After they picked me up at the Technology Building station we drove up to the Yangmingshan area, which is a mountain park north of Taipei and a very popular one-day getaway for the locals. Not only is it green and pleasant, but there are numerous hot springs spas in the area provided by the natural geothermal springs in the area.
This trip really wasn’t the best planned out activity I’ve every been on. We had no real reason for going other than to go, and so we had no specific agenda either.
We stopped first at the actual Yanmingshan Park, which is a small, well-manicured park inside the larger park area, then we went to Cingtiengang (which I think they changed the spelling on), which is a large, grassy area “famous” for cows (actually water buffalo.)
It was swarming with school children. For as far as the eye could see, there were swarms and swarms of school children out on a field trip. I got to thinking about it and virtually everywhere we’ve go this trip, we encountered hundreds, if not thousands – for there were hundreds in the park this day, of kids on school excursions. Do they ever spend time in class?
These particular kids appeared to be all schoolgirls, about 12-15 years old, and they were moving around in clustered groups of about 20-30 per adult, and whenever they encountered Michelle they went ape-shit over her. Of course, they assumed she only spoke English and tried talking to her in English, and, of course, she decided to clam up and pretend they didn’t exist for the most part.
But throngs of schoolgirls can be a difficult force to resist, and they would gather up around her and take pictures of her, like they were mobbing a movie star. At one point, it overwhelmed her and she began to cry.
I haven’t mentioned it much on this trip, but, like last trip, Michelle generates a lot of attention from the locals. Unlike last trip, she has competition. James, being the baby, gets more attention than she does, and she usually fares better when he’s not around.
Just like with Michelle when she was his age, people come up and ask to hold James, sometimes taking him away to show others – although that more often happens in restaurants, and the people wanting to hold him are employees prompting me to believe they’re trying to help Irene eat in peace. People are always trying to play games with him from other tables in restaurants or just when we’re walking down the street.
The wedding photographers were out in full force, too. No fewer than five crews were in the parks with the clients, dressed in wedding costumes being posed and photographed for their obligatory albums. I’m still disappointed that it was raining so hard that Irene’s and my album was done entirely indoors, but I don’t relish the torture they’re putting these people through to get their shots.
Michelle got to play on a suspension bridge, which she loves and I spent my time trying to read the road signs and asking questions like, “Zhuzihu, ‘Bamboo Lake?’ Have I ever been to Bamboo Lake?”
“Yes”, says Irene, “you have.”
“I don’t remember seeing anything like a bamboo lake.”
“There’s no bamboo there, only flowers.”
“Fine. I don’t remember any lakes, either.”
“There’s no lake there, either.”
“Oh”
“It’s where they have all the flower orchards now. You’ve been there.”
“OK, what about Jinshan? That means ‘Gold Mountain’, right?”
“No, you haven’t been there. There’s no gold there.”
“I didn’t think there would be, I just wanted to know if I’d been to that mountain.”
“Oh, it’s not a mountain, it’s a town on the coast, outside the park.”
“Oh, OK.”
And so, unbeknownst to me, a chain of events was set in motion…
(to be continued)