Each summer Danshui has a festival that is sort of like mardi gras in that it's a three day 24 hour a day street festival. The streets are packed with parades, music, fireworks, and somewhat contained violence. Meaning certain people are trained so that during this festival they will be possessed gods, thus impervious to pain. They then do various acts of violence to themselves and other god possessed individuals.
The most impressive and chaotic of these events is when two of them will put on blindfolds and fight each other with real swords. They don't do any stabbing motions, but they also don't wear any shirts, so they get sliced up very badly. Very very badly. This is so wild and unorganized that sometimes spectators get cut. i myself came very close to getting cut one time, and another time losing an eye.
This is because this festival is not fun. if you are a tourist it's probably amazing, but when you live there, it's horrible. the streets are packed, and getting around without being able to see anything around you because of the sea of people makes it easy to come face to face with a sword or firecrackers being thrown. The fireworks 24 hours a day are no treat either. They don't stop when the sun is up.
In fact this is the cause of my dog's emotional scars. when she was first abandoned as a puppy it was right before this festival and so the loud noises terrified her. Because of this she always freaks out when there are fireworks which living in Taiwan...is not a good place to have this fear. Holidays, temple birthdays, funerals, weddings and more are all reasons to have a parade and set off firecrackers and fireworks. I think you'd do better counting the number of days in a year that there aren't fireworks going off outside.
Thankfully for her, the last year I lived in Danshui the festival was cancelled after the first day. This was because a very old building that housed a local market burned down (nobody was injured). What you are looking at in it's place is a small park that was built.
This was actually quite a surprising thing to see because the street the market was on is called "old street" and a super popular tourist spot full of stores that sold various knick-knacks and snacks. With the popularity of this street and the quality of the location, i figured that everybody was thinking it was a "good" thing that the building burned down because now they could replace that old hazard with new stores to bring in more money.
So wow, they decided to make a small park instead. Color me happily surprised.
