Okay, that didn’t work. I had every intention of starting my new story based on my wedding photography experience. But as soon as I started (okay, after I wrote three sentences and then browsed the web for a bit), Doolies informed me that it was time to go to dinner with her family. Her big uncle (Taiwanese, and I think most Asian people, call their aunts and uncles by their birth order: big, small, and middle) had stopped by the previous day to invite us to dinner. We were meeting at a “traditional” place near where Doolies’s uncles live. Doolies’s parents used the word “traditional” a number of times when describing the establishment, which I translated with Doolies’s help as hole in the wall.

Our translation wasn’t too far off. When we arrived, we found an outdoor kitchen stacked with meats and dead fishes at the entrance, and a few ratty tables behind the open kitchen. Only one of the tables was occupied with customers. The host (or was he the cook?) pointed us toward a backdoor that led to a staircase to the second floor. The conditions on the second floor were not much better. But the place seemed to have the necessary accruements: three big round tables, Doolies’s family, and an old-school coin-fed karaoke machine, complete with 1980s backdrop photograph hanging above the stage. Doolies’s uncles had reserved the whole floor for our get together.

Stacked on the tables were food dishes and many bottles of Taiwanese beer, most in a half-empty state. The beer is going to play an important role in this story, so I should describe it. The bottles themselves were much larger than what we in America think of beer bottles. They were probably a liter or so, although I didn’t think to look at label—ignoring, for the moment, that the volume was probably written in Chinese characters. There was a green glass version and a brown glass version. Since they gave me only the green version to drink, I can’t say what the difference was. I imagine one was a light beer and the other a darker beer, but, again, that’s only supposition. I learned later from big uncle that this Taiwanese beer (I didn’t catch the name either) came from a region of Taiwan that was once a German colony. Seeing as Germany is the home of the best beer in the world, big uncle assured me, this was very good beer. From what I remember, big uncle was right, the beer was good. At least I think it was. It is difficult for me to remember a lot of what happened that night. I have doubts about whether the memories I do have are my own, or details I made-up or created through Doolies’s telling to fill in the gaps. But more on that later.

The large tables were like most large tables you have probably seen in Chinese restaurants in the states: an inner circular platform on the table spun on tracks to allow the family-style dishes to rotate around to the different chairs. When we arrived, the uncles made room at the first table (the one closer to the Karaoke stage) by supplanting Doolies’s cousins. This allowed us to sit with Doolies’s little aunt (an elementary school principal) and her husband, her middle aunt (Doolies’s mother, I guess, would be big aunt, as she’s the oldest of the family), her big uncle, and her grandmother, the matriarch of the family. Doolies was the first granddaughter on this side of the family. She uses this to explain why she was so spoiled while growing up in Taiwan. She’s no longer spoiled thanks to the ruthless children in America, and, and this story I find particularly insightful into Doolies’s character, a perm haircut her mother forced on her at a young age to look more American, we presumed. The middle uncle sat at the second table with his wife and their four supplanted children, the second of which dragged her husband along for the festivities.

The simple dishes of food arrived through the early part of the night until the table was covered in plates. I ate lightly, sticking with vegetables and mayonnaise-covered albacore. Doolies’s uncles sent the youngest cousin (and the only male cousin, the other three being, like Doolies and her siblings, all females) out for vegetable dumplings for Doolies’s dad, who, after reading a book on nutrition probably by a smarmy pseudo-doctor, had foresworn fish and meat and eggs and simple carbohydrates and frying oils, for the tasteless world of vegan delights. Big uncle is a vegetarian as well. He was the first in the family to move to the states, and his English is very strong, stronger even than Doolies’s parents.

Because of my experimentation with keeping kosher (at least my version of it, what I dubbed ‘Kosher Style’) I ate only fish, vegetable, and rice during time in Taiwan. This was by far the hardest trial in my kosher experimentation. There are lots of yummy dishes with duck and beef and chicken and pork in Taiwan, and to limit myself to only fishes (of which I only have a mild fondness, except when deep fried, since, as we all know, even deep-fried shoe is tasty. But, regrettably, deep fried food has a tendency to cause my stomach to summersault and back flip and do all sorts of nasty dances at the strangest of times) and vegetables seemed criminal.

I made only one exception to the Kosher Style for Doolies’s grandmother’s drunken chicken. I promised Doolies I’d make this concession before we left so as not to insult her grandmother as it’s one of her specialties. I kept my word, and even though it contained non-kosher chicken, I ate it for dinner one night. What amazed me most was the simplicity of the recipe. All the times I ate the chicken in Dallas when she cooked it (this was pre-Kosher Style David), I assumed she had slaved for hours preparing the meal. For those who have not eaten drunken chicken, you are missing out. It’s chicken cooked in an alcoholic broth. Here’s the entire recipe as told by Doolies’s grandmother: chop up chicken legs with a large cleaver; fry the chicken pieces in sesame oil with sliced ginger until browned; transfer the chicken and ginger to a stockpot; add equal parts rice wine and water; cook until done (she wasn’t more exact about the doneness and ignoring Doolies’s repeated requests—since she only speaks Taiwanese, I wasn’t in a position to ask her directly—for more details about the signs of doneness. The soup contained no vegetables, and is all about alcohol and grease and chicken. It was the wonderful exception to Kosher Style that convinced me that for all my posing, I could never be a vegetarian. Over the course of this week, my stomach has shrunk to a small ball. I can’t even look at Chinese food or fish without growing a bit queasy. For me, at least, it’s true that the food you grow up eating has a huge influence on the food you crave. Maybe if I stayed in Taiwan for long enough, I could get used to their dishes.

Since big uncle turned vegetarian, he missed the mixed wasabi and soy sauce that sushi and sashimi are paired. He told us that he now dunks the strings of white radishes into the dipping wasabi sauce. I’m not sure why I brought that up. I guess there are some details that add nothing to the story and yet seem so important when you first hear them that I feel I have no choice but to record them. And then when I get around to writing them, I find there’s really no place in the story for it but I refuse to cut it (and only partly because it would push off reaching the 3,000 goal). Or maybe, and here we’re dipping into David’s deep psychological waters, maybe it’s just that I really like to type radishes in wasabi.

The place settings at the tables suited the traditional aspect of the restaurant: fitted inside a beige plastic bowl was a small glass cup—smaller than your average water glass in a restaurant—stacked upside down. I immediately wondered how much beer one could drink from such a small cup. I had always heard that Asians enjoyed binging on alcohol. But judging by the size of the cup, significant doubts crept into my mind. Perhaps my Asian friends were not so keen on drinking. Perhaps their boasts of drinking were as empty as their food made me fell an hour after eating it. Now, I will admit, I was never one of those people that judged a person’s worth by how much alcohol they imbibed. (At least not really: I often belittled people for their lack of drinking skills, but that was social pressure. If you’re not in the belittling group then you’re in the belittled group, and we all know which group gets all the girls.) But looking at the tiny glasses, I wondered if maybe there were times when size did matter.

It wasn’t long before the uncles sent a bottle of beer across the table to me. Except for Doolies’s grandmother, all the women at the first table chose to drink tea instead of beer. This provides additional evidence in support of the hypothesis that women truly are the smarter of the sexes. It was only when I popped open the beer bottle that I realized the true ingenuity provided by the small cup. You see, drinking beer in Taiwan is not about sipping. It’s about downing shots of beer. You fill the cup, and then you drink it in a gulp. After a few rounds I realized that this was a very civilized way to drink beer. Similar to how chopsticks are civilized because diners aren’t expected to saw through their meat before forking it into their maws.

With the small cup, there was no hiding behind the colored beer bottles. I did that in school: I hid my slow drinking behind colored beer bottles. I was never a strong drinker in college, and in order to avoid ridicule by my friends (some of which are reading this—well, are probably reading this, if they’ve make it this far into this overly long musing), I would upend the beer bottle, and keep my tongue partly lodged in the mouth of the bottle, which allowed only a trickle of beer to make its way into my mouth. This left me with plenty of time to position the beer at the back of my throat for a proper swallow. As I said, I was not a strong drinker, and the sad fact was it wasn’t that I couldn’t handle my alcohol; it was that I really couldn’t drink it. My throat refused to swallow more than a few sips.

It wasn’t until sometime after graduate school that I found that drinking alcohol wasn’t as hard as I made it out to be. It was all about relaxing the throat and swallowing the alcohol without twirling it around in your mouth. Alcohol does not have a particular good taste on the tongue and nose, and the faster you get it out of your mouth and into your belly where it can perform its magic, the better. Relaxation was the key.

Besides the small cups, there was another devious custom in wait for me. As in America, there is plenty of toasting. But unlike in America, where at the end of the toast, people are expected to graciously sip at their wine glasses, in Taiwan people are expected to down a shot. I was already into my second bottle when I realized that anytime I caught the eye of any person, they would immediately raise their cup for a toast. I was three bottles into the wind before I realized that they were out to get me drunk. It was a conspiracy, I tell you. At one point, Doolies’s female cousins lined up in front of me, and each toasted me separately. That’s three drinks for me and one for each of them.

There were some people who were not involved in the conspiracy. Doolies’s mom was one of those people. As I began my quest to drink too much beer, she kept pointing me to the food, telling me I shouldn’t drink beer on an empty stomach, I would get sick. It turns out she was right as mothers usually are. But at the time, I politely nodded and continued to toast and chug full glasses of beer. That was another secret Doolies’s mom shared with me the next morning, as I struggled to keep my stomach in check while in a disgustingly terrible hung-over state: you don’t have to fill your entire glass to toast. You can fill it halfway or with less alcohol, or, and this she repeated many times during breakfast, you can toast with hot or cold tea, the temperature really didn’t matter, she assured me.

What Doolies’s mom did not understand, however, was that getting drunk was fun. There was much singing and dancing (see photos for evidence), and while, as I grew drunker and drunker, I was less likely to find the proper key in the karaoke singing, nobody seemed to mind. Big uncle in particular was a fan of my excellent drinking skills. He told me that his father, Doolies’s grandfather, was a very skilled drinker as well. He could substitute beer for food when needed. One time, big uncle was called by Doolies’s grandfather to pick him up at a restaurant. When he arrived, he counted 48 empty bottles of beer on a table with only two people. That is an insane amount of alcohol. I can’t imagine how long it would take to empty 24 bottles of beer (and I’m really thinking of emptying one’s bladder after the drinking). It truly boggles my mind.

I consider myself a relative good drunk. I tend to get very happy and social once I cross over the drunken line. I managed to toast everyone with their Chinese names, and even convinced the cousin’s husband to punch a song into the karaoke machine. Everyone sang except for Doolies’s grandmother. Not even a Japanese song could convince her to get up on the stage. The earlier parts of the night I remember better. I definitely drank too much and sang too much and danced too much, but everyone agreed (well, maybe with the exception of Doolies’s parents) that I was a fun drunk—as in, a drunk we can all point and laugh at. Yeah, that about sums up my night.

As with most good things, there’s usually a price to pay when it’s done. The tab for the night was very high. I’ll provide one example: Doolies found me in the bathroom with my head literally in the toilet puking. That example is rather tame compared to a few others that I remembered only vaguely, but which Doolies filled in the details the next morning. I’ve heard it said that you can judge a wife by how she treats her husband when he’s drunk. If there’s any truth to that, then Doolies will be an excellent wife. I do believe that the uncles’ karaoke night was the most drunk I’ve ever been. But I also believe that I’ve been close to this drunk before. Just don’t tell Doolies’s mom.

(Disclaimer: no, I don’t get drunk often. Stop worrying, mom. And, yeah, I did have more juicy details to add to the price part—but I’m tired now, and I wasted most of my energies on the earlier part. I guess you’ll have to let your imagination run wild on the other parts.)

As I penned these words on my flight back to Seattle from Taipei, I was constantly interrupted by “serious turbulence,” a term I guffawed at when the flight attendant first went on the horn to instruct us to tighten our belts. I now freely admit and accept that “serious turbulence” is a very complete and accurate description of large swaths of the flight back. The captain had warned us at the beginning of the flight that we would run into turbulence over most of the flight. I have been on many flights where captains gave similar such warning, only to hit a few bumps here or there. On those flights, I would look around at the shocked faces of my fellow passengers, secretly secure that the rational parts of my brain knew that the rough air—since that is all that turbulence is, dips and currents in the air, similar to potholes in the road—will not damage the plane. For the most part, my rational brain wins out over the more primitive parts of my brain.

What the turbulence will do, however, and is doing now in a most egregious way, was aggravate a sensitive stomach. Yes, my dear friends, after yesterday’s fiascos, and even counting today’s hang-over remedies and partial recovery, my stomach was still delicate. I’ve found that these particular bumps in the road are not a good balm for my ailing stomach. Reclining the seat all the way and taking short naps did help keep the demons from bursting forth during the more aptly-named stomach dropping moments of the flight. This flight has been one of the worst I’ve ever experienced in my extensive flying time, falling out somewhere between high flying rollercoaster and awkward bumper car memory, of which I’m sure you remember: you’ve waited an hour in the blistering sun downing hotdog after hotdog and washing each dog down with sugary colas, only to find yourself hot and bothered and behind the wheel of a bumper car, the smell of rubber heavy in the air, the repetitive carnival music drowning out the sounds of screaming children, and after the electric cars unfreeze, and you ram the rubber end of your car into the first thing that moves, you realize that the dogs swimming in colas in your stomach have declared war, and while you’re not sure who the enemy is, you are sure that if one more person bumps into you, the partially liquefied dogs will ride the brown sugary water up and through the esophagus to erupt and give new meaning to the bumper in the cars. It was times like that you focused all your efforts on driving true and straight and avoiding pile ups. The day’s turbulence was no different. It passed again, and I managed to keep my stomach for now.

And for those keeping score, while on the uncles’ karaoke night, I promised and failed to deliver on the 500 words to reach my goal (no matter how much I want to, we’re still too close to the Marathon to capitalize ‘goal’), I made up for it on the flight home, pounding out my 4,000+ words. This should cover me for the drunken day and today. I haven’t been able to do the math yet, but since I left on Sunday at 11pm Taipei time, and return on Sunday at 6pm Seattle time, I can also write another 1,000 words on the second Sunday night. I’m not sure if it will be necessary, however. I figure the goal is something I aspire to (as opposed to during the Marathon where it is something that cannot be missed), and my aspiration begins at ends not at the daily count, but at the more accurate weekly count.

Regrettably, my batteries died after I wrote the first few paragraphs of my next story. I’ll save those paragraphs for tomorrow’s entry. These last two weigh enough to keep me in check. And besides, it’s past time for me to get to sleep. Staying up for one and a half days instead of the normal one day has made my brain a bit weirder than usual.