Moon Festival

One of the biggest traditional holidays here in Taiwan is the Moon Festival, celebrated in mid-autumn on the autumnal equinox. It feels a lot like Thanksgiving in the US, and is a time when families get together and celebrate harvest. However, rather than turkey and cranberry sauce, there are some different food traditions here, including:

The barbecue. Since the festival is all about the moon, it makes sense to eat outdoors under the moon and it's certainly still warm enough to do so. Unfortunately, it also rains here almost everyday, so barbecues end up moving into garages or covered spaces and you can't see the moon. However, I happen to think BBQs here are pretty fantastic. Everything, from vegetables to tofu squares and every kind of animal is put over charcoals and eaten off a stick. And neither of the parties I've been to have had real sit-around-360-days-out-of-the-year barbecues, instead there have been little cinderblock constructions sitting on cement floors, which make more sense to me. And in case you were wondering, blowtorches and an electric fan do wonders to get charcoal going.

The moon cakes: Little ball-shaped cakes flavored with sesame seed or taro. Total number of moon cakes given to me this year: 18 and counting.

Pomelos: Pomelos, like Hershey's kisses and crack cocaine, are highly addictive. Lucky for me, they're not as unhealthy as chocolate or illegal drugs. Not only is it traditional to eat Pomelos (it looks like most families get at least one crate of them) for Moon Festival, but also to wear the rinds on one's head. Entertainment, hair treatment, and bug repellent in one. My kind of celebration.

Happy Moon Festival, everyone!

Tidbit on Turtle Island

Please feel free to check out the modified Turtle Island post-- now with dolphin footage directly on the page!

Google Maps

For anyone wondering what life is like here in Yilan, here are a few of my favorite haunts embedded in a GoogleMap. Mostly, these are the things that are truly important to me... the dumpling shop, the pizza restaurant, and... school. Please don't add or move things around on me unless you live here with me and want to set me straight. If you plugged a Wendy's into my map, you could light a glimmer of hope that I might spend hours chasing down.


View Larger Map

Also, you can zoom all the way out on my map and see that I really am just about as far from home as I could possibly be, but still on Earth. (A warm fuzzy thought for us all.)

Weekly Mandarin: 8

8th Edition: Bu Yow...

Apologies to anyone who read the temporary 8th Weekly Mandarin. It was lame to say the least. Here is its improved replacement:

It's somewhat fascinating that I have survived in Taiwan thus far with my vocabulary of approximately a dozen words. But it's even more fascinating that I've been the opposite of undernourished, as...

Most everyone who knows me knows that I am a picky eater. So now I have the grammatical tools to deal with that. Besides the name for what I do want, I now know how to say what I "bu yow" or don't want as well. This means I can order my rice without eggs, or my tea without milk, or sandwiches without sauce and life is automatically a bit better for me.

This sentence was driven home for by stories of Jeannie's lovely student. The one who expresses all responses prefaced by "Bu yow." For example, he answers questions like "What letter does Apple start with?" with "Bu yow A." He just doesn't want English.

Turtle Island

This Wednesday, rather than working, we were taken on an awesome field trip to Turtle Island. The Island seriously looks like a turtle, with a head, shell, and tail. It is a preserved ecological resource and its visitation is strictly limited.

Of course, we took a boat to get to the Island. Which meant I needed some serious motion sickness drugs (for some reason Taiwan makes me motion sick more than anywhere else I've ever been). But it was totally worth it because we ended up seeing about 200 dolphins playing in the Pacific Ocean on our way. I took only mental pictures and tried to soak in the experience. But if you're itching for some footage, here's a bit courtesy of Katie:

Once we got to the shore, we made a b-line for the restrooms and met our guide, who told us that the hike to the summit would be "about seven hundred" steps up. Actually, this seems to have been a breakdown in translation. Because once we got to 700, we realized he'd meant "seventeen hundred." But it was totally worth it because check out the view from 401 meters above sea level.

(Turtle head)

(Turtle Tail)

(Finally... but it was totally worth it)

Jin

You might remember that I was kind of handed a Chinese name on my first day in Taiwan. I'd come in with my grandmother's name (Kim Ling Wei) and came out with a different character for Wei, and a Jin-Nee. Considering that all of the other non-Chinese speaking Fulbrighters were assigned names that sounded like their American names and surnames, I kind of let go of my grandma's name and surrendered.

But actually, I found out last weekend that there's a lot more to "jin" than sounding like "jen." "Jin," seen below, is the character for gold (quite auspicious), but it's also pronounced "Kim" in Cantonese. So I did get my grandmother's name after all, through some cosmic blessing that my English name sounds like her character in Mandarin. I kind of got teared up because it didn't hit me how much it meant to me until I was so relieved that it had happened after all.

Weekly Mandarin: 7

7th Edition: Yujia

Kate and I decided to have an adventure by signing up for some dance classes at the local community center. Since we couldn't get dancing shoes shipped in fast enough, we decided we'd ease into the whole classes-instructed-in-Chinese thing with some nice easy yoga, or yujia.

HA. The class is taught by a 46 year old mini-Amazon. And it's half aerobics and half intense stretching with some yoga poses. For example: while trying to get me and Kate (both former dancers) to clench our butt cheeks really tightly together during plank, she took out a toothbrush and held it between her buttocks. She is my hero. And we're planning on taking the class until we can do the same. Besides that, we'll come out of the whole year with a great vocabulary of anatomy and movement verbs.

Weekly Mandarin: 6

6^th Edition: Cha

cha-cha-cha. No. I haven't started ballroom dancing again yet. But I did get a very elaborate tea-tasting during a visit to the local tea farms. So this week's word is “cha” for tea.

Of course, here there are so many kinds of tea. And usually I just drink whatever I get handed. But during my tea tasting, I got to eat some wonderful (and addictive) tea-roasted peanuts and I tried 4 varieties of tea. Personally, I seem to be a weak-tea drinker who doesn't care too much about the scent of the tea but hates an aftertaste, so ended up with a lovely green tea (which, I was told, is so called because it is not roasted like many other teas). It was really quite an experience!

This is me with the sniffing cup. There was one short-squat cup for sipping from and one tall cup for sniffing out of. The sniffing was fun but really didn't make or break the tea, in my mind.

As a bonus, I can also recognize the character for cha, which I believe is supposed to look like a leaf. But to me, it looks more like a little tea house... whatever gets me through my menu.

Museum MADNESS

Ok, not really. But I did visit two historical houses this past weekend.

One Museum, which was about a 15 minute walk from my apartment, was the historical seat of the Yilan County government. It was a recently restored Japanese-style house and was positively beautiful inside. The teak wood (a local crop that's been exploited for years, especially during Japanese occupation) smelled wonderful! It had a mix of historically accurate living spaces and exhibition space with a timeline of the government and culture in Yilan County. And I taught the friend I was with the word “restoration.”

...which she then used during our outing the next day to the historical center of the lumber trade in Luodong (the city I had been living in until this month). The most remarkable thing about the site was the large, perfectly still artificial lake on which the lumber used to be floated. Since it's not used for lumber any more, it's become a protected bird habitat. And it was a perfect mirror of the evening sky when we stopped by.

I also visited a great scenic lookout (with a very romantic cafe on top of it).

Weekly Mandarin: 5

5th Edition: Pah boo

Food is a huge part of the culture here. I've had a few moments of "oh. my. gosh. get-this-out-of-my-mouth" but mostly, the food has been pretty great. However, this causes its own problems. Because I'd prefer not to return home the size of a hippo, I've taken up a new hobby: pah boo.

"Pah boo" is "running" in Chinese. It's the one thing every class, regardless of grade, understood when I was introducing myself and my hobbies. It has become a very important part of my day, mostly so I don't feel too rolly polly. And, luckily, across the street from my apartment is a huge high school with a nice track.