My New Year's Celebration

We got ten days off for New Years, and I had had grand plans of going backpacking, or at least leaving Taipei, but in the end I didn't do much exciting. The weather has been pretty crappy for a while (basically almost always cold rain), but I'd heard that the southern part of Taiwan has much nicer weather. I planned on going down there, and even found a hotspring on the east coast of the island that I'd have to hike in to (I hoped this would reduce the number of people I encountered) and if it turned out that there were too many people, then there were other hotsprings in the area that didn't have official trails to them, but which probably had 'paths' and I thought they might be less crowded. All of this turned out not to matter because I kept an was keeping an eye on the weather and saw that rain was forecast for the area of the hotspring. I thought about it and decided that I could go and if it did rain, the hotsprings would always be there, but in the end I decided I could hang out in hotsprings all day, and I wouldn't die, but it would probably get old after a while, and I probably wouldn't be that comfortable. So I scrapped the whole idea.

Some highlights from the weekend and the first part of the week are:
1. Actually went out to bars for first time this year, and got to know some classmates other than Luke.
2. Found a bar that sells Irish Car Bombs for a decent price, then spent the next day terribly hung over (actually I only had one car bomb, but it was a highlight of the night).

Jerry invited me to spend New Year's Eve (Wednesday) with his family, and naturally I took him up on it. In the morning I went to get eggs because I knew the woman I buy my eggs from was about to close up for a few days. The first time I ever bought eggs from her, she burst out laughing when I spoke Chinese, but that must have just been a weak moment because I think she's actually really nice. A stranger came up to me the other day while I was buying eggs (to talk to me because I'm American) and chatted at me for a long time (apparently he was 70 and his head had been opened twice and he was a soilder and construction worker when he was younger but now teaches some thing to do with the oceans, or something like that) and after he left the woman I buy my eggs from asked me if I knew him, so I launched into the whole story, and we chatted for a while. She asked if I had been back to the states since I'd been here and, when I said I hadn't, she asked where I had been for a while. Then I realized I had gone to Thailand, and that was what she was talking about. It was nice to realized I'd been missed by the woman I buy eggs from. Anyway, on New Years Eve when I bought eggs from her she threw in a small cake-like muffin with the eggs. It was neon pink, really good, and very moist (I think it had been steamed). So that made my morning.

After I got back I took the bus to Jerry's house, early enough to watch the end of a movie with him. Then we drove over to his Uncle's house were the shin-dig was going to take place. Right as we got there they were finishing up a small ceremony with the food. They had it all laid out on a table, and I assumed it was all for us, and we were about to start eating. Then Jerry's dad told me it was for the ancestor's so then I thought it was their's. Then, after they finished the ceremony, they started taking the food downstairs, and I realized the food wasn't completely for their ancestors. It was the ancestor's for a little while, then when the ancestors got done with it, it was ours to eat. Among the goodies were: a whole fish (aside from spicing and cooking it there appeared to be no preparation at all, it was served with the head, tail, and skin on, which was fine, but serving it turned out a little difficult because flaky fish is hard to pick up with chopsticks), a whole pig thigh (I think the skin was still on), and a whole duck (which had been feathered, but all it's appendages were still attached). I, however, couldn't eat any of those so they whipped up some veggie dishes for me, such as: bamboo slivers, cabbage, brown hard boiled eggs (I'm pretty sure they were boiled in tea, giving them the brown color), some sort of green beans, and something else which was good (and had been ok'd as vegetarian) but which I couldn't hazard a guess as to what it was. One of the best things were some beans. They looked exactly like black beans (same shape, size, and color), but were sweet. Deliciously sweet.

The actual meal was pretty interesting, if nothing else it was the most crowded around a table I've ever been. We (I think there were about 12 or 13 total) were sitting around a circular table, about 5' in diameter. Basically, everyone got their own bowl, and just grabbed anything they wanted (and could pick up) with their chopsticks. I did fine with everything, but I had to get some help with grabbing the hardboiled eggs, I'm not quite that adept yet. The table itself, aside from being surrounded with people, was also completely covered with food. When they brought out the special vegetarian stuff there was barely room to put it, and I ended up with no room to put my bowl, which was OK, because I spent most of the time shoveling food into my mouth (in a polite manner).

After dinner we went into the other room, started watching TV and eating some more. At first they brought out some unique peanuts, which were delicious. They were like no peanuts I'd ever eaten before. From the outside they looked like regular peanuts (except some of them had 4 nuts per shell), but when you cracked open the shell, instead of the individual nuts being wrapped in little red paper like substance, they were wrapped in little black paper like substance. And more importantly they were sweet. After we about polished off the peanuts, they brought out some plum tea, oranges, apples, and cherries. All in all it was an amazing feast.

After Jerry dropped me off at my house in the evening the fireworks began, and they continued, fairly constantly, for the next 3-4 days, regardless of the time of day or night. Apparently not all of the fireworks are just nice to look at, they are also to scare away the demons of the New Year, and because of this, some fireworks dropped all pretense of being pretty, and were just really loud. Because the fireworks kept going so long, and were pretty consistent, sometimes at night it felt like a war zone. Except a war zone without terror or danger, just lots of loud noises.

On Sunday night I went down to Yilan (about 1.5 hours away from Taipei, on the west coast of the island) for a Toga Party. Last year Luke taught English in the area, with a Fulbright program, and still had some friends there. The party not only gave me the opportunity to wear a toga (a personal first), but I got to see the fireworks from the roof of some friends' apartment building, which was very enjoyable, and sort of exciting because almost all of the fireworks were set off by regular people so they were coming from all directions. If you saw a flash, you had to turn as quick as you could to try to see the actual fireworks.

On the way back to Taipei, the next day, we stopped at a hotspring. It was the first commercial one I'd ever been to, but it was pretty cool. Before we went, Ben described it as a 'wonderland' and I think it completely lived up to the description. Basically, everything they had from saunas to hot tubs, came in a bunch of different flavors. They had the regular fruit flavors like orange, but the also had flavors like 'Chinese Medicine', 'white liquor', 'milk', and surprisingly 'sulfur' (which was neon yellow, but didn't actually smell very much like sulfur). They also had a 'hot rock' (a hot rock that people lie on, pretty straightforward really), a small heated fish pool (which people sat in and got nibbled on by fish), and a killer water slide in to a hot tub (which I went down twice before stopping to read the sign at the top that says you have to be under 140 cm, which I was disappointed about because I'm about 190 cm).