Hi Everyone. This is Linda writing this portion of the blog. Josh will pick up later and tell you all about our afternoon seeing the many sights of Tainan, but he’s out taking photos of temples right now!

We spent the morning with David again this morning. It’s hard to think of him as David though now – we’ve been calling him Chien-Chien along with the St. Lucy’s staff. He definitely remembered us today – and there’s no doubt that he’s going to be a daddy’s boy. He did not want to be held by me but I still got lots of smiles as we played together – he really liked playing peek-a-boo with Daddy’s baseball hat and looking out the window at the mopeds and bikes on the street! He also likes noisy toys – we have lots of those waiting for him at home. I think he’ll be totally overwhelmed though when he sees our basement, which is full of toys. He was perfectly happy today playing with just a couple of things for two hours.

He is a very cute and charming boy and it’s really clear how much the St. Lucy’s staff all cared for him. Today we got to basically hang out in a room with him for 2 hours. At one point, his caretaker came in and he immediately went to her and wanted her to hold him. But then the next time she came in, he went to Josh!

I have to say that he is much happier than I expected. We were told that he didn’t smile much and was a very serious boy. . . he smiled at both of us a number of times today. He cried twice – once when I scared him with a doll (bad mom!) and once when his rice cereal was too hot. Both times he calmed down extremely quickly. I think he’s destined to have a Mohawk for a while though – his hair is so thin it won’t stay flat on his head. We’ll either have to basically shave it all off or let him run around with it sticking up. Jessica, our main contact at St. Lucy’s, said a number of times today that she’s amazed at how well he’s doing with us. They had been showing him the pictures we mailed every day so I think he recognized us – especially Josh. My picture didn’t actually look a lot like me, but Josh’s photo clearly looked like him with his glasses and a non-changing hair style.

Tomorrow is the big day – we will go to St. Lucy’s at 9 am and stay through lunch. David’s birthmother will come at 11 to see him and meet us. I imagine that will be a very emotional visit but I’m really glad that we’ll get to meet her and she’ll get to meet us. Hopefully she’ll be happy with David’s placement. We have a number of questions we want to ask her including if there’s any significance to his name. We also have questions about his daily schedule, etc. that we’ll be able to ask the caretakers.

I can’t think of anything else to write about David, so on to my next topic -- food in Tainan. Last night we ventured out and walked around the part of Tainan near our hotel looking for a restaurant. We managed to pass a children’s clothing store on the way, which was handy, and we bought some bigger clothes for David and some new shoes – hopefully they’ll fit. We also bought some of the surfboard (rice) crackers that he likes to snack on. It’s such a globalized city – we passed a Puma store, an Adidas store, a Nike store, and a Birkenstock store! Then we found a restaurant that looked promising – I ordered shrimp noodle soup and Josh ordered some sort of pork noodle soup. I was very disappointed to discover that my shrimp were encased in pork. Since I don’t eat pork, I was feeling very frustrated at how hard it is to find things to eat here (it was partly our own fault – a friend had written out “I don’t eat pork or beef” in Chinese but we had left it in the hotel. Even that would only have helped so much since the restaurant we were in did not have a single item that didn’t contain pork). So, I ended up eating cold noodles from 7-11 in the hotel room.

But, this morning I decided I had to take action. Josh was telling me that I wasn’t being a very adventurous eater, which I felt was a little unfair since it’s hard to be adventurous when 99% of the food contains an ingredient that I don’t eat. Our friend (thanks Hai-Chu!) had also given us a list of vegetarian restaurants in Tainan. We showed it to our driver when he picked us up from St. Lucy’s – he happened to know the husband of the vice-manager of one of them and he called and got us a 20% discount on our lunch. The lunch was the most amazing thing I’ve ever had. It was a buffet with at least 150 different items – including 4 different kinds of vegetarian sashimi! They had a huge salad bar, a fruit bar, a sushi bar and other appetizers. Then they had 5 different soups. They had a stir fry bar – you could put things in a bowl and they would cook them for you. They had two bars of main dishes with pretty much nothing identifiable! They had 6 different kinds of ice-cream, 8 different cakes, and many other custard/pudding types of desserts. Even though it was a buffet, you could apparently also order things (even though there was no menu). The waitress brought us a couple of things to try, including a veggie version of a local sticky omelette - made with rice paste, sweet potato powder, and some mushrooms - and some cabbage with cheese on it. While not everything tasted good (I now know why stinky tofu is called stinky), most of it was great. The majority of it was hard to identify – was it tofu, vegetable?? But it was very nice to know that none of it was pork! Anyway, whether you’re a vegetarian or not, I highly recommend this restaurant to anyone going to Tainan. If you go, give yourself at least a couple of hours to do it justice and have time between courses.

We basically hired Stephen, the taxi driver recommended to us by others, for the entire day. He took us to St. Lucy’s in the morning, then to lunch, and then on a tour of Tainan in the afternoon. His English is very good and he did a great job taking us to different places and explaining what they were (although we did consult the Lonely Planet guide a couple of times when we weren’t clear exactly what we were seeing!). The very coolest thing we saw was an old salt factory that had been consumed by banyan trees. Since Josh is a much better history buff then I, I’ll let him take over the writing now. . .

We made six stops during the afternoon. The first part of our tour took place in a district of Tainan county called Anping, which was right on the coast. This was one of the earliest settled parts of Taiwan. We drove down a street that was called the first street in Taiwan and then visited the Golden Eternal Fortress, which was built in the 1870’s to shore up Taiwan’s defenses against the Japanese. We were able to walk to walls, which had been extensively planted with flowers, and look at the cannons.

Our next stop was the Anping Tree House, which Linda mentioned above. As she said, it was an old salt warehouse that over time was completely consumed by banyan trees. The roots grew all up and down the walls, covered the roof, and grew in the middle of the floor. They had metal walkways built up over the roof so that you could walk among the banyan trees and look at the roots snaking their way across the roof.

Then it was on to Anping Fortress, where we were able to climb a tall tower for a great view of Tainan. In just a one small section of the city directly in front of the fort we counted at least six colorful temples, and those were just the ones that were large enough for us to see. The fortress had a gift shop, and that was actually the first time so far on the trip that we had found any souvenirs. So we went a little crazy, buying gifts to give to David as he gets older. I also bought three cookbooks of Tainanese dishes.

After that, we returned to downtown Tainan and visited the Chihkan Towers, which started out as a fortress built by the Dutch and were later occupied by many different governments. Now it is a temple to two different gods of education and literature. Many students go there to seek blessings on their examinations. They have little boards where the students can write their names and what they hope to do well on and hang them on a prayer wall.

The Confucius Temple occupies a tree filled park. Inside the park is the largest banyan tree in Tainan – it towered over us and shaded a huge section of the park. Our guide, Stephen, told us about how he had taken part in ceremonies to celebrate the life of Confucius when he was a boy – they hold celebrations at the Temple every September.

Our last stop was a Koxinga’s Shrine. Koxinga was a Ming Dynasty general who was sent into exile when the Ming dynasty collapsed. He led 30,000 mainland Chinese to Taiwan to overthrow the Dutch occupiers. Koxinga died a few months later, but many of his followers stayed and more soon followed suit, establishing a strong Chinese presence in Taiwan.

Next to the shrine was a beautiful park with a curved stone bridge and beautiful fountains.

On the way back to the hotel we passed lots of preparations for a celebration to take place this weekend for the Jade Emperor, the main Taoist god. There were numerous stages set up along the street and plays or re-enactments seemed to be taking place on them. We think that this upcoming celebration might be the reason for nightly fireworks that we’ve been hearing. It seems like fireworks must be a pretty common thing here, because when a huge display goes off most people don’t seem to bat an eye or even look up even though they’re much louder than at home.

After returning to the hotel I went to check out a local temple – one of at least three within a 30 second walk from the hotel. It was a tiny affair, but the woman who worked there was kind enough to sell me some incense and then help walk me through the complex procession – I went to at least a dozen different stations, each with statues of different gods, and at each one I said a little prayer for David’s health and happiness and was then instructed to leave either 1 or 3 sticks of incense in an ash filled container in front of that diety. Outside the temple was an oven where people went to burn stacks of yellow lucky money that they had purchased from the temple.