Dragons everywhere

Day three in Taiwan is sort of a sweaty blur of dragon temples, flaky pastries, and air-conditioned lulls in a van. Mr. Pong (Pahng?) picked us up in the morning and we headed out to visit some of the older temples in Taichung. The first was a quiet Taoist temple, the oldest in Taiwan, that has been restored. It was serene, thick with incense, and heavily decked out in ceramic scaled dragons and phoenixes. This particular temple was dedicated to the goddess of mercy. Mr. Pong showed us how people cast two sort of semi-circle blocks to see if the god is willing to answer a question. If, in three tosses, you get a yes combination, then you draw a stick from a pot and then find the fortune that matches the number on the stick in a cubbyhole. The paper helps give you your answer, though he said that the temple people generally have to explain the meaning as it is written in a very old, poetic Chinese style that even native speakers have some trouble interpreting.

The next temple made the first look almost bare. It was Confucian, bustling, and in the middle of a very busy market area. Dedicated to the god of the sea, which apparently used to come right up to the area though it is no where near now. Again, a riot of guardian dragons, a fish pond where they let J feed ravenous koi and turtles, and what was the reddest room I’ve ever seen, filled with small statues of ornate historical or mythological people (I had no idea, really, who I was looking at) and below them little glass boxes with startling plain wooden carvings of people from all walks of life just going about their days. Despite the shocking red of the boxes, the unpainted wood came as a visual relief and it was interesting to see how people had carried water and played games and gardened in long ago times.

I know I should know a lot of specifics about the names of these temples, when they were built, exactly what the gods did for the people, but it was so hot (high 90s) and humid and we spent a lot of energy just trying to remain upright. I’ll look it up later in the Taichung brochures and add it in. We enjoyed the visits, but it was filtered through a wall of semi-solid air, so we weren’t as focused as we could have been. The umbrella sunshades only accomplished so much.

We had some time to roam after the visit, wandering through the street stalls and trying out all sorts of pastries and candies and woven fans but passing on the smoked oysters heaped in pans in the sun at this point. There are temples everywhere in the city, some the massive and ancient ones that we were driven to, others just little alcoves or single rooms tucked in with all the other businesses in the street. I like the idea of all those dragons and lions watching out for the neighborhood.

We parked Mom in an air-conditioned back room at one point, guzzling grapefruit juice to prevent her brain from pickling, while we sought out woven fans to get the air moving. It cracks me up to watch Roni asking vendors, “What is it?” because it inevitably leads to puzzlement and calling out to the neighbors and someone hunting down a high school aged daughter who speaks a little English and valiantly tries to come up with the name of whatever fruit on a stick has been candied as a flavor treat. I’m more a buy-and-try person, but Roni is the inquiring-minds-want-to-know type.

We also sang happy birthday to a high school student and his friends who asked us to sign his birthday card in English – Roni added some Hebrew as well which mystified them.

We walked next to La Kang street, an ancient byway since restored into a shopping street but with the older architecture and brick/wood doorways restored. It was actually a lot of fun, despite our melting. We bought clever wooden puzzles that we tried to solve all evening, and J turned out to have a natural talent at a pachinko like game and won a little set of wooden pencils with a sharpener that had him ecstatic all afternoon and left pencil shavings across Taiwan. Mom bought some sandals and a scarf and we all added little odds and ends to the shared shopping bag – a seed pod that heats up and is used in massage, a little bowl, a spinning top, etc.

Then, stunned by the length of time without air-conditioning, we fell gasping into a 7-11 as we waited for the van driver to find us. J has proven to be a hit every where we go, and in there was no exception. It was about 60 seconds and again people were handing him candy and wondering how he came to be living with us. They are all delighted with him. Clearly, no one has any idea the true devilishness lurking behind that dimpled grin! If they knew the depths of his stubborn willfulness, they’d back away slooooowly.

To be fair, we’ve dragged J across 15 time zones and a date line, his nap time has been on the seat of a van, we all wake up at 4:00 A.M. every morning, and it hit 98 today. The food is different, he’s stuck in a hotel room with no place to dig, and Phineas and Ferb isn’t playing on the cartoon channel. But no matter how predictable and explainable it is, his charming ways are rather diminished here, and we’re all struggling a little to maintain our calm. He’s rather an emotional rollercoaster at the moment, with no flat parts in the middle of the ride.

Then there are the funny moments. When he’s frustrated with us, he’s been shouting, “Li li!” over and over, a new phenomenon. At a calmer time, I asked him what li li means. “That’s when I was Chinese,” he told me earnestly. Still clueless, but amused. Later on, after telling us 4000 times (counting conservatively) that he was hungry in a sing-song voice, (about 6 minutes after lunch) he finally said, “Mama, my tummy is crying for food!”

Back in Taipei, we wandered the neighborhood a little, noting the changes since we were last here. The bento stand is now a coffee shop, the bakery has spiffed up its façade. The noodle place where we met a nice woman named Jenny who had lived in Texas is still here, and our favorite fruit stand. We had had enough of noodles for a while, so we went to Mos Burger, fast food Taiwan style. My shredded beef burger had rice patties rather than a bun which was really tasty, and they had fabulous thick mango drinks.

One more day before we go to get D, and I’m getting more and more tense. It is going to be such a dramatic jolt for him – he’s lived with his foster mother since the end of September, and we’re just pictures in a book to him. We’ve got a truck and a stuffed tiger to offer, which seems a bad trade on his part. I’m worried about how J is going to react to the change in his life as well, and in the earliest hours of the morning when I’m staring at the ceiling, I wonder how I’m going to cope as well. It is weird to feel so impatient for something to happen and so nervous about it at the same time.