Lanterns, Night Markets, and a Birthday

I've been in Taiwan for more than a month and in my apartment for almost 2 weeks! That means that the "everything is new" awe I had when I first arrived is being replaced by a feeling of ownership (now I have "my neighborhood" and "my campus") and growing friendships.

But first I promised to talk about the Lantern Festival. Two weeks ago the plazas surrounding Sun Yat-sen (the first president of the Republic of China in 1912) Memorial Hall filled up with lanterns and people. There were some old-fashioned, round paper lanterns like the kind I had been expecting hanging from the eaves of Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall itself, but mostly the lanterns were huge and shaped like cows/oxen (because 2009 is the year of the cow/ox) or pandas (because the Taipei Zoo is incredibly proud of their two pandas) and they were arranged on floats like parade floats. Most of the floats were created by elementary, junior, or high schools while a few were sponsored by businesses. Some of them were cute, many were strange, and all of them were entertaining. I went to the Lantern Festival with Tiffany one night and with Amanda and my host mom the next. It was really cool to participate in a traditional Taiwanese festival and admire the lanterns with hundreds of other people!

And now for another promise: night markets. One of my favorite things to do with friends (Tiffany, my church friends (who are Indonesian, Colombian, and Taiwanese), and my new friends Ulla, from Finland, and Maren, from Germany) is go to night markets. Taiwan is famous for its night markets: sprawling open-air markets that offer a dazzling array of clothes, trinkets, and food until about midnight. A night market includes established shops whose wares (shoes packaged in plastic wrap so they don't get dirty, t-shirts plastered with broken English, cell phone accessories, and umbrellas) spill out onto the streets, some of which become pedestrian-only while in others cars and scooters weave their way through the crowds. Some brave/crazy people set up shop in the middle of the street, selling sweatshirts off of blankets. Most importantly, night markets feature hundreds of carts from which entrepreneurs sell culinary specialties such as fried dumplings (careful! these are so hot that they will literally burn the skin off the roof of your mouth and make your mouth hurt for a week), candied strawberries and cherry tomatoes on a stick (I would not recommend the tomatoes- I still don't buy into the Taiwanese view that they're a fruit and thus a dessert), pig skin (tastes sort of like pork but is really chewy), pork sandwiches (they carve the meat off of a hanging carcass after you order), wraps with veggies, dried meat powder, and cilantro (a popular Taiwanese flavor), fluffy cakes smaller than your palm with red bean paste inside them (which is actually really good and might just convince me that red bean is a dessert- though red bean ice cream is still pretty weird), Taiwanese hamburgers (the "bun" is fluffy and white and inside there's meat, veggies, and cilantro), a flaky, crunchy sesame roll with a sweet filling, little donut hole-type things with vanilla pudding inside, and my favorite- deep fat fried mushrooms! You can choose from several kinds of mushrooms that I've never seen before, and they fry them up fresh while you wait and then shake a kind of cajun powder on them. You eat them out of a little McDonald's fries-type bag with a toothpick. Delicious!

I've been to four different night markets so far. The most famous one in Taipei- Shilin- was so crowded the first time I went that most of the time we couldn't move at all because of the pedestrian traffic jam. It's in situations like that (and rush hour on the metro) that I really like being a head taller than most people here so I can see and breathe above the crowd. Shilin also has a covered market which reminds me of the market in Antigua, Guatemala except that this one features an arcade and a pet store with adorable puppies in deplorable conditions- puppies that are too young crowded into cages that are too small. Gongguan and Shida are night markets in downtown Taipei near two of the best universities in Taiwan (my school, Chengchi Daxue, ranks with them in the top three) that have a fun, young atmosphere and aren't as crowded as Shilin. My favorite store (so far) in Taipei is in the Gongguan night market- it's a stationary store with cute cards and notebooks and post-its and on and on. I could spend hours just browsing. =) I also went to a night market in Shulin, the town where Amanda's teacher lives (a 45 min. train ride away from Taipei). I liked that night market a lot because it felt authentic- the whole town, young and old, comes out at night to walk through the streets and eat dinner or a snack from the food carts.

So, more about my friends: I spent last Thursday with my friend Tiffany and 5 of her friends (2 girls and 3 guys) and practiced Chinese (mostly listening!) for 11 hours with them. First we went to Yingge, a town a 40 min. train ride away from Taipei that's famous for its pottery and its cobblestone "Old Street" which reminds me a little of Europe. We had lunch (beef and noodle soup) and then made our own pottery (each person sat at their own potter's wheel). I made a big coffee mug that will be glazed espresso brown with a golden stripe in the middle. The pottery place will send us our pieces once they're fired. After wandering through Yingge a little, we headed back to Taipei to the "Apartment Cafe," which reminds me of the Tea Room in Siena, my favorite hangout there, because it has a cozy atmosphere. We sat downstairs on the patio (next to old bookcases filled with old books) and I ordered a pot of Earl Gray milk tea and shared a waffle topped with honey, fruit, and whipped cream with Tiffany. Then we shared a birthday cake that Tiffany had bought for me (it was called "Gateau boston au chocolat" and had chocolate mousse inside) and they even lit 4 candles on top -2 each for 22- and sang Happy Birthday to me in Chinese! They also gave me a birthday card that Tiffany had made and in which everyone had written a message in English. It was all really sweet.

I also love to hang out with the friends I've made at church: Joni, Felly, Teo, Harki, Tetuko, and Tirza (all Indonesian), Lisa, Sandy, Ashley (Taiwanese), and Daniel (Colombian). I met some of them my first week at church but it wasn't until Valentine's Day when Lisa's parents May and Jack invited me over with other students/young people that I really got to know them. We had so much fun- we each had to introduce ourselves in our second language so I had to use Chinese, though most of the day I spoke English (since some of the Indonesian students just came to Taiwan in September to study engineering in English and so they don't speak much Chinese yet). A few people brought guitars and Tirza played piano and we had a Valentine's themed sing-along with love songs like The Lion King's "Can you feel the love tonight?" Haha it was awesome- I've always said that I wished I lived in an era where friends just gathered around the piano to sing together, and that's what we did! Then we played Pictionary in English, which was hilarious not only because of poor drawing skills (like mine!) but because nobody but me was a native English speaker, and so when the word was "graffiti" everyone drew giraffes (I've never realized how alike those words look!). Next we had a huge dinner with homemade Taiwanese dishes and Domino's pizza (I had a piece of the Supreme and it tasted basically like pizza in the States). Lastly we played a game I'd never played before- it's like Charades meets Telephone. I suggested we make it a competition, so we formed two lines facing the front door, and the last two people in line turned around and read a word that Jack had written down. Then they each tapped the next person in line who turned around and watched the first people try to act out the word. Those people then tapped the next person and tried to imitate the first people acting out the word. And so the charade traveled down the line until the last person in line had to guess what the word was. It sounds a little confusing, and it is, as we learned when the word "Batman" ended up looking like a crying penguin. Don't ask me how that happened- we each blamed the person before us in line!

A few of us got together this past weekend to go to "Video Games Live": the biggest video game music concert ever, performed by the Taipei Symphony Orchestra and Chorus. It was a free outdoor concert at Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall, in a plaza between several impressive temple-looking buildings with red roofs that commemorate Taiwan's former dictator and head of the Kuomingtang government. My favorite songs were a Mario Brothers sequence (classic) and the theme to Metal Gear (sad epic tune with battle drums). Then on my birthday, this past Monday the 23rd, eight of us went out to dinner at Forkers, one of my favorite restaurants here. When Tiffany introduced me and Amanda to this awesome burger-and-salad place a few weeks ago we met the owner, Joe, and found out he's half American and half Canadian, which explains why Forkers food tastes like good Western food (unlike the "Italian noodles" that are served everywhere but don't taste Italian). We laughed our way through dinner as we tend to do and they gave me a cute birthday card shaped like a castle that they had all signed and sang Happy Birthday to me in Indonesian, Spanish, Chinese, and English! A linguistics major's dream! I had made chocolate-covered strawberries for dessert so we ate those at a picnic table on the patio. It was awesome celebrating my 22nd birthday with them! One of my prayers before coming to Taiwan was that I would have friends to celebrate my birthday with and God definitely answered my prayer.

I'll have to talk about my apartment, neighborhood, and campus (classes start on Monday by the way) in the next post. Until then, I'll leave you with words I read everyday: my sheets say "Memory, Beauty," my comforter says "Lucky. Your Confidence," and my pillow says "True Love is Power, Forget Not Your Friends."