HA HA HA!

TK quite accurately tells Nick and Don that Jen's issue is that if you don't fight all the time, she figures you don't care. Don has a simpler, and also quite elegant, theory: "They're worried they're going to get eliminated; that's why." Dude, it's so nice just having nice people on the race at this point, who can still sit around a train car and legitimately have a discussion about how things are going. You can see how TK is hanging over the seat talking to Don that he really likes the guy and is talking to him because he thinks Don can offer something helpful. It's been a really long time since people on the race were able to view each other that way, since there were this many adults left at the end. And I'm not talking age, really, since I'd totally include TK and Rachel and maybe not so much Ron. I'm just talking about attitude.

Ron and Chris find their way to the teahouse. They sit down to drink the tea, and Chris reveals that the clue says they have to drink all the tea to reveal the clue at the bottom of the cup, but that they're allowed to take the cups with them. She and her dad blow on the tea to cool it off.

Nate and Jen, Nick and Don, and TK and Rachel pile off the train. Everybody in cabs. You know what I love? In the cab on the way to the teahouse, despite the stress and the bullshit and the possibility of being eliminated, Nick is grinning as he talks about the fact that we're down to the wire and somebody's being eliminated. Nick is actually competitive, is the thing. Nick loves competing, and he loves the part where you go into that gotta-go-gotta-go mode. There's a difference between people who are happy while they're competing and people who are only happy after they win, you know? In the second column: Jen, who can only muster, "And it's my birthday, so we want this so bad." Seriously, sweetheart, simmer about your birthday.

Chris and Ron finish their tea, and she reads the clue from the bottom of the cups. Written in Chinese, it sends them (as Phil says) to the Gong Guan Night Market. There, they have to find a clown who will hand them a clue. I have to say that among the things on my list of Stuff I Need Not Experience, spending an evening trying to find a happy clown on a unicycle in Taipei is right up there. Chris can read most of the location, but she can't figure out the word that apparently means "clown," so she stops and asks a guy who gives her a hand. With the clown in mind, they take off for the market on foot. After checking in with the other teams, who are all in their taxis, we return to Chris and Ron, who don't seem to take long to find the unicycle-riding clown they seek. He gives them a clue, which leads to a Detour, where the options are Fire and Earth. In Fire, you head to a park, where there's a field where you "participate in a mystical Chinese ritual." This basically involves writing good-luck messages on paper lanterns and lighting fires in them that cause them to rise into the sky. Once you've done twenty lanterns, you get your clue. In Earth, you go to a different park and walk barefoot down a path of pointy rocks. This is allegedly a ritual used to relieve stress, but the person shown demonstrating it totally looks like he/she is running across a hot parking lot in July, so...not looking all that relaxed, actually. You walk up the 220-foot path, then back. Both people have to do it.