screams.
oh well. finally uploaded my pics on both my comp and facebook, but it took forever to get them sorted-- way too many pics and i didn't want to split albums so i crammed sentosa and taiwan in one. decided, too, to finally talk about taiwan before my memories of it fade completely.
when i think of taiwan now i already draw a blank-- it takes effort, effort and more than a little head-scratching, to recall anything of it apart from rather insipid memories of di gua qiu. haha. it's like this article in today about what defines a global citizen-- written by a singaporean who moved to new york. basically the common idea of a global citizen is someone who is in one place for no longer than 48 hours, rushing about for meetings and business deals and trying to cram something in to remind oneself that one is in a different place than yesterday. my taiwan trip was certainly more than 48 hours long, but after a while each day just blurred into the next and by the tail-end of the trip i was just so heartily sick of the place i was dreaming about the warmth and heat of singapore.
i think one of the first things i said when i arrived in t3 was "oh my god. humidity!!"
so i've blogged about danshui, abt yehliu, abt jiufen. maybe it comes time to talk about another hot spring experience-- not the horrific omg-i'm-fainting-i-cannot-see-or-breathe one, but this awesome expedition my family took out to wu lai. we'd been wandering about the outskirts of taiwan that entire day, from traipsing up and down some really old roads in bi tan (emerald waters!-- the water was REALLY emerald) and visiting a temple (on coming down from the temple my dad paused to read some inscriptions and my mum promptly chivvied us to hide behind a car. omg my parents. NOBODY beats them for childishness). food bought a bottle of water that had the brand supau or supah or something like that and we ended up laughing our stomachs sore by threatening to "supauuuu!!" each other for the rest of that morning, regaining shreds of sobriety only when we entered the temple.
thereafter we took a horribly long ride to wu lai-- almost an hour long!-- and the driver drove like a maniac! but it was all worth it. after trudging through streets where cold rain dripped icy drops down the backs of our necks (i really don't understand how the rain manages to find its way into such inaccessible nooks and crannies that just wind up being the MOST uncomfortable spots) my mum espied people paddling about in a river and clouds of steam rising off the water. we eschewed all the sundry spas offering piped-in springwater and opted for au naturel, and i am GLAD we did! it was such an adventure haha.
having dressed completely inappropriately (my clever sister wore footless tights which she could roll up, and everyone else was in jeans) i took forever to hop around and remove my spangled tights. but when i finally did enter the water it was great-- i've never had so much fun playing. water can be such a miracle-- i was reminded of haikou's impossible confluence of calm river-water and wild surging waves, but wu lai's transliteration of it was heat-- icy cold waters on one side of the rock boundaries and burning 80deg water on the other. i watched in disbelief as this man on what had to be the advanced side of 50, dressed in nothing but tights, briskly hopped into the icy water and started swimming against the current. water-based treadmill hahaha. RESPECT.
my family had to drag me out of the water. i refused to leave even after two hours of tripping over rocks and burning my feet because it just felt so good. i'm afirad my dad has about seventy completely unglam pictures of me making various ugly faces at him everytime he tried to take a picture. and, to once again support my theory that my parents are going through their second childhood, my mum bet my sister that she could throw a rock across the river and swung her arm. a rock hit the other side of the river alright-- but my dad threw it. my siblings all just rolled their eyes-- i think we stopped falling for that trick about, i don't know, TEN years ago?? hoho.
with my feet nice and warm and toasty and faced with the impossibility of trying to put on my tights again i hopped barefoot up the mountain to catch a glimpse of the waterfall feeding the river. it was a forty-minute walk/run, delayed by stops to taste rice wine and lemon vinegar (stop making sour faces. it was very very good for my throat k!). since everyone else thought we were crazy my dad and i jogged up the slopes on our own, both agreeing that it would have been a wonderful place to run. both mum and dad tried to badger me into buying a caftan once we reached the top but i steadfastly held my ground. whee! one for the sensible yvonne who knows that her wardrobe cannot fit another item without something drastic occurring!
all in all a lovely place with even better vinegar. hoho. i bought that lemon vinegar in the end-- cost 15 bucks per bottle k! more than the rice wine :( but it's goooood. yummy yummy in my tummy as nette would say.
apart from such cool memories there was also this really horrific one. my parents took us to huayi jie- supposedly a street of delicacies. as we walked down the street we suddenly saw this tray outside a restaurant piled high with bloodied carcasses. a closer look revealed that they were turtles. they had been deshelled; the pearlescence of their violated insides glistened sickly in the weak fluorescent lights. as we watched in a kind of horrified fascination one turtle opened its mouth and extended a black tongue, trying in vain to lick some of the blood off.
it was that action that really got to me-- its complete inability to comprehend what was happening to it, why this was happening to it. that utter wronged innocence... oh but that wasn't the end of it man. a few shops down the street i just stopped dead in my tracks; it was a shop selling snake soup and snake meat. there was this beautiful python locked in a cage far too small for it. behind that cage there were demonstrations of how the snakes were "prepared" for eating-- they were skinned ALIVE. a small ring would be cut in their skin and then the man would just rip it off like a tube, a warped sort of sock, as the snake twisted in convulsions in his hands. halfway down he would insert a knife and cut a hole so that he could extract the bile.
my entire stomach lurched and i grabbed my sister and stormed away. if i had stayed any longer i would have done something illegal-- like skin the goddamn man. i couldn't stop choking on my tears, it was so so freaking horrible i just wanted to throw up and stab out his eyeballs and release the snake. sick, sick, sick and depraved-- we are worse than beasts, we humans. i think my parents both saw how badly it affected us because they caught up with my sister nad i after we'd just stormed off like that and i got away with only a mild rebuke even after i started cursing the snake-butcher.
i still shudder at the memory. that incident ruined half the trip because all i could think about was how depraved these people were...
but i forgave taiwan, in the end. not that there was much to forgive, but for all the horror of that there was beauty in so much else! for the wild surging crashing of the seas, and for another incident that brought tears to my eyes YET again (i think my biology was trying to make up for the lack of moisture in the air or something).
christmas eve and we went off to the area about taipei 101. as we walked along and my mum did her best to donate half the contents of her purse to any and every street performer (eh we spent like NT600 on donations i think i have a right to be horrified!!) we encountered this group of people holding white and pink balloons in their hands. thinking that they were handing them out for xmas we hovered around hopefully trying to induce them into giving us one or two. when that failed my mum asked us to sit down-- she'd spotted some people setting up amps and speakers and expected another street performance.
as we sat and rested and i poked at my miserable insensible shoes, i started noticing something rather peculiar about the balloon people. pink and white heart-shaped balloons was one thing, but-- wasn't that girl holding a rather big bouquet of flowers?
and the balloon group looked like they were affiliated with the singing group. i stared at them, then nudged my sister and motioned to my mum excitedly. i started miming putting a ring on my finger.
yups-- marriage proposal!! how cool is that can. the singer was the dude proposing; his girlfriend was guided to the spot by two girl pals after a while. he sang to her-- some amended version of a classic-- and then asked her to marry him. after she repeated her answer in a shout-- the first had been inauidble-- everyone in the square broke out into cheers and applause. his friends let go of the balloons, and i watched as they sailed up and away into the dark velveteen of the night sky.
my sister turned to me. she asked, "are you crying??"
i couldn't help it whaaaaat. it was really so romantic. damnit la for all the lissimore-v-downing-esque expressions of boys-are-stupid i'm still a complete sucker for this nonsense.
ok that's it it's damn late i haven't packed i shall go sleep.
or rather, pack. because i don't HAVE time to sleep.
MUST stop skyping.