In which I eat a lot of meat

Last week I celebrated Mid-Autumn Festival with my family. Mid-Autumn Festival is a celebration of barbecued meat (and also a story that changes every time you hear it about a woman and rabbit on the moon. it's great, you should look it up!). Therefore, I took it upon myself (as a culturally sensitive individual) to eat a lot of barbecued things!

Lamb steaks, beef steaks, shrimp, crab, green peppers, sugar cane - all of these things are delicious when barbecued by my aunt. I was too busy eating to take very good pictures but here is some of the food:


Technically barbequing (I think especially outdoors) is supposed to be illegal in the bigger cities in Taiwan because of concerns about air pollution, but people still bbqed openly on the street:


Oh, you're also supposed to eat moon cake during Moon Festival, the deal is that supposedly they organized the rebellion against the Monguls by baking the instructions into moon cakes (since Monguls didn't eat moon cake, only Han Chinese did). I personally find moon cake kind of icky, much more suited to secret message passing than to eating, so I stuck with the BBQ.

Also, I have really cute nieces! The oldest one has about the same Chinese level as me (Spongebob squarepants level), so we get along really well. I also shared my meat-eating expertise with her by teaching her to use a fork and knife:



Her little sister can't talk yet (so, also about the same level of Chinese as me):


Anyway, this is so awesome because little kids are sooo cute!




And, the words they are just learning are the ones I need to learn, because even though I can talk about economics and other boring things I am missing some pretty basic vocabulary.

A book she needs help reading, that I also need help reading:


"What'd you say? I don't speak English. Or Chinese. Could you repeat that?":



Cuuuute!!!