Children's Day Feast

All right!  The Children's Day public holiday on Wednesday was a success :)  Around 10am I left the house in Cingpu to meet Johan at the Taoyuan TRA train station (via free shuttle service from the HSR.).  It was a beautiful blue-sky sunny day and it was hot out!  I had a sweater on and I was sweating on the bus ride.  It's about a 45 minute ride from the HSR station to the central Taoyuan area (during the bus ride I wrote my last blog).

Okay so arrived at Taoyuan TRA station.  It's beautiful out.  Johan is running late due to crazy traffic so I walked around the area exploring.  I checked out an appliance store to see prices for microwaves and water kettles etc.  It's kind of expensive.  A microwave is like... $100 and a kettle is $60.  This is average I guess for Canadians, but this I think would seem quite relatively expensive for locals (think of it as the microwave costing $300, and a water kettle costing $180).  Cost of living in Canada is pretty good compared to lots of other places in the world.  So next time you complain about prices, know that you don't have it all that bad!

Ok so Johan picked me up and we drove straight to Gugu's house to meet the rest of Ali's family.  It was nice seeing them again.  They are always SOOO friendly and hospitable to me.  It's a blessing to have a "family" over here.  As usual we got right away into some Chinese and English language exchange.  My mandarin that I learned last time was rusty so I was trying to remember words such as "today", "yesterday", and "tomorrow".  By memory I think it is "jin tian", "zuo tian", and... "mien tian".  But I could be wrong :P

After 10 minutes we left to a large chinese banquet hall.  We occupied a small side room and after a few minutes, piles of Ali's dad's side of the family filtered in.  I think there was probably 50 of us.  The tables were large round tables that sat 10 people with a large lazy-susan in the middle.  Food started pouring in quickly: tuna and salmon sashimi, thai salad with pineapple, sticky rice with dried shrimp on top, sweet fried squid, pork spare ribs, hot pot, white fish, and whole chicken cooked in herbal soup.  Whole chicken in taiwan is a bit different than in Canada.  Their whole chicken is literally the whole thing. legs, wings, neck, and even the whole head in-tact!  (only thing missing was I think some internal organs, and the feet).

Everything was delicious!  The chicken was quite good.  The "herbal" broth had a neat nutritious taste to it.  Sort of like dark chicken stock with.... Chinese rooty herb smell to it.  Not sure how to describe it unless you've had the taste before.

In addition to the food there was Taiwan beer flowing, guava juice, cranberry juice (not tart. tasted like drinking jello), and even red wine (red wine was really easy to drink).  Every so often a family member from another table would come by and cheers everyone.  My friend Alex from London, England was here for the Children's  Day feast 2 years ago (same people, same place).  One of Ali's family members enjoyed drinking a lot and had drunk quite a bit with Alex last time so they nick named him DeNiro.  DeNiro remembered Alex and I was the new token foreigner so we also had a few cheers.

It was a pretty casual lunch and great to be a part of.  Ali's grandma sponsored us so thank you very much to her.

Afterwards I went back to Ali's parents place and we chilled out chatting and talking, watching TV, and looking through apartments online.  We found maybe 8-10 that were decent and 1 that I really liked.  We were looking in both Gonguan and Qizhang area.  The one I really liked was in Qizhang, which is very close to my office and close to Johan's place at Xindian Station, and also close to Ali's place at Dapinling Station.

I had johan call the landlord of the number 1 place and we set up a meeting for the next day to check the place out.

Niki came home around this time and it was nice to see her.  Anne (Ali's sister) was also there the whole day and we also got to talk a lot.  All of their English is pretty good!  I am very thankful for that.  After a dinner of leftover from lunch, Ali drove me on his scooter to the Shuttle bus stop and I boarded the shuttle back to Cingpu!

I think I like Children's Day :)