People People, So Many People

This weekend was an eye-opener to the reality of my new home's population.  I have always heard that Asian cities are the densest in the world, and that people are just used to not having any personal space.  The population of Taiwan is 23 million, 6.8 million of which are in and around Taipei.  Little did I realize, the population density of Taiwan is second in the world only to Bangladesh. We got a small taste of that in Taipei's Ximen district that week, but other than that, Taoyuan just feels as crowded as any other city.  There is traffic and tall apartment buildings.  It is hard to find parking downtown and you never are alone.  At the same time, you can move about quite freely and never feel claustrophobic.

Saturday night, our new Taiwanese friend, Jack, went with us to the night market.  Taiwan is famous for its night markets, where there is all sorts of cheap clothing and wares being sold, as well as carts upon carts of tasty eats.  Plus, there are people everywhere. It is a cultural experience to say the least.  Read any excerpt on Taiwan, and it will tell you the same thing.  What did we sample?  Jack led us to many carts.  We started with mochi, which are doughy balls filled and covered with peanut or sesame dust.  They were tasty, but quite dry.  Next we ordered a kilo of these huge shrimp grilled in a garlic sauce.. so delicious and so messy to eat, because we had to shell them ourselves.  We tried octopus balls (not literally the balls of an octopus (doubt they have any) but octopus meat, and cabbage deep-fried into a scalding treat that is too hard to bite through, but just big enough to be difficult to eat in one bite), an oyster omelet (more of the tacky dough with egg and oysters cooked on top, topped off with ladelfulls of three unknown sauces, all in all taste: not bad, texture: WEIRD), and were handed a pig's blood cake (which is congealed pig's blood, perhaps mixed with rice, cooked and then rolled in peanuts.  Quite tasty, I recommend it.)  I washed it all down with a fresh kiwi juice, Jack a watermelon juice, and Hal some weird iced tea with lime and an unknown distinctive ingredient.

Sunday we met with our landlady, read through and went through our translated lease before heading off to the river!  We were so excited to spend the day in the mountains, in nature, OUT of the city, AWAY from people.  It was a beautiful drive, unfortunately, half of Taipei had the same idea!  We just kept driving and driving thinking, "we'll keep going til there are no more people" and " I thought the Taiwanese didn't like to tan their bodies," until we got to a waterfall an hour and a half into the mountains.  It certainly was beautiful.. HUGE spiders and webs everywhere, black butterflies the size of my hand flying around, and a monkey (rare in the north) even graced our presence.  It was good to be with some of our co-workers and get to know them better, but we pretty quickly got rained out.  Not just a light rain, or the usual short summer downpour, but a heavy, soak you all the way through, rainclouds clinging to the mountain type of rain.  The same rain we quickly drove out of into crazy traffic of everybody racing out of the mountains.

It was a great weekend, we are finally really meeting people who can show us around and recommend things to do.  We both finally have a few classes of our own now, but are still subbing most days of the week.  Check out the new photos on the photo page!

Love to you all!!!

Siri