New affection and noise

Taiwan is absolutely full of stuff:

• neon signs, advertising je ne sais pas
• smells, including but not limited to: moisture, dumplings, stinky tofu, sewage, bonsai trees, perfume, plastic, asphalt, fried chicken, guava juice, disinfectant, fresh meat (fresh as in barely five minutes deceased), scooter and car and bus exhaust, occasional whiffs of mountain and even sea air...
• monks on cellphones
• buildings with totally dilapidated frames but shiny automatic glass sliding doors
• women with eerily perfect hair (the first things I want to learn in Chinese all have to do with food, but as soon as I’ve mastered that I want to learn to say, “Excuse me, what hair products do you use?” [my hair has gone rascally and unwieldy in the humidity] Whenever I think about asking this question, though, I think of that bizarre segment of Paris je t’aime that deals with Asian hair products, and then usually get distracted and walk past wherever I’m going)
• stray dogs and cats, particularly in my neighbourhood. The cats are high-strung and suspicious, but the dogs are surprisingly meek.
• temples (Buddhist, Taoist, and syncretic)
• scooters (motorized)!! And it’s astonishing what can fit on a scooter. Great Danes, 2-year-old children, enough food crates to load a small cargo ship, up to four mostly-grown people: these are relatively common sights, and everyone drives like a maniac.
• jungly mountains that territorialize the city suddenly and unexpectedly
• people in anti-H1N1 masks, many of which are designer and/or Hello Kitty-themed. People are taking the epidemic v. seriously; I sneezed innocently on the MRT (= the underground) yesterday and was immediately a cause of alarm. I smiled weakly and tried to look healthy.
• 7-Elevens: v. disconcerting. There must be more 7-Elevens in Taipei City than there are in the whole of the United States. They sell hot dogs, and also hard-boiled eggs marinated in tea, and exceptionally good soy milk in tiny little green cartons.
• noise: imagine the smells, only auditory. And add to it Beethoven, who is omnipresent in Taipei thanks to the garbage trucks, which drive around all day playing “Für Elise” to advertise their presence. When people hear this they run sprinting out of their apartments to throw their trash into the back of the trucks, which wait for nobody.

Taiwanese national obsessions are: putting things in multiple plastic bags (in bakeries, for instance, each item you buy is put into a tiny plastic bag, and certain like items may be combined into slightly larger plastic bags [i.e. sweet things vs. salty things], and then the entire purchase is handed to you in a large plastic bag), buy-one-get-one-free offers, and being genuinely and exceptionally kind to strangers.

On my first or second full day in Taipei, I went to Longshan Temple, the oldest and one of the most sacred Buddhist temples in the city. I arrived just as the evening service was beginning — a v. beautiful affair with incense and chanting and gorgeously intricate shrines. It was v. crowded, so I was trying to stand somewhere unobtrusive, admiring but not really understanding what I was watching. After ten seconds, maybe, there was a tap on my shoulder and a girl my age-ish said, “Please, may I introduce you to this?” She started telling me the history of the temple and explaining the ceremony — the tables full of food were offerings to Buddha or the worshipers’ ancestors. Although various offerings correspond to various wishes (pineapples and oranges = good fortune; green onion = intelligence), people left all kinds of things — Oreo cookies, even, which I thought was delightful (Buddha likes Oreos!). The worshipers collect them again after the ceremony, but in the meantime they can pray at the main altar or at any of the numerous shrines around the periphery. This shrine is for medicine and health, my friend explained, and this one is for success in business, this one if you want to have a baby, and this one is to fall or stay in love — “this one is the most popular,” she grinned. Inside the shrines are hundreds of tiny little candles, each one representing a family who has prayed there and donated money to the temple. My friend said that she liked coming to Longshan Temple in particular because they were generous — they don’t charge for incense or candles, nor for fortunes, which are written on small scrolls of delicate paper by a monk calligrapher. I was in awe of everything there (spiritually and physically — the architecture of the temple is opulent and graceful, and there are exquisite gardens of orchids [as tall as me or taller] flanking the main altar), but mostly entranced by the unstudied kindness of this girl, who kept apologizing for her hesitant but elegant English, and who had to leave to get back to her university before I got a chance to ask her name. I know karma is Hindu, not Buddhist, but still — I wish her good karma.