Taiwan, Day 3. We wake up in the morning to discover that Sabriya is sick, maybe from something she ate. (Or maybe that’s what we’re hoping it is, since it would mean a faster recovery than if she’d caught a nasty bug.) She can’t keep anything down—even water. Cheng-nan pops out of the hotel to find a pharmacy that sells electrolyte solution. Angela and her mom stay in the hotel to watch Sabriya. Jan and Cheng-nan take Anya and Liya out for a morning expedition.
Our first stop is Longshan Temple, one of the more famous temples in Taipei. The girls are puzzled by many aspects of the template: the smell of incense, the visitors bowing, the deities, etc. There’s some young people at the altar of the god for good luck on tests, mixed in with some older people that are probably parents praying for kids.
On the map we see that Taipei’s Botanical Gardens are nearby, so we make the 15 minute walk. It’s interesting to see more of Taipei on foot, like the long block we pass of pet shops specializing in birds. The Gardens turn out to be more of an arboretum—nothing’s really in bloom, and while the trees make for serene surroundings, they can’t hold the girls’ attention. They’re more fascinated by a small side path of pavers, which makes a loop they have fun exploring.
The Botanical Gardens are a short cab ride from the Ximending shopping district. E-moon later recalls how, when she was in college, she and her friends went to Ximending every weekend. At the time it was the best place to shop for imported goods; it was quite the glamorous place to hang out. It’s described in our guidebook as “Taipei’s answer to Tokyo’s Ginza”, but the area surrounding Ximen station looks more Taipei’s answer to Tokyo’s Shibuya: narrow pedestrian streets with 12-story builds. Signs jut out from every floor advertising everything from bars to dentists to Internet cafes. Strolling down the streets, we struggle to identify anything that looks like a restaurant the kids might like.
Jan finally spots a giant sign for a Tonkatsu restaurant on the second floor of one building, and the girls are up for it. It seems to be a chain, but it’s pretty good, and the girls like virtually everything in their set course meal: the pork, the miso, the rice, the takuan pickles, and the mocha ice cream for dessert.
Meanwhile, back at the hotel, Angela takes Bree out for a trip to the Taipei branch of the Japanese story chain Muji. Nearby there’s a story selling Crocs shoes, and when Bree seems a tiny pair, she fusses insistently until Angela relents. Bree looks pretty cute in her little blue Crocs!
When we all return to the hotel, the Cheng-nan takes the older girls back down to the pool. Bree’s still pretty sick, and is starting to run a fever. She has periods where she’s listless, and others where she seems normal. It’s disconcerting to be playing with her one minute, and she seems happen, and then she’ll suddenly lose whatever she tried to drink twenty minutes ago (and then she’ll act as if nothing’s happened).
In the evening Angela’s fourth aunt (we don’t know her name—she’s just “Fourth Aunt”) comes to visit, along with her daughter. They take us out for dinner, with the exception of E-moon, who stays at the hotel to watch over Sabriya. Fourth Aunt takes us to, of all places, an Italian restaurant—in a mall called “New York New York”. Anya and Liya are absolutely exhausted from the poor sleep, the long walks, and the splashing about in the pool. They can barely stay awake long enough for their pizzas to arrive; we let them play games on our phones to help keep them from falling asleep. As soon as the food arrives, the girls scarf down some slices, then immediately fall over to sleep in our laps. Lugging both of them back outside to a cab is a challenge all by itself, as is getting them all the way back into bed. At least tonight they’re going to sleep at a reasonable hour. Bree manages to sleep for a long stretch of the night, and seems to be keeping down her electrolyte solution, so that’s progress.
Taiwan, Day 4. In the morning, Jan and Liya walk to go shopping at Muji. They’re followed by Angela and Anya, but when we all reach the store, they’re closed—and don’t open for hours. We head back toward the hotel, and stop at the nearby bakery that sells strawberry sandwiches. The girls get those, we get some other pastries, and some delicious milk tea. The bakery has a stylish little eating area next door, and it’s fun to hang out there for a bit.
Today’s focus is getting together with Jan’s good friend from Cornell, Christine Lee, whom he hasn’t seen in 19 years. They studied together in Cornell’s pressure cooker Japanese program before Christine switched to the university’s architecture school. Shortly after graduation, Christine moved back to Taiwan, where she worked as an architect for a number of years. (She worked at one of the firms that did the Taipei 101 building.) The only contact Jan and Christine have had are our annual holiday letters, but they’ve had the desired effect of keeping us connected.
Christine meets us at our hotel. Bree’s still not feeling well, so we leave her with the Chens for the day. We join Christine in a cab ride to have lunch at famous restaurant Din Tai Fung on 216 Street. It’s best known for xiao long bao, little dumpings filled with meat and soup. We also order some of the chicken soup they’re known for.
During lunch, Jan and Christine catch up and reminisce about some early Cornell friends. At one point, Jan asks Christine whether remembers a woman named Cindy. Jan’s clearest memory of Cindy was that she immigrated to the States when she was a young girl. Given the choice of picking her own English name, the young girl selected the name of the only American TV character she knew who was her own age: Cindy from the Brady Brunch. Christine can’t remember Cindy, which is strange since Jan’s pretty sure they were part of the same circle of friends from Cornell’s North Campus dorms. Jan mentions Cindy several times, but Christine is positive she didn’t know her. Hours later, Christine suddenly exclaims: “Oh! Now I remember. Cindy was my roommate.”
Lunch is followed by an equally famous dessert place around the corner. (The English name is given as “Eastern Ice Store”.) You pick out three or four items from a wide selection of soft, goopy, or gelatinous substances: sweet tofu, strawberry jelly, passion fruit puree, tapioca balls, grass jelly, etc. Since each child gets four choices, making our selections takes forever. We each end up with a bowl of sweet goop that’s pretty good and very filling.
We make a trip on the metro all the way to the end of the red line, a stop called Danshui. It’s almost at the mouth of the Danshui river that runs through Taipei. When we get off the train, we end up on a long walkway that has a boardwalk feel to it. It’s lined with stalls selling random trinkets and snack foods. Down the river, to the north, we can see the ocean. The place feels like a Taiwanese Coney Island.
We suddenly realize we’ve left Liya’s most precious security blanket at the dessert restaurant. Angela happens to have grabbed one of their business cards, and a quick call confirms they have the blanket. Whew! After our passports, that blanket is the one object whose loss would create more problems than anything else. Luckily, the dessert place is open late, so we can make a stop tonight on the way back to the hotel.
We wander along the boardwalk. Peering in the stalls, we see there are more ways to fry or grill a squid than we could have thought possible. Anya and Liya are intrigued by the game where you throw darts at water balloons, so we buy them tickets. They’ve never seen or thrown darts before, so we give them a quick lesson. Some of their darts find their mark. Some darts thrown more erratically land on the water balloons with the flight end first. These bounce somewhat alarmingly back towards us, but thankfully fall short. The girls manage to pop just enough balloons to each win the smallest prize: a little inflatable ball.
We stop for some boba (bubble tea). Boba bubble tea. Anya tries a “Honey and Aloe Vera” drink with lumps of something in it. Taiwanese sweets sure include a lot of lumps. At any rate, Anya likes her drink.
We ride the metro back to the Zhishan neighborhood where Christine lives. She and her husband Lin Yun have a nice, spacious apartment with a view of a park and the mountains. Christine designed the interior herself, and it’s quite well laid out. She’s no longer in architecture—she teaches English half-time now instead—but she keeps thinking about going back to it. She bemoans the fact that building projects in Taiwan go up so fast that construction often plows ahead before the architect has had a chance to even come up with a design concept, let alone a full plan.
Christine ropes Jan into helping fix an assortment of problems with her computer. Luckily these all turn out to be pretty simple. Case in point: She wants to buy a copy of Microsoft Word online, download it, and install it. Jan determines that she’s already got Word installed, she just didn’t know it. Christine is flabbergasted. Would that all computer problems were this easy to solve.
Christine’s kids, Katie (10) and Anna (7) come home from school late, around 5:00 pm. A few years ago the local government condensed the mandatory school day so that kids could have more time at home with their families. Parents responded to the shorter school day by signing up their kids for longer after-school private lessons in the afternoon, so now the kids are even worse off than before. Anya was a bit hesitant to meet Katie and Anna because we weren’t sure if they would speak English, but Christine’s girls speak well enough to get by. In any event, most of the play involves running around the apartment.
The kids eat dinner first, followed by the adults who are joined by a coworker of Christine’s named Teresa. We’re hoping to eat with Christine’s husband, Lin Yun, who’s just returned from a business trip to Shanghai. Unfortunately, he won’t be able to be home until 8:00, and our girls don’t look like they’ll make it that far, so meeting him will have to wait for another trip.
We barely get the kids into a cab before they fall asleep. Instead of going straight to the hotel, we first need to make a stop at the dessert place where we’d left Liya’s blanket. The ride through nighttime Taipei is nice, and the city looks noticeably cleaner and hipper since our visit in 2000. As we get close to the dessert place, even the adults are getting very sleepy—including the taxi driver. We’re glad to get the blanket back, then finish the ride to the hotel in one piece.
Taiwan, Day 5. Anya’s very tired when we start the day, so Angela stays with Anya as the rest of us go down to breakfast. Coming back to the room, it’s apparent that Anya’s not just tired, she’s sick. She probably has the same stomach virus that Bree has. For her part, Bree can eat a little bit, but she’s still somewhat listless.
We work around the two sick kids as we pack, since we’re leaving for Changhua at noon. Between the five of us, we have an enormous amount of stuff. Adding in the Chens’ luggage, all told we have eleven pieces of luggage. Angela and E-moon have affixed numbers to each piece so we can check the luggage count every so often.
With Anya running a fever, we put her in a stroller so we can move her to the train. Jan takes Bree in the Ergo carrier. When Liya sees she’s the only one who’s not being carried, she complains that she wants to ride in the stroller too. At various points during the day, Liya suggests that maybe she’s getting sick too, perhaps just to get attention—or maybe she’s really sick. Either way, it’s not helping.
At Taipei’s main rail station, we meet up once more with Fourth Aunt and her daughter to say goodbye, then head down to the platform. We’re taking the relatively new HSR (High Speed Rail) bullet train to Taichung. Moving through the station and onto the train is complicated by Anya’s sickness, in two ways: first, we have to use the stroller to carry her instead of using it as a luggage cart the way we usually do, and second, Anya’s not available to drag a suitcase. With these factors, it’s a small ordeal to simultaneously push, carry, and pull all the luggage onto the train. The task is made harder by the narrow train door and train aisle. A line of people forms behind us as we try to stow all the luggage in the little luggage area near the door.
When we find our seats, we discover there are already people sitting in them. There’s a discussion in which tickets are produced and checked. The people sitting in the seats point out that we’re on the wrong train. There are apparently two bullet trains that leave a few minutes apart, and the one we want is across the platform. Now we have take out all the luggage we just stowed and get off the train, which was hard enough before, only now we’re swimming against the stream of people coming on board with their own luggage. We finally manage to get everything off, across the platform, and onto the right train.
After all the trouble boarding, the train ride itself literally zips by, taking barely an hour. We’re met at Taichung station by Angela’s uncle, known to us only by his title A-pei (“father’s oldest brother”) and his son, Ike. Ike lives nearby in Taichung, but our destination is Cheng-nan and A-pei’s neighboring hometown of Changhua. A-pei has kept a family home in Changhua for decades. Compared to the surrounding apartment complexes, the home is huge, and ample enough to absorb seven guests. The style of the place is an eclectic mix of 1960s American Brady Bunch, Chinese kitsch, and a dash of Japanese traditionalism.
None of the girls eat very much for dinner. Bree just wants water, Anya has a tiny bit of soup, and Liya’s almost too exhausted to sit up. E-moon’s worried that Jan won’t find anything to eat among the main courses for the adults, and in fact Jan is pressed to identify anything on the table. Normally he’s up for trying new foods, but tonight the proffered home delivery of fried rice is welcome. There’s also tons of fresh fruit on offer, almost none of it common in the States: cherimoyas (green outside, goopy white inside), renbu (vaguely apple-ish, but shaped like a bell), and gibei (persimmon-like in texture and color, but smaller and oblong).
Everyone keeps trying to get us to eat more food, especially the fruit. Having learned on a previous trip that this is customary Taiwanese behavior, Jan’s taken the precaution of learning key phrases in Mandarin along the lines of “Wo hen bao le” (I’m very full). That particular phrase never has any effect—people just push more food at you—so Jan’s also learned some follow-up phrases, like the more emphatic “Wo chi bu xia le” (lit: I can’t get any more down). It’s too bad A-pei and his wife A-um don’t speak much Mandarin. When talking amongst themselves, the Chen clan uses Taiwanese exclusively.
After dinner, A-pei offers Jan an impromptu lesson in Taiwanese history, particularly the Japanese occupation of Taiwan in the first half of the 20th century. He’s speaking in Japanese, which isn’t a native language for either him or Jan, but the gist gets across. Cheng-nan adds more color in English. The brothers were born during the Japanese occupation (A-pei was actually born in Japan), so both were made to use Japanese names. Cheng-nan was actually known as “Kenzo” for the first seven years of his life, until the end of World War II. Just after the Japanese left, the Kuomintang fled mainland China for exile in Taiwan. At that point “Kenzo” was made to adopt a Chinese name, Cheng-nan. He goes by “Kenneth” in the States. It’s hard to say how much choice was involved in any of his names.
The brothers also provide some interesting accounts of their family. Like many families, they had a lot of siblings. Their parents had a total of 12 children. Three of these died early. Three of them were given away to other families, a fairly common practice in that time. So they grew up in a household with six siblings. When they grew up, they tracked down the three that had been given to other families, and remain quite close to two of them.
History lesson over, it’s time to put the kids to bed. Somehow the request for a crib came across as a request for a car seat, so we don’t have a crib for Bree. We end up assembling one from thin futon mattresses and seat cushions. Bree’s normally pretty picky about where she sleeps, so we’re relieved that she takes to her bed eagerly, and drops off to sleep without a sound.
,Taiwan, Day 6. We start the day with a traditional breakfast of soy milk and you tiao (fry bread). Our morning destination is Bagaoshan, a nearby hill with a Buddhist temple at the top. Cheng-nan and A-pei walk there with Jan, while A-pei’s wife, A-um, takes E-moon, Angela, and the girls by car. It’s a short walk. We pass by a local history museum. According to A-pei, there’s a display inside about his and Cheng-nan’s grandfather, who founded a prominent local bank. A savings and loan, actually. Apparently he was a very nice guy, and willing to lend to people who needed help—a George Bailey “It’s a Wonderful Life” local banker type, if Bedford Falls were in Chenghua County.
We reach Bagaoshan hill, and the path from the base to the top follows a nice long rushing stream. We all meet up at the top, and walk around a water fountain to the giant Buddha at the top of the hill. You can climb up inside the Buddha, which we do, although the viewing area inside the Buddha’s head is closed. Ironically enough, there’s a store inside the Buddha. It is selling religious items, but still, it seems odd to find commercial activity inside of a religious icon.
Back at A-pei and A-um’s home, A-um pulls out some family artifacts, including an amazingly tiny pair of ornate shoes. These belonged to Angela’s great-grandmother, who lived in a time when women’s feet were bound from birth to keep them small and, to people of that era, attractive. One era’s fashion is another era’s torture. The shoes won’t even fit on Bree.
For lunch the plan is to visit Lukang temple about 30 minutes away. To some extent, this is breaking with our guideline of only visiting one tourist attraction a day, the wisdom of that practice asserts itself once more. Before we get to the temple, we stop for lunch at a large building that turns out to be a hospital. It’s a sort of high concept hospital, in which a functioning medical hospital is also a shopping mall and food court. We pass a purse store directly across from Diagnostic Radiology. We also see someone being wheeled in a hospital bed past the food court. The food at the food court is nothing special, and Bree’s feeling pretty fussy. Before leaving, we make a tour of the complex’s art gallery and medical museum. The museum features, among other displays, an enormous pedagogic replica of the human digestive tract from end to, um, end. By the time we’re ready to go to the temple, Sabriya’s done, so we bail on the temple and go home. The return trip is another 30 minutes drive, so all told we spent an hour in the car for a so-so meal from a food court.
Sabriya finally gets to nap back at the house, and everyone else putters around. The girls spend a lot of time watching cartoons on the Cartoon Network, often American or Japanese cartoons dubbed in Mandarin.
After a week abroad, Anya’s feeling homesick. Today’s a Saturday, the day we often eat breakfast at the Starbucks down the street in Madison Park. Anya usually gets a bagel for breakfast. So today she keeps moaning how she wants to get a bagel. Jan’s phone indicates there’s a Starbucks in Chenghua within walking distance of the house. Having prepared her for the likelihood that they’ll have different food offerings, we decide to make an expedition to the Starbucks. We’re joined on our walk by Angela’s cousin Ike, his wife Pei-lin, and their children Leslie and Eddie. It’s nice to stretch our legs, and it is indeed a bit comforting to be surrounded by the highly regimented interior design of a Starbucks location. Anya does get her bagel, even if it’s not the kind she usually gets. Liya, for her part, has been a pretty happy camper all day, with or without a bagel.
In the evening there’s a huge dinner banquet, thrown partly as an excuse to reunite the dispersed members of the Chen family, and partly to honor Angela’s parents and us. It’s in a Japanese restaurant. Dinner starts out with fairly a typical sashimi course, then veers into Taiwanese dishes like fried soft-shell crab. Anya and Liya are a bit taken aback by the sheer number of their Taiwan relations—there are about 30 people present, all of them related to us in some way. These relatives take turns coming over to our table offer us a toast, and we take our turn going around toasting the other tables. By the middle of the banquet, there are more people standing up toasting other tables than there are sitting down and eating at those tables. By the time the main courses begin to arrive, we’ve already had far more food than we need, so we’re glad to cite the girls’ bedtime as an excuse to duck out early and go to bed.
,Taiwan, Day 7. Today’s our Taiwan road trip day. We’re heading from Changhua, about a third of the way down the west side of Taiwan, all the way south to Kending, at the very southern end. The whole trip should take 4-5 hours. A-pei’s rented us a VW micro-bus that comes with a driver.
Cheng-nan sits up front in the passenger seat to help him avoid becoming car sick. The second he sits down, he begins chatting up the driver. The Chens always chat up taxi drivers. E-moon chimes in from time to time from the back. Angela tries to entertain Bree. Jan tries to negotiate some compromise between Anya and Liya over which of them will get to lean against Daddy. One bright note today is that Anya seems to have recovered from her bout of stomach virus.
In the middle of the morning, we heads east off the main highway, and up into the ridge of mountains that forms the north-south spine of Taiwan. We go a little ways up into the hills, to a village called Guanzhiling which is known for its hot springs. In fact, years ago the Chens came to this hot spring town for their honeymoon. Apparently, we’re here for a couple of hours to try the hot springs too.
We pull into a place called Reikei Hot Spring Resort. We’re assigned two temporary hotel rooms: one for us, one for the Chens. Each room is one half hotel bedroom, and one half giant bath area. There are two large baths: one which fills with opaque hot mineral water from the hot springs, and another with cool clear water. Everyone likes the bath, even Bree. Afterwards we all notice how smooth our skin is, especially Bree’s.
Lunch is upstairs at the rooftop restaurant. The whole hotel is really quite nice, and there’s a nice veranda outside the restaurant. From there we get a great view of the surrounding mountains, which are ridged with palm trees. Lunch is good, although unfortunately Sabriya gets sick again. She’s so calm that she makes no noise, and it takes Angela a minute to even notice.
Cleaned up and back in the bus, we have a longer drive in the afternoon down the southbound highway. There are vendors selling fruit by the side of the road, and E-moon asks Anya if she’d like to try some fresh coconut juice. Anya’s interested, so we pull off next to one shack where a family is selling coconuts. After some negotiation, a woman pulls out a large green coconut and a wicked looking kamma blade, which she uses to hack the top off the coconut. A straw goes in, and Anya gets to try the fresh juice. It’s a good thing Anya likes it, because the coconut holds something like a liter of juice. We all take turns helping to finish it off.
We finally get to our hotel around 4:30 pm. We’re staying at a place called Yoho Kids Hotel, which is a good sign. It turns out to be fantastic. It’s part of a complex that’s really three hotels: Yoho Beach Resort, Yoho Bike Hotel (for mountain bikers, it appears), and the kids hotel. The kids hotel is stunningly well-designed for kids. The hotel is built around a small water park. As we walk to the reception desk, we pass through a tunnel lit from projectors above. These project a computer-generated fish tank scene on the floor below, complete with fish that school around you when you walk through the light. This delights Bree to no end, as she happily makes her little “Fish!” sign language sign. (For the rest of our stay, any time we go near this area, Bree insists on walking out onto the projected fish tank scene, which always makes her lauge.) The reception area has a bright color scheme, and big colorful smiley-face cushions in the shapes of the letters Y, O, H, O. There’s a cool kids library and playroom off the lobby. The room keys take the form of a rubbery day-glo colored wrist bands containing RFID chips; the girls just need to wave their wrist to open the door. The door knobs even have extra-long handles so little hands can get enough torque to open them. They’ve thought of almost everything.
The highlight of the kids’ hotel, though, are the gorgeous illustrations covering the walls of each room from floor to ceiling. Each room is done in a different theme, and the illustration is done by a different cartoonist or children’s illustrator. The themes are pretty varied, and interesting. The door to each room is similarly covered in an illustration that gives a preview of what’s to come inside. Our room has some happy giant zucchini hanging from a trellis. The walls of the Chen’s room are covered in happy cartoony TVs. A cartoony TV illustration wraps around the actual flat-panel TV in the room. Anya and Liya are supposed to stay in the Chens room, but Anya decides she doesn’t like the TV faces, so we all swap rooms so Anya and Liya can sleep surrounded by happy zucchini. The rooms have some other nice touches, like the low raised platform of light-colored wood, and giant poofy beanbag chair there. The icing on the cake are cute happy colorful Y O H O letter pillows on each bed that match the cushions we saw in the reception area.
While we wait for our luggage to come up to the room, Jan takes Bree on stroll through the hotel complex towards the beach. There’s a pathway that runs alongside a long pond stocked with koi (carp). Bree makes her “Fish!” sign again and again. At the beach, Jan and Bree dip their toes in the Asian side of the Pacific ocean.
Our dinner reservations are at a restaurant in the hotel called “El Toro”. Surprisingly, this restaurant has zero Mexican food, nor beef of any sort. It’s a big Taiwanese buffet.
Taiwan, Day 8. Liya wakes Angela up in the middle of the night. Now Liya’s sick too. Angela didn’t feel well back in Changhua, so this now makes four of us who have gotten sick.
We have breakfast at at the “Seaview Restaurant” which indeed looks out over palm trees to the Strait of Taiwan. One good thing about a country whose cultural diet has traditionally revered pork is that every breakfast comes with copious amounts of bacon. Anya, our little bacon monster, couldn’t be happier.
On the way back to our room, we stop at the koi pond and buy some fish food. The girls happily toss in handfuls of fish food. Back at the room, we change into swimsuits to try out the water park. This early in the morning, it’s freezing, so at Anya’s suggestion we try the “Hot Springs” area. The water is much better at 40° C.
Our morning destination is the nearby National Museum of Marine Biology & Aquarium. The aquarium portion of the place is huge, and as we walk down the main path, we pass huge tank after huge tank of fish. Bree is happy to see all the fish, although gets a bit weirded out when we pass through an absolutely enormous tank. The tank has multiple clear tubes running through it, and we pass through this tank several times. Bree’s somewhat spooked by all the fish surrounding us on all sides. The last tube passes through a large shipwreck in the tank that’s been staged to illustrate the value of artificial reefs. Only halfway through the aquarium, we stop at a small outdoor playground where Sabriya is happy to go down a small slide over and over and over. We finally continue through the second half of the museum, which reaches its climax in another giant tank. There are tons of beautiful fish inside, but the show is stolen by the whale shark that lives there. It’s small for a whale shark, but still dwarfs everything else in the tank. It swims slowly in circles, accompanied by a small entourage of other fish.
We have lunch outside at a sort of food court, but it’s really windy. Jan and Bree eat a corn dog for lunch (sold from a shack with an American flag painted on it). Jan’s really hoping Bree is over her illness, because a greasy lunch doused in ketchup is probably not going to stay down otherwise. Angela retreats from the wind into a Starbucks with Anya and Liya. The girls are happy to have another chance to get a bagel. It’s interesting how, for us, Starbucks is replacing McDonalds as the place we go abroad for comfort food from home. At least it’s healthier.
We spend the afternoon back at the Yoho Kids Hotel trying out the different pools, taking turns staying with Sabriya for her nap or tending to Liya. Anya spends the entire afternoon in the water.
Taiwan, Day 8. Liya wakes up in the middle of the night. Now she’s sick too. Angela didn’t feel well back in Changhua, so this now makes four of us who have gotten sick.
We have breakfast at at the “Seaview Restaurant” which indeed looks out over palm trees to the Strait of Taiwan. One good thing about a country whose cultural diet has traditionally revered pork is that every breakfast comes with copious amounts of bacon. Anya, our little bacon monster, couldn’t be happier.
On the way back to our room, we stop at the koi pond and buy some fish food. The girls happily toss in handfuls of fish food. Back at the room, we change into swimsuits to try out the water park. This early in the morning, it’s freezing, so at Anya’s suggestion we try the “Hot Springs” area. The water is much better at 40° C.
Our morning destination is the nearby National Museum of Marine Biology & Aquarium. The aquarium portion of the place is huge, and as we walk down the main path, we pass huge tank after huge tank of fish. Bree is happy to see all the fish, although gets a bit weirded out when we pass through an absolutely enormous tank. The tank has multiple clear tubes running through it, and we pass through this tank several times. Bree’s somewhat spooked by all the fish surrounding us on all sides. The last tube passes through a large shipwreck in the tank that’s been staged to illustrate the value of artificial reefs. Only halfway through the aquarium, we stop at a small outdoor playground where Sabriya is happy to go down a small slide over and over and over. We finally continue through the second half of the museum, which reaches its climax in another giant tank. There are tons of beautiful fish inside, but the show is stolen by the whale shark that lives there. It’s small for a whale shark, but still dwarfs everything else in the tank. It swims slowly in circles, accompanied by a small entourage of other fish.
We have lunch outside at a sort of food court, but it’s really windy. Jan and Bree eat a corn dog for lunch (sold from a shack with an American flag painted on it). Jan’s really hoping Bree is over her illness, because a greasy lunch doused in ketchup is probably not going to stay down otherwise. Angela retreats from the wind into a Starbucks with Anya and Liya. The girls are happy to have another chance to get a bagel. It’s interesting how, for us, Starbucks is replacing McDonalds as the place we go abroad for comfort food from home. At least it’s healthier.
We spend the afternoon back at the Yoho Kids Hotel trying out the different pools, taking turns staying with Sabriya for her nap or tending to Liya. Anya spends the entire afternoon in the water.
Taiwan, Day 9. We’ve decided to stay at the Yoho Kids Hotel an extra night. The girls are having a great time here (even if Liya’s still feeling unwell), and we’re not in a big rush to get anywhere. We do have to change rooms, though. Since all this rooms are different, this just affords us the opportunity to check out a different room theme. We’ve seen in a hotel brochure that some of the rooms have lofts, so we ask to switch to one of those room. The receptions has Angela select a room theme from a computerized catalogue of themes. Angela chooses a room with a cartoony under-the-sea theme. The girls love it. The walls are covered with a cartoon coral reef populated by cute fish, starfish, and googly-eyed sea urchins, all the way up to the 20’ ceiling. The girls like both the loft bed and the bed underneath it, which is lit from above by a large ceiling light decorated with happy manta rays.
Today’s outing is to Kenting National Park. Liya’s not feeling well enough to hike, so Angela stays behind to watch her. The Chens join Jan, Anya, and Sabriya in the micro-bus. The ride to the national park takes about 20 minutes on a road up a mountain. We’re following a bunch of tour buses, and of course they’re all going to the same park we are. As soon as we get our park tickets and get into the park, we get off the beaten path that will lead us along a modest loop through a portion of the park.
The side path we’re on takes us past an enormous 300 year-old maple tree. The tree’s been hollowed out by disease, but the outer part is still alive, so the tree is still thriving. Walking on, we eventually come to a little gazebo where we take a moment to rest and snack. We’re about halfway through our walking loop. Jan points out to Anya that we’ve just about reached the furthest point from our home on this trip. To get to this little gazebo, we’ve: ridden a car to SeaTac, taken the little train at the airport, flown across the Pacific, flown to Taiwan, taken a bullet train to Taichung, taken a car all the way to Kenting and this park, then walked for a while. From this point on, every step takes us back closer to home. On our way out, we continue past more interesting points on the loop: a large greenhouse full of orchids; a cave with some large stalagmites and the roots of trees growing down from above; a boardwalk through a wide grove of enormous banyan trees that in actuality is probably only three or four trees.
Back at the hotel, Liya is sick, but she insists she’s well enough to swim. And, indeed, when she gets in a large indoor pool filled with fountains of all kinds, she brightens up. We spend the rest of the afternoon in the various pools.
Tonight the Chens are eating dinner outside the hotel. E-moon’s heard that there’s a local place famous for its pig’s feet, and has thankfully decided to cut us out of that plan. Before leaving for dinner, E-moon gets us situated in a hotel restaurant, negotiates with a waitress on the dinner order, then leaves. People start bringing food, and the food doesn’t stop coming, but it’s all pretty good. Anya and Liya ignore most of it, continuing to subsist on rice wrapped in nori.
Angela takes Liya and Bree to bed. Anya and Jan linger outdoors. There’s a breezeway with a wall upon which a projector is showing a giant page with an illustration from on the different hotel room themes. Sensors detect when anyone walks past the projection, and flip the page shown on the wall to reveal a different illustration. Jan reads a sign that explains you can also turn the page by waving your arm, so he and Anya spend a while there flipping through the whole virtual book. The quality of the artists’ work is really quite amazing. Their favorite theme is a wall painted about halfway up with cute happy teddy bears—and a painted game machine claw hanging down from the ceiling to pick them up.
Taiwan, Day 10. Time to head back to Changhua. We check out and drive back north, making a stop in Tainan. E-moon explains that Tainan was where her mother’s family spent some time each summer. She says there’s a lot of great food to be had. Unfortunately, we’re trusting our lunch to the driver, who comes up short, and we end up having lunch at “Sushi Express”, a so-so conveyor belt sushi joint. One thing that can be said for the restaurant is that it offers a stunning variety of sushi. Almost every dish going by on the belt is something different, and we watch for three minutes before we even see anything we recognize. We experiment. Angela likes a sushi roll that’s been rolled in little white and pink dots that turn out to be crunchy balls of puffed rice. Jan likes an inari-style sushi topped with cashews. Both Jan and Anya love a dessert plucked from the belt: a white-flan like pudding covered in a burnt sugar syrup.
Before heading back to the highway, we visit Chihkhan Tower, a pair of Chinese temples built on the ruins of an old Dutch fort. The place is a memorial to a Chinese warrior who led the recapture of the fort from the colonial Dutch. The volunteer tour guide who has attached himself to us doesn’t speak any English, so it’s not always clear what we’re looking at. It’s still a pleasant day to wander through the grounds, and the girls enjoy another chance to feed the koi in yet another koi pond.
Another two hours in the micro-bus finds us back at A-pei and A-um’s home in Changhua. Dinner’s at a restaurant down the street, joined once again by First Aunt, Second Aunt, Sixth Aunt, and various other relatives.
The food’s somewhat challenging. Sabriya is more open to it than her older sisters, who for the last four dinners have subsisted on nori and rice. A-um wants to make sure Jan tries everything, including a number of mollusk dishes Angela knows Jan won’t be able to stand. Angela tries a raw scallop that even she doesn’t like, then discretely slips the empty shell onto Jan’s plate so that no one will try to foist a scallop on him. Jan still has to try the shark salad and a chunk of some dried but nevertheless oily fish.
Over dinner, Cheng-nan and his siblings enjoy one more reunion before we head back to Taipei tomorrow. Way back last year, the Chens had tried to discourage us from coming to Taiwan this year. They felt that the girls were too young for a big trip, especially Sabriya. There’s truth to this, but we really didn’t want to wait too long. For one thing, deferred trips have a way of getting deferred indefinitely. For another, the elder generation of Chens is getting on in years, and we really wanted to see them all again at least one more time, and have a chance to introduce them to the girls. At dinners like the one tonight, Cheng-nan, his brother, and his sisters are all clearly happy to have the chance to get together again. Later E-moon tells us that she and her husband are indeed glad they came.
One interesting bit over dinner is that A-pei presents the results of his suggestions as to about what a good Chinese name might be for Sabriya. We had picked Ren-ya as her Chinese name at birth on Cheng-nan’s suggestion. It turns out that many people who hear the name think it’s too masculine, so we asked A-pei to think of other choices. He’s the family expert on Chinese character numerology, and enjoys consulting books that dictate which number of strokes should go into each character of a name, and how much the “water” portion of a name needs to balance the “earth” portion, or whatever. Mostly we just want to make sure Bree gets a good name. His finalists are Boya and Sanya. The “Bo” means “expansive”, and the “San” means “coral”. We like the meaning of “Bo”, but Jan thinks Sanya sounds prettier. Plus, another reading of “San” is “three” or “third”, and Bree’s the third child, so it seems to fit better. So, we decide that Bree’s Chinese name should be Chen Sanya, or 陳珊雅. (The 珊 character is pronounced “shan” in China, but “san” in Taiwan.) Jan had also forgotten that the “ya” part of all three of their names, which means “grace” or “elegant”, is also the same “ya” sound used to spell “Seattle” in Chinese (西雅圖, or “xiyatu”), which seems appropriate.
Taiwan, Day 11. Jan and Angela wake up at 8:00 am, late by Yaya Sisterhood standards, and discover that everyone else in the house has gone out to eat breakfast and taken the girls with them. A-um had said something last night about having breakfast at a place down the street, so we head there, only to find they’re not there. We’re pretty sure Anya and Liya have convinced everyone to take them to Starbucks instead, but since we’re already here and hungry, we have breakfast where we are.
Meeting up with everyone back at the house, we pack up and say goodbye to the Changhua family crowd. We board the micro-bus one last time for the drive up to Taoyuan, the city next to the airport we’ll leave from on Saturday. On the drive Jan sits in the back row with Anya and Liya as they identify ways Taiwan looks different from the highway than the U.S.: the plants, the use of Chinese characters, the styles of some of the cars, and so on. One interesting difference: even the biggest trucks in Taiwan don’t have full-size cabs with beds in the back—a trucker can drive from one of the country to the other in a day.
We make a stop at Sanyi, known for its museum of woodcarving. The museum’s okay, and there are indeed some impressive pieces. Lunch afterwards is the highlight of the day, though. The driver takes us to a nearby restaurant called Green Ark, nestled in a mountain forest. Apparently we’re lucky we’re here on a weekday, because on weekends the place has a long wait. As we’re slightly after the lunch rush, we have our pick of tables, and decide to eat outside on a nice deck overlooking a grassy lawn, a pond, and the surrounding forest. The food is a treat, somewhat eclectic, leaning towards European. They serve a cream of mushroom soup that’s so good even Jan loves it, and he usually hates cream of mushroom. Sitting outside was a good call, because when the girls finish their meal before the adults are halfway through ours, they can run around. The deck we’re on has a little sunken pool in the middle of it, spanned by an old wooden dugout canoe. The girls are able to amuse themselves endlessly walking around and playing on this canoe, and end up mixing with a number of Taiwanese girls who are similarly horsing around.
The remainder of the afternoon takes us up the highway towards Taipei, pulling off in Taoyuan. Our Rough Guide describes the city has, “Taiwan’s fastest growing city, wholly unattractive”. The hotel we’re in, the Chinatrust Landmark Hotel, is surprisingly nice in an anonymous, Asian business hotel sort of way. The reason we seem to be staying here is that one of the managers is a relative (brother, we think) of the Lee family that arranged much of the Taipei leg of our trip. We’re met by this manager, who welcomes us to the hotel and sees us ensconced in our rooms. Unfortunately we have three separate rooms: one for the Chens, and two rooms for us that are adjacent but don’t connect. We’re not sure how to manage it, but Anya and Liya are up for trying to stay in one of the rooms on their own for the first time.
The hotel’s Cantonese restaurant is reputed to have an excellent dim sum dinner, so we’re excited when we go down at 6:00—and crushed to hear that there’s a long wait. It seems Thursday’s the day the restaurant not only offers an all-you-can eat dim sum buffet dinner, it’s also the special day of the week when the buffet is half price. We can’t wait around with hungry girls to feed, so have to settle for the hotel’s other—and vastly inferior—restaurant which serves Western food.
Tomorrow, our last full day in Taiwan, is the only day that hasn’t been planned at all in advance. Angela does some last-minute consultation of our Rough Guide and Lonely Planet Taiwan, and finds a beautiful-sounding park called the Manyueyuan (“full round moon”) National Forest. It’s supposed to have some great family-friendly hikes. The hotel says it’s too far away, though, so we settle for a closer city with a ceramics museum. E-moon arranges a driver with the hotel to take us there.
Taiwan, Day 12. We pile into the hired van a little after 10:00 and set out for the ceramics museum. As usual, the Chens chat up the driver—and we learn that the place we’d really rather be going, Manyueyuan, is actually only about an hour away, half what the hotel had indicated. We’re delighted to change our destination. We leave Taoyuan and its nondescript neighboring cities and begin to climb up into the mountains. The forest is beautiful, and the road follows a river gorge, crossing over it several times.
We arrive at the national forest and realize that, due to our change in plans, we’re not set up for a hike. We don’t have our Ergo baby carrier, for one thing, nor a sizable day pack to hold snacks or water—and we don’t have water either. We also have left behind most of our umbrellas, and the weather in the mountain looks decidedly wetter than down below. Still, we’re game for the hike. The driver lends us an umbrella, and we find out we can buy water in the park.
Manyueyuan National Forest is indeed a beautiful park. It starts to rain as we hit the trail, but thankfully the rain stops 10 minutes later, and eventually the sun comes out. We hike a modest kilometer to a point where a self-guided interpretive trail branches off. Anya decides she really, really, really wants to go on that trail. The thing is, it’s getting close to lunchtime, and the only place we can buy food is at a visitor’s center up the main trail. Much persuasion is required to pull Anya away from the side trail, and even then, we have to promise we’ll take it on the way back down.
We’re not sure what sort of lunch we’ll be able to cobble together at the visitor’s center (strange dried vegetables? goopy stuff in tubs?), but the center turns out to offer exactly the sort of lunch we all want. The girls get sticky rice, and Angela, Jan, and E-moon all share jiao zi dumplings. Everything turns out to be pretty good. The woman selling food is charmed by the girls. She gives the older ones each a lollipop, and gives Bree a little white ball with chocolate inside. Bree gobbles hers up immediately and, when we walk out of the center, she runs back in to get another.
We decide to hike further into the park up to a waterfall called the Virgin Waterfall. Because we’ll be later getting back to the van than we’d expected, Cheng-nan heads back to the van to give the driver a heads up. The rest of us hike on. After we cross over a nice bridge over the river gorge, the path gets considerably steeper. Jan carries Bree up a very long steep set of stairs that switches back and forth. We finally reach the overlook for the falls, and it’s quite picturesque. The waterfall isn’t one big cascade, but a series of smaller ones down a steep cliff. There’s a big viewing platform where we can feel the cool mist coming off the waterfall. There’s also another steep staircase up to a watchtower. Sabriya insists on climbing these last stairs herself, although she does rely on Anya, Liya, and Angela to take turns helping her negotiate the stairs.
We hike back down to the main trail, and now only Jan and Anya continue hiking upward so they can link up with the interpretive trail Anya really wants to explore. Angela, E-moon, Liya, and Sabriya head down. Jan and Anya find the trail we’re looking for, and soon come up Cheng-nan coming up the other way. He says the trail is pretty hard, and thinks it should take about twice as long to descend that way as on the main trail, but Anya is undeterred. As for him, he heads back to the main trail to catch up with the others.
Jan and Anya hike quickly along the interpretive trail, although Anya’s not really interested in stopping to read the signs. When Jan occasionally stops to take a drink of water or look at the beautiful forest on the mountains opposite the one they’re on, Anya says, “Let’s go… you said we would walk quickly.” They do indeed move quickly up and down the steep staircases. Jan’s happy when we finally reach the bottom of the trail, and link back up with main trail. Just as they get there, they see Angela and the rest of the party coming down the main trail. Cheng-nan, being the only other person who hiked the side trail, is impressed with Anya’s speed.
We ride out of the park, and since the surrounding area has many hot springs, we make a stop at another hot spring resort called Great Roots Forest Hot Springs. Bree has managed to fall asleep in the ten minute ride, and we’re hoping she’ll keep napping, but no such luck. So, it’s into a hot spring bath with all the girls. This time Angela and the older girls enjoy going between a piping hot bath and a freezing cold one.
Back at the hotel, we have a little time before dinner. Angela decides to go running at the gym upstairs. This lets her fulfill a promise she made to herself to go running while we were on our vacation, and to justify the extra room her sneakers have been taking up in our luggage.
Tonight we finally get to have dinner at the dim sum restaurant on the hotel’s 3rd floor. We’re joined by Dr. and Mrs. Lee who met us at the airport way back at the beginning of our trip. The dim sum is pretty good, although nothing special. Towards the end of the meal, a titanic struggle unfolds for who will get to pay the check. Whenever Taiwanese people go out to dinner together, there’s always a contest of wills, with each side vying for the privilege of paying—and winning obligation points in the underlying gift economy.
A waitress brings the check to the table, and Dr. Lee quickly takes it, leaving it on his left side. Our positions are, going clockwise from the check: Jan, Sabriya, Angela, Liya, Anya, Cheng-nan, E-moon, Mrs. Lee, and Dr. Lee. Angela’s mom signals to Angela that we should try to steal the check away from him. Angela in turn signals to Jan, who’s sitting near Dr. Lee, to reach over and grab the check. Jan decides that the weak point in the Lee defenses lie with Mrs. Lee, who’s been trying to get Sabriya’s attention all evening. Jan whispers to Angela that he’s going to create a diversion.
Jan takes Sabriya out of her high chair and flanks right, aiming for a spot between E-moon and Mrs. Lee. Mrs. Lee takes the bait, and turns to the right to coo at Bree. Dr. Lee follows his wife’s attention, and turns to his right—distracted from the check at his left side.
Our Check-Fu is good—but Dr. Lee’s is better. Jan is holding Bree up for Mrs. Lee and Dr. Lee, but Angela’s not taking advance of the rapidly evaporating opportunity to move in and grab the check. Jan looks significantly at Angela, who looks helplessly back. She shakes her head. It’s no good! Dr. Lee reveals his mastery of the Iron Elbow technique: he clamps his left elbow firmly down on the check to pin it to the table, even as his head is turned away to the right. His defenses are impenetrable. Jan has to pull out. He extracts Sabriya from the melee and regroups with Angela. She says she never had an open shot.
The hotel manager—the nephew of the Lees—comes over to say hello. He speaks with Jan a bit in Japanese. At one point he asks Jan about the “keiki” in Seattle. Jan’s confused about why he’s asking about cake, and finally remembers that “keiki” is also the Japanese word for “economic conditions”. Jan heads up to put Bree to bed, while Angela stays behind with the girls.
Check-Fu Grand Battle Redux: Angela takes advantage of the distraction of the hotel manager to make one more dive at the check, and manages to sneak off with it before anyone notices. She hurries to the cashier and fills out the room charge form. Dr. Lee’s spider sense tingles, and he raises the alarm that the check is missing. The manager spots Angela by the cashier, who is about to process the room charge. The manager runs towards the cashier’s desk, yelling something to the effect of, “Belay that order!” The cashier cancels the transaction. Curses, foiled again! If Angela had only paid with cash, she might have gotten away with it.
Before they say goodnight, the Lees give Anya and Liya little teddy bears as parting gifts. We finally get the girls to bed. We end up doing our final packing with our set of bags arrayed in the bathroom so we can keep working without waking them up. We turn in early, hoping to get a good night’s sleep before the long trip tomorrow, but Bree sleeps restlessly and wakes us up countless times.
Travel Day back to Seattle. We’re up at 6:00 am, and hurry through breakfast so we’re ready for the van driver who’s coming at 7:15 am. We leave the hotel on time, but a few minutes away, the driver’s cellphone rings. It’s the hotel, asking whether we left any bags at the hotel. A quick count reveals that the Chen’s luggage was never loaded into the van, so back we go.
The procedures at the airport go surprisingly smoothly, as does the first, three hour flight to Tokyo. Jan invents an act for Anya and Liya, casting one of their new teddy bears as “Clumsy Bear” who likes to sing but keeps falling down or meeting with accidents. The girls go into laughing fits, and happily sing while having their bears meet with accidents. Jan struggles to quiet them down.
The connection at Tokyo is all too brief, and there’s no time to explore the shops or anything fun before we have to board the Tokyo-Seattle flight. This also goes pretty well. Sabriya once again shows her late-night endurance by staying up well past her bedtime, but eventually succumbs to sleep. We all watch a campy Japanese action movie called “K-20: The Legend of the Mask”. It’s in Japanese and subtitled in English, so Liya eventually gives up in favor of watching Kipper, but Anya makes it all the way through. It’s the first time she’s ever watched a real movie meant for adults without any sort of previewing on our part, so we’re relieved the fight sense are comic and both of the deaths shown in the movie are revealed in later plot twists to have been faked.
Touching down at SeaTac early Saturday morning (on the same day, so to speak, that we left Taiwan), we’re mostly awake. Liya is the only one really conked out as we stroller her through immigration and customs. A final van ride later and we’re home.
We’re all happy we made the trip. Overall, everything that had been under our control went nearly perfectly. The trip would have been even better if 10 of the 15 days hadn’t included some child being sick, but even then the illnesses didn’t really stop us from having a good time. And it was priceless to see all of our relations, and for them to see the kids. There’s no telling how long it will be until we go back, but we hope it won’t be long.
Bree is starting to say the names of her sisters. She said Liya’s name first, as “Lya”, and in just the past day or so started to say “An-na” for Anya. She refers to herself as either “Baby!” or else “Bee beah!” (for “Bree Bear”).
For picture day at school, Liya decided to wear a chi pao and have her hair up.
We celebrated our 11th anniversary! Instead of the normal night out, Angela planned a date day. Siri watched the girls in the middle of the day while we headed out. We had high tea at the Fairmont’s Georgian Room, followed by an afternoon at Ananya Spa north of Belltown. We stopped for a snack at Essential Bakery before coming home. Anya and Liya had a school event over dinner, so it was just the two of us plus Bree for dinner at Volunteer Park Cafe. A great and relaxing day!