Wednesday 6/10/09 - Whales and Chi

In the morning we had a 3-person scooter ride on Todd and Shu-Fen's scooter through the city to get to a famous pot sticker breakfast place. It was a little scary but mostly fun dodging cars, buses, and other scooters!
Then we took a bus to a long riverside pathway to rent bikes only to discover that the bike shop wasn't open during the week. A guy pointed out that we could rent boats just a bit further down the river so we went over to check it out. They were paddle boats...okay, at least it was a beautiful day to be 3 grown adults traveling down a river in a whale shaped paddle boat, so we went.

Afterwards, we wandered around Taipei a bit. This was our hottest day in Taiwan so far. Every other day the weather hasn't been too hot (especially by this girl's standards), but today it was HOT. We went in and out of stores just to cool off. I bought a happy Budha necklace at the jade market.
In the evening, we met up with Shu-Fen at her work and walked to a Temple. There are many ornate temples all throughout Taiwan where people go to pray and to leave gifts (mostly food) for God. We were given two incense sticks by a woman standing inside the temple. We stood facing the wall where a beautiful statue stood and we prayed. Then we stuck one incense stick into a big pot with sand in the bottom, burning side up so it would continue to smolder until it burned down to nothing (or until our prayers were answered?). We repeated this process facing the opposite wall where another statue stood.

Many people stood or knelt in prayer and then threw down two pieces that looked like halves of a small red plate. Shu-Fen told us that if they land with one side up and one side down three times in a row than the answer to the question that you are praying about is "yes."

Finally, we stood in line to have our energies adjusted and our chi altered a bit. Here, these elderly women are making sure that everything is in order and we felt good as new.

We had dinner at a Mongolian BBQ with Jay. I met Jay several years earlier, when we came to Todd and Shu-Fen's wedding in Vermont. Short on conversation, he was the only non-English speaker there, he busied himself with picture taking. And boy did he take pictures of everything. It was good to see him again.