temple that is a gigantic dragon that you enter through the mouth, another with a gigantic (like five story high) warrior figure, another one with a megaBuddha perched on the roof, etc. Even some of the older more sedate looking temples have been updated with a digital screen running continuous advertisements for ongoing temple activities, which is sort of sad).

Home for late lunch and nap (me & baby) and out to aunt's house for meal prep and ancestor worship ceremony (babydaddy), after which we took a taxi driven by a heavily pomaded tracksuited taxi driver with a taste in remixed 1970's hits to aunt's house for New Years dinner, where there is so much to describe my head might actually explode. Babydaddy was terribly apologetic about how boring he was worried it was for me, and I was like, are you kidding? I was desperately wanting to take notes so I wouldn't forget anything...

where to begin:

house: 4-5 story multi family compound; essentially one aunt/uncle per floor, plus family. sort of dark dingy entryway with stairs, take your shoes off at the top, change into plastic slippers, go into living room of aunt and uncle's house. Decor can only be described as early 1980s random: textured pink/green streaks on the ceiling, geometric design taupe curtains, digital clock which also showed temperature/barometric pressure/time at the South Pole/lord knows what else because it had a lot of blinking red numbers, enormous display case with reclining nude female statue, Chinese dolls, stuffed animals, cardboard boxes piled up of Pampers, a Vitamix mixer, a telephone which must have been there since 1956, black and white photos of grandma and grandpa, gold plastic cat figurines

furniture: sofa/coffee table/armchairs made out of gnarled wood, vaguely Tolkienesque; dining room table was folding red metal of the kind that we used to have in the cafeteria of public elementary schools, with plastic stools.

food: table overloaded with dishes of clearly complicated food: fish, bamboo shoots, cabbages, sausage, chicken, meatballs, sticky rice balls filled with meat, soup, candies, peanuts, chestnuts, crackers, wine, whiskey for the Men.

people: assorted aunts/uncles, all very friendly, and particularly sweet with baby. one cousin is a forensic ichthyologist (!) whose job it is to figure out whether certain oysters are being illegally imported/exported, and who gave baby a set of "Fish of Eastern Taiwan" playing cards, a kit to make your own coloured sand painting of a graph of ocean depths around Kaohsiung (I think), several fish stickers, and two Taiwanese fish identification tables, which frankly are the coolest presents I think she may have ever been given. Another cousin was introduced as being "he is very shy" and, indeed, he spent the entire time in the kitchen and not talking, as far as I could tell, to anyone. Another cousin gave us a tour of the upstairs, where the ancestor worship ceremony bit had happened earlier in the day: there is a little shrine where you present the food that you are going to eat that night (in babydaddy's words, "so that the ancestors can sort of pick at it first. It's also OK to present it in a not-totally-table-ready form, apparently, as "the ancestors don't necessarily like a lot of sauce." (that's a direct quote).

Then you ask them for any special requests that you have that they might be able to arrange from the afterlife (I wished for good health for my family aaaahhhhh) and you put a little stick of burning incense in a pot in front of the Buddha (their particular family Buddha is the Qin yuang Buddha, who is the Buddha of compassion), and you burn fake money in a metal container to grease the ancestors' palms a bit, although apparently this practice is being replaced by burning a check (!) made out to the ancestors in the interests of reducing smoke-related pollution.

After that we got the tour of the rooftop area, where babydaddy's uncle had apparently kept a whole aviary and built a koi pond and where everyone had played when they were little; it's since been given over to uncle's new passion for growing bonsai trees and collecting tea-related paraphernalia.

Other exciting events: the handing out of red envelopes full of lolly to the kids by the adults. This is fraught with politics, as you have to keep track of who gave who how much last year, everyone has to get the same amount, the kids don't actually get to keep a lot of the cash, since the adults have to redistribute it evenly so that everyone ends up pretty much with the cash they started with. Luckily both baby and toddler cousin were blissfully unaware, and baby was mostly pleased with the red envelopes because they were something she could put into her high chair and take out over and over again.

In other baby news: a coffee-table vs head collision which will give her an impressive black eye by tomorrow, I suspect, but she recovered her sense of humour admirably quickly. She can now say "grandpa" "big sister", and "one two jump" in Chinese; she says voom voom when asked what noise a car makes, and "water" in English (lots of fun playing with the water feature in the courtyard of the apartment building this afternoon), and she has raspberry-blowing contests with her cousin, in which they politely take turns blowing very wet raspberries at each other across their carseats and laughing like maniacs.

Huge impressive fireworks display visible from bed through the window just now! which must mean it's midnight and thus officially the new year. Happy Chinese New Year, everyone, and best wishes for wisdom, kindness, good health, and babies what sleep through the night.

New Years Eve Eve

Observations, in no particular order, about Taiwan:

1. Stickers on appliances advertising the appliance's features tend to be left on. Forever. This is how I know that that bathtub in the flat has a "Power Wow Pump" (don't you want one of those?!?). "Compact Design, Reliable Operation, Whisper Quiet Operation, Lower Amperage Draw, and Amazing Performance".

2. When babydaddy and wild brother-in-law went to buy coffee at Starbucks, the barista asked babydaddy for his surname to write on the cup, so that they could call it out when his order was ready. Babydaddy asked (Caucasian) brother-in-law, hey, how did they manage your surname? to which wild BIL replied, what? they didn't ask me for my surname. Babydaddy looked at BIL's cup, and the barista had written "white guy" in Chinese.

3. Baby's face is open season for anyone with a wiping cloth. (The waiter in the hotel restaurant came up to her twice to wipe her face while eating breakfast two days ago, although there are clearly some etiquette points here, as both times he waited until babydaddy had got up to go and get a coffee refill).

4. "Inside voice" is not really a thing here.

This morning we climbed, as promised, the mountain with mosquitoes and monkeys; I am pleased to report that there were WAY more of the latter than of the former. We hiked up a beautifully maintained trail through banyan trees up to the top of a steepish mountain (I burned off one and a half mochi red bean cakes carrying the baby) where, of course, there was a Taiwanese chiringuito where we had tepid tea. Macaques absolutely everywhere, completely unafraid of humans (presumably because many humans, despite all the posted warnings, were feeding them). They are quite sweet to look at, especially the baby ones, but there were a couple of less sweet moments, one when two monkeys decided to have a teeth-bared screeching fight within two feet of baby; I don't think I have ever moved to pick her up or jumped mentally to fear-of-baby-contracting-rabies so quickly before.

The second was when a boy monkey decided to make sweet tender love to a nearby (completely nonplussed/oblivious) girl monkey; the whole thing lasted about seven seconds, and then after girl monkey wandered off to go rub her bum on some grass, boy monkey decided to eat his own ejaculate eeeeeeuuuuuuwwwwwwww. Anyway. The view from the top of the mountain was great, and like I said, very few mosquitoes. :)

After lunch we left baby in charge of wild mama H. and went out to the shops on a book-buying spree; the plan had been to get some kids' books in Mandarin so that baby has got something to read once she can actually say more than "cat" and "pick me up" in Chinese . Bizarrely, the vast majority of the books in the children's section were actually in English, which either indicates a huge push towards English education, or a vast and invisible expat population with a surge in birth rates about 2-5 years ago. Either way, we found both a book about cats AND a book called "Pick Me Up", so our bases are covered.

Dinner out at a little Vietnamese joint around the corner, then for a Love Boat River tour which sounds a lot, lot sexier than it actually was; a little half hour pootle up the river in a covered tour boat to the harbor with a lumpish twenty-something equipped with a microphone pointing out the scenic attractions of riverside Kaohsiung (I think I liked best the twin apartment buildings with neon diamond rings on top of them, apparently to connote total luxury living)... then home, bath/bed for baby (who was so tired she gave up after only one and a half renditions of "Dos Gardenias Para Ti," and one of "Three Old Ladies Locked in the Lavatory"), a brief and pathetic stab at sketching a glass (doomed, especially when I am this tired), and now to bed. No idea what plan is for tomorrow beyond 'going to see ancestors for New Year and we bring food,' but I will report as faithfully as I can. Love to all....

Back in Kaohsiung and gearing up for New Years!

In bed freshly showered and over-fed, with baby sleeping next to me in her little tent. So lovely.

Yesterday night (our second night in Taipei) was great - mama H and babydaddy and the bambina and I hit the night market for a peripatetic dinner - and then Buddha answered the request I made at the temple, which was for both me and baby to sleep the whole way through the night. Yeehoo!

Then today we hit the National Palace Museum before heading back on the bullet train to Kaohsiung.

Wild brother-in-law and I were discussing yesterday that there is a Buddhist relinquishing-of-self element to being a non-Chinese-speaking in-law on this kind of family vacation, because not only do you renounce all control as to what happens to you during the day (i.e. someone else is deciding the agenda) but you don't even know what is coming (you don't understand the conversation in which the agenda is being discussed, and there's no point in anyone translating the discussion for you, since you don't have agenda-decision-making power anyway). You therefore have the ability to predict maybe fifteen seconds into your own future, but beyond those fifteen seconds, it could be anything: dinner at an aunt's house, going to look at panda bears, buying dried squid parts, getting into the car - could be anything, you have no idea. A similar thing on a smaller scale happens when you go to the night market with babydaddy and wild mama H. for dinner: you are walking along minding your own business when all of a sudden something totally delicious and/or strange is shoved into your mouth and hey! look! I'm eating fish balls/Chinese churros/mochi rolled in sesame/papaya chunks! Disconcerting but lots of fun. It has been particularly enjoyable to watch babydaddy in food-rediscovery mode: he will see a particular yummy thing he hasn't had since he was very little and get very excited and have to have some RIGHT NOW and make me taste some as well RIGHT NOW and it's really, really sweet.

I totally love the whole night market thing: apart from the food, most of what is being sold is complete schlock (if you need HelloKitty thigh high stockings or a rhinestone I-pod case, it's the place for you) but I can forgive the schlock because the food aspect is so fantastic. It makes me very happy that it is so completely different from the U.S. (can you tell I am still traumatized from the McDonald's/getting-lost-in-a-shopping-mall experience?) There are few things more disheartening than travelling to the other side of the world and having it look just like where you came from, but by the same token, there are few things more fun/exciting than travelling across the world and seeing stuff that it is totally different, and I love that there are places where you can buy pigs' feet and wasabi and noodles (btw "pasta" in Mandarin is "Italy mien" hee.) out of a gigantic cauldron on the street.

Ennyways. This morning we packed up and taxi'ed to the National Palace Museum, which I just realized I am too sleepy to describe but was nice (my favourite I think either the miniature walnut shell carvings or the great big bronze happy Buddha or the ivory carved lunch pail or the big long scroll painting of the epic love story of some guy and a river nymph or the big painting of a dog by the Italian monk who ended up being a Chinese court painter) then lunch then train back to Kaohsiung then crazy fun/crowded/colorful night market for New Years' goodies then back to bed ok starting to ramble really really really tired. Babydaddy is doing his loud not-quite-snory breathing next to me, so will have to do some judicious and tactful poking to get him to roll over without actually waking him up. Wish me luck.

Taipei...

Sorry to my vast reading public for the missing couple of days - we hit a black hole of sleep, which you'd think would be a bonus for the insomnia diaries, but it involved everyone but the baby really really wanting to sleep, and the baby being infested by evil anti-sleep spirits. However, with some persuasion (about a gallon of hot milk, a pacifier, all the lights off, and both parents patting and shushing for a solid half hour...) she has condescended to conk out on the hotel bed between us. Hurrah! I celebrated with a hot bath.

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.

Kaohsiung day 1.75

This morning we went for a walk with yet another aunt (Sarko, as in Nicol, which in Chinese means either second aunt, third aunt, last aunt, or some other number of aunt; I've lost track) around the big park near the flat. It was like a dreamscape, a long-abandoned graveyard partially reclaimed by jungle: very misty, (and quite early), so not many people out walking, but every so often through the mist we would come across a group of people doing tai chi, for example, or an old guy playing Amazing Grace on his clarinet next to the lake, or another guy doing breathing exercises while listening to what sounded like sort of a menacing motivational speaker on mini speakers strapped to his belt. There were also collections of signs exhorting you to examine nature (and a few totally bizarre inexplicable ones, such as “Beware of Picasso,” with an unmistakably Cubist picture of a woman, just in case you were in any doubt), and then random clearings with large abstract sculptures of the sort that probably looked better when they were first commissioned by some well-meaning political committee for Public Artworks, and before forty years of exposure to a tropical climate gave them that slightly wilted look of painted metal and concrete so characteristic of Communist architecture.

We also stopped for coffee at a convenience store, where I was served by a clerk of indeterminate gender wearing glasses that were so exclusively for fashion statement purposes that they didn’t even have lenses in the frames. Apparently this is a common thing; I need to look out for more because it is frankly awesome. (In this case, the look was completed by a big swoosh of bangs carefully gelled into place to completely cover the left eye _underneath_ the glasses frame, so you didn‘t miss a moment of the no-lenses frames-only fashion statement). Baby and I opted for a rice & shrimp triangle wrapped in seaweed - yummo - instead of coffee. It is weirdly gratifying to see her taking so naturally and avidly to food that I distinctly remember being scared of well into my teens (I first had nori in New York age 13 and thought it was icky).

Back to the house for a nap (babies & babydaddy) and a review of Taiwanese history in my guidebook plus pathetic attempt at drawing sleeping family members (me); we’re going out for lunch with godmother soon.

----------------------------

Later - wow, that was not lunch, that was an edible orgy. There is a mafioso quality to expeditions here: what happens is that we receive instructions (how, I am not sure, because I never see anyone actually talking on the phone) to be downstairs at exactly x o’clock, so we pile downstairs at the appointed hour, through the lobby still incongruously decked out with blue-fairy-lit Christmas tree, onto the street, into the borrowed silver minivan, except for babydaddy, who climbs into the back of a nearby mystery car with tinted windows (everyone has tinted windows here); whereupon all vehicles do a sixteen point U-turn to get back out onto the main road and we follow the mystery car (which turns out to contain a relative who has not been seen for many years, or in today‘s case, a godparent) to food destination, narrowly escaping death by psychotic moped-driver multiple times.

This afternoon’s food destination was inside a super posh shopping mall (we entered through the Bvlgari store…), up some elevators which I just have to take a moment to describe because the baby was totally dazzled and kept saying “Wow! Wow! Wow!” over and over again, and I have to say, I kind of agreed with her. The elevator was lit only by tiny little fairy lights stuck onto the mirrored walls and ceiling, so you had infinite reflections of little fairy lights and it felt like you were in outer space with zillions of stars all around you. Confirming the poshness of the shopping mall was the Hello Kitty themed wedding party that was going on when we got off the elevator… anyway, into the restaurant, sit down at big round table, and start to Eat with a capital E. I am starting to recognize some favourites: soup dumplings, pork sesame triangular pastries, more of the bean curds in syrup (ginger-infused this time…. mmmm…..) as well as some new things: lotus roots, egg tarts, some delicious shrimpy business.

The highlight of the meal, however, was when the baby decided to go for a sip of my nearly full glass of beer; I don’t actually know what percentage went in her mouth and what percentage went all over her, but I know that each was > 0% because when I turned to see what she was squawking about, she was sopping wet and making her “I just swallowed something horrible” face. I did not, of course, have a clean outfit to put her in, so wild mama H. and I hustled off to the loo to at least get her into a clean nappy, and I had what I thought was the rather nifty idea of putting my T-shirt on her (I was wearing a jersey as well, don’t worry), so she was at least semi-decent, but after a few minutes back at the table wild papa H suddenly disappears and it turns out he is off buying her an outfit somewhere in the shopping mall oh mortification. He comes back with a fetching little red shirt, which we put her in, and I’m hoping that is the end of it, but then five minutes later godmother goes haring off to buy some trousers as well, and wild mama H is honour-bound to chase after her and have a credit card battle, and eventually they come back with pants for both my beer-soaked baby & baby’s much better behaved non-beer-soaked little cousin, just to be fair. I don’t think baby & me will be allowed back in that particular restaurant, needless to say, so I’m glad we made the most of things, food-wise.

After that, the original plan had been to go climb a mountain where there are lots of monkeys and mosquitoes (this is the sum total of what I know about this mountain, but since people keep repeating these two facts, I feel like they’re pretty solidly in the data banks at this point), but frankly after that lunch, there was no fucking way, so instead we came home and slept for two hours while the grandparents (bless them. I mean it. They are wonderful) took care of the still manic little girls. Then up again to go to the night market and then to visit yet more aunties, but that is going to have to wait for another day because I am a tired little soybean and it is time for bed.

Day one and a half in Kaohsiung

Three a.m. - baby & babydaddy are still asleep, babydaddy having virtuously resisted a nap yesterday and baby having been a complete party animal for pretty much the entire day except for when I was Evil Mother and strapped her into her tent and forced her to sleep for two hours because I was afraid of the consequences otherwise. Party Animal Baby I can deal with, ThermoNuclear Baby I cannot. Wild inlaws are coping with ThermoNuclear Toddler currently in the bedroom next door, and it’s Ugly with a capital Ugh. We’ll see how much longer baby & babydaddy stay asleep for.

With respect to Mr. Wordsworth and his definition of poetry, I am realizing that (for me, at least), blogging is gluttony recollected in insomnia. Yesterday was pretty much straight eating, which is great except for I don’t remember the official name of a single thing I put in my mouth, so future biographers are going to have to do sorme fairly tedious cross referencing with Taiwanese street food cookbooks.

“Breakfast” (it’s in quotation marks because it was actually about three meals rolled into one): pork bun thingies, fried donut sandwich thingies, egg scallion wrap thingies, tofu soupy thingy, black sesame thingy, peanut fluffy thingy.

Lunch (eaten wandering around the nightmarket; please automatically add “thingy” to the end of all descriptions to connote the variety of shapes, sizes, and textures): chicken blood sausage, pork blood rolled in cilantro and possibly corn meal (favourite savoury thing I think so far), tofu squares, tomatoes on a stick and glazed in hard candy (totally delicious), strawberries on a stick and glazed in hard candy (the most orgasmic dessert I may have ever experienced).

Dinner (eaten at a restaurant where aunt Banquo (I am not making this up. She is actually called that. For all I know there’s another aunt called Lady Macbeth; stand by and I will update as I find out) took us near the night market): chicken/shitake/rice, cabbage in mystery sauce, beef tendon noodle soup, jellified pork, egg rolls, scalding soybean curds in light syrup (total comfort food).

Dessert (eaten once we got back home): Eight Wonder Ice (ha! I DID remember the name of one thing): Sno-Cone consistency ice with syrup & black beans & mystery fruit & mystery gelatin balls. (yummy).

Ok time to head back to bed & give sleeping another try. ThermoNuclear Toddler next door has been downgraded to Sniffing Repentant Toddler hurrah. Love to all…

Hello from Taiwan

Oh my goodness so much to blog about so little time. Or rather, so few compos brain cells with which to string a sentence together.

Day one in Kaohsieng, Taiwan, where we have come to spend some QT with the wild in-laws. The flight was pretty much what you would expect for fifteen hours encased in an oversized lipstick tube with not one but two toddlers (who, to be fair, (a) did some entertaining of each other, bless their snot-encrusted little selves and (b) slept a larger percentage of the time than I had dared hope). We read (the verb is used loosely, here) the three books we had brought with us over and over and over again; we obsessively pointed out examples of our two favourite things: flowers (on the China Airlines logo, in the SkyBoutique catalogue) and cats (in our books, on some wrapping paper that babydaddy had wrapped some little boredom-battling gifties for the girls in, and in our jetlagged hallucinatory one year old brains), we dropped our pacifiers down various unsavoury crevices in the aeroplane, we crapped spectacularly… all in all, a good time. I will say that, while it is kind of the airlines to allow you to save money by having a child on your lap up until age two, it is a very, very good use of money to buy them their own seat.

We staggered off the plane in Taipei and miraculously made our puddlejumper connection to Kaohsiung (the English spelling of which I had always imagined as “Gauchon,” with a vaguely francophone pronounciation, but alas, no), where we were not met by the in-laws, who hadn’t made it to the airport in time, so we stood around with our luggage wondering what to do and marvelling at the gigantic line at the Bank of Taiwan kiosk. Apparently in honour of the Year of the Dragon (what it is about to be), the Bank of Taiwan has issued special Dragon Coins, which can be yours for the low low price of about thirty US dollars, and not only do lots and lots of people want these, they want them _enough_ to trek all the way out to the airport to get them, on the theory that the line at the airport bank will be shorter. Suckahz….

The wild in-laws turned up in a borrowed minivan not long after, and I started to get that sort of surreal floaty feeling that you get when you are super super tired and other people are doing things that wouldn’t make sense even if you weren’t really jetlagged, viz, spend fortyfive minutes trying to install the carseats for the kids into the minivan (the nonsensical part was why they hadn‘t installed the carseats before they had four exhausted adults and two wound-up toddlers and world-record breaking quantities of luggage to cram into the car). For the uninitiated, toddler carseats are gigantic contraptions with lots of buckles and straps and places to adjust and each model is different and in this case, someone had threaded the straps through some holes that it turned out were not the right holes to begin with, and installing one really is a project best accomplished by one person with a clear head & an instruction manual, rather than seven people each of whose child-car-seat-installation experience was inversely proportional to the amount of sleep they’d had in the preceding twentyfour hours & their confidence in their ability to correctly install a carseat.

Once we were on the road (hurrah!) there was a brief threat to go out to breakfast before going home for a shower & a stuff-dump, but there are some things I am massively inflexible about, and taking a shower after a sixteen hour flight with an incontinent toddler and my period (wheeee!) is one of them. So back to the apartment, which is in a 1970‘s era block of condos overlooking the River of Love (!). More later, as babydaddy has just returned with nappies and milk and BREAKFAST!