As many of you probably know, it is not in fact the year of the dragon, that was last year. (This year is the year of the snake, also called "little dragon" as a consolation prize for being just a few feet away from being the luckiest animal in the Chinese calendar.) However, as many of you also know, I am painfully behind on my blogging, a whole year behind in fact, so as I am currently in Penghu sharing the new New Year with my roommate and her family, I will also take this opportunity to share about the old New Year with my family.
Last year, I was invited up to Taipei to spend the holiday with my three Canadian friends, Bree, Luc, and Tyson. As an added bonus, I also got to stay with my American friend, Sarah (you remember her, right? the girl I met at the American embassy in Hong Kong).
This was my first trip to Taipei, and also my first experience of the Chinese New Year hoards that descend upon any interesting location in the country during that time. See, traditionally if you are married then the family lives with the husband's parents so you eat with them the first day, then everyone travels to the wife's family's house on the second. Today, many grandparents still live with their children but not necessarily the husband's, so you just travel to whomever’s family you don’t live with. So that takes care of two or three days; then, once everyone has eaten and played mahjong to their heart's content, they decide they better go sight-seeing, which is fine except that you now have millions of people going to the exact same places at the exact same time!!!
As you know, I am not great with hoards (I even get nervous in Wal-Mart during peak hours, you never know when they might start a stampede and, let's face it, no one wants to get trampled to death) and for added fun I was unknowingly incubating a fairly nasty fever that pounced me from behind like a voracious wolverine (too much?) on the third day, both conspiring to make parts of the trip not-so-fun for all involved. But let's focus on the good, shall we? Hoards and wolverines aside, it was a great trip and these, after all, are MY memoirs so if choose to remember in a rosy hue, that's my right, right?
Right. We four took the high speed rail up to the Taipei station (first time on Taiwan's HSR, but it really just felt like a train); now, in Kahosiung, the main station is a tiny, two-storey building ideal for meeting people, so I had suggested to Sarah that we met up in Taipei's main station. Bad idea. It is a multi-storey, circular building infested with shopping malls, cafeterias, lockers, and crowds, so it took a while to find each other. Then we all went out to lunch and dropped bags off, etc., and hit the town.
First stop was the Chang Kai-shek Memorial Hall where we all wandered around, looking at strangely decorated dogs and pointy buildings. The Hall is also next to the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall, so you can tick two of Taiwan’s founding fathers off your list in one fell-swoop (mixed my metaphors a bit there, but hey, a bird in the hand, in time saves nine).
The Chang Kai-shek Memorial Hall is a round, white-stone building with a traditional blue roof that looks suspiciously like the Temple of Heaven in Beijing because Nationalists wanted to remind everyone that they were brining the glory of China with them when they left (if I ever get around to writing about my life in China, you’ll see what I mean). There were guards standing around the bronze Chang Kai-shek statue and there was a great view of the rest of the square from the top of the marble stairs.
In contrast to the fairly drab Chang Kai-shek Memorial Hall, the Sun Yat-Sen Memorial Hall was a vibrant red and yellow against the gray sky, fashioned after a traditional Confucian temple. Inside, we saw a bronze statue of Sun Yat-sen and watched the changing of the guards.
The next day we got up and went to the National Palace Museum. Here we found our first real crowds. Outside the museum tour buses, mostly from Mainland China, lined the parking lot. In the museum there are two very famous pieces of jade: a white cabbage and a sphere within a sphere. Both were carved out of one piece of jade, and are apparently exquisite pieces of art. (There’s also a famous stone in the shape of some braised pork, no joke.) I would put pictures up here, but I didn’t get a chance to see them. There were lines of people circling the entire showroom twice just to get a glimpse of these small bits of jade. That look like cabbage.
We hid ourselves in the neglected archives area of the museum where there was an amazing exhibit on the Treaty of Nanjing as well as other documents relevant to nineteenth- century political history between Britain and China! We spent hours there looking at all the documents, thus neatly avoiding the tourists cowering around bits of rock upstairs.
"Why is Chinese (not Taiwanese) history in Taiwan's National Palace Museum?" you may well ask. Well, when the great Chang Kai-shek fled Beijing leading the Nationalists to Taiwan in the early twentieth century, he took loads of documents and artifacts from the Imperial Palace with him. This is actually a good thing, because they may well have been destroyed during the Cultural Revolution in China had they remained behind. This is also why Taiwan’s status is so confusing. Taiwan is the Republic of China because everyone figured they have all of China’s imperial stuff and they’re Chinese people, so they’re China; but China, aka the People’s Republic of China, says China’s China because, well, they’re in China. But they also claim that Taiwan is China’s too, which is where it gets blurry because Taiwan says they’re China, but that they’re not China’s China….(P.S. It was Taiwan's 100th birthday the year I arrived, 2011!)
That night we decided to take a train and go up to a little village called Mao Kong to get some traditional tea and look out over the mountains. We then took a cable car up the hill so we could look out at the scenery as we went up. Unfortunately, it was so crowded that we had to buy a ticket for a ride up after it was already dark, but we enjoyed the ride anyway. Then we wandered around until we found a tea shop and we all sat down to lovely tea and ate the best kungpao chicken I’ve had since Beijing.
That night I stayed up late with Sarah and watched some Taiwanese movies then crashed on the couch. Bree and Luc went hiking the next day so Sarah and I took the opportunity to visit another little village, Jiufen.
Jiufen is beautiful with rolling green mountains overlooking the sea. We spent much of the day walking up and down the hilly village roads and dodging other tourists.
We also toured brightly colored, ornately decorated temples.
There were old bookstores
to peruse, cafes, and night market stalls located down the windy, cobblestone
alleys.
The alleys were full of craftsmen like this man who makes and paints his own ocarinas in various shapes and sizes. There were also tons of cats lurking about.
Then we had some tangyuan (soup balls made of yam, taro, and potato) that are traditional snacks around Chinese New Year because they represent long life.
We waited until dark to see all the lights come up in the village and headed home. As we made our way back to Taipei, we went down the road to catch our bus, but there were so many people the line for the next bus wrapped around the hill! 
Next day, the fever had really started to kick in. My feet felt so heavy that I could hardly walk; I felt as though I had weights attached to my ankles. We still managed to pack in a full day, however, starting at the Taipei 101.
This was the tallest building in the world for a few years (and difficult to photograph in its entirety) until the one in Dubai was completed. We took an elevator up to the top and walked around the exhibition hall to look out on the city.
Then we headed to the bus stop to catch a ride to yet another village called Pingxi, home to the biggest Lantern Festival in Taiwan. The Lantern Festival is on the 15th day of the first lunar month, but Pingxi has lanterns for weeks after the New Year. This was the most crowded place I think I’ve ever been (outside of Beijing). There was a huge stage set up with performances, a night market selling snacks and souvenirs, and, of course, lanterns. As you walk along the crowded street or stop along the highway, you can purchase paper lanterns to send up.
You’re supposed to write your hopes for the coming year and a few wishes for luck, fortune, health, etc., for your family. Some people used traditional ink and brush, but the majority (us included) just used Sharpies.There were tens of thousands of people (literally) but very few tables, so we improvised.
After a few false starts, we got all of our lanterns to go up. If they don't burst into flame and come straight back down again, it's a good sign. (They do fall pretty soon after you send them up, but catching fire isn't particularly lucky as you can imagine.) I thought it was kinda dangerous, but they have lantern-retrievers with big sticks to get the fallen paper out of the trees and power lines. All of our lanterns made it past the tree line (that's mine flying in the photo above) and fizzled out safely, promising an auspicious year of the dragon. (Below are some not-so-auspicious lanterns we saw!)
We released our lanterns in the afternoon, but stuck around til it was dark, that’s when the official lantern release is. Hundreds of beautiful, glowing red lanterns are sent up into the stars while traditional music is played from the stage. Everyone oohs and aahs, then crowds back on the buses to leave. We decided to get in line for the bus before the big release so we could watch the lanterns while we waited (my camera battery died at this point…how appropriate). Two hours waiting for the bus!!! That was because we were picky and decided to wait for seats on the bus, standing room would’ve been about an hour, but the bus ride was about a couple hours, so we decided we could spend two hours standing in line watching lanterns, then sit for two hours on the way home.
We decided to save some money and take a sleeper bus instead of the High Speed Rail back to Kaohsiung. The seats have recliners, individual TVs, and little trays! (I did the voice recording for the stop announcements for the economy U-Bus line that travels all around Taiwan. I’ve actually heard myself on it since then. Yes, if you fly to Taiwan and take a cheap bus, you too can ignore my voice saying in an overly happy and soothing manner: “Kaohsiung Main Station”. Now I know what it’s like to be famous!)
And that was it for our Chinese New Year adventure. Stay tuned next year for this year’s Chinese New Year update!!!
