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.
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