Happy Moon Festival

Melodie's moon, Moon on his special day.

Happy Moon Festival, everyone! Today was a special day in Taiwan. It's a day when the locals spend time with their families, barbecue (even on the side of the road if you have to- lawns are hard to come by here), eat pomelos (and wear the rinds on their heads) and eat moon cakes under the full moon. Mel and I were given SO MANY moon cakes by our students and employers. Mel's school gave her a very fancy looking box of "Chirlie Brown" brand moon cakes, which is a fine brand name if ever I've heard one. One of my students had a bag of cakes and asked me how many I wanted. I said that one would be fine, but she came back a few minutes later and passed me the entire bagfull saying "my mother said". There are many different kinds of moon cakes. The kinds that we've had (and enjoyed) have been filled with pineapple and sugar. The kinds that weren't so enjoyable contained fish jerkey and an egg. You never know what you're going to get when you bite into these things.


Since today was a family holiday and we don't have a barbecue we basically just spent our Saturday as we would any other Saturday: being tourists. Today we went to the Miramar shopping center in Taipei. The Miramar is popular because of the huge-ass ferris wheel located on its' roof.



The ferris wheel is 100 meters tall, costs $200 NT ($7) to ride and one rotation takes about 17 minutes.


The view was pretty cool, but it was a really hazy day... probably due to that pesky typhoon that's on its way.


After lunch, we took the MRT to Shilin market for some shopping. I guess it's safe to tell you that Melodie was looking for a birthday gift for her niece. Since she's going to be 2, she probably won't be reading this blog and have her surprise spoiled. One of the first things we noticed upon getting off the subway was a giant neon penis perched on the roof of a building. Nice!


Shilin is a great place to go for wigs.


A bit of drama at Mel's school this week: the head teacher decided he'd had enough stinky tofu and Hello Kitty and made a kind of abrupt exit from the school. Luckily, his exit led him to a hotel in Ximen for a few days before flying home so we had a place to hang out that was conveniently close to a karaoke room! If it was your last weekend in Taipei trust me, you'd want to have me sing you off. The karaoke room was a bit pricier than we were used to from Korea (it was $1350 NT AKA $45.00 CAN) but it came with a private bathroom and $400 NT worth of free food or drinks. You know what that means...


FREE KEG!

Hope you all had a pleasant moon festival. By the way, as I was typing this we just felt our first earthquake in Taiwan! My computer chair started wobbling, and being from Nova Scotia your mind doesn't immediately think of "earthquake", but of course that's what it was. It was just a little one... the internet didn't even go down and we all know that's what's really important. Good night!