Dear Reader,

My apologies, I’m afraid I’m getting all chronologically mixed up with the blog lately.  I’ve been at that juncture of busy where I’m rushing to frolic, frolicking, or trying to recover from frolicking by sleeping (and doing medically prescribed drugs for the aforementioned nasty goopy cough), or trying to figure out my next mission in life since superheroine doesn’t seem to be working out well (I mean, I know superheros do wear masks, but the goopy cough really ruins the effect, and I’m just not brave enough for the spandex suits, though I did sport a borrowed two-piece for the wun chen this week).

My mother tells me I’m all too forthright in my blog and should be more elusive.  She did give me a topic that was permissible, but I forgot what it was (I don’t think it was quite as bland as the weather, which really isn’t that bland here at all with all the random dramatic thundershowers).

Anyway, I think I am going to finally take my last pills of the day and go to bed with a book.  I guess this is just a head’s up– the blog is a bit topsy-turvy with posting about what has happened and is happening and such and probably at a date that may never come, I shall realign it with chronological correctness and screw up all the links to the original posts.  I still mean to post about the Taroko Gorge and visiting Danshuei’s Fort San Domingo (at least, I think that’s what it was called– everything is becoming blurrier as it gets closer to 2 AM).

Until that happens, I hope you’ll bear with me and the randomness and tell me what you would do in Thailand if you were to go there for half a week, and how your own adventures are going.

Hugs,

meiguotaiwanren

In a temple in the mountains…

Past the large painted Buddha that greets you as you walk into what would be a large garage if it weren’t a temple, across the green concrete floor, up the stairs to where there are identical crystal Buddha sculptures peacefully smiling at you from within identical curved alcoves, through a stairway where there neat shelves of slippers to flip flop across granite floors of shadows into a room filled with stacks of pink plastic doors, there are the ashes of my grandparents and my uncle and aunt.

My cousin drove us up the mountains and through the curvy roads in his modified Mazda.

My grandmother was actually Catholic, but my uncle said she wouldn’t mind resting there, where there are chants that soothe them through round speakers in the ceiling.

It really feels like a library of the dead.  Each door is the same, names in gold on a blue background.  I managed to thrill my father by happening to stand right in front of my uncle’s door, and actually read his name in Chinese aloud.  It helps that his name was made up of some of the most common characters in the language, which I happen to actually recognize.

We trooped out and did the obligatory squint photo, and headed back on the road along the coast to stop and eat very fresh seafood (I have huge sympathy for vegetarians– watching my lunch thrash wildly as it was picked up by the net was rather disturbing…  But I confess… I ate it.  It was delicious.  I don’t think it died in vain, but maybe that’s rather selfish of me.)

I also managed to impress my parents by reading from a Buddhist Sutras book which has the zhuyin fuhao bo po mo fo printed on the sides of the characters.  The only literature here that has zhuyin fuhao on the sides of the characters seems to be children’s books and Buddhist Sutras.  I think a friend of mine explained that the zhuyin is actually supposed to approximate the original language in some cases.

So, although wo de zhongwen sze bu hao, at least I can still impress my parents a little bit, even though they still correct me most generously…  😉

So this is how it ends…

I thought to myself as we pitched forward into the darkness, two girls hiding their faces in my lap. The doors opened ominously and we were on our first ride for the last day of school. The car jerked us through the “Haunted House” that was frightening for the entirely wrong reasons (dummies clad in army camouflage shooting guns at you as you ride past!? Keeping in mind that they are included among dragons, glow-in-the-dark skeletons, pirates, mummies, etc…?! ).

The final hurrah of the school year was a trip to Leefoo Village, which was predictably exhausting and fun, though I was exposed to my students for the ‘fraidy cat I am by refusing to go on rides that would make me sick. (I can be susceptible to motion sickness and swift drops in height, even in a jerky elevator tend to make me queasy). I did win points for managing to make our swirling barrel spin faster than the rest until we were delightfully dizzy. However, someone needed to stay with the kids who were not going on the big swinging ship

and hold on to the glasses of those that were riding the roller coasters,

and the spin-you-upside-down whirligigs,

so I tried to take nice pictures of the red dragonflies unsuccessfully, while keeping an eye on my fellow ‘fraidy cat charges. I’d only seen red dragonflies in Chinese paintings before, but they are real, kissing ripples on the green man-made concrete pond, and weaving spells of summer through the air.

This is a real, albeit sadly out of focus red dragonfly– but they’re really red all over!  And I think they’re pretty, not just because I’m partial to red, but I think I’m becoming partial to dragonflies…  In fact, they’re getting their own category.

We petted and fed the goats, greeted the flamingos, and said hello to the rather large pig on the premises. I was most enamoured of the tigers lounging in their cage and the butterflies as big as small birds that visited the flowers along the walkways.

We didn’t get to go through the safari train, because just as it was finally pulling up to the station, the skies let loose with a pelt of thunder and lightning that seemed simultaneous, and right on top of us. They decided to cancel the ride, and we made no complaint as we dodged puddles and ran to the cafeteria to munch on snacks before fording rivers of rain in squelching sneakers and boarding the buses early.

I made it through the school year! Yet it doesn’t feel completely over. Maybe it’s because I didn’t have time to do my usual note to each student, or because I am still figuring out books and lessons and will see some of the usual suspects in summer school for a bit.  Or because my summer adventures are still up in the air.  There was definitely the end-of-the-year exhaustion though.