5/12/14
My mom woke up earlier than me and went to eat breakfast with grandma. I lazed around, so I stayed behind and had some bread with tuna spread, both made by my aunt. The morning sky was blue and had beautiful, dramatic clouds.
Gorgeous.
We were just packing and researching Kyoto all the way until lunchtime, when my uncle took us, my aunt, and grandparents to a dim sum restaurant. Unfortunately, the cousins couldn't join us because it was a school day...speaking of which, I saw their biology textbook while eating breakfast. It was paperback, and only half or a third as thick as the horrible, heavy, hardcover textbooks we had to lug around in high school!
Anyway, back to dim sum, my aunt and uncle ordered a bunch of different dishes including stuff that I've never tasted before like cow intestine and chicken feet! I tried both, and they were okay, though they weren't my favorites. There were many other delicious dishes that I recognized though, such as the shrimp shumai (燒賣) and the carrot cake (蘿蔔糕)!
Crispy pig skin.
Shrimp shumai.
Good old carrot cake.
Still not really a fan of chicken feet...
...Or cow intestine. :I
Taro ball!
In the afternoon, we brought over our luggage case to the grandparents' so my grandma could pack belongings too. While we were going down the elevator though, it suddenly began to rain. As we crossed the walkway to my grandparents' apartment building, we were hit by a sheet of almost-horizontal rain. The rain in Taiwan is amazing; the city disappeared in blank whiteness during the downpour, and it subsided just as quickly as it had begun.
Before dinner, as we were talking some more about our trip tomorrow, my grandpa told me that he lived and worked in Japan for about a year towards the end of World War II. He was still there when the U.S. bombed Nagasaki and Hiroshima, but wasn't really affected by the incident. Unfortunately though, the Japanese people around him were; he knew of a man whose home burned down during the bombing, and had to live under a makeshift shelter of a blanket draped over four stools while continuing to go to work every morning. My grandma was a child back then, when Japan also occupied Taiwan. At that time, food was scarce, and everything was strictly rationed. In both Japan and where my grandma lived, people would barely have any rice; whenever they finished eating, they would pour water into their bowls so they could drink up anything that was stuck to the sides. There was an airport nearby that the Japanese military used, so there were many air raids. My grandma and many others would often hear the siren and then have to dash into the underground bomb shelter. They would hide there as they heard the explosions from American B-29's dropping bombs on the airport. It's pretty hard to imagine all of this since I've never experienced anything close, but I'm glad to be able to hear my grandparents' stories of the past.
Well that's it for now. Sorry for ending on a low note, but I have to finish packing and then go to sleep early. So excited for tomorrow!