Day 20/ Day 21 - Tradtional Chinese Medicine

On Monday and Tuesday I got to go to a Traditional Chinese Medicine hospital where my cousin works and shadow him and two of his colleagues. The TCM hospital is a full-fledged hospital with nurses, doctors, and different specialties, and TCM is taken just as seriously as Western medicine, although TCM doctors are definitely aware that Western medical doctors criticize them.

On Monday shadowed a husband and wife duo who specialized in traumology, although they actually treated patients using all different specialties such as prescribing herbal medications (which usually come in powdered form or soup) and acupuncture. My cousin told me TCM is only split into specialties because the government wants them to be more like Western medicine. I'm not sure what all the specialties are, but the traumology doctors used a lot of massaging and bone cracking. They also demonstrated bah-gwan to me, which uses a suction and a cup-like glass to syphon off too much chi (I think. It was a lot of complicated information, so I'm not sure if a lot of this is correct). Bah-gwan leaves a circular bruise or welt and is usually done on the back. My cousin explained to me that diagnosing and treating TCM involves finding what is out of balance. A person can be too wet or dry, or have too much chi which is similar to energy or too little.

This morning (Tuesday) I shadowed my cousin, who did acupuncture all day. At first, it was really freaky! I really don't like to see needles go into the wrist area or the back of the knees, it is gross to me for some reason. And some of the needles were really long!! There is a super-long one for the butt, I didn't get to see it, but what my cousin showed me with his hands seemed to be about 10 inches! The needles are supposed to touch a person's jing which are invisible highways of the body, so they need to be long to penetrate the butt if they are going to reach the jing. Most of the needles went in about 1 inch! And the doctors had to pull them in and out to find the correct place. I saw one butt-needle that went in about 2 or 3 inches! Most of the people were fine with needles, but the big burly man who needed the butt-needle was really scared! I felt so bad for him!

One of the best parts of shadowing the doctors was that I got to ride a motorcycle with my cousin to work! The first morning I was really sleepy as I hopped on, but I quickly woke up because I was scared out of my mind! We weaved between cars and with large groups of motorcycles. We also got really really close to other vehicles, as in move one inch and I could be close enough to hug other people on motorcycles! And turning was really freaky, there is one turn my cousin makes every morning which is on a high bridge, and he gets really close to the cement railing where I could have stuck my elbow out and touched it! The first morning I kept screaming and gripped my cousin's shoulders really tight. No one else I saw riding in back of the person driving the motorcycle held onto the person's shoulders, but I didn't care because I was so scared. I wish I could have taken a picture while I was riding on the motorcycle Monday afternoon, because we travelled in a HUGE pack of motorcycles. There must have been about 100 of them!

These days involved a lot of eating delicious food, like every day. Monday night my relatives took me to eat at the Jhonghe Night Market. Jhonghe (the J is pronounced like a Y) is where my aunt lives and where I am staying. It is not part of Taipei city but counts as part of Taipei district. My aunt told me the other day that it is the most densely populated area in the world, with 10,000 people per square kilometer!! Wikipedia says this is 25,000 people per square mile. Whew!

Anyway, we ate lots of tasty things, but I was so tired because I couldn't sleep well and we had to wake up at 6:30AM to go to the hospital, that I sort of just stumbled through the crowds and I'm not sure if I even said thank you to my aunt at the end! We ate at one vendor where the food is laid out in front and floating in a broth and you pick what you eat and put it in the white bowls in the picture. Later that night we also had three massive bowls of crushed ice dessert, where we could pick 5 toppings and eat them with a ton of shaved ice and caramelled sugar syrup.

This afternoon, (it is Tuesday night right now), my aunt picked me up from the bus stop and we went to eat at a moving sushi bar! Little plates of sushi rotated past us and we picked what we wanted. Although actually it was just me eating, because my aunt had already eaten, so I felt sort of guilty. Eat plate was NT$30, so about US$1, which is pretty cheap for sushi in the US but expensive for Taiwan. The fish was really fresh and everything was tasty, so I was very eager to eat it up.

When we were ready to leave the restaurant, we discovered we were stuck in the building for thirty more minutes! Taiwan conducts bomb/attack drills, and today from 2 to 2:30pm was the drill for five counties including Taipei. No one was allowed to be on the streets and the building we were in had to bring down it's metal door (the kind that stores above in the ceiling and you can pull it down, it looks like sheet metal). I took a picture of the eerily quiet street from underneath the door.

It really sort of disturbs me that Taiwan has to be ready for attack, specifically by China. After the drill was over, the streets immediately flooded with people. I wish I had taken before and after pictures, the difference was so drastic!

Tuesday night we took out the trash, which sounds boring but was actually fun. In Taiwan the garbage truck comes around and everyone has to come out and throw their trash into the truck themselves. The truck sings Fuer Elise to tell people it is coming, and it comes very regularly, I think four times a day (at least on weekdays). I don't know how people don't go crazy hearing Fuer Elise 4 times a day. Today there was an unusual amount of people throwing away trash, because starting July 1st people have to buy trash bags instead of just using any old bag. This should cut down on the amount of trash people throw away. My aunt and three-year-old daughter of my cousin waited on the street for about two hours because the truck must have been too overloaded and had to head back and dump its trash before coming to us. During these two hours, the three-year-old crawled all over me and climbed me like a tree, until I was covered in her sweat. A lot of the times she is really mean to me and beats me up (!), but it is so hard to say no to her because she is so cute.

Since you have to go out to throw your trash, throwing out the garbage becomes a social thing because everyone in the neighborhood comes out. Here is a picture of the garbage-throwing horde. The hellow thing is the back end of the garbage truck, and the man with the reflective-tape jacket is making sure everything goes in the right place.