Peggy had to leave for work in the morning and I tried to keep up my diary. There were two days full of events and even fuller with photos (not to speak about the videos, they must wait anyway!) and it is time-consuming to decide, which pics to take for the blog, which to keep stored although I don’t upload them and which to delete, because they are just more of the same.
I was nearly finished when Peggy came back, and we set out to Kaba, the village where Peggy comes from. A bus took us to the “center” of the village and then a friend of Peggy, Mavis, came with a car to bring us around. The first stop was at her brother’s new old house, a very old village house that he carefully had renovated and now uses as a kind of restaurant that however only opens on demand.
a bed turned into a table 
the old houses can be so tiny
We got nice food and a special tea and went on to a cousin of Mavis There, they prepared bread for the night market and the smell was all around ?
We moved on to a pottery factory specialized in temple accessories. They get orders for special scenes and must form the figures according to sketches they get. And mysterious enough, it can happen, that a customer (some temple-person) calls (using a very down to earth and at the same time still mysterious mobile phone) them because s(h)e can feel that something is wrong with a figure. Then it must be re-done.
for the roofs 
the sketch for the scenery 
after first burn 
after second burn 
mother forms roof decor, children are also busy with homework or playing 
roof decoration before and after 2nd burn
before burning, thing 
The forming of a figure takes half a day, then it dries, gets burned, coloured and again burned, all in all a process of 2 weeks. So, this is very costly but apparently necessary to make the gods happy and so they are so good and nice to the Taiwanese….
After that, we had a short time in the garden of Mavis’ parents, where James, her son, played and Peggy and I talked about this and that.
Meanwhile, Mavis and her parents sorted paprika according to colour and size into boxes for the market and re-sellers. I would have loved to help them, but they didn’t allow it and instead I got two big, juicy and sweet paprika for my next cycling day.
We then visited a temple and now I looked at those figures in a different way. For me, there are a lot of strange things and it is even more unbelievable than Christian belief and the combination of real people living in this crazy modern world and believing in a God for money (which presupposes that money was here before this God started to exist) becomes even more picturesque when you see how they people combine an archaic belief with modern technique.
the figures at work after been set free from the factory 
for burning you can also use and electric oven 
behind a glass you can see the goddess for something… 
and left and right, she has guards 
…this one sees everything, the other one hears everything 
under the altar, there is a tiger to be fed with eggs 
for 300T$, a LED will be lightened especially for you and your fortune 
this scene tells a complete story 
printer, telephone, PC makes worship more efficient 
the position of those objects, tells if a God says yes or no, then you need a stick, after that you get a paper and then you need someone who explains what all of that could mean. For sure you are wiser then than before
The last event was Peggy’s English class for six 6y old boys. It was so loud and lively that you could see how much fun the boys had with the games and tasks they got from her. And Peggy was very exhausted after that….
Mavis brought us back to the village’s “main square and the bus back to Chiayi. We bought something for dinner and went home and although we talked for a while and I packed my stuff and me made another Bürgschaft-recording, we managed to get some sleep before midnight.
