May 28th, 2009

Well, these are just some more from our Thursday at the beach.

I have a four day weekend due to the Dragon Boat Festival, so we headed to the beach early. We got there as it began to drizzle, and it was overcast all day. Not that we really minded. The lunch was cooked in the fire (soup noodles and green veggies + hard boiled eggs & tins of various things), and aside from a little ash -- which is good for digestion, anyway -- it turned out really nice.

So, I got to work clearing the shore of bamboo -- cutting down pieces into manageable lengths and the like... burning what isn't usable... At about 2pm, some senior citizens came down to the beach in search of bamboo. They were local residents and were apparently gathering some free bamboo to make some oyster frames in the nearby river. At first I thought the woman was yelling at me for using the bamboo, but she was just a tough as nails Taiwanese grandmother trying to explain to me what she was doing. I spent a while helping her and her husband carry bamboo poles up the road to their blue truck... it was really nice getting to know them --- they spoke Taiwanese and a little Chinese, I spoke English and a little Chinese, and we both spoke with our hands. As they took a break, they came and inspected my hut. I got their thumbs up which was really a seal of approval considering who it came from...

I worked on the hut and placed the frame for the kid's hut ( fifteen feet down from ours), the old woman and her husband scavenged bamboo for their own project, the kids played in the ocean with Gosia and the fishermen fished along the shore.

A very nice day at the beach.