Outside the City

Saturday, June 9, 2007--Taipei to Lugang (Continued)

I lucked out. The heavy rain never came until the evening. Instead, there was only light rain and sprinkling off and on. I caught a train at 11:00 for Lugang and arrived there about 2:30. The hotel I had picked out was easy to find and was fine for the price (but has the smell of cigarette smoke).

Lugang has many old shops and nice temples. I just wandered the streets. I had already eaten a granola bar on the train, so that was my lunch. It was fun just wandering with no set purpose. I knew I would have all day Sunday there, too, so there was no reason to try to organize what I was doing. I took many photos looking inside the old shops such as tea shops, hardware shops, herbal medicine shops, etc.

After a rest at the hotel, I went back out around 19:00 to find dinner. Since had been raining some, it was quiet out. Apparently that's a little late to find dinner in such a small town. Either the popular places were packed and I couldn't get in or the other places were closing. I finally stopped at a dumpling shop and bought 3 warm pork dumplings and ate them as I walked down the street back toward the hotel.

Before finishing even the first dumping, there were fireworks. Then drums beating. It was some type of a temple parade. I watched and took photos. It had people in huge paper mache bodies, dragons, floats, etc. It was starting to rain again, however, so I rushed back to the room.

Sunday, June 10, 2007--Lugang (The 3rd anniversary of Arne's death)

Today was one of those special days for a traveler. It started simply with me leaving the hotel around 11:00 and heading to a temple/school/martial arts complex. Then I wandered to another wonderful old temple. After that I was hungry and saw a street stall with all its tables full where people were eating soup. A table emptied and no one was waiting, so I thought I had better sit and eat. I later learned it is an especially well known place for a local specialty--noodle soup with meatballs in thick broth. I doctored my soup with chile sauce and soy sauce. And before I even started eating, four other people had joined me at the table--first a woman and then a family.

The woman started speaking to me. She said she was from America, too, although I think she had only lived there temporarily or been there only for business. She had been to Texas and California among other places. Before we finished eating, she asked me if I would go with her and let her show me the city for the day. I was a bit skeptical about her reason for offering, but I decided to go along and see how it would be. I was eventually glad I did.

First, we walked to her aunt's house in the next block and got an extra helmet for the motorcycle. Then she cycled me through the city pointing out various sites and making occasional stops. One stop was at a clothing shop operated by another aunt. Another was a sweets shop operated by family friends. Another was a portable stall where a friend was selling trinkets. At each stop, she encouraged me to use Chinese words to say, "Hello," "Thank you," and "Goodbye." And everyone giggled as I did.

From the sweets shop, she bought some offerings for the temple and we walked across the street to the most popular temple in town. It was a special day there, because a Buddha which is in China all year except for a brief visit here was returning today. The temple and its surrounding streets were filled with pilgrims. She also bought incense sticks and items to leave the temple for resale to support it. We entered and placed the offerings on one of the tables that had been set up and were filling up fast with similar offerings. We then went to the side and set the insense sticks afire. She went into the temple and, although she said she is Christian, asked Buddha for a wish. (I was hoping that wish wasn't to have me go to bed with her later!) Then she stuck 3 of the sticks upright in a container of sand and put the others in a burning caldron. I did the same with the ones she gave me. Then we went back into the temple for her to use the sticks to tell her fortune. She used her hands to pick up a big wad of sticks and drop them vertically back into the container. The stick that stuck up the highest had a numer on it. Then came a secondary step where she dropped two beanshaped pieces of wood to the floor to see if that was the right number. (There were 3 possibilities for the beans to fall, since they were flat on one side and curved on the other. Either two curved surfaces up or one curved and one flat would signify it was okay to keep that number.) She repeated the process to get another number. Then she went to a side area where there were pieces of paper with those numbers on them along with the fortune. She read the fortunes and seemed okay with them.

We left the temple and went wandering in the small nearby streets that were filled with special shops. We stopped again at a fortune teller's home. We were shown the home (including the bird that meowed like a cat) and then she had her fortune told there. I still kept wondering if she was trying to find out if something was going to happen with us. I could tell that she wasn't getting good answers if that was the case. For instance, the fortune at the temple emplied that things in her life would be black or white. And this fortune teller repeated something similar and tried to interest her in a man from mainland China.

There were wonderful old houses on this small street. They had old doorways with interesting pulls, old silk lanterns hanging above, beautiful New Year's red banners around the doorways, etc. We kept stopping and taking photos of them. Then we went inside the Old Peoples' Hall. It was an old auditorium with tables throughout. Some people were playing board games, some were doing karaoke on the stage, and others were just visiting. We sat at a table with two woman and a man and they offered us hot tea and small cherry tomatoes. We had the tea and tomatoes and watched the karaoke. Rosana, the woman I was with, scheduled a song and sang it. The two women at our table sang also. They wanted to know my age and whether my hair was colored or not, and they were amazed with the answers. I complimented them, too, for having such young, smooth skin for their ages.

From there, we went to a fan shop operated by Rosana's cousin. He was painting a fan at the time, and I watched. Then he showed us around the shop. Rosana said something, and he pulled a fan out of a box and handed it to her. She said she was going to paint a fan for me as a sourvenir. She was horrible at it. I hated to see the fan be ruined. She kept dipping the brush in the ink and then in the water well which meant that only a film of ink went onto the fan. When she finished, however, it was better than I had expected. And her cousin sat down and improved it as much as he could before handing it to me to keep.

We got back on the motorcycle and went to a hotel where she thoght there would be entertainment, but there was none because of the temple celebration that day. Then we went to another hotel where there was a convention rather than entertainment. Then the rain came. She drove back to the center of town and it got harder, so she stopped. It was time for the big temple parade bringing the Buddha back from China to start anyway. We stood on the covered sidewalk and waited. Within 10 minutes it arrived. Unfortunately, almost everything was covered in plastic because of the rain. But it was 10 times the size of the parade I had seen the night before. It had long dragons, huge floats with flashing lights, many people walking in costumes including women in beautiful silk dresses and pants suits, big drums being beaten, etc.

My hotel was actually just about a block from where we were, so when the parade was over, I excused myself and said that I would go back to the hotel since it was now raining. Rosanna accepted that with no alternative suggestion. I was glad. And I was finally sure that she had been sincere in wanting me to have a good visit to her city. (I also could tell from something she said earlier that maybe her boss had suggested that offering to show tourists around the city would be a way to improve her English.)

After a while in the room, I went out and ate another bowl of soup for dinner. This time, it had chunks of beef rather than meatballs, but it was essentially the same soup as the one I had eaten for dinner. I tried walking around some more, but the rains had sent the crowds back home. The streets were deserted. So I returned to the hotel for the eveing and watched TV.