February 10, 2008 - This is so long ago, it's distant in my memory. It was a Lunar New Year family outing, but it was distant family to me, so it's all appropriate - my cousin's wife's family, and I got invited along because I happened to run into my cousin's wife on the street the day before.

That mound is a stone oven we built. This is a family activity that's more for kids, so it was dirty and interesting. It developed from a real kids' activity in Taiwan a long time ago. Some in the older generation remember making these ovens in the neighborhood and barbecuing food. Now it's organized in these special parks that provide the oven base, there are rocks that need to be collected to build the oven, and the park provides the food, too, as part of the fee.


I forget exactly where the park was, about a 25 minute drive out of Kaohsiung, towards Tainan, I think. These are my cousin's wife's family members, they were very nice and I had fun there.


Later in the day after the fires died down and the food got eaten - not very good cooked that way, but the point of the activity was to have fun with the kids, not to feast on good food necessarily, so it was still successful. And with kids, playing in the dirt becomes primo.

iTunes soundtrack:
1. Here We Go! (J-Walk)
2. Loved Despite Great Faults (Blonde Redhead)
3. Give a Little Love (Rilo Kiley)
4. Clones (We're All) (Smashing Pumpkins)
5. Uptight (Everything's Alright) (Stevie Wonder)
6. Message to Prez (The Maupin/Williams Project)
7. Offline PK (live-ish) (Pinback)
8. One Flower (Guo Brothers & Shung Tian)
9. Colored Spade ("Hair")
10. Not A Day Goes By ("Merrily We Roll Along" - Sondheim)