Late nights, early mornings

My mom is convinced that I'm a secret morning person, but nothing could be further from the truth. (In case you need convincing, check the time stamp on this blog post--I'm beginning it just after 2:30am.)

To some extent, this has worked to my advantage here, 16 hours ahead of the vast majority of my friends and family. In a course of cyclical reasoning, my family and the time difference are actually why I'm up right now: I've been Skyping with my mom, dad, and younger brother for a few hours, watching my mom's always-alert morning self in contrast with my brother's squinting just-woke-up face and my dad's slow ascent from awake to functioning, over the course of a cup of coffee. (Yep, that's where I got it from.)

But by all accounts, I shouldn't be up right now, since I was up late last night talking to family, too, but was still up early (for me) this morning, ready for a trip to Tainan with my wonderful host family and Rachel. The getting-ready process definitely involved chugging a bottled latte in 7-11 right as my host family pulled up, since I'm fresh out of coffee beans and I recently discovered my non-caffeinated propensity towards headaches.

We had a fabulous day, visiting such landmarks as the Eternal Golden Fort, Anping Old Fort, Anping Tree House (probably my favorite place EVER), Chihkan Tower, and the Confucius Temple. Unfortunately, we were dogged by what seemed to be a whole-city celebration of some Daoist deity's birthday, complete with a multi-pronged parade of gongs, drums, horns, incense and firecrackers--SO MANY FIRECRACKERS--but aside from that, the locations were gorgeous and the weather could not have been better. Rachel described it well by saying it reminded her of the first day after the snow melts in New Hampshire. I, of course, have never experienced that particular day, but it reminded me of the first day in May that reminds you that eventually summer will come. Glorious.

Of course, with any Taiwanese city, the main event is the food, and Tainan didn't disappoint. Their famous shrimp rolls, which I was a bit nervous to try, since I tend to steer clear of seafood, were absolutely DELICIOUS, tasting mostly of onion. So was the shaved ice we had later (though it tasted of strawberry and sweetened condensed milk, thankfully). And the coffin-cover bread with which we finished out the day. 


Probably the highlight of my day was the Anping Tree House, which is actually an old warehouse from the early days of European-Asian trade which has been abandoned to the banyan trees, which in turn eagerly incorporated themselves into the floors, walls, windows and even roofs of the giant building. The even coils of banyan root run everywhere over the old brickwork, giving the impression that you've stumbled into ruins much older than a few hundred years, and perhaps at the center of an Indiana Jones film.


Also at Anping Tree House (and everywhere else), Rachel and I re-encountered the blatant stares and paparazzi-like photo-stalking of us which we had seen in mainland China in our various excursions there. It's interesting, really: for the most part, Taiwanese people are largely unphased by our clearly-Western presence (though not enough to stop the steady flow of 'hello's which sound oddly like the speaker is half cat-calling, half proudly practicing his one English word that we got multiple times today), but mainland Chinese tourists are still awestruck and fascinated by us. Go sight-seeing in Taiwan, and you feel like you're back in mainland China--and you realize how very normal your life in Kaohsiung is.


But here I encounter once again my as-yet-unnamed situation in which I have no energy left to write about my day because I simply had too much fun living it. And, while I have no school tomorrow, thanks to Sports Day yesterday, my morning should still be at least existent, if not early. And this is a very late night.