sky lantern festival, oh and my cat is an fbi agent

Now that I've finished blogging about my amazing trip to Thailand and Cambodia, it's time for some Taiwan updates.  I've got about 4 weekends worth of material to catch up on.


First weekend: Lantern festival in Pingxi. Lantern festivals take place all over Taiwan, including Taipei of course. However, we wanted to go to the most famous Lantern Festival, so a group of friends and I took a bus for 45 minutes or so to Pingxi. Thousands of people crowded the tiny streets; so many people wanted a piece of the Pingxi action that we literally stood at a stand-still for about 45 minutes trying to buy our own lanterns. It didn't help that the president of Taiwan visited Pingxi to deliver a speech and set off an enormous lantern, meaning tons of people wanted to watch and take pictures.

 The president's lantern is the big white one with the dragon drawn on it.


Here's how sky lanterns work. You buy this huge plastic lantern for about 5 USD. They're almost as tall as I am. You then can paint your wishes for 2012 on each of the four sides. 

Since I've been studying Chinese at a language school for the past few months, I now can write some Chinese characters. The Taiwanese people's lanterns looked so cool with their characters that I thought I'd try too. This is what my Chinese translates to, "I am Robin. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10." Pretty poetic, I think. 

 I tried an English wish for another side. 

You then light the bottom on fire and the sky lantern floats out of your hands into the sky, where it floats on for miles. They had launch times, when hundreds of people all set their lanterns off all at once and the sky is filled with the lanterns.

Since it is a festival in Taiwan, of course the streets were filled with many yummy (and not-so-yummy) and cheap street food.

Weekend two: Abe, my friend from Michigan, turned 23 and we celebrated by dressing in 20s clothes for the "Abestravaganza" and partying a bit too hard.

Weekend three: My Chinese class decided to hold class at a KTV (what the Taiwanese call Kareoke) lounge. We were supposed to practice a Chinese song so we could sing it. I chose this song since it was slow and easy.

However, after listening to it 235872340598 times and only remembering three lines, I decided to screw it and sing a fast song that had a few lines in English.

I butchered it, of course, but then just sang Britney Spears the rest of the night, so it was okay.

 Weekend four, aka this past weekend: We had a 5 day weekend this weekend, as it's Tuesday and I still haven't been to work. Unfortunately, the Taiwanese government says because we got two days off this week, EVERYONE has to work on Saturday. Kids have to go to school like it's a normal day. Seriously? That makes 0 sense. Anyway, it rained basically the entire weekend so I spent much of my time in my apartment. It's okay though, because I was super productive. I accomplished great feats like eating an entire box of cereal without moving off my bed, wearing sweat pants every day, and taking pictures with my one-eyed cat, Potato. 

Also, I took pictures of her in a FBI jacket.

As I mentioned up above, I can now write a few characters in Chinese. My three month class is finished as of yesterday. I'm pretty much fluent now and have daily philosophical discussions with the Taiwanese in my newly acquired language skills, such as, "Do you have a sandwich? I have three sandwiches," "Miss Wang rides the bus to work," "The chicken is fresh today," "What is your honorable surname?" I'm taking a month off of Chinese and then possibly looking into doing a one-on-one tutor later. 
  

I mostly just know the pinyin, or the romanization of the Chinese characters, so I'll end with this: Zàijiàn wǒ de péngyǒu! (Goodbye my friends!)