Yesterday my dear friend Ariel visited Taipei. She's a dance teacher down in Kaohsiung (southernmost part of Taiwan) and came up for the weekend because seven of her kids are having dance shows around Taipei. She invited me and it was really fun. Let me break it down for you:
I arrive to the entertainment complex at 6:45. This is a big place call "The Miramar" with a seven-story department store, a big ferris wheel and a ten-venue cinema. Ariel meets me and I follow her through some of the winding "backstage" corridors of the big department store complex to meet up with her seven dancers. They were aged seven to twelve and were all very cute. When I arrived they of course became shy and quiet, but soon enough they started talking again. None of them knew English but I can actually sort of understand what people ask if they talk slowly now so I managed to talk to them a bit. There were also two parents there who were really nice.
So we go to the show and they start dancing. At first I thought they were totally worthless even for kids, but then I realized they were just warming up and going through the dances in their heads, barely moving their bodies. So I let out a sigh of relief when the real show started. To summarize: it was totally awesome. They were breakdancing like mad, flipping and spinning and doing handstands and god knows what. They also had breaks from the dancing where three pirate-clad older people were doing bottle tricks (spinning and flipping bottles and cups in the air), eventually lighting them on fire. It was dazzling. There were also two clowns who took care of the talking. At one point the bottle-flipping pirates were mixing "drinks" on stage and handing them out to the audience when the clown said "gei waiguoren de xiansheng igge bei!" (Give the foreign mister a cup!) and every single person in the audience turned their heads to look at me. When I spoke Chinese they laughed at me, or maybe with me. I'm not sure.
After the show was finished the clown met us up, he turned out to be working at the miramar and helped us around.. he also gave the kids a bag full of arcade tokens (in the taiwanese arcades you pay for tokens that you use in the machines, you don't use real money). So we played arcade games for two hours or so... after that we got free tickets for the ferris wheel and went up and around it. I sat in a cabin with ariel and one of the girls. Her English name was Claire but she was shy when it came to talking English. She is probably the cutest kid I have ever seen in my whole life, for real.
And that's about it. It was very fun. Two people called me "a very handsome man"... and they were both men. Lovely.
