Moon Festival

We were planning on visiting Taroko National Park during the holiday long weekend of the Moon Festival, but a typhoon came in so we had to change our plans. Instead, we headed down south to Kaohsiung (the second largest city in Taiwan). We met up with some Taiwanese friends from Tiachung who have a cottage in that area. We met them in Kaohsiung, at a mall with a giant Ferris wheel on the roof (we didn't go for a ride though). We all went to check out the Love River. It's a popular river in the city and you can take a boat ride on it. It was described as a paddle/row boat, but it was just a boat that they pile on a bunch of people on. There was no rowing involved, it had a fully functioning engine.

The river was pretty busy that night, probably because Florentijn Hofman's giant inflatable rubber duck, a.k.a Duckzilla, was in Taiwan (it died in a 6.3 earthquake we had here recently). The flocks of people over this duck was absurd. We were there during the night, and even while on a boat on the river, you could see all the camera flashes going off from the people taking pictures. Even the Love River tour boat was advertising that you could get a view of it from the boat ride.

This was the view of the actual duck from the boat while touring the river at night.

After touring the Love River, we headed to Kaohsiung's largest night market. It's not much different than any other night market, other than the fact that it is larger and more crowded. You have more vendors selling the same things, but you do have a bit more selection when it comes to your arcade games. We wanted to test our strength so we found a punching machine. This scene reminds me of an episode in Dragonball Z (I had a younger brother so I have actually seen all of this show) where the characters want to enter a fighting tournament and they need to punch a machine to get a number which put them in a particular category. I will admit that according to this machine my strength was puny; I just wouldn't compete at Vegeta's level.

After eating, punching, and more eating, we headed to our friend's cottage for the night. The next morning we all grabbed something for breakfast and headed out to a small town called Meinong where we learned to make tea. We paired up and got a bowl with about 18 different ingredients in it. We were also given a large stick to squish the ingredients together, we did this for about an hour. This helped build strength in my arms.

After that, you add in some green powder and mix that for another while. Once all the ingredients are all mixed together, you take some of your concoction and put it in a small bowl and add hot water and dried rice things (they looked and tasted like rice crispies), and finally, you eat it. I don't think this falls under the category of tea, but that's what everyone kept calling it. You must be sure not to be wasteful, so use a brush to clean the bowl out of any remnants and eat it.

This tea making shop also had costumes you can wear for either pictures or during the tea making process. Here, Matthew is trying to make it look like he's a traditional and serious emperor, but I think he just looks miserable. What do you say?

Once we got Matthew to cheer up a little, we went to a paper making place and we hand painted our own fans. I wated to paint an umbrella, but it would be difficult and a little awkward to bring back to Canada with us, so I painted a fan as well. It was a lot of fun. I would suggest you have a plan of what you are going to paint before starting because mine it just blobs of colour as I had no idea what I wanted to paint. Matthew decided he would tell our story of coming to Taiwan on his fan. I think they will be proudly displayed on our walls when we get back to Canada. It was starting to get close to dinner time so we all decided to head back to Taichung. It was the Moon Festival after all, so it calls for a barbecue. We got to one of our friend's home and they had tables and chairs set out and had these small portable barbecues set out in the streets. It was a lot of fun and we ate so many new items. Some things were way too spicy, other things were just plain weird, but a lot of it was good. Matthew and I also ate a ton a vegetables, but one in particular, I don't know what it's called, but you had to peel it like you would corn, except it was all white; it was really good. We only knew a few people at the barbecue, but there were all kinds of other people we hadn't ever met, and when I asked our friend, she didn't even know who some of the other people were, she just assumed they were firends of someone else at the barbecue. For all we know, they could have been strangers off of the street. We ate and drank until we could do no more and then we went bowling.

After bowling we did some exploring and Matthew wanted to try something exotic, so we went looking for snake. We went to a shop/restaurant where you can buy dishes with snake meat (they have the live snakes right next to the cooking area). While we were there, the shop owners were so amazed with Matthew (because he's a white man) that while we were waiting for our snake meat dishes, they offered him some shots of snake's blood.

The shop owners kept saying that it was really expensive and something about health benefits, but that really only applies if you believe in the whole Chinese medicine stuff. Matthew said that the snake's blood was so diluted in alcohol that you couldn't really taste anything else. But hey, at leat he can say he's had it before.









After getting our take-out snake meat, we headed to an outdoor restaurant with the group. Yes, we were eating again. Everyone order a ton of food, and we all shared, although, no one wanted to try the snake meat dishes. We had it in the form of a stir-fry and a soup. The snake meat itself was so fried that it tasted like any other fried meat. Matthew of course, ordered more snails while I stuck to my sashimi.

The next day we all decided to hit up the batting cages. I was so excited as I had wanted to do this since the summer before leaving Canada and never got the chance. Ottawa doesn't have any batting cages, so I would have had to go all the way to Toronto, but when I do go to Toronto there is always a reason and I never seemed to have the extra time to go for fun. Matthew and I had gone down to Windsor to visit my family and Detroit has some batting cages, but again, between not having enough time and a boy who seems to be afraid to enter Detroit, I missed that opportunity as well. I had to come all the way to Taiwan for my darn batting cage and I'll tell you one thing, it was hard. A lot of the cages were just way too fast, not quite MLB fast, but too fast for even Matthew. However, there were some people there who managed to hit every ball, and I was certainly impressed. For my 25 shots, I missed every single one. I found some much slower cages and tried those ones. It was much better as I managed to actually hit a few, but I really suck at baseball.

Matthew and I also entered a basketball competition (it wasn't really a competition but they called it that - I don't even know if there were any prizes to be won, but they did have a speaker making the announcements). I'm a lot better at throwing basketballs into a net than hitting a ball with a bat. We did some other random things that day and headed home the next morning. Even though it wasn't what we had in mind when starting that weekend, it was a lot of fun; we learned many new things and it was well worth it.