Day 6: Grandma/ Craziness in the market/ Taipei 101

We visited my grandmother yesterday. She is 80 and she had two strokes, but miraculously can still walk short distances and talk fine. She really liked me for some reason, I don't know why. I find it amusing because she calls me Fay-fay, even though my small name is Fi-fi. Fay-fay can mean fat person. :D We visited her with my oldest aunt, here is a picture.

After we visited her, my parents and my oldest aunt went to the bizarre in the middle of Taipei. The amount of street vendors and shops was overwhelming. Each vendor is trying desperately to sell you something, so they have people standing at the entrances shouting prices at you and talking up the products. I really enjoyed listening to them because they talk so fast and loud. Here is a picture of the fruit vendors before the entrance to the market.

At the market, my mom bought some shoes that made me laugh so hard that I couldn't stop. She disappeared with my aunt to buy them. My aunt and my mom keep saying how comfortable they are and that they are made of calf hide, but I think they have been tricked. They are black with straps going across and were definitely made for some Emo punk. They also say THC on them in gold rhinestones, which I think is a reference to the active component in marijuana. I couldn't stop laughing when I saw them!

I wanted to find a chi-pow, a traditional Chinese dress, but my search was unsuccessful in the extreme. I tried on about six dresses, and it turns out I am considered very fat in Taiwan. I had to try on large and extra large sized chi-pows! But all the ones that fit on the bottom were huge on the top, so I had to try on fat people chi-pows! When we decided that maybe I should get one made instead of buying a pre-made one, my aunt started saying clothes that fit are bad because they will reveal my bad physique. She told me I should do these feet exercises and stuff my bras. But she didn't just say it once in a quiet voice, she shouted it all through the market for a couple hours. Then she tried to get me to buy a Chinese-style shirt instead, so she went into a store and tried on shirts for me and then grabbed me and tried to shove one on my head. Hahahaha, it was so insane!

That evening we went to a vegetarian buffet dinner with a bunch of people my dad grew up with. The middle-aged woman next to me kept joking with me and hitting me. Then she asked me what my English name is, so I told her Stephanie. She replied in Chinese, "30 percent interest?" which sounds like "San-fan-li." Then for the next hour I had a bunch of old Chinese people saying "San-fan-li?" at me and laughing hysterically. The said the questioning raise at the end was important too. I just smiled sheepishly. :/

After the ridiculous day, we did something really cool: we went to Taipei 101! It is the tallest building in the world. I went at night and from the top you could see the whole city and the lights going up the mountains in the distance because Taipei is a basin. Taipei also does not look like an American city, the lights in the dark are all different colors, so you can look down from Taipei 101 and see the city glowing with green, red, blue, and all different neon colors. The pictures turned out sort of bad though.

To keep the building from toppling over, they have these balls called 'dampers' set up in the building. They move in the opposite direction that the building is swaying and were first used in Japan for earthquakes.