Day 4/ Day 5: The morning of the three breakfasts and Arrival in Taipei

On Day 4, my parents and I went to my cousin's grape farm. They were harvesting the grapes, so the grapes were all plump and juicy and looked beautiful hanging from the trees. The leaves of the trees formed a flat canopy above our heads about 5'3" above the ground, so my mom and I were lucky to be the short ones and not have to duck. The grapes hung from the canopy and the light filtered in through the leaves. The only thing was I forgot my camera!! I was so pissed!

I got to see children for the first time in Taiwan at the farm, because my cousin has three children in 1st and 5th grade. Children who speak another language other than English are always alarming to me, because they speak it so fluently while I still stumble over the language.

The rest of the day we didn't do much, so walked around Shetou (the rural village where my dad's family lives) and took pictures of noteworthy things.

Taiwan is really beautiful, and one thing I think adds to its picturesque-ness is the doors. Many of the front doors here are sliding double doors. Other ones are metal with decorations made by frosting the metal, and many doors are decorated with panels of Chinese words on the side to bring prosperity/longevity/etc. I took a picture of one of the metal doors; this one does not have a particularly pretty decoration, some of them have bamboo decorations or pictures of mountains. The other door is crappy and old, but I thought the picture on top would be interesting. It is there to ward off evil spirits, my dad says it is called "bah-gua" which means 'eight-sided.' It is used in feng-shui to keep the house safe.

I also took pictures of graffiti I thought would be interesting. The big Chinese words say Chen family. The whole village has my last name, so anyone could have written it. I don't know what the other words say. The graffiti cat was next to the letters and I just thought it was funny.

On Day 5, I woke up early because I was supposed to go to the market with my older uncle to see people make this red sticky bun stuffed with beans or peanuts. Unfortunately, we went to the market at 6am and the seller was not there yet, so we came back. When I saw my younger uncle, I told him I was sad we missed out on eating a lot of delicious food he told us he made because we ate out last night. So he told us we could have the food for breakfast. We ate two delicious soups, one with something called 'fried vegetable' and strips of fatty pork, and another with shaved bamboo shoots. Then I asked about this traditional Hakka food that my uncle pulled out the other day, so he warmed them up and we ate them too. Hakka are a minority group here that mostly live in the mountains. The place where I am teaching English is actually a Hakka area. Their dialect is actually more like Mandarin than Taiwanese is. The Hakka food was this sticky bun stuffed with bamboo slivers and shiitake mushrooms. It was so delicious, and had a flavor different from Taiwanese or other Chinese food.

After we finished lunch, I went over to my older uncle's house to go to the market again to see if the seller of the red sticky buns would be back. But instead, my older aunt told me they were ready for my parents and I to come eat noodles. Not wanting to be rude, we all went to their house and ate noodles and mushroom wrapped tofu as well as tofu soup. It was delicious, and we felt bad because she had specially gone out and bought the food, but we could only finish half of it because we had already eaten.

As we were leaving, my cousin pulled up on her motorcycle (which everyone drives in Taiwan). She had bought the red sticky buns! They are especially filling because the sticky bun is made of rice, and that type of bun is very heavy. Even though the name has red in it, they are actually bright pink. Chinese people have a different concept of red than Americans; red is anything brightly colored with red or pink, and pink is a light pink. Here is a picture of the food.

So we had three breakfasts that day. That morning we left for Taipei, and my dad's cousin who drove us took us to a famous area known for fish. We ate a huge fish made 5 different ways and stuffed ourselves. After this, I thought I was going to die. After we put our stuff down at a table, we went to the back of the restaurant and picked which fish we would eat. Here is a picture of the man catching the fish we ate.

My distant cousin who is a couple years older than me and her mom met us along the way to Taipei and I sat in their car because my distant cousin wanted to practice English with me. She and her sister had stayed at my family's house one summer while I was in high school. We got really lost, but I got to see a lot of Taipei that way. The city is ridiculously huge and there are people everywhere! It was actually sort of alarming. People ride motorcycles in Taiwan because it is easier and less expensive than a car, so there are motorcycles lining the streets and motorcycles pack the roads. The weave in and out between the cars and freak everyone out.

That evening we arrived in Taipei after stopping a few places and had dinner with the whole family. I thought I was going to die because I had to eat more food, plus I was so exhausted from the whole day and waking up at 5am, plus there were all these relatives I hadn't seen in 11 years. I was nice when they all came to meet us at my second aunt's apartment, but at dinner I thought I was going to fall off the chair and die.