day 38! zhongxiaoxinsheng, shandao temple

Mother's Day! Well, not quite. Mother's Day is actually tomorrow, but my aunt had plans to visit her other mother (her husband's mother) on actual Mother's Day, so we did our celebration a day early. My aunt had told me to wander over after I'd had lunch, whenever, but my cousin said nono we were celebrating over lunch, so come over at 11am. WELL, I had not gotten much sleep the night before thanks to the internets, so I dragged myself out of bed after a few hours rest and got ready to head over.


Since it was Mother's Day I thought I should bring some flowers to my grandmother. But then I'd want to bring some for my aunt too right? And then my cousin's wife (apparently I should call her sousou) is a mother too, so I should get her some too. And if my cousin is the only person that doesn't get flowers then it's not fair. T^T


So. Flowers for 4 then!

Went to a flower shop that's almost literally next door to our apartment. They have a nice little selection of flowers. :D Pretty ne?

Seems like they're ramping up for Mothers Day, everything is pink, red or white.

So, fun experience. Silly Steph, you don't know how to order flowers! I went in there and said "I need 3 朵 of flowers". In Chinese, they use different counting words for different types of things, like how we might say "3 SHEETS of paper", "4 PAIRS of pants". Well I thought 朵 (duo) is the one that you use for flowers! And it is. But. It actually means 3 stalks or 3 stems of flowers! Which I quickly found out when I was handed 3 individual carnations and charged $5. I was like D::::: uhhh. They had already wrapped them and stuff so I couldn't exactly give them back! On the other hand I'll be damned if I'm gonna pay $5 for 3 little (ugly) flowers (I hate carnations). And I can't go over there with so few flowers, it would be like saying "Happy Mothers Day! I hate you mom."

I think I liked this one best though.

So I sat there in awkward misery for a few seconds before grabbing my balls and trying to stutter through what I ACTUALLY wanted. The problem was they had a bunch of people suddenly pour in  probably all buying stuff for Mothers Day, so I had to wait uselessly in the shop for another 15 min since I didn't have the confidence to stumble through my explanation in front of a line of angry people.


Oh speaking of which. One thing I've noticed about Taiwan is that the service here is...hm, different. It is sort of first come first serve and lines don't mean anything. You could walk up to the window and wait for them to take your order, but if some lady walks up and just announces what she wants, they will serve her first! So you need to just talk louder and faster than anyone else. I....can't though, because I am weak sauce. :( So all I do is sit there and glare at the bitch til my order is taken.


Anyway. I eventually express to them that I want a bouquet, like that other bouquet that you made for that nice lady. How much is it? Oh, we sell bouquets for 500, 800 and 900NT. Eeee?? The cheapest bouquet is $17?? T^T crapbag. Ah well I so rarely get to see them. Ok, I want one of the $500 ones. There were two people working there, a husband/wife combo. Surprisingly (or maybe not surprisingly) the husband's taste in bouquets was SUPER girly. The one he put together was all pink carnations and baby's breath, super bride-to-be looking. O_o I liked his wife's a lot better, even though she used non-traditional colors together (pink + red) and other randoms (purple??), it all turned out to be really sharp looking in the end. :)

See? Doesn't it look like Cupid vomited....

I think this one is much nicer. :) For example.

After each bouquet they prepared, I would say "...can I have one more?" and by the third they were like "?!??!" I could tell they were wondering who the hell orders 3 giant bouquets of flowers.  It's hard to see from the pic but they really were huge. And then finally I was like "...and now I just want one small one". They were pretty fond of me by then. Cuz at the end of it all I dropped about $60 on flowers cuz I'm baller and that's how I roll. :D


Then came the problem of how to transport them. I didn't want em to get crushed so I thought I would just hold them all but...after the lady piled them all up on my arms it seemed unlikely. Or in her words "you can't even see the road, how are you gonna walk like that??" Toyed with the idea of taking a cab but in the end just asked her to put them in bags for me and walked with 4 ridiculously large/long bags to the metro.


Since I woke up late I didn't really dress up or anything, just wore some jeans and a dark UK flag shirt and some big headphones. If anything I looked somewhat angry/anarchist/punk ish. So you can imagine how awkward it was to be holding 4 gigantic bouquets of pink girly flowers, with everyone on the metro blatantly staring.... (they do not care about openly staring here, it is very normal).


But I made it!


When I got there, my cousin was like "Oh, there was a miscommunication. They told me afternoon, so I assumed it was for lunch but actually it's dinner! They won't be here for a few hours....want to go get lunch for grandmother with me??" I was like T^T hai............. not that I didn't want to get lunch, just that I was so ridiculously tired! And I hella hustled to the station, thinking that I was late (the flower gathering set me back like an hour).

Anyway it went fine, we got some Coco's and I got some sugar in me. We had lunch and chatted a bit, and my cousin said that after lunch she'd take me to see this art show. And at first of course I was like I just wanna sleeeeeeep and I don't like art. But. Turns out that would have been a huge, huge mistake. :)


Cuz. It. Was. So. Cool!!!!!!


So, my aunt & sousou arrived with the baby and a bunch of food they bought from Costco and started cooking. They said we'd have a few hours to go look at the art stuff. I still didn't have a clear idea of what it was, but apparently it's like an exhibition that's held at a hotel (Sheraton hotel) near Shandao Temple station (just one station over). The show is called "Young Contemporary Art" or something along those lines. We were directed to the 3rd floor or so, and I assumed that they rented out the banquet hall or reception rooms to have an art show in. What it ACTUALLY was was a whole floor of hotel rooms, with each room transformed into an art gallery space! I think how they must have done it was invite different art galleries across Asia (almost all were from Taiwan, China or Japan) and give them a room to showcase their art -- I don't know if they had to pay for the honor or not.


I just think the whole thing is ingenious. First, the viewers pay a fee ($8-10) to get into the event. They get some cool entertainment for their trouble. Also, the galleries may or may not pay a fee to show their work. But they get tons of exposure, as well as many interested buyers coming to see their stuff! In other words, traffic. So it's a completely symbiotic setup, a very unique experience...I just completely loved it all around. :) And to think I would have completely missed it if my cousin hadn't brought me along! Hm.


Anyway there were maybe 50 rooms altogether, TONS of people filtering in and out....photography was allowed so I did take a good many pictures, but mostly of the pieces I liked. I skipped over a lot. I won't post them *all* here but I'll show a lot just cuz I think they're so cool. Usually art isn't too interesting to me but so much of the stuff they had really appealed to me. :) Bear with me! Not many food pics in this post....

One of the first rooms we went into.

If you walk into the bedroom area, more art is displayed there. :) Seriously it's an awesome viewing experience! I really think the rooms add to the atmosphere, like you get a preview of what it looks like in an actual home. I love it! It's so clever.

Some of the art was more installation like, though most were regular 2D (and some 3D) pieces.

Another installation example. I don't know why, but the pulsating, beating egg was really enthralling. Creepy but entrancing.

One of the best uses of the bathroom that I saw. :) I would so love it if my bathroom looked like this! It's like peeing on Princess Mononoke.

Gorgeous use of color. (Btw I will apologize for this once to get it out of the way and then not mention it again though I thought it countless times while going through my photos -- my camera is not great and the lighting in some of the rooms was unideal so I'm SORRY a lot of the pics have a yellow tinge to them, I really wish I could have captured the original pieces better! Ok done.)

Delicate mushroom lady.

A detailed piece. I'm so envious of this sort of art, that mmm mostly serves to dazzle you with the dedication and perseverance of the artist. :) Thousands of little lines or dots or whatever. I'm always too impatient, I could never imagine doing something like this. I can only imagine that the artist is heavily driven by some grand end vision they have in mind, otherwise they'd never be able to force themselves to keep going...!

This one is cute, it's a depiction of 4 different Greek/Roman gods with a monochromatic color palette, but what I like is that they go ahead and include the color tones used right next to the piece. :)

Also upon closer inspection, you can see that the pieces were done with like...paper cutouts? It's not actually oil paintings like they palettes would have you believe.

This picture looked delicious from across the room, it did look very much like a photograph. When you look closer you can see that the light spots were drawn in (just streaks of white) and the glazed look is affected but...yum! The lady there (the gallery owner) said that the artist does work for many fooderies? Like chocolateries and other places where you want to whet the customer's appetite. And believe me it worked. If they had sold strawberries in the room I undoubtedly would have bought some.......

These were cute. A set of little drawings, with a girl on top of various Mt. Fuji's. The artist was Japanese. :) I was kind of laughing at the absurdity of it with my cousin when she came over with a piece of paper, with a word written on it. I didn't recognize it but my cousin said "oh! it's the zodiac". Too small to see but each of the girl figures is somehow representing some zodiac animal, like a horse at the bottom, or monkey, tiger, etc. Cool.

Actually that is one part of the whole thing I really did enjoy. :) There was a mix of Chinese, Japanese, and a smattering of English everywhere....most of the Japanese rooms had a volunteer translator there, to switch between Japanese/Chinese, and...it was just kind of nice to hear all of them together. I don't know. It's funny but I felt like I belonged there, a little, hehe. ^^;; Also I'm always happy to hear Japanese! My cousin likes to push me to practice speaking so she kept saying "go ask them such-and-such!" "why are there two moons? go ask!!" hehe. It was kind of fun. :)

Cute lil sheep girl. I like how shiny her hair is.

This one was so odd. It was just various famous deceased leaders, calling you on an iphone....although they missed the obvious Steve Jobs??

This one was cool too. Each of those little pendulums have a word on them, and a word behind them. If you read the words on top, it says (in Chinese) "we have everything". But behind/underneath, it says "we have nothing"....

I liked the frames more than the pictures here.

Omg. As soon as I walked into the room and saw this I knew it would be my favorite. :) :) Even though there was still more than half the exhibition to see somehow I knew!! It's all the things I absolutely love in art, combined. :) It's cute but creepy. Stark but dreamy. Dark but colorful. I could stare at this for ages and ages. :D :D I really loved it!! The individual pieces are for sale of course but they're way too much money for someone like me to go and buy one~ hehe. So I was bummed but they had some pamphlets around that I figured I could just cut away the words and sort of have free art! :p hehe.

Once again though my cousin pushed me to go talk to them, and so I said to them in my broken kiddie Japanese "Umm...I think your artwork is the best of all the artwork here! :D" and the gallery owner was like "thank you thank you :)" and pointed me to a corner of the room I HADN'T seen, where they had books of the artist's work for sale!! WHAT!!! There were 3 different ones and I absolutely adored all of them. They were...hm. Maybe a bit expensive. Like $25 ish, but I dunno. :( I think I liked this more than all the clothes I bought, anyway. :) Plus it was signed by the author and had a simple little doodle inside each one. ^^

Also I got the business card for the gallery (which is in Ginza, Tokyo) and he said I could take a free postcard :D I think they liked me. <3

Very innocent and Victorian looking. :)

Again, creepy but cute.

This is a little different~

Another detailed work. :) Lineart only! Very impressive.

Same artist. I like the subject of the piece, as well as the title. ;)

Cute :)

Love it :D

Want. T^T I can't believe there is so much artwork in the same place that I'd want.

More creepy/cute. There's a goldfish on her bowl! I just love how strange and twisted it is. Very Alice in Wonderland.

I'm also a fan of tiny mounted canvases.

Big fan of the color scheme. How tranquil. I want my dreams to look like this.

Looks very classic. :) Like the Audrey Hepburn of Asia.

Really very intriguing and beautiful. I love the linework, the seamless transitioning, and the colorwork done. I dunno. I love watercolor. It's like seeing the world through stained glass.

Man there are so many more I want to show but I'm gonna wrap it up with this one. :) Actually there were tons and tons more pieces, but not all of it was to my taste (so I didn't take pictures) and also our pace was just too slow, we'd never make it to all of them (so I stopped taking pics for a while in the middle). Also we never ended up making it to all the rooms. :) It didn't look like that much stuff, but after 1 hr we'd only made it to, oh I don't know, 8 rooms???  It was quite daunting. :) I absolutely loved it though, and I think it's one of my favorite parts of this Taipei trip so far. I'm not sure why. I know I'll remember it, and I was really inspired by it.

When we got back, dinner was almost ready. I was super exhausted. Being on my feet for a while, and the lack of sleep...when the excitement had worn off I realized I was dog tired. But there was still a delicious dinner to be had. They made lion's head (the meatball thing), bamboo shoots, eggrolls, pickled cucumbers, and shrimp+egg in ketchup sauce. The lion's head was so interesting! In the center of each meatball was an egg yolk. :o

Then we watched some TV (I didn't particularly want to but mmm family time is family time!) Scott Pilgrim was on. I think they may have watched it for my sake. I'm sorry for that because that movie is extremely odd and I cringed for the US every time something weird happened. :| I think my aunt and grandmother in particular did not enjoy it. Hehe.

After that, there was Black Forest cake (from Costco) to be had. It was actually really really good! Costco cake, but done Asian style so the cake was not too oily or strong. It was good but....they ended up sending about a quarter of it home with me. I told them there was no way I'd finish that in 4 days, but they insisted that they couldn't either. (Then why get such a big one?!?!) Le sigh.

Then I asked the 3 ladies of the day to take a pic with their bouquets (they are holding the wrong ones T_T I don't think they were paying attention to whose was whose).


After a bit more socializing I was sent home to sleep :) All in all I spent about 12 hours there.


So. In some ways not the day I was expecting at ALL. Kurt was gonna come the next day so this is technically my last "solo" day in Taipei and I thought I would go around somewhere or something, but in the end it was a family day. I would've thought that with the lack of sleep I'd be grumpy and feel .....obligated all day but really it was actually one of the nicest days I'd had so far. :) The art, being with family that, though they don't know me well, are so welcoming and loving.....well I can say that I was very touched. I think we all had a happy mother's day.


(Except my actual mom, who I didn't get any flowers for! Happy Mother's Day O_O Please don't kill me.)