Kriegsbemalung (War Paint)

I have to make a confession: I burned myself terribly that day. In the summer, the UV index in Taiwan can climb easily in the “extreme” region of 11+ in summer. You feel the sun tickling the moment you step outside and it takes only a few minutes to have light burns. So of course I grudgingly jumped out of the water all half-or-so-hour, danced over the lava… eh sand, to hit me up with a new dose of sun screen.

…but I forgot my hands. My poor hands. They were sandy and I didn’t want to “waste” my last drinking water to clean them, so I only did a half ass job. Well, turns out sand on the hand is rinsed in water. So yeah, I had two lizard hands afterwards and a quite worried and angry wife.

Anyway. Apparently the way you are supposed to do it is with these war-paint like stripes. As the sun is coming from more or less straight above, this is enough? It immediately reminded my of some Maori warriors or something. Which is cool, because Taiwan’s coast is actually the Maori’s cradle! Maybe they even surfed these very waves? (Well, not these waves of course, see last post…)

(“Kriegsbemalung” is the German word for war, “Krieg,” plus the German word for painting, “Bemalung,” with the genitive-s in-between. “Bemalung” is also interesting as it has the verb “malen”/paint in the middle and a lot of stuff around it to make it a noun. But I’m not a German teacher and this is not German class, so we’ll keep it at that for now.)