Merry Christmas?

So it's Christmas, apparently. Today we "celebrated" by going to some coastal towns to see an old mining village, then driving to a wonderful restaurant in the middle of seeminly endless rice paddies. At the village we saw the "Golden Waterfall," a yellowish, smelly, but beautiful little cascade tinted by deposits from previous gold mining. At a little museum, we learned about how awesome gold is (did you know that a single gram of gold can be beaten into a square kilometer of gold leaf? Craziness!), and got to touch a massive gold brick worth several millions of dollars. The restaurant was really exceptional; there was no menu, and we almost arrived too late to get in on the food for the day, but thankfully they let us have our meal there, because it was absolutely exquisite. We had a selection of sashimi that arrived on a little boat (!), various vegetables and meats, crab coated in dried garlic, shrimp in fried rice noodles, hot pot with milk broth, a whole steamed fish, milk pudding and fruit for dessert. It was a Christmas dinner to die for!

Yesterday we attended the engagement ceremony for one of Roger's cousins. It was at the Palais Chine, one of the fanciest hotels in Taipei, and apparently the mother of the bride booked it both because of this fact and because there is a life-sized horse statue in the lobby, and the groom's zodiac sign is a horse. Yes, really. And it only gets better. We arrived at about 10am, just as the engagement ceremony was actually ending, because we were not allowed to be there. The reason? Roger and I are both tigers in the zodiac, and tigers are not allowed to be at ceremonies like that because they bring bad luck (destructive energy or something). Roger's mother was also not allowed to be there, because her relationship to the bride is aunt, or "gu gu", which sounds too much like the word for alone. Seriously. Apparently at the ceremony the groom-to-be puts the ring on the bride, and she crooks her finger so the ring doesn't go on all the way, because she doesn't want him to control her completely. The elders also give red envelopes, and I saw the bride's sister, who was taking care of the envelopes, holding at least a half-dozen, with more in her bag. Pretty crazy. When we arrived, it was photo op time, so we posed for several pictures with the bride, groom, and some permutation of relatives. We then ate lunch, which was a decadent twelve-course affair featuring things like shark fin soup and suckling pig with duck. When we were three courses from the end, the groom and his entire family suddenly got up and left, without saying good-bye. Roger and I were pretty stunned, and were informed that this was both traditional and respectful. They left right before the fish course, because the word for fish (yu) is a homonym with the word for spare change, so they were essentially saying "We leave you some spare change", ie not taking advantage of the generosity of the bride's family, who had paid for the meal. They didn't come back either, so half the table was left to eat the dessert. It was a very interesting and edifying meal, that's for sure!

And new items for the strange foods list: raw snail, raw oyster, rice with pork blood, pork ears, pork liver.

We're leaving early tomorrow morning to travel around Taiwan, to go sight-seeing and visit Roger's mother's parents and some other relatives. I'm not sure what the internet availability will be, so I guess it's so long for now!