Dihua Street Holiday Market: Year of the Dragon

So I have a camera again. Brendan  dug out his old pro Canon EOS 350D, found the old memory card and charger for it, and has been letting me lug it around town to take lots of great pictures.

The upside is that unlike my old camera, which was good but not the best, this is a real pro machine. They say that it's not what camera you use, it's who's behind the camera (incidentally, they say the same thing about professional musical instruments), and there's a lot of truth to that. On the other hand, I'm still me. Same woman behind the camera, and yet, the photos I've been taking with this giant hulk of a machine are worlds better than what I got out of my dinky little camera. I mean, check out the depth of focus on that first shot. I couldn't do that with my old camera.

The downside is that this thing is heavy and conspicuous. No more quietly taken from-the-hip candids or quick shots. Everyone in a ten mile radius can see that THIS WHITE GIRL IS TAKING A PICTURE. This leads to more posed faces, although I appreciate that people make goofy faces instead of smiling moronically. It's definitely heavier than I'd like. I can't just throw it in my purse. Heck, it doesn't even fit in my messenger bag!

But, it is what it is and I do enjoy the privilege of using a good, solid camera for the time being. It's good enough that in the future, even after I get a tiny digital camera again, I'll probably take it out for fun.        

My first round with this camera was on Dihua Street. We went to the holiday market yesterday - I naively thought that being a weekday afternoon, the crowds wouldn't be so choking. I was wrong. I'm terrified of what it will be like on Saturday. We have the week off and precious little to do other than painting our apartment, so we bought some snacks to enjoy, which will help it feel like it's really Chinese New Year for us and we're celebrating in some small way.

Any foreigner stuck in Taipei on CNY with nothing to do would do well to visit the market before Monday - it'll infuse you with a bit of holiday spirit. Assuming you are OK with crowds, of course.

Everything is sold here, from snack food you can eat right away to canned and jarred goods to dried snacks - the dried vegetables, especially the garlic cloves, are a favorite of mine to ingredients to cook full meals to pre-cooked packed food to clothing to housewares to decorations.

I'm guessing a lot of this stuff gets purchased to either feed relatives descending on one's house while they wait for dinner or watch CNY television specials or is bought by the descending relatives themselves to add to the feast ("Hi Grandma! We brought egg tarts!").

This reminds me of my own family Christmases where we'd show up at Grandma's with cookies, a bowl of hummus, cheese and sausage or whatever else we felt we should contribute. I always made the hummus.

My first run up the street, with Brendan, the camera bag and my purse - and our purchases - in tow, wasn't that fruitful. After leaving Brendan at a coffeeshop - the one outside that's attached to Yongle fabric market - with our bags, I went back up with just my two hands, empty pockets and the camera and did much better.

 

One thing you can usually see a lot of at the market - as anywhere that's crowded in Taiwan - are people with their small dogs. I'm not sure how the dogs deal with the crowds, but they generally don't seem to mind. Once, I saw a cat at this market. Not a stray cat, mind you, but a couple who brought their giant fluffy orange-and-white cat with huge green eyes to the Dihua holiday market and carried him around like a dog. I can guess what the cat thought of this.

The vendors that sell everything from red envelopes to vacuum-packed squid to peanuts - we bought some of these fiery fried peanuts in seasoned chili powder  (YUM) often wear costumes. These run from the relatively tame qipao dresses that the peanut ladies are wearing to full-on costume insanity.

My personal favorite are the promoters who dress up like the thing that their stands are selling and loudly point you to where you can buy a non-anthropomorphic version of them. My least favorite are the ones who just stand there with a megaphone or bullhorn extolling the virtues of buying their dried squid over, say, A-chen's down the road.

In previous years, I'd thought of the crowds at Dihua Street to be a detriment, not a bonus. This year, as I was riding the human wave with just my camera, it finally hit me - no, this is what the holiday market is all about. It's no fun if it's not crowded. OK, it could be slightly less crowded, but I think a bit of a glut of people is what makes it so much fun. When I was in China, we went to a similar, but smaller, market in Sichuan (we traveled overland from Chengdu back to Guizhou and had a blast along the way). It had people but wasn't crowded. It wasn't nearly as much fun. That was nice, but Dihua Street is the real deal.

Even when crossing the street is an ordeal!

The dried goods are my personal favorite. Dried vegetables - which you can eat like potato chips as you lie to yourself pretending that they are healthy (they are not - they're dried, yes, and they're vegetables, but somewhere in the process they had unholy relations with a deep fryer and never looked back. Fortunately the deep-fryer/vegetable love child is a tasty little morsel). I bought a bunch of these and plan sit on my ever-fattening ass all week when I'm not painting, nom nom nomming on their delicious goodness. My favorites are the mushrooms, apples and garlic cloves.

I plan to write later - possibly later today, seeing as my class postponed and my Chinese New Year vacation began yesterday - about the times when I feel like I'm in a liminal space as an expat. Christmas is one of those times. Elections are another. Chinese New Year is a third. Major events that I can't participate in the way I would back home, or the way people do here. I can recognize them, watch them, be a part of them in a very borderline way but in the end they serve to highlight the ways in which I am not totally a part of any one society of people, and I think that might be true of most expats.

So, going to the holiday market helps me feel less liminal, less borderline, less nominal, less whatever-Latin-term-for-there-but-only-on-the-edges.

It helps that everyone there is in a festive mood. It lifts my spirits and makes me feel more welcome, more participative. One thing that is universal is festivity. You see cute things:

You get free samples:

Dihua Street's market is all about the samples - you could fill up on them just walking down the street. Everything that's not in a can, jar or bottle has a sample on offer, and even stuff that is packed up is often put out in little cups or with toothpicks, or brewed if it's a drink for you to try. No - really no - obligation to buy.

You get lost in the crowd:

You see some interesting things:

...and you can pick up a few new items to munch on or for your apartment. It's a great time to update or add to dishware and other housewares. Good selection and a lot of it is affordable Japanese-style ceramic or china which is fun and funky to use at home.

So, with that, I'll leave you with a few more photos. Something to enjoy if you didn't make it to the market this year, or you just don't want to go because it's too crowded.

Enjoy!

New Year's in Taipei

Happy New Year everyone! I am sure some of the fantastic photographers blogging from Taiwan got better shots than me, but I thought I'd put this up anyway for friends and family back home.

 We used our  gorgeous tatami tea room to eat dinner (Thai basil chicken with brown rice) make tea (泡福壽山高山烏龍的老人茶) and catch up with our friends Cathy and Alex.

One of the great things about living where we do is that we can walk right up to a good view of 101 with minimal hassle - 10 minutes up Da'an Road, maybe 20 coming back. No muss, no fuss!

It's a bit far, but a good perspective from which to see how far back the crowd stretches every year.

We saw Cathy and Alex off on Xinyi Road, where they caught the train back to their place. We came home and enjoyed a quiet cute-couple moment with glasses of Bailey's. I bought the glasses, which look clear but actually have the slightest hint of Depression glass yellow in them, at Aphrodite: currently my #2 favorite secondhand/antique/thrift/vintage shop in Taipei. The other is near Guting.  (Aphrodite is in Neihu just next to where Minquan Bridge lets off, walkable from Costco).

A blurry shot. I expected more of a show, this being the 101st year of the ROC (not Taiwan!) and Taipei 101 and all...it was pretty average. Still nice though, especially as the view is now walking distance from my place without horrendous crowds.

Happy 2012!

I'll Not Be Home For Christmas

...in which I admit I'm a total sucker for the holidays. Including the cheesy music and glittery decorations.

I love Taiwan, but it can get a little depressing around here between Thanksgiving and Christmas, when the weather is almost uniformly crap and the only places that decorate or really do anything for the holidays are the department stores, Starbucks and IKEA - and the Holiday Inn Shenkeng, as I've recently discovered. I've been known to peruse IKEA just for the holiday music and goods, and go to Starbucks even though I don't particularly like their coffee, just to get an infusion of holiday spirit.

Yes, of course, it's clear that Christmas is not a local holiday and I can't expect it to really be celebrated in Taiwan, but well-decked halls are a part of not only my culture but also my life, since childhood. It's hard to go without them. It's hard to watch the streets go by from a bus window, with overcast skies - no snow, of course - and no decorations in sight. Going out into Taipei City at this time of year is like preparing for a sad little Holiday of One (now Two).

Joseph, Becca and Alex at Thanksgiving

I'm all about the cheesy music, plastic garlands and shiny ornaments and lights hanging from everything in sight. I don't even mind that half the time it's done in an attempt to get you in the spirit to buy more stuff - maybe it's the result of being totally in love with Christmas but having a very secular moral code. To me, Christmas is about family - which includes shopping carefully to find them gifts that will bring them joy* (or spending time making them, which I have also done). It also involves baking cookies with my mom and sister, going out to the fire department's Christmas Tree sale in a shopping center parking lot to pick out a tree, always a real tree, the livingroom redolent of evergreen as the cats sized it up as a climbing post, visiting Grandma and burning wrapping paper in the fireplace, watching the flames catch the dye and change color.

In Taiwan I don't have the chance to do any of this. No real tree, no fireplace, and this year is the first one in which baking cookies is a real option. Sometimes I feel like I drink Toffee Nut Lattes - which I'm not even all that fond of, if I'm going to drink a gussied up holiday beverage I'd go for gingerbread latte or peppermint mocha or good ol' egg nog, but those aren't things you can get in Taipei - just to pretend it's good enough to make up for what I don't have.

And that's just it - most of the time, living abroad is great, but this is the one time of year when it's not quite so great. Christmas in Taipei is not the same as Christmas in a city that actually celebrates, and definitely not the same as going home for Christmas. All of the traditions Brendan and I have adopted for Christmas are great, and I love that we have our own little family unit with our own way of doing things on the holidays, but my childhood always included larger family gatherings on Christmas and Thanksgiving and it's hard not to have that every year. The party is great, but it doesn't quite adequately substitute what the holidays are back home: in part because it's not family, in part because the weather is all wrong, in part because the run-up to the holiday is so devoid of holiday cheer everywhere except in my own apartment and at Starbucks.

There is something really missing in that lack of a feeling of communal celebration. Something about the holidays is made richer by knowing that your friends, neighbors and extended acquaintances are celebrating too. I guess I have an inkling now of how it might feel to celebrate Channukah in a community that isn't very Jewish, or Chinese New Year in a community where you might be the only Chinese (or Taiwanese, or Singaporean) family celebrating. It's true for both Christmas and Thanksgiving.

Of course, we do have some holiday traditions that we've built up in Taipei. It's not a complete wash. We put up a plastic tabletop tree - pretending, again, that it's good enough - and put gifts for each other under it. We stuff stockings because - why not? I play Christmas music on iTunes and buy foods that remind me of the holidays at City Super and IKEA (Glogg!). This year I'll invite people over to bake cookies. Every year we throw a Christmas party on Christmas Day for other expats at loose ends - some years big, some years smaller. I never take pictures because I'm generally enjoying myself too much to remember my camera, and anyway, what happens at the Christmas Party stays at the Christmas Party.

Thanksgiving Beijing Duck with Cathy and Alex

I love that Brendan and I have our own way of celebrating Christmas now that we're a family unit. I love that this year we get to celebrate in our new apartment, which I'm hoping to have painted and decorated by the time the holiday comes around. It's not quite the same, though, as being near family - everything I associate Christmas with includes family gatherings, big or small (more often than not "big").

Which, you know, is how expats have been doing it ever since the dawn of expats. I'm not the first to feel like I'm celebrating alone, to spend the day with friends rather than family. I'm not the first to get a little misty-eyed when I'll Be Home For Christmas plays, not the first to throw a big party in a land far, far away in lieu of a family gathering at home, and definitely not the first to put up a plastic tree and proclaim it "good enough".

On Thanksgiving we get whatever size group we can together, not always on Thanksgiving, though, and go out for Beijing Duck. This is actually great, because duck is clearly the superior bird to tasteless turkey. It may not include Grandma L teetering around with a Manhattan in hand, green bean casserole, pumpkin and cherry pies, uncles passed out on the couch, or cousins arguing over which Thanksgiving special to watch on TV, but it's got a big dinner, a group of friends and a convivial atmosphere.

In all the ways Christmas comes up short in Taipei, Thanksgiving has the potential to be just as good - if not, in some ways, better. This year I think it lived up to that, although everyone was a bit tired (I have bronchitis, too, so there's that). I've written about previous Thanksgivings in Taipei in 2009 and talked briefly about it in 2008. This year we went to Tian Chu (天廚) near MRT Zhongshan. Better service, we got two ducks instead of Song Chu's paltry one (I still call that place 北宋廚 - which utilizes some slightly rude Taiwanese slang), and really good duck.

Next year, for Christmas, I think we're going to try to go home. No idea which family we'll spend the holiday with, but it's high time we had a real American Christmas, with family and shopping malls and tinsel and all that fun stuff.

*before y'all judge me for being all about the shopping and the gift-giving and less about the religion, I just want to say this. Last year my mother was coughing terribly at our wedding. The family ganged up on her to see another doctor. She did, and by Thanksgiving was diagnosed with lung cancer. Serious lung cancer. By Christmas she was starting chemo. I bought her an iPad to watch movies or whatever else she wanted while she recovered from the chemo sessions as a Christmas gift. I couldn't be there in person - we were still recovering financially from the wedding - which was totally worth the cost, I might add. She'd already started losing her hair when we did our annual Christmas Skype session. She got through chemo and despite being given a prognosis of "you've got two years at most", she's made a full recovery since. Complete remission! Her words: "I spent days on the couch after the chemo sessions, especially the later ones. That iPad got me through it. Thank you." So I don't want to hear any "you're so materialistic!" BS in the comments, 'k?