Day 3- Rural life in Shetou

On Wednesday my parents and I left Taipei to visit the small village my dad is from called Shetou.  Everyone in the village is a Chen, and we are related to every person in the village in some way.  We can't walk down the road without having someone call at us from their front door to invite us in. 

When we arrived, my dad's oldest brother took us to pray to our ancestors at different temples and my grandparents' graves.  He was worried that as pampered foreigners we wouldn't be able to climb up the mountain where the temples and graves are since the heat is pretty intense, so we climbed into the back of his truck and up we went!

First we went to a huge temple where we prayed to my grandfather's Earth god.  When you pray to relatives who are passed away, you first pray to their Earth god and then to the relative.  Each time you pray, you put out your offerings in front of the alter (we used fruit), light incense sticks, and pass them out so everyone has a couple. You put your hands together and wave the incense up and down while praying, then the leader of the family takes all the incense and prays with all of them together.  You then stick the incense in front of the alter or in burners scattered around the temple, like this one below. I love the sweet smell of the incense, I think the entire countryside smells like it.

Next you have to burn gold pieces of fake money for the god or ancestor to use in the ghost world.  My sister's guidebook complains about the burning and says it contributes to pollution. There are big pits and kiln-like structures to burn the money in. And you don't want to be too stingy, because no one likes being broke, even dead people. So today we burned about 10 million dollars. It actually takes skill to separate each piece of money and fold it up so it burns more easily, but I had 10 million dollars worth of practice so I'm pretty OK at it now.  Here's a picture of some burning money in the money pit.

We did this a bajillion times: at my grandfather's Earth god, my grandfather's grave, my grandmother's Earth god and grave, and then at the Chen ancestors' temple and another god's alter, which is six in all.  It took a couple hours, I'm pretty prayed-out now.