Walking in St Petersburg

To get ourselves oriented in St Petersburg, we spent the entire day walking.

St Petersburg is a city of rivers and canals, reminiscent of Venice or Amsterdam.  This is the Moika River.

The Church of the Resurrection of Christ on Spilled Blood.

There are many little churches tucked between larger buildings. Discovering them is kind of like being on an Easter egg hunt.

This is the day before the day.  The city has been decorated for May 9, Victory Day, the commemoration of the surrender of the Nazis in 1945.

Arrival in St Petersburg

It's amazing to think how accessible the world is.  This morning we said good bye to Mount Hood as we flew away from Portland.

About 9 hours later we were having "slow" tea while we sat through a 5 hour lay over at the Amsterdam airport.

After a 2 1/2 hour flight from Amsterdam to St Petersburg, we are now in Russia!  Too tired to even walk around the block, we made ourselves comfortable in our room, and went down to the bar to sample vodka and admire people passing by St Isaac's Cathedral.  Tomorrow we will begin exploring in earnest.

I know you all know what vodka is.  The tall colored glasses, however, are Mors. These are homemade juices made every season from available berries.  The one on the left is raspberry, the one on the right is sea thorn berry.

Here's hoping for a good night's sleep so the real adventure can begin.

Finally - A Lion Dance

We heard the drumming from our patio, but we couldn't see anything.  Finally, Solomon and I, wearing slippers, and Taylor in his shoes, ran down to the lobby and out the front doors.  We followed the noise, and a block away we finally saw the drummers, and the lions!!

Baby lion.

Solomon refused to have his picture taken with this handsome guy.

But he did give the lion a little pet.

What a way to start our day, thanks to the grand reopening of the Standard Charter Bank!

Tainan

David and Chia planned a trip to the south of Taiwan for us.  We took the high speed rail early in the morning. Two hours later we had traveled from the north of the country to the south.

Here we are on the High Speed Rail.  Life couldn't be better for a three year old.

We stopped at the beach shortly after arrival.  The beach affords a chance to shake the wiggles out and............................

to practice a little yoga.

Lunch at a local seafood joint was great, but these ice cream cones were even better.  The U-shaped tubular cone is made from corn meal.

Taylor and I liked our cone too.

This is Anping Fort. It was originally built in 1624 by the Dutch.  It was known as Fort Zealandia.  

This is the beauty of being grandparents:  we are relaxing while David chases Solomon around the fort.

All good forts have cannons, and this one has a lot.

I have learned during this trip to Taiwan, that I can't go anywhere without exploring a temple.  Anping Kaitai Mazu Temple is next to the fort, so of course, we had to go in.

Because we are at the ocean front, these are gods of the sea.

Solomon likes to kneel in a temple occasionally.  I love this about him.

Outside the temple is a carnival type area.  Among the games of chance and ice cream vendors, we found Dragon Hair candy. It is indescribable, but delicious.  It is labor intensive and must be eaten shortly after being made.  If I see this again, I will buy it.

Each candy was filled either with peanuts, or sesame.

Classic Taiwan ice cream experience.  Push the pink button in the center.  The wheel on the left will spin.  Where it lands, you might get a free ice cream cone.  If not there is a very small purchase price.

Our next stop was the salt fields, where salt making was once a huge enterprise. 

A huge salt mountain.  Tourists come from all over to see this.  It is especially advertised to Japanese tourists as a desirable sight to see.

View from the top.

This area is now an amusement park.  The best part for Taylor and me was watching our little family take a ride in a pelican boat.

You have to be seaworthy to go out on the water.

What a great way to end our trip to Tainan.  Now, two hours on the High Speed Rail, and we will be back in Taipei.

It Appears That Even Gods Need Cellphones

Songshan Temple, Taipei

Signs are Pointing Toward a Propitious New Year

The New Year festivities keep marching along.  The last several days have been filled with the sounds and smells that go along with fire crackers and bonfires.  Shops that had been closed for the New Year holiday are now ready to reopen. Before reopening they display an altar with their god, fruits, flowers and incense.  They also provide burners for employees to burn paper money to send on to their deceased  relatives. However, the shop doesn't officially reopen until they set off firecrackers.  The air is filled with the sounds and scents of the New Year.

Early days in the New Year I noticed that several temples had buckets filled with rice and symbolic items on display.

These two photos are of the first two displays that I saw in small local temples.  Each bucket is filled with rice, a mirror, a sword, a ruler, a scale, a pair of scissors, and perhaps a dagger.  I don't think the buckets on the left were complete, because later I found the display on the right which has a banner, and an electric light.  Chia informed me that these are all part of a Taoist ritual.  In my imagination I pictured people marching along and chanting while holding the buckets.

Yesterday, when we walked by the small temple with the red bannered buckets, all the lights were ablaze.

The buckets are on the right and left of this display to the gods.  The women at the temple explained that everything here is in honor of the New Year and the god Tu Di Gong.  They encouraged us to come back at 2 p.m. for the chanting, but we never made it.

Today, however, as David, Taylor and I walked past the Citibank ATM from our first day in Taipei, we heard chanting in that very first temple we visited.

The courtyard leading in to the temple had this huge display of electrically lit rice buckets. There was no marching as I had imagined, but there was chanting.

This small altar is in the center of the rice buckets.  Looking closely we could see food products - rice, tea, apples, cakes, many fruits.  All provided to us on earth by the god Tu Di Gong - the god of the earth.

We walked through this colorful display, through the clouds of incense and into the main chamber where the chanting, accompanied by drumbeats filled the air.

I encourage you to listen to the following videos.  Each one is slightly different.  One is a very measured atonal chant, the other breaks into a more glorious sound with several instruments and differently pitched voices.

We aren't done with this temple yet.  When we left, we walked down the regular sidewalk next to the temple and discovered that the area had been made into a kitchen.

This area is normally a sidewalk next to the temple.  Today it is a kitchen and they plan to serve a lot of people.  We walked by stacks of  ham hocks and fresh vegetables.

These women are washing the dishes.  Have they already served a meal today?

The sidewalk that has been transformed into a kitchen is on the left. The passage on the right is the regular hallway leading into one side of the temple.

And this all happened on the way to the park.  I think it was a highlight of this visit to Taiwan for me.

On the way back from the park we walked by the temple again.  Food prep was still happening, but oh my...........................................a troop of volunteers was dismantling the fabulous display of rice buckets.

Can you see the people dismantling the display?

It looks like everything will be stored until next year.

We still have a few more days of the New Year celebration left.  I wonder what will be in store?  I certainly feel that what we saw today is a symbol that we will have a most propitious New Year.  What are the chances that we would stumble into the final chanting of the celebration, and that within two hours all would be disassembled?  It was all very fortunate in my mind.