This is a long one...

Wednesday afternoon, my mom, my brother, and I headed down to DouNan to visit my paternal grandparents. It was how it always is down there: in the middle of nowhere, smelling like chicken and goose droppings, and very, very, very Taiwan-rural, which might conjure a romantic pastoral mental image, but it is much, much different from that. Sleeping at my grandparents' means sleeping under a mosquito net; otherwise, I would probably wake up swollen beyond belief. My brother rode a bike in circles for about 20 minutes and came inside with a baker's dozen of mosquito bites. The ring finger on his left hand is currently swollen to about one and a half times its original size.

To give a measure of my brother's and my boredom, I'll mention that at one point, we pinched each other on the arm until one of us cried mercy. I bruise easily, so my left arm is now an array of purple bruises. And we spent quite a bit of time sitting outside and watching chickens run around and harass each other. However, my mother did take me on a tour of the land, rice paddy after rice paddy. 'Twas an interesting tour until something on the audible level of a gunshot exploded, thereby cutting our little tour a bit short. I could write a novel about my grandparents' place, I suppose.

Friday morning, my grandmother woke my mother up at 5:30 so that my mom could help her, um, butcher a goose. When I walked out to the taxi that took us to the train station later that morning, I passed a pool of blood and endless white feathers.

Then we made it to Taichung to see my dad's best friend from elementary school. At first, we went shopping at the local open-air market and stores. And at this one store, I honestly passed judgment on about 20 or 30 pairs of jeans and tried on at least 15. I ended up buying three. They were cheap though, and the store hemmed them for free. And then we went to a really, really nice dim sum restaurant on the 13th floor of a department store/mall type thing. Following lunch, the women in the group, myself included, toured and shopped our way down the other 12 floors. Finally, we decided to go to another department store in Taichung, where I tried on tons of suit jackets and pants and stuff and was told by one saleslady that the smallest size made in pants in Taiwan these days is a 25. Not fair. However, I did find a suit that I liked, and I ended up buying the black suit that I have been trying to buy for the last five years. Finally. And they altered it for me! It doesn't fit perfectly or anything, but it fits nice enough, and it was relatively inexpensive, being on sale and everything, so that was super-cool.

It is my new policy for buying clothes that I have to absolutely love whatever it is that I want to buy before I buy it. Otherwise... I'll go broke within the week. I did sort of break that policy on the suit because I don't really like that it is so loose, but my only other option besides that suit would have been to have one tailored specifically for my needs.

We had dinner last night at about 8 at a restaurant on the top floor of the second department store called Currydictionary. That I found quite titillating. And then my dad's friend drove us back to Houli and my aunt's house, where my brother and I promptly dropped in our beds to sleep. Twelve straight hours of shopping and fine dining is the closest I have gotten to "shop 'til you drop."

I was going to write a very creative and artistic entry concerning these past few days, but my eyes hurt, so it is time to end this discourse.