Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious

I'm now writing to you from a small town in Chiayi county. The town is located in the south of Taiwan, which, topographically, is very different from Taipei. Where Taipei was mountainous and full of tall buildings, South Taiwan is flat, and mostly farmland. It feels strange to be in the country after spending a month in the metropolis of Taipei. Apparently, however, during Chinese New Year, Taipei is less of a metropolis and more of a ghost town. Everyone heads south to see family during the holiday, and so Taipei is empty. All of the businesses close and the public transit does not run. Further motivation to migrate south and leave the city behind. Not to mention the tranquil beauty of the southern area. Now, normally, I would show you all a ton of pictures and give you short explanations for most of them, but the upload speed of the internet here could be liked to that of a turtle's, if you felt like insulting a turtle. So, we will have another installment of the blog that will require your imaginative facilities and my descriptive writing skills. Maybe later I will be able to upload the pictures that accompany this post.

Here goes:
My family has a vacation house here in Chiayi county in the same complex as my aunt's parent's house. The complex is relatively new. It is a huge matrix of sleek duplexes just outside of the city. Across the street from the duplexes are several sugar cane fields. From the duplexes you can see the nearby city in the distance, because there is a huge plot of land that has been completely cleared out in preparation for a south branch of the National Palace museum. The city itself is small, but surprisingly crowded and full of tall, compact buildings. I don't quite understand why the city is laid out in this way that is designed to save space when the city is surrounded by fields. It seems counter-intuitive to me, since I am used to small towns in the U.S. that are spread out over a vast area. Perhaps this is how the people here maximize the limited space that they have for farming in the future on this small island.
Since we are away from the basin that Taipei sits inside of, the air is drier and it is also windy around here. Which is nice, because I am unused to the humidity of Taipei, and my, normally, stick straight hair becomes an afro when there is even a hint of moisture in the air. This weather also made my cousin happy, because he is an avid kite flyer. On my first day here, the two of us went out to the aforementioned cleared plot of land to take Mary Poppins' advice and "Go Fly a Kite." This was interesting for me, because the only other time that I have ever flown a kite, it was far too windy and my kite flew into a tall tree, never to come down again. So, I was interested to see if this time would turn out any better. I'm happy to say that it did. My cousin was able to get his large multicolored kite up into the air without too much trouble. Once the kite was up 100 meters in the air where the wind would be steady, he let me take the string. I had always thought that kite flying had to be kind of boring, since you just stand there and hold a string, but I actually found it to be a zen-like experience. There is something cool about holding on to something that is in flight. It makes you wonder what the kite is experiencing, and what it would be like to look down on the earth from that high. We tried to get my cousin's other kite up into the air as well, but it is a box kite, and is very difficult to fly.
Later on, I went with my aunt, uncle, and my aunt's mother to a supermarket a few towns away. When I say "super market," I really do mean "super." This store is similar to Wal-Mart, Sam's Club, Sears, and Target, but it is inside of a building that is laid out like a department store. There is a parking garage underneath the building, and the store itself is several stories tall. In the parking garage there is a place that will wash and detail your car, and the entrance to the supermarket is there as well. To ascend to the upper levels, you have to ride a special escalator. Instead of stairs, this escalator is a flat belt that rises on an inclined plane. I didn't understand the purpose of this until we left the store, but the reason for the flat surface is so that you can take  your shopping cart down to the garage level. All of the shopping carts have stops on the back wheels so that they will stay in place on the conveyor belt. I found this to be a clever solution.
Inside the store, we bought ingredients to cook food for Chinese New Year. The store had a huge meat section, full of fresh cuts of meat, and seafood on ice. I saw whole squid, and crabs, sea cucumbers, and buckets of shell fish. The produce was nothing to sneeze at either. There were piles of papayas, apples, and many other fruits that I have no name for. There were several different varieties of mushroom, and leafy green vegetables overflowed from their containers. The frozen foods section offered dumplings and bouzi along with a large selection of meat balls, (don't think meatballs in the context of spaghetti and tomato sauce here, these are made out of pork or fish, rarely beef, and are usually eaten in soups. They have a subtle flavor, and tend to be a little bit chewy). The bakeries in the store all carried Taiwanese-style pastries, which, as we have already established in this blog, are the pinnacle of culinary goodness. This store was amazing, and that was only the section that carried grocery items. The other levels had appliances and linens, and decorations for Chinese New Year. I was like a kid in a candy store, all wide eyes and trigger happy with my camera, (one day you all will get to actually see those pictures). It was a cool thing to see. The store had employees who were promoting the products in the store, they would stand at displays at the ends of the aisles and call out for customers to try sample the products. Everywhere you looked were people in red smocks, a far cry from Wal-mart where it often seems like nobody is working there.
I was interested to see this side of Taiwanese life, much like the U.S., the culture in the South is different from that of the North. I will be interested to explore this further.