Hike after the last Typhoon

We are slowly catching up to our present time:  many things have happened since first arriving, loosing internet for about three weeks, to resting in our own apartment.  So, back at the end of September we experienced our first Typhoon.  Chiayi City is situated just to the west of the central mountains, almost built on the foot hills.  So we didn't experience the damage due to flooding like a number of other cities in Taiwan.  A few cities were hit really hard, with quite a bit of damage.  We just stayed in and made our first meal as the wind churned around the apartment.  No going out for us in such high winds.  A few days later we went for our first real mountain hike, out of town by about 40 minutes.  Almost straight up.  Here's a few shots.

Bamboo was downed all up the trail from the high winds.  And these plants are quite strong.

Mambo big dragon flies.

Before ascending, walked along the river bed in the valley.

River was a bit low, I think, but still had these huge rock piles everywhere.  All covered in green goo.

Steep fall off right behind us.

Steep climb with our friend Jean.  It was freakin hot!

You can't see me.  I'm just part of the tree.

Largest Stick Bug I've ever seen.  A good foot long or more.

Trail down hill with bamboo everywhere.

View from almost the top.  Big impediment and possible snakes called the hike to a turning point.

Spiffing it up a bit

So our back balcony is now the garden.  Making it our own place.

To make it a bit more our place, we've opted for plants.  Particularly tomatoes.  Sauce will be a happening.  I will be very happy to have my own to cook with.  Oh yes, and just in case there was confusion over my post about the first meal, that shot was taken at the end of Septmember when we just moved in.  I didn't waste a moment to make a meal, especially not three weeks.  Also, orchids here are wicked cheap so we just got one.  It will live off the bark, just spritz and it thrives.  Kinda halloween-like host creature type thing, once look past the flower. . .

It's right outside our bedroom window.  At night, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, maybe not time to sleep deeply...

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Ramdom thoughts month after moon festival

Can barely believe it, but it is one moon cycle later.  This shot is from the full moon in September, the Moon Festival in Taiwan and China, where ya gotta burn, blow up or somehow detonate something so your ghost relatives know they are appreciated. If you don't the aforementioned relatives may feel you haven't made enough noise and will hex you, your family, your dog, your friends... you get the picture.  On the special full-moon day blow stuff up, drink tea and look at the moon.  From our balcony, into the balcony courtyard view of the night.

So, this is for Chris, who so reasonably requested some night shots from out apartment .  To the king of the night, and Halloween's own personal Dr. Calligari.   Just a few shots of things for the fun of it all.

View from out balcony at night.  The first and fifteenth of  every month is an auspicious time so off go fireworks...  So are most other days, so let's set off fireworks.  Hey, we have explosives in the house, let's set off fireworks.  If you sit still in one spot for an hour, you will 99% assuredly here something blow up.

 

First cooked meal at our place.  Veggie dumplings with local organic stuff. 

Off the back balcony, to the east, looking at the morning mountain view.  City and jungle, geckos live on this balcony, as well as some other things... our tomato plants!

This is for Nate & Krystal, you know why.  The bottom "L" is for the "Loving Hut", a veg restaurant chain which we were EXTREMELY grateful to find within the first two weeks of being here.

More tomorrow, or later tonight.  Depends on how much halloween movie watching I can get in.

The ChuKou Temple Festival

Dragons wait to be animated at the Chuhou Temple. 

Trying to gauge what religious tradition is the norm has become my personal endeavor.  We will see.  On a whim, off on the scooter we rode out of town west toward the mountains with the idea of seeing this temple before a hike at the edge of the mountains.  Little did we know, the gods had requested to go for a ride...

One of three religious leaders/channelers, this takes on the spirit of a diety through a spinning dance and directs the prepatory workers to light bundles of "cash", I believe to make the site sacred.

 Most temples incorporate both the mundane (booths like at a fair and at this one a 7-11) and the sacred interchangeably, it is sometimes hard to know when an auspicious occasion is occurring.  It took us until the next day to be sure.  Like most of my experience of Taiwanese culture so far, the event had a purpose with a laid-back, not-sure-when it was going to start attitude.  The Lion dancers, a whole crew of smoking teenagers, couldn't give us an idea of when the festivities were going to start, nor seemed to care how long they had to wear the freakin heavy outfits in the hot weather for.  Oh well, I'm from New England, in shorts I'm sweating.

The temple is off to the right, with two lion dancers chilling by the "burning" honorary tower( a marble structure surrounded by an intricate walkway with an opening on one side to throw "money" or whatever in to supplement the local god).  Yes, he looks tough, but so did I as a teenager...

The Temple is at ChungKuo right at the edge of where the mountains literally stop the road from going anywhere but up. 

 We arrived at the ChungKuo temple thinking we would just check out the scene before ascending into the mountains for a hike.
I parked the scooter amidst the usual visitors to this site taking photos by the gorge (in the picture above you can see the beginning of a bridge that spans the gorge-not a really big one, but still a gorge).  I had wanted to come back here to check out the gorgeous temple and, like most temples, all the stands around it.  I thought all was normal, just a little bit of fireworks (everyone sets off explosives ALL the time) and people in matching outfits.  Then a whole line of swordsmen walked by, hey-ho, I asked what is going on.  Time to wake up the god is what I got to understand.  So here is the day of shaking the gates of heaven, or otherwise...

Gotta burn money, no one is gonna get anywhere without burning something.

 The ritual is actually going on in a number of places at the same time.  The temple has a big rectangle of a space in front of it, boardered by the canyon river at the end.  Things are going on inside the temple as well as in front.  This temple's guiding "priests" represent a drunk, happy, esoteric link to the god we learned later.  The multi-colors of their outfits is meant to depict a pauper priest in a sewn-together rag of an outfit, and their actions, depending on the purpose, are usually affected by some stagger or the like to show drunkenness.  This is a pretty loose interpretation considering my Chinese.  Inside the temple, one priest divines the future of the community, another leads the procession to where the auspicious exit will occur, and the third leads the auspicious exit.  Here we go...

Drums, drums, drums in the deep.  Gotta have drums if you are gonna wake anything up. Leaving the temple to the courtyard.  See the camera crew in the background; no ceremony over here seems too sacred to be filmed, photographed, painted, etc.

Lions prepare the way for the auspicious gods-as-men to leave

 This is the part I am not to sure about; the god's representatives/dudes/local officials/yet another person besides the priest who can carry the god on/in their person leave the temple, get into a car-a very expensive car-and high tale it out of there, which leads the rest of the procession to do the same in a much more round about way.  There is a wooden carriage, intricately carved, that all the symbols of the gods are placed in before all this happens. Those icons seem to be the actual "incarnation" of the spirit in action, the carriage gets carried around in a procession, all the people follow it and make sure it gets safely put onto a truck.  From there I believe it goes to visit a another god's temple, for a spin around the neighborhood, out for some Chinese, or get's stored.  I'm on it, I'll let you know the deal when I get it.

Dude in the red was quickly shuffled into a mercedes along with two others from the temple.  Great God transport, let alone for us.

Although many hang around, it is a single dancer who clears the way for the car.  Quite an amazing dancer with a dominating and intricately painted mask.

Car gone, the festivities quickly continue.

Inside the temple, this central priest makes some form of precognitions from or through wood blocks.  Pairs of men join him at the alter.  After some answer is given, the recipients go outside.  There is an announcer, who seems to be stating something that has been acquired from inside the temple, but I can't honestly say if this is the case.

Similar colors and weapons were these guys theme. 

The dance of the masks is always syncopated by symbols and drums.  This guy was really intense, the one in red.

Incense, incense, incense, oh yes and explosives.

Gotta make sure the gods, in the carriage, are transported safely.  They were very sure to get the chariot up into the truck in one fell swoop.  You will notice the person in the foreground, in the outfit.  She was "the god's keeper" all day long.

 I watched as the procession wove through the grounds, back out to where the buses were-those that brought most of the celebrants.  The central figure was this officiant in the black grab with the patchwork, that I was actually quite afraid of through most of the day.  She really put most people in their place, including the most important dudes who sped away in the expensive sedan long ago, and really seemed quite particular about how every little thing should be done.  So, I was very, very careful about when, where and how I took photographs.  After the god's carriage got loaded into a truck, she went around blessing all the other vehicles, buses, cars, etc.  I was surprised to find she was quite funny and grabbed me unexpectedly with a big laugh rambling on in Chinese and gave me a big hug. 

Here she comes, and I think I'm in trouble.

She makes sure someone takes a shot of us after a hug and some hand motion thing.

So that was our surprise.  Fantastic and still not completely explained.  I want to be sure I get as much of it as accurate as I can, but the experience, the presence, of being in their company was a mix of everyday within the ecstactic.

Alive She Cried

Alright.  OK.   Awwwww what thoughts left on the road.  Collected amidst the mayhem of beginning a life in Taiwan, which I honestly thought, but foolish believed could be done in a way that was like just moving from one town, or city, to another. Oops. My apologies to you all. Our conversations will be more often, we all want friends who are there.  We will be better compatriots.   On that note, all is back on track.  Some of those simple things.

Banana man, on the rented scooter.  A simple 125cc that got two of us around for over a month.  The yellow is a better choice than the pink alternative.  Sizes for 6' plus are rare without search and expense. So banana man I am when it rains, and it rains a lot.

Our city of Chiayi (Jah-yeeh) is a train turning point for the mountainous destinations, or just to work in this small city.  This is the walkway over the back tracks.

Not everything moves all the time..., but eventually does.  Probably. 

The high speed rail out of Chiayi.  This thing cruises, 280 km/hour, to you 173 miles/hour.   The engineering is pretty impressive, from stations, to the ride, to the precision of arrival time.  Oh yes, and all the color coordination...

Yeah, this is grass.  That is a hand dryer... in the bathroom at the Taipei train station.  OK, I get a general idea of what it is supposed to represent, but I'm not really sure what to make of this. 

 Alright, this is the quick one to get it out there.  The next is almost immediate.  Naughty monkeys, we will be better.

Teaching English

After six weeks here it seems a fitting time to have a blog entry about teaching English! It has been a very different experience for us both. Not only is it the first time we’ve actually been teaching the language to a room full of children who know few words of English but the two schools we’re working at are very different. My school is very supportive with paid planning time, teacher communication, and resources. Jeremy’s hands him a slip of paper 5 minutes before going into class which tells him the page he’s teaching that day. That is a little frustrating and anxiety producing and doesn’t quite make him feel like a respected professional.

Here's a group of my 8/9 year olds.

4 Seasons: Here are four of my lovely girls who volunteered to pose with their favorite season.

This group was learning about the four seasons. Where do they have four distinct seasons? Not in tropical Taiwan. How do you teach children who have never seen snow what it is like to be a kid in New England and go sledding or build a snowman? The flashcard with “January” showed a snowman. The flashcard with “December” had a Christmas tree. Hmmm, maybe this material is meant more for kids immigrating to the States from other countries. The funny thing is, these kids knew what the images were and got excited about drawing them. I did find some helpful images on the good old internet that I could show them and teach them words like “toboggan”!

Here are some kids from Jeremy’s school. They decorated their palmelos for Moon Festival. Moon Festival is held on the full moon in September. People get together with family and eat barbeque and moon cakes. It is pretty much like Thanksgiving only it’s held out on the street (if you don’t have a deck) with fireworks. The plentiful palmelo tastes like a grapefruit which, to me, makes it more useful for decorating than eating. There is a Moon Festival legend about a jade rabbit and a jade emperor so many of these palmelo creatures are supposed to be these characters.

It is definitely interesting being the one foreigner in my school. Chinese is being spoken all around me - kids, teachers, staff - and I seldom know the content of the conversation (although I am taking Chinese classes at the University here so I'm learning!). Sometimes I don't know why a kid is crying or details about students that are shared between my coworkers. They do let me in on the important stuff but it's like there's a curtain around me most of the time and the communication isn't getting through. Luckily, I work with very nice people and we all end up chatting in English at the end of the night.