Lien: ”Do
good people also sometimes do bad things?”
Amy: “What could that be, if they are good people?”
Lien: “Maybe they don’t want to go to work?!”
Normally, Saturday should have been off school and work, but because of a holiday next Thursday, people can have a free Friday, if they work to compensate on this Saturday. So, this Sunday would have been the only chance to have a bike tour together. We had planned to get out at 6:30 for breakfast and then meet friends for a ride.
But it rained all day, the bike trip was cancelled, and we had to find something else. Neil and Amy wanted to meet another bike family from Taipei in Nanzhuang Township at a place called Hakka-Tea. There, we first played old children’s games like stilt walking, hula hoop and string jumping while we were waiting for them.
this is a train 
looks stilted… 
this is another train 
They had also some old tools and objects to see
a raincoat made by plant fibres 
a cradle 
a Hakka t-shirt 🙂
and the traditional board game Go that Lien in a self-invented version played with me.
let’s Go! 
Amy explained to me the first part of our DIY “lunch”, a traditional Hakka kind of tea/soup crossover, called lui cha with black and white sesame, pumpkin seeds, green tea and three other ingredients that I have forgotten, but as far as I found on Ecosia, it can vary anyway.
The other family arrived, and we started from theory to practice. We had to grind the seeds with a wooden stick (Guava wood) for at least 20min so, that the oil comes out of the seeds and the mass becomes mushy. Everyone ground for a while because you get tired fast.
After that, we got another, even more exhausting exercise: for rice-balls, we had to smash cooked glutenous rice, also called sticky rice and it doesn’t take long to get the meaning of the word, because not only hammering down was hard, you also needed strength to get the mallet out again. At the end of this process, the host showed as what real power is and finished it – onehanded…
The sticky mass had to be divided into small balls and then were rolled in a mixture of ground peanuts, sugar and sesame.
We enjoyed the self-made lunch together with spicy cookies and a second kind, called “cat-ears” and a little bit sweet.
The four children aged 3,4,6 and 8, found ways to spend their time for a while by chasing or playing Go and the parents and I could sit and talk. The mother is from Kinmen Island that has a very special situation, since it is only a few kilometers from mainland China and for decades was the most endangered part of Taiwan. Instead of now bringing an incomplete overview I just report one detail. “Since the Second Taiwan Strait Crisis, Kinmen has become famous for its production of knives and cleavers made from PRC artillery shells.“
One of the boys still had some homework to do and we could see his workbooks. We talked a bit about Waldorf, both families had been or are still thinking if it could be good, better or worse for their kids to be at a Waldorf school and sooner or later change to the normal system and have to face some challenges. I could not say much, because I just know from Austria that you can well “survive” outside the “system” and additionally I don’t know much about the way Waldorf school is adapted to Taiwanese reality.
I just can say it makes me sad, to see that one of the most important things for mankind, the education and upbringing is more focused on unquestioned specifications and expectations instead of giving children what they need to grow their abilities, to save their curiosity and joy of learning. Just trust them! Nobody needs to teach a child to walk and talk, they just want to master it and they don’t have a clue about grammar, syntax or whatever when the are a few months old and still, after a few years they are little philosophers and scientists asking things like “Is wind air?”
On the way back home I asked Amy why some Taiwanese still want to unite with China and was shocked by the answer. According to this, some people think, as China is so rich and powerful, also they (or Taiwan) would become richer. So, they would sacrifice all achievements that set Taiwan apart from China for something that is not even true. Of course, China is the biggest economy in the world, but India is number 3 in this ranking – anyone here who would like to unite with India because of that?
The truth is, that the average Indian, Chinese and even far too many US-citizens (number 2 as economic superpower) is poor. And even when you take the average, US is number 8, China number 75 (8640$/person – world average would be number 66 with 10600$/person) and Taiwan is number 36 (24600$/person).
It took 5 min to find out these numbers – is it so hard to understand or to communicate them?
We had another stop at the Lai Xinkui Noodle Restaurant in Sanyi to get a Hakka noodle dinner with that special black egg.
At home, we went to the roof of the house and Lien performed on her pushbike. She is so fast, and she has so much fun moving around and show tricks. Maybe I could do something to get better photos with my camera but if there is not enough light, soon photos of movements become blurry.
