Bye Bye Pod Houses

Two Things:

1.) We took a bus from Danshui to Jinshan today, and ended up in Jinshan eating all things sweet potato. A nice town to stop in if you're in the area but not really worth its own day trip. But the purple yam ice cream there is fantastic and you'll love the local food on offer if you like sweet potatoes.

Also, though the "old street" isn't really "old" at all, you can at least stock up on the usual Old Street stuff that you may like - for me it's black sugar cake (黑糖糕) and those smelly glycerin soaps in a million scents, and the little camphor balms. Also got some ginger herb tea (薑母茶) chunks because it tasted so good.

But we didn't go to Jinshan because we'd planned it that way - we originally set out to find these:

Photo ganked (sorry) from The Creepy Abandoned Pod Houses of Taiwan

To, you know, look around, take some photos, marvel at the total freakiness of the place. We've been by there on the bus a few times so we knew where they should have been...but they weren't there! They're gone! They are (or rather were) quite close to the highway - you can practically see in the windows from a moving bus - and we kept our eyes peeled out both sides of the bus all the way past Laomei and Cape Fugui. And they're definitely gone.

Boo. There should be a law against demolishing creepy, old fantastic things that may be haunted.

We also walked to the tip of Cape Fugui after the sun had set, which made the walk extra atmospheric - with the lighthouse beacon, lapping waves, frightening military installations, large domes, sea breezes and garbage truck song playing from nearby Laomei Village and all. Plus, out there, you can see a lot of stars - about as many as I remember being able to see from my parents' rural backyard on a clear night.

We did not, however, make it to Jinshan Beach, so no awesome photos of the nuclear reactors on either side.

2.) I just realized why I love posted photos from American-based message boards so much - no matter the topic of the board.

Whether it's a photo contest in which someone enters a picture that involves the inside of their house, or Fail Blog with the picture of some heinous Fail taken while displayed in a living room to a woman trying on her wedding dress in her den...

...it's the houses. On some weird, subconscious level, I may not be homesick, but I feel a weird desire to visit home whenever I see the insides of American houses. Doesn't matter what room. And not from movies or magazines, because those houses are all impossibly expensive or fake. Seeing real people's homes reminds me of what it was like to live in a big American house with things like a "den" (do you have any idea how long it's been since I've been in someone's den? Do dens even exist in Taiwan) or even a garage or rec room. Bonus points if it has wall-to-wall carpeting or an installed setup that I recognize from lots of houses from that era, like my grandparents' pre-installed "stone fireplace" that so many suburban homes have, or wood paneling on one wall, or *gasp* a bay window.

Anyway I'll stop there - it's clearly a very weird outlet of homesickness and I swear it's not creepy. It just is what it is.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch...

So, last weekend before our delicious dinner at Hui Guan (回館) - which I still highly recommend by the way, they seem to do no wrong - Emily and I went to Dihua Street. In my free time, I've been rambling around their fabric market looking for wedding dress fabrics because hey, what a great reason to get a pretty dress made. By the time I brought Emily along, I had a good working knowledge of where to get what in that area - which street has the most bead and ribbon stores, which sells the most expensive fabrics, where to get funky borders, which stall in the main market has the most Chinese fabrics to choose from...so we managed it in pretty short order.

The tailor I like works in the stinky part of the market next door, but I've had her do stuff for me before and she's done an excellent job, so even though her stall is tiny and the market smells like fish guts, I'm having her do the honors.

I've known for awhile that I don't want a white dress. I have a lot of reasons that I won't get into now (I typed them out and it sounded a bit 'ranty' so I deleted the paragraph). Suffice it to say that I just don't like the white-spectrum (white, ecru, champagne, ivory, bone, cream) dresses that the Wedding Industrial Complex insists we buy. I don't like 'em and they're too expensive, to boot.

So, I chose this:

The main color will be cranberry dupioni (Thai double-weave silk) (top left), with the others as accents, mostly in the wide sash you can see on one of the 2 dresses that I'm using for inspiration.

It's hard to tell but the ivory dupioni (bottom) and vintage Japanese obi match perfectly, the copper is darker and shinier in real life and the cranberry, when in the light, takes on something of a flame color.

For shoes, I want these, though I may also get a pair of heels, since I'll wear them again anyway:

A Day in Meinong

After the King Boat Festival in Donggang ended two weeks ago, we headed to Meinong for the day before catching the HSR back to Taipei. Meinong is the center of southern Taiwanese Hakka culture and is famous for its oilpaper parasols, which are beautifully handpainted and sold in several places around town. At least they would be if half of the old street weren't torn up by construction at the moment.

The food is excellent too - we really enjoyed everything we ate at the well-known restaurant on the outskirts of town (which is actually called "Traditional Hakka Restaurant" but is quite good). We had lotus leaves, cold peanut "tofu", flat board rice noodles cooked two ways, basically all of their famous dishes. All of it excellent.

Below is a set of photos.

The dog and the couch suit each other quite well I think.

For old architecture enthusiasts, Meinong is full of examples of traditional homes. You'll see a lot of them in this post.

Dongmen, the only gate and most famous landmark in town, sits at the end of Yongan Street (the "old street" which isn't very old and is currently partly under construction).

A piece of door calligraphy (this year is the year of the rat). I just liked it.

Something in an old temple.

Dongmen in black and white.

A pretty cornice (?) thing on Dongmen, partially painted.

Hakka woman on bicycle, taken from the 2nd floor of Dongmen.

Old guy watching his front stoop get torn up by construction.

Temple lion.

Three sets of fortune blocks in a temple.

Side column of a traditional house.

Traditional houses (above and below)

Shi Jin Lai is 100 years old and has made traditional Hakka blue clothes since the 1920s. His relative/apprentice here now does most of the work (Shi himself sits in an easy chair and says hello to visitors and is generally celebrated by the town, which sounds like a pretty good deal for a centenarian.) I ordered a blouse because they're pretty, and I like to support the traditional arts.

Cool dragon thing outside of a quirky shop.

Another traditional home - the friendly owners allowed me inside.

Baskets of things (yucca? yam?)

The back of the old Matsu temple (the front is brand new)

The brand-new front of the Matsu temple.

Oil paper parasols above and below - I bought one for my aunt as a Christmas gift - not the yin-yang - I bought some pretty purple...flox or irises. (above and below)

King Boat: The Fiery Finale

That's us after staying up all night. We went to bed at 7am that morning (not long after this photo was taken).

Anyway, here is a set of photos from the final night of the King Boat Festival. In the previous pictures, the boat barely featured because it was barely visible - not easy to see behind a big fence covered with the wishes (written on wooden blocks) of festivalgoers. Instead, there were dangki, tall god costumes and bajiajiang to snare one's attention.

This time around, the boat took center stage. So here goes...the final night of King Boat Festival 2009:

I'm sorry but this balloon is TERRIFYING.

There is something inherently funny about taking one's picture in front of some large thing that's on fire, you see.

Peace!

King Boat I Take II

Some more photos from the first weekend of King Boat. I promise later to sit down and spend some real time making captions and explaining things about the festival. It's really fascinating stuff, but I've just been really busy lately.

I'll also post photos of the second weekend, in which the boat is burned, soon. Tonight, even. I promise!