First photo: Taiwanese police officers guarding the President’s birth home. I pose with them and the Chinese Mickey Mouse poster above their table.

Second Photo: Lantern Festival rehearsal in Tainan County. WOW!

The absence of want

I first heard this phrase spoken by my friend Paula Goldman when we both lived in Sarajevo, Bosnia. When I lived in Bosnia, I felt an incredible feeling: I was weightless. On my first night in Sarajevo, I was in bed and I couldn’t feel gravity pushing me downwards. I wasn’t flying, but I didn’t feel my own weight. This sensation came back to me periodically over my 15 months in the country.

Now, in Taiwan, I do not feel the same way I did in the Balkans, but I feel the “absence of want”. I am floating. I am on a Group Study Exchange in southwestern Taiwan, sponsored by the Rotary Foundation, the same organization that funded my Ambassadorial Scholarship to Argentina in 1999. This is a description of the program:

“The Rotary Foundation’s Group Study Exchange (GSE) program is a unique cultural and vocational exchange opportunity for businesspeople and professionals between the ages of 25 and 40 who are in the early stages of their careers. The program provides travel grants for teams to exchange visits in paired areas of different countries. For four to six weeks, team members experience the host country’s culture and institutions, observe how their vocations are practiced abroad, develop personal and professional relationships, and exchange ideas.”

I am at the end of my second week in the country and am astounded at the warmth and hospitality of the people. I feel taken care of to the point where I am afraid to even hint at what I want or need because one of the Taiwanese hosts will go out of their way to make it happen. We are living with host families and are spending a couple of days in hotels. On one of my first days in the country, I asked where I could print out several documents. The Rotarian who was driving us to visit a special school for the developmentally disabled, called his friend, a Rotarian, and asked if we could come over immediately to print. Claire, my team member and I went to his office, and he took my USB flash drive and printed over 100 pages. I gave him a gift of a bar of dark Swiss chocolate and he seemed flustered at my gift and ran upstairs and brought back two boxes of Taiwanese sun lotion for Claire and I. He was doing me a big favor and then even gave me an extra gift!

Chopstick Carpal Tunnel

For the first week in the country, I was experiencing “Chopstick Carpal Tunnel Syndrome.” The use of chopsticks was hurting my right hand so much that I felt like I had carpal tunnel problems — the kind people get traditionally from typing incorrectly. Not being able to eat with chopsticks in Asia is a problem! Luckily, my hand and wrist accommodated to the local eating habits fairly quickly.

More exotic than a wild monkey

We are in a part of the country that sees few foreigners, especially white foreigners. We went for a hike at Tsai Mountain near the second largest city in Taiwan, Kaoshiung, and the main attraction of the park was the abundance of wild monkeys. I think we took the stage away from the banana eaters last Thursday. I got a lot of interested looks. I thought the monkeys were more interesting than I was but I was an exception with that thought! This is the first time I am in a country where I attract a lot of attention fairly often without doing anything in particular. People are more discreet than in other countries I’ve been in. Nonetheless, I think we get special treatment because people want to impress us and be very hospitable.

Fireworks galore

We are here for part of the Chinese New Year festivities. On one night, we went to the Lantern Festival. And on another night, we went to the Bee Fireworks Festival where people were setting off fireworks left and right.

From Wikipedia:

“Yenshui or Yenshuei (traditional Chinese: 鹽水鎮; Wade-Giles: Yen-shuei Chen; literally “salt water township”) is the name of a town in Tainan County, South Taiwan which is famous for its notoriously dangerous fireworks festival. The annual event commemorates a cholera epidemic more than a century ago, the fireworks symbolizing the exorcism of demons associated with the plague. The festival falls on the 15th day after the commencement of the Lunar New Year: the last day of Chinese New Year festivities.
The most important of Yenshui’s prominent fireworks are the so-called “bee hives”, essentially multiple launchers of bottle rockets. These rocket forts are actually thousands of bottle rockets arranged row atop row in an iron-and-wooden framework. The setup looks like a beehive full of unleashed gunpowder. When the contraption is ignited, rockets shoot out rapidly in all directions. Dazzling explosives whiz and whirl across the sky and often into the crowd itself, both thrilling and intimidating the spectators.”

It was so loud and dusty that the owners of an incense store gave me a face mask to wear. I walked into a plant nursery shop, where we were taking a break and sat down near an old Taiwanese man who looked like he wanted to sleep but couldn’t because of the non-stop fireworks. I just wanted to sit down after standing and walking for several hours. That desire was not realized for very long. A drunk Taiwanese man who looked like Jacky Chan (martial arts movie star) sat next to me and tried to talk to me in Chinese. I don’t speak Mandarin. He motioned for me to go outside with him to light a box of fireworks. He had the box of fireworks in his hands. In my non-existent Mandarin, I said “No” and nodded my head in such a way that is was obvious to him that I was not a firecracker woman. Most people wore heavy clothing and helmets with a safety shield to protect them. I had none of that. Well, Mr. Jacky Chan look-alike in a black BMW jacket pulled me from the bench onto the street. I am strong, but I can’t compete with Jacky Chan!

I hate matches. I truly do.

Jacky Chan handed me a long ignited stick and pointed to the box of fireworks on the street. People were in huddles all along the street lighting boxes of fireworks and setting of rocket fireworks. Oh my! Am I one of these crazy people? Reluctantly, I touched the box of fireworks with the lighted stick and a small explosion went off and I ran back to the nursery.

Jacky Chan tried to get me to set off more fireworks. It didn’t happen.

“Waterfall” fireworks
Ropes were tied from light poles on different sides of the street to hold a large string of fireworks called. People went down the street igniting each string one-by-one, creating the look of a waterfall going off in sparks.

Two of my team members, Lloyd and Sergei, who had no protective clothing, danced around in the huddles of the Taiwanese men clothed in protective gear. As the rockets of fireworks went off, they danced around and closed their eyes with their hands. I am crazy, but these two got the Cuckoo prize for the night!

The point of the bee fireworks festival is to kill off the demons. Well, I felt like I was in a war zone from the sound of the fireworks. I killed off more bad spirits from my world than I even knew existed.

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