I am a bone cleaner.

Hot hot hot!!! It's so hot today. I guess Melissa would say she like it!
Today is a very specail day for most of the Taiwanese people and we get a day off, (That's GOOD) but all of us have to be bone cleaners.(That's BAD)

Hahah..... not exactly, that ridiculous answer is from my colleague. April 5th is our national day, I only mention Taiwanese people because I don't know people live in China have this kinda festival or not. Anyway, we call it "Tomb Sweeping Day".

I didn't go sweeping the tomb today, because I already did that on last Saturday.
That's a big work for us to make preparations for Tomb Sweeping .... and we had to sweep two tombs.

I don't know how tomb things going in other country, but as I know in my country, it may cost you an arm or a leg to get a place to bury bodies nowadays. Most of the people choose cremation and keep the bone ashes in a jar, then set the jar in a temple or pagoda. (People who live in China don't use jar, they prefer to keep the bone ashes in a pretty tiny size of coffine, so they always buy two coffins, one is for the body, the other one is for the bone ashes.) To buy a small place to set the jar is also expensive, a place like a rental cabinet in the shooping mall may cost you 10o,ooo ~ 700,000. Also, you must be very careful to find a nice temple or pagoda which has excellent reputations .... otherwise you may got a notice for re-setting the jar in other places in the future. (Temples also bankrupt or move to other places sometimes.)

Taiwan is a small place, the more places be the grave yards, the less places people can live on it. So, I wonder how tomb things will go in Taiwan in the future. From grave yard to pagoda, what's next? It might be a chip or wafer to keep our DNA in it. The chip or wafter can be designed as an art or a decoration.... maybe a necklace is a good idea! then our future generations can wear it all the time to remeber their ancestors.

Yesterday, my colleague told me they never sweep the tomb before, because her parents were all from China. She is the second generation in Taiwan, therefore, their family doesn't have any tombs need to be sweep in Taiwan. Tomb Sweeping Day fot them is a day to remeber who they are and where they come. I think for my colleague, she probably won't have lots of feeling about that, but her parents must be very very missed their parents in China. I had heard lots of stories about how the first generstion decide to come to Taiwan and be liminted by the law can't back to China. After 50 years, our law allowed people going back,but the things were totally cahnged. Most of their parents were already passed away. All they could do is donate some money to build a nice grave for their parents.How sad....ah?