In Pingxi there is a pretty big night market where you can buy food, cloths, and best of all, Sky Lanterns. These are mini hot air balloons, in which you light the base on fire and it heats the air inside the balloon and takes it up, up, and away. You write wishes on the lantern before releasing it and the higher up in the sky it goes the better because it gets closer to the gods so they are more likely to answer your wish.
This goes on all year around but it is especially popular during the Chinese New Year. I wanted to catch all the action so I hopped a bus from the Taipei Zoo after class on Sunday (yes, I said class on Sunday but that's for another post). They have buses running from the Taipei Zoo and Taipei Main Station about every 20 minutes. The ride takes about 50 minutes from the Zoo to Pingxi. I arrived around 6pm as it was just getting dark. That day they were releasing 200 lanterns at a time all night long. If you wanted your lantern to go up in a big group this was day to do it. You could also just release your lantern in an open area whenever, as many people did.
The food at the night market was pretty standard stuff: stinky tofu, BBQ squid, skewers with various types of meat, bubble tea, big intestine wrapped in small intestine pork sausages and the infamous penis shaped waffle sticks. When I first arrived I said I would try stinky tofu but that I would wait a month to get acclimated to Taiwan first. Yesterday, I saw it and figured, why not. I will have to admit, of all the carts selling stinky tofu I picked the least stinky one to ease my way in to it. It didn't really taste like much of anything. It sure smelled funky but didn't really have any flavor. From what others tell me the stinkier it gets the smell gets stronger but the flavor is about the same. For those who haven't had the pleasure, it smells like old garbage. People in Taiwan love it. I can't say it's bad because it doesn't really have much flavor but the smell certainly makes it hard to put near your mouth, let alone in your mouth. Maybe it's an acquired taste. I hated the first beer I ever had so...
Getting to the festival wasn't much of a problem. Leaving was crazy. Taiwan does a good job of offering constant bus service to the thousands of people who show up for this event. When I went to get in line for the bus I realized the line was a few THOUSAND people deep. It was so thick and went back so far I thought I would be in line for the rest of my life so I tries to do things the Taiwanese way and just cut in line. I tried three time and was caught each time by the festival police and kicked out of line. They weren't having it at this event. Either way, I figured it was worth a shot...or three.
They split the bus line up into two lines. One for people who wanted to sit down and another much faster line for those who didn't mind standing on the bus ride back. Given that the standing room only line was moving about 4 times as fast as the sitting line, I opted for the standing room only line. I moved through the line in about 1.5 hours and I figured what was the difference between standing on a bus for 50 minutes and standing in a line for at least two to three extra hours just to sit down. Well, the difference was I was sitting down at home before those people sat down on the bus. Actually, what ended up happening was, there were still seats available on the bus when I got on so I sat down the whole ride anyway. Suckers!!!
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