You Can't Take Us Anywhere

I'm sure most of you have seen the wedding pictures on Facebook. I'll probably do a post soon about that (I don't think I will ever forget the hilarious story of how Andrew's mom tried to marry us without us being there) but I wanted to first write a catch-up post for the past few days.

It's Monday night, and I'm in Hualien right now, a town in south-western Taiwan that's close to Taroko Gorge and is famous for its mochi. For the next few days, we're planning on doing a lot of eating and appreciating scenic views.

Let's go back to....  Thursday, the day after we got married. We had lunch with Andrew's mom, grandmother, and one of his cousins at an all-you-can-eat buffet. Andrew warned us that it would be a lot of food, but I should have definitely listened to his mom when she advised us to eat a small breakfast. Instead I had Youtiao, a fried stick of dough, wrapped in an egg pancake. And a vegetable bun. Whoops!

The buffet was... so overwhelming that I forgot to take pictures. Most of it was meat, but they brought out special vegetarian dishes for my mom and me, the majority of which I couldn't finish despite my aversion to wasting food. It also included a dessert buffet (with dozens of pastry options, Haagen-Dazs, and two chocolate fountains). Honestly, I think I'm just not meant for all-you-can-eat buffets. I always get overwhelmed by all the choices and feel vaguely ill.

After the buffet my whole family went back to Andrew's mum's apartment and napped.

My dad and Andrew's mom bond over producing perfect children

It was really nice to spend another afternoon in Zheng Da. One thing I hadn't realized when I stayed in Taipei over the summer is how much cleaner the air is in Zheng Da and the more suburban areas than Daan, which is in the center of the city. It's a lot quieter, too.

Unfortunately it had been raining (...this is the theme of my trip to Taiwan, apparently, along with "Weather.com lied about the rain stopping") so the stray neighborhood cats weren't lazing around like normal.

I don't always make Andrew carry my backpack, but when I do, he makes it his BabyBjorn

This ledge is where our favorite neighborhood cat normally lounges

It's easy to forget how many little differences there are among countries until someone who's never been to Taiwan reminds you that scooters and pink apartment buildings are less common in the U.S.

After our nap, we took the bus to the Taipei Zoo metro station to catch the Maokong Gondola up the mountain. If you don't feel like reading my earlier post, it's basically a ski lift up the mountain. This was one of my favorite sight-seeing outings that we did over the summer, and it was nice to be able to show it to my family.

We also got to see the Maokong Gondola front desk cat again--and we discovered there were now two of them!

Andrew and I noticed that they'd increased their prices from $60NT to $120NT, which was a bummer (but honestly, $4 for a round trip ride up the mountain was almost too good a deal to begin with).

Tara, skeptical about bubble tea (we made them try it--Andrew drank most of it)

The binoculars were fun but it was too foggy to see a lot of things.

We got to the top of the mountain around dinnertime, but all of us were still so stuffed from the buffet that we decided not to get dinner there as originally planned.

So instead we took a cab back to Daan (near the apartment rental), and got dinner at a Japanese restaurant. I don't consider my nuclear family to be super high maintenance in restaurants (despite my vegetarianism and Tara's life-or-death aversion to tomatoes), but after that dinner, I was wondering if I should re-evaluate that assumption.

Each person was supposed to order 400NT worth of food, but even at 8pm, my dad and Andrew were too full from the lunch buffet to eat. So we were already bending the rules a little bit to begin with. Because a lot of the dishes were Japanese, Andrew couldn't easily translate them and had to ask the waiter about many of them. We ended up going back and forth for a solid five minutes with the waiter about the contents of the vegetarian options. It was the least efficient method of ordering ever and we probably should have just asked him to pick a few dishes for us. We also kept asking for carafes of water from the other waitress working, because my dad was very dehydrated. As in, the waitress would bring us two carafes at a time and we would immediately drain them and ask for more.

The waitress seemed to find all of this hilarious, but our poor waiter looked like he had aged five years just serving us. Andrew overheard him ask in Mandarin "what do they want now?" when we asked the waitress to bring us more water for the fourth time.

The food was genuinely very good, though, and we saw another cat when we left.

It climbed onto the roof of the restaurant next door