Yin's in Taiwan: We Missed the Boat!!

So this past weekend was a holiday - "Duan Wu". Duan means 'beginning' and wu means 'horse' month. The holiday begins on the fifth month of the Chinese (moon) calendar and usually is in June. There isn't a definite reason as to why there is a holiday, but it goes something like this - There once was a poet named Chiu Yuan (and no he wasn't from Nantucket - dirty joke minded people). He was the number one advisor of the kingdom of Chu . But people were jealous of his position and said lots of bad things behind his back. The king wouldn't take his advice and in the end was killed by the enemy of a neighboring kingdom. The new king continued to enjoy the luxury of life and didn't like Chiu Yuan either. Later, Chiu Yuan was exiled. He wrote many patriotic poems after that and traveled. Long story short - he commits suicide by drowning himself in the river basically because he feels no one cares about life. The fishermen on the river threw Zong-zi (rice cakes) into the river so the fish wouldn't eat him. They later claim they saw a dragon skimming through the water and it held the poets coat in it's mouth.

So on this day it is considered good luck to eat Zong-zi. We were given many - lots and lots - of these by people - sadly the only one who will eat it is John. We ended up throwing like 15 of them away. I wonder if that would be considered bad luck? It is also considered good luck (why else do anything - right?) to try to stand an egg up straight. They actually hold competitions to see who can stand the most eggs upright. I tried to find the picture that was in the newspaper, but sadly I couldn't. It has something to do with the summer solstice - we will definitely take the kids next year (if we are still here) and do it. There's only a small window in which you can do it like a 2 -3 hour period around noon.

So after a couple days of actually trying to make it to the boat festival blah blah blah - we ended up going the last day and of course we missed any of the actual races. But we still had a pretty good time. Like I said before, we will plan it out next time. People come from all over the world to race and apparently it's very competitive.

The kids got to go on the bouncy bouncy things and they thought that was pretty fun.

Apparently John was jealous because he was doing "bouncy bouncy" on the ground while the kids did it on the bouncy thing (k - I clearly don't know what it's called). It made Jordan laugh so hard she was almost in tears.

Then we got to climb into a real Dragon Boat - complete with water and goo in the bottom of it -oh fun!!! See how excited Casey is - yeah, ya feel it rolling off her in waves huh?!