A Weekend in Nantou with Buddhas and Pineapples

Welcome to May, my favorite month of the year.  Let's hope it is a good one (preferably one that is not too hot and not too rainy).
This has been a weird week for me, because no matter what I did, and no matter how much I slept, I was exhausted all week.  I might be a little crazy, but I think it is because I was feeling stir-crazy in Changhua.  I sometimes feel the need to go out and do something new, and it has been a couple weeks since I have done that.  Thankfully I went out and explored Nantou County this weekend, which will hopefully help eliminate the stir-crazy, sleepless me.
This weekend was a lot of fun, Saturday was spent in the mountains of Nantou County.  A few of the my friends, inspired by an ever-present urge to eat pineapple cake took our scooters to Sunny Hills, one of the well known pineapple fields/pineapple cake companies.  Have I explained pineapple cakes before? They are easily my favorite food in Taiwan.  There is not much to a pineapple cake to be honest, it is essentially a shortcake stuffed with pineapple jam, but I would live off of them if it were a a realistic option.  Certain tourist attractions in Taiwan are not actually set up for people to do/see things, and that is a reasonable description of Sunny Hills as well.  Upon entering the site you are given a free pineapple cake (which is, of course, the best thing about the place), and then you the throngs of visitors to one of three places: a store where you can buy pineapple cakes and pineapple juice (and nothing else), a tent on top of a building where you can buy a pineapple smoothie (and nothing else), or a small market area where you can buy non-pineapple goods (mainly vegetables, vinegar, and honey).  With the large number of people that visit Sunny Hills, I was expecting...more.
The rest of the evening was spent exploring Nantou City, which is surprisingly small, and completely uninteresting from what we could tell.  The temples we tried to visit were closed, the cultural center was poorly labeled and therefore impossible to find, but the restaurant of our favorite night market salesmen was open and that led to a wonderful Pakistani dinner.

Sunny Hills pineapple cakes!

 Today was, a weird day, to say the least.  Early on, when I moved to Taiwan, I made a Taiwanese friend at the train station, and she has been my language exchange partner since then.  We meet every once in a while, and today she took me to Nantou County to celebrate the birthday of one of the deities, which should have been much easier than it was.  Nantou County is a little over an hour away from where I live, but I have noticed in several 'road trips' with Taiwanese people that asking for directions is not frowned upon like it is in the US, instead it seems to be expected.  We knew the name of the city we were going to, and once we exited in that city, we got the rest of our directions by asking locals (and we didn't just ask one person, we stopped and asked for directions at every turn).  In the US I think the majority of people would be too embarrassed to ask for directions, and now that the popularity of GPS devices has increased there isn't much of a need to anymore.  The problem with the person-based direction system is that some people struggle with giving directions, and we found ourselves terribly lost.  After about an hour of wandering, and making the realization that we had arrived back at a town near Changhua, we decided to veer off in a different direction, and ended up in a small town called Guoxing.  Ironically, Guoxing had a temple that goes by the same name as the one we were looking for, but after a few phone calls we confirmed we were not actually in the correct location.  That didn't matter, we still enjoyed a temple buffet (which was consisted of a lot of tofu, which is still not my favorite food) and performed the temple rituals of incense burning and Buddha bathing.
My favorite part of this temple was not the building itself but the gardens surrounding the temple.  There were two main gardens, one had 20 or so boulders with Buddhas carved into them, the other had a large Buddha in the center of a paved circle surrounded by 500 smaller Buddha statues.

The 500 Buddhas: no two statues are the same.

I've talked before about superstitions on other cultures, and today I have another Taiwanese superstition.  This one pertains to photography in religious places, and how it is often viewed as taboo (though a lot of people, foreign and native still take pictures in these places).  Rather than having a fear that the photograph will take something away from the subject, in Taiwan the fear of photography in religious places refers to the unknown way this photograph will later be treated.  For example, if someone were to take a picture of a statue of Matzu, and this picture was later printed and somehow found its way to the floor where it was stepped on or torn, this would be disrespectful to the god.