adrian is rad

My rental car this weekend seems[1] to have a feature where the radio gets louder when you go faster (and the engine/ car noise goes up). It works pretty well, but not perfectly.

But, really, how hard would it be to put a beat detector on the radio and sync the turn signals up with it? I’m pretty sure the turn signals are already run off of a microprocessor (through probably a FET) in modern cars, so it’d just be another sensor and a bit more code.

[1] I can’t find anything about the Chevy Cobalt doing this online but I’m pretty sure it does?

(Shipping Up to Boston makes me feel very nostalgic for the city even though it was recorded years after I left the town.)

That’s my celebration of the 4th, I guess.

I’m back in San Diego, this time I’m here to attend a friend’s wedding.

A main problem of traveling on holidays is that nothing is open. Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade circa 1988. Couldn’t find a place open to use the bathroom for what seemed like hours.

This evening, I went to find dinner. The place I intended to go was closed, of course, so I went across the strip mall to look for something else. This is perhaps the longest strip mall ever made. I walked across perhaps half a mile of parking lot. This place was big enough to have a TGI Fridays, a Boston Market, a Marshall’s, a Mervins, a Shoe Pavillion, a Payless Shoes, a Barnes and Nobles, an In N Out, and probably 50 more establishments….I got brisket at Joey’s BBQ.

Then I saw Wall E. It was really good. Pretty interesting concept for a film–and impressive that they made a compelling film about robots virtually without dialog.

1. challenging each other to eat cake after a large meal. mid-afternoon at a local diner, surrounded by regular patrons and served by a pleasant waitress. after finishing a meal that was larger than any of us thought it would be, looking at a dessert menu and practically demanding that friends get a slice. then: devouring despite the already-present stomach pain.

2. sitting on shaded grass, eating fast food frozen dairy desserts quickly. after the rehearsal, realizing none of us had eaten for many hours, deciding to sneak off before the rehearsal dinner to a close-by fast food restaurant. surreptitiously eating the chocolate shake-ice-creams while taking a minute to relax in the shade by the parking lot before sneaking one to the groom.

3. hugging pillows. with some having gone off to run errands and pick up supplies, watching mediocre TV filler and making inane jokes that wouldn’t make sense to anyone else (and often didn’t make sense to us) about hugging pillows (while hugging pillows)

4. frantic typing and nervous suggestions. mid-afternoon in a hotel room, people hurrying about and dressing. half tuxed, ten minutes left till we were to leave for the ceremony, groom and friend debugging and typing out a last-minute script to make the big project work. (it worked.)

5. radiant smile and glowing cheeks. early evening by a pond and many flowers, under the shade of trees. above a magnificent and flowing white dress, a radiant smile and glowing cheeks and eyes staring into her partner’s.

1. Coronado, a beach near the Hotel Del. Mid-afternoon. Walking across that area of sand that’s firm because water has run over it recently and dipping my fingers into the chilly Pacific and pondering aloud if the military planes roaring overhead on their way to the base were Harriers. I don’t think they are.

2. A bar in South Park. Night time. Between local bands giving it their all on a small stage in the dark club and packed in among the local young hipster population, discussing merits of a variety of many recent bands on the scene with a new friend.

3. Balboa Park, near the Moreton Bay Fig. Late afternoon. Lying on my back on the slightly damp grass, staring up at the deeply saturated sky, talking about finances and how it’s strange to be an adult with an old friend.

I’ve done awfully awkward “you too”s before. The guy ripping my ticket at a movie: “Enjoy the movie” “You too…if you happen to see a movie sometime soon…”

Well today, I was flying back to San Francisco. I slept the whole flight. I was drowsy when getting off.

As I was exiting the plane:

Flight attendant: Thanks for flying.

Me: Bye. Have a good flight.

I think I might have meant “night”. Otherwise I really have no excuse.

Some days now I don’t even think about having lived in Taiwan. For weeks, something would remind me, some element of reverse culture shock or talking to someone about what I’ve been up to. But these days, America seems quite a bit more normal and when someone asks what I’ve been up to, I generally talk about the more recent happenings since coming back from Taiwan.

The overwhelming Taiwan-related thought/ feeling these days is that I’ve been itinerant for a long time. I haven’t lived somewhere even semi-permanent since August (and even through June-August I knew my time there was limited) and it’s started to wear on me. In a couple weeks I’ll move into somewhere for at least a year and I’m looking forward to that feeling of permanence.

number of pens that burst in the pocket of my pants on Thursday: 1

number of pants I brought to SxSW: 1

I just got back from “South by” as some (silly) people call it.

I saw around 38 bands in 5 days. It was pretty crazy. Some amazing stuff (like J Tillman (listen in, Tarky!), Two Sheds, and Fanfarlo) and some not so great stuff, but overall I was pretty thrilled with the stuff I saw.

But it got me thinking about music. I mean, even moreso than normal. After all, I had five days to basically only think about music. Here are some thoughts:

• label: seeing so many great bands that are unsigned or not signed in America got me thinking that maybe I should start a label. I don’t know the second thing about starting a label, though–I know the first thing, the first thing is that it’s a time and money sink–so I’ll need to talk to some people and get a better idea of what’s involved if I’m serious about it.
• self: I want to start recording and playing more music. I was even thinking about trying to get enough tracks together for a demo and maybe try to play a show sometimes. I don’t know what instrument I’d use. Maybe Wurly or banjo? I’m not sure. I need to get better at instruments as well.
• self, pt 2: I think I ought to get decent at trumpet again and ply my trade to the bands of SF to play for them.
• blog: I spend a whole lot of time on that thing. Is it worth it?
• presents: I should present more shows, I think. I was even thinking it’d be cool to be involved in a party/ showcase at SxSW next year. I’ll need to talk to some people about how to go about this.

In Mexico I had a Pepsi Retro.

It has “natural ingredients” and “no artificial flavors or colors” (that’s what the Spanish says, I think). As we know, I like my sodas sans corn syrup.

It has an old timey taste. Jesse tried it as well and said the same thing. I liked it. Generally I like Coke a lot better than Pepsi but if Pepsi Retro was available in Estados Unidos (apparently it’s Mx only), I might even buy it over regular coke (though probably not over Mexican Coke (w/ sugar rather than corn syrup) in a glass bottle, which is available in some stores around me.

I’ll be in Ixtapa/ Zihuatanejo for a few days. Be back early next week.

Last night, I ended up walking from the Sunset to my place via Tank Hill (that is, a steep hill to walk up and then down again; also it has a pretty sweet view of a large chunk of the city).

Boston you could walk across in a few hours and it was pretty flat so no knee problems or anything. I remember being exhausted after walking a lot one day and figuring out that I’d walked 11 miles that day. I was pretty pooped after yesterday’s 5ish (the above walk + some miscellaneous stuff) miles.

But I’m really liking being able to walk places. That’s fun.

Decisions: do I bike the Wiggle or take one of ‘em Muni buses?

Oh learning new things in a new city!

Drinking is one of the most common responses to the stress of being an expat — most expats don’t recognize how stressed they are.

Yes, that makes sense.

[Yes, I’m consciously stealing the title.]

Lucerne (Safeway’s house brand) now has a green tea light yogurt. It’s really good. I’ve been enjoying it frequently. The mango green tea is also good, but I’d give the peach green tea flavor a skip.

Fight Quest is a pretty fascinating show. I caught a couple episodes of it today. Two guys travel to different regions of the globe to learn regional martial arts styles. They have 5 days of intense training and then they have to fight a skilled fighter of the style. I’m not quite sure why it’s fascinating; maybe it’s seeing these guys push themselves to the limit.

[I feel a bit odd about this post. I’d just like to note that I’m just try to tell things the way they are here and despite the way that this may come across I don’t mean to be a braggart.]

I’m among the shyest and least adventurous people I know.

I’ve done more adventurous things than many of the people I’ve know, like living in Taiwan and Germany or visiting an island with practically no English speakers. I really like to travel and experience other cultures but that’s not really the whole story.

I know my limitations, at least in some ways. I know if I just did nothing, I’d probably just sit around (and I know I’d live to regret that), so I do things. That doesn’t make those things easy. Among my most flustered, awkward and socially difficult moments in recent memories were due to going places, to being “adventurous”. I compensate for my limitation.

The other way in which my shyness manifests itself in my “adventurousness” is this: I don’t find social situations easy normally, so other situations, which people may say are more difficult, possibly much more difficult, are only marginally more difficult to me.

What I mean is this: going to a party and making small talk for hours is really tough so moving to Taiwan seems doable; that is, it’s only marginally more difficult. (This statement seems difficult as I read it, and while I acknowledge that it is, I don’t think it’s far off the truth.) Similarly, once I was in Taipei and I was having trouble communicating and with social situations nearly all the time, going to a slightly more out-there place like Kinmen seemed doable.

(Here’s another post from my Taiwan backlog.)

I found the bathrooms in Taiwan pretty interesting. I sort of wanted to take photos of them except that it would make me a bit creepy[1], so I didn’t.

In America, many, if not most, urinals are of the short and blocky variety, like this American Standard one, but in Taiwan and other parts of Asia, they were of all sorts, short, tall, down to the floor, curved, blocky, narrow, deep and so on. Many of them were made by Toto (”I bless the raaaaiins down in Aaaaaaaafrica!” is what I’d sing in my head each time I saw one of those.)

There were also numerous funny signs. Two of my favorite are below.

In the MRT stations in Taipei:

Come Closer Please
automatic flushing when you draw near

This one I’d always imagine the “come closer please” said low and breathy, like a movie monster or serial killer. Because, I mean, when else do you hear “come closer please”?

In the train station in Hualien:

Stand Closer
to be discrete and clean

There was also a theme in many bathrooms of things that said something like “Let’s learn English!” with an English idiom and its Chinese meaning. Some of these idioms were not very common or possibly not idioms at all. I’d love it for a Chinese person to come to America and then say one of those and when people looked at him questioning, he would have to explain that he learned it in a bathroom so it must be right!

There were also a lot of proverbs and old sayings on walls. These were also translated into English. Most of them were not very funny.

I did take one photo of a sign in a bathroom in Thailand:

I hadn’t really considered washing my feet in the sink but now that they mention it, it does sound like a good idea!

Outside of a bathroom, but still related:

[1] Is this post creepy anyway?

Number of days: 112

Number of days or parts thereof spent traveling: 47 (3 to/ from, 7 intra-Taiwan (3 Kaohsiung, 2 Taroko, 2 Kinmen), 37 intra-Asia (7 Indonesia, 5 Thailand; 15 Hong Kong, Macau, China; 10 Japan)

Number of countries visited (since moving): 6 (Taiwan, Indonesia, Thailand, China, Japan, U.S.) + 2 special administrative regions with separate border controls (Hong Kong, Macau)

Number of countries visited (year to date): 8 (above + South Africa, Swaziland) + 2 S.A.R.s

Number of flights (since moving): 14 (SFO-> TPE-> CKG-> DPS-> CKG-> TPE-> BKK-> TPE-> HKG-> TPE-> NRT-> TPE, TSA-> KNH-> TSA, TPE-> SFO)

Number of flights (2007): 31 (SFO-> CVG-> IAD-> JNB, DUR-> CPT-> JNB-> JFK, BOS-> JFK-> SFO-> BOS-> DFW-> SFO-> HNL-> LIH-> HNL-> SFO + above + SFO-> CLT-> DCA)

Miles flown (since moving): 27,406 miles (44,106 km)

Miles flown (2007): 63,569 miles (102,304 km)

Number of high speed train journeys: 4 (Taipei->Kaohsiung->Taipei, Tokyo->Kyoto->Tokyo)

Number of train journeys: 6 (above + Taipei->Hualien->Taipei)

Approximate number of km ridden on scooters: 225

Best hotel (overall): Kamandalu Resort, Ubud, Bali. A connection to the cousin of the owner opened the door for staying in this swanky place. Gorgeous surroundings and really nice rooms. Private verandas looking over rice paddies. The service was also excellent. We went out riding bikes around the rice paddies one day and came back sweating. Pretty soon after we entered the lobby we had cool moist towels to wipe our faces with. Perhaps the only nicer place I’ve stayed is the ridiculous Schlosshotel Veir Jahrezeiten (Four Seasons Palace Hotel) in Berlin. (They had a Ferrari convention while we were there and it didn’t seem out of place.)

Best hotel (value): Hirano Guesthouse, Kyoto. 3500 yen a night in Kyoto is very cheap and besides a nice place to stay, the owner was very friendly, helpful and accommodating, making us tea when we came home for a break in the afternoons. She also made us breakfast every morning, let us use her bicycles and computer/ internet. Oh and there was a candy bowl and after we ate an unreasonable amount of it, she didn’t complain, she just refilled it.

Number of American chain stores patronized (not counting convenience stores, exact): 3 (2 Subways-Taipei, 1 Denny’s-Kyoto)

Number of American chain stores patronized (counting convenience stores[1], approximate): 22.2 (the above + Circle K’s in Taiwan, Bali, Thailand, ampm’s in Japan, plus 0.2 for a Mister Donut in Japan[2])

Oddest food obsession: Harbo’s Happy Cola gummy candies

Most common food eaten: rice (~ >1.5 servings a day)

Most common food product eaten: Kinder Chocolate (~ 0.6 a day)

Most “exotic” foods eaten: crickets, silk worms, frog

Number of Dr. Peppers consumed: 2 (one in Japan, one in Thailand)

Foods most missed: good bread, good cheese, Dr. Pepper, good beef, shelled shrimp, deboned fish.

Number of Hello Kitty products seen: in the thousands

Number of Hello Kitty products purchased: 1 (alarm clock, convenience store, Japan)

America: so quiet, so dark, so many English speakers, so many whites/ latinos/as, blacks. big supermarkets. low population density.

Least useful piece of clothing: dress shirt (the greenish one, never worn, given away at the end)

Most useful piece of clothing: shoes (the brown Adidas, nearly daily)

Most useful piece of clothing out of its original purpose (and new use): board shorts-style swimsuit (exercise shorts)

Piece of clothing I most immediately realized I’d forgotten: navy blue cotton boxers (that I use as warm weather pajama bottoms)

Number of books read: 5.75 (2nd 0.5 of Slow Man by Coeztee, Love is a Mixtape by Sheffield, Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: a Story of the Hip Hop Generation by Chang, Sex Drugs and Cocoa Puffs by Klosterman, Born on a Blue Day By Tammet, You Don’t Love Me Yet by Lethem, first 0.25 of About a Boy by Hornsby)

Number of concerts attended: 3 (Emily the Band @ Underworld, Apples in Stereo @ the Wall, Sugar Plum Ferry @ the Wall)

Number of CDs purchased: 19 (5 in Hong Kong (Monitor), 5 @ WWR (1st trip), 5 @ WWR (2nd trip), 2 @ IMPO, 1 @ FINAC, 1 @ Roses(?))

Number of pieces of mail received: 6 (3 packages of promo CD(s); 1 each from Ian, Lauren, Gumbeaux)

[1] This is tricky because things are confusing. 7-11 is Japanese for instance.

[2] Mr. Donut is an American brand but the Asian stores are run by Duskin Co out of Japan under a licensing agreement.

dark, quiet, sparsely populated, wasteful, English-speaking, diverse, casual, expensive

filled with…
people who drive everywhere, giant cars, giant portions of food, giant supermarkets, giant stores, giant napkins, whites, blacks, latinos/as, smiling people

People said a lot of things before I came.

“With how long you’re there, you’ll be pretty good at the language by the time you come back.”
After quite a bit of effort, I have mastered a couple dozen words.

“There are a lot of scooters.”
Yes. They are everywhere.

“It’s really polluted there.”
Some days I think so and others it’s quite nice. It’s certainly much better than Zhuhai, Bangkok or Jakarta. There are some smoggy days and then there are some days I’m pretty sure are just overcast. (And others with a blue sky.) Overcast isn’t usually in a Californian’s vocabulary so there could have been some confusion with that.

“The people there are really nice.”
People are pretty-to-very friendly overall. I did find some things that I saw pretty frequently inconsiderate, like some of the driving maneuvers, or walking patterns on sidewalks.

“You’ll be great.”
I’d rate my performance as “fair” or “good” at best.

“The girls will love you there.”
I have found no evidence of this.

“You’ll meet a girl.”/ “You’ll come back with a girlfriend.”
See above.

“You’ll be tall there.”
I may be a bit above average but not any amount that I notice constantly.

“You’ll love it there.”
It took a while but I grew to like it. I don’t love it, certainly.

“Everything is cheap there.”
Sometimes. Food is cheap. Brand name electronics isn’t (generic stuff is). Clothing is cheap. Housing isn’t.

various preconceptions about it being unsafe/ corrupt
It’s really safe. Very safe–most parts of Taipei that I was in felt safer than San Francisco. It’s also pretty law-abiding and not (obviously, at least) corrupt.

I’m back in the ol US of A. The flight was surprisingly smooth and went by relatively quickly. It’s yet to be seen how I’m doing with jet lag but early signs are promising.

More later!

These blazing white sheets will see me on them for only 8 hours more.

Surprise of the day: I may be missing things–this is entirely possible–but it appears that my two to-be-checked bags are in the following states: 1) slightly below weight, at capacity. 2) well below weight and approximately as much space left as I have things left to put in. Tomorrow night I’ll finish packing it (save my alarm clock, tooth brush, deodorant) and make sure, but this might be okay.

I spent last weekend in Jinmen (historical and common English names: Kinmen or Quemoy).

The history here is important: it was historically fairly isolated but also had some rich residents that had traveled to SE Asia. Basically this produced some of the best examples of classical Fujianese architecture and South-east Asian Colonial architecture, patterned after British colonial houses in Singapore and Malaysia but with Chinese influence as well.

On the other hand, it was the front line, literally, for the war between Chinese capitalists (the Nationalists, the Republic of China) and communists (the People’s Republic of China), for many years, with it situated 2km from Mainland. It was bombed, invaded, shelled with propaganda fliers for over two decades.

So it ends up being a really interesting place–old buildings, old buildings in a semi-Western style, bombed out buildings, fields of sorghum with spike-topped anti-parachute landing spikes, beautiful beaches with anti-amphibious landing spikes, military bases, fishing vessels, and quaint villages.

I found it very interesting and photogenic. I took a lot of photos but they’re all on film, so I’ll scan them when I back in the U.S.

It was easily the hardest place I’ve been this trip or this year–possibly even ever–in terms of getting around and not knowing the language. (Scratch that–Tanzania in 2004 would have been harder but I had a friend that spoke KiSwahili.) It started out fine–all the announcements at the airports and on the flight were also in English, despite the fact that I appeared to be the only westerner at either the airport or on the plane. But then I was picked up at the airport by someone who didn’t speak English (identifying each other by the other person with the cell phone up to their ear looking very confused), and brought to a scooter rental shop that didn’t speak any English. It wasn’t until I got to my guesthouse that someone spoke some English. For dinner at a seafood restaurant, I ordered “fish” because that was all that was mutually understood. It ended up being steamed and in a sauce and marginally undercooked. I ate it; I didn’t have the ability to complain. In the end, I saw things I wanted to see; I ate food; I was able to get there and return; I didn’t die. I consider it a success.

Perhaps seeing that I was in a little over my head, a couple people did some really nice things for me (not to get into the overly sappy I-love-everyone blogosphere realm). I went to a restaurant the first day for lunch that served Kinmen’s signature handmade noodles. All the tables were taken so I was just hovering near the entrance. I indicated to the woman working the food area that I wanted one of what she was making, so when she pointed to one bowl on a tray and brought it to a table, I followed her. Turns out I had just invited myself to sit at someone else’s table. (That’s fine in Asia from what I’ve found–in fact this table already had two groups–two guys and an older woman at it.) When I got my food, one of the two guys pushed over the spicey sauce: “good.” I added some. When they got some fried chicken, squid and tofu, he added while making a circling motion with his hand “together.” So I had a few pieces. When they paid, the proprietress gave me an odd look. Turns out the guy paid for my lunch.

The next day, I wasn’t sure how to get back to the scooter rental shop, so the other guest at the guest house let me follow them there. They hadn’t been planning to go out; they got in their car solely to show me how to get to the shop and then they headed back to the guest house.

I was in a store the other day and ended up talking to a guy from Bradford North England (which, he said, is know for three things, two of which are Indian food and riots). Accents from Bradford, are apparently quite heavy–I could understand him but not without a bit of effort on my part.

It turns out this guy has been teaching English in Taiwan for 7.5 years. Anyone else see a problem with teaching an accent that’s not very well understood by many English speakers?

This is how much that will help filter out exhaust or really anything at all: 0.

The R3 has a bus stop name called

Keelung River Second Term Housing Project I

There are also Keelung River Second Term Housing Project II and Keelung River Second Term Housing Project III.

So I have one week left here. It doesn’t seem that soon and though intellectually I know I’m excited to go back, I don’t particularly feel that way right now. Does that make sense?

This week has turned a bit hectic as my number of days is numbered and the number of things-I-meant-to-do-but-haven’t is still rather substantial. Last night I went to a night market and then shopping for some souvenir sort of things for friends. One great thing about living somewhere with a funny script–everything looks cool, so I could probably give friends a piece of paper with some chinese characters on it and they’d think it was cool. Or at least that’s what I’m hoping because that’s what they’re getting…

It’s rather suddenly gotten warm again, starting around Sunday. The last few weeks it has solidly been jacket weather, with highs in the low-to-mid 60s. It was raining a lot a couple weeks ago (another typhoon) but it was pretty nice last week. Both Monday and yesterday I was walking around outside at night in a rather average way–not quickly or uphill or strenuously at all–with a hoodie or jacket (respectively) on and I had to take them off because I was sweating. At night! In December! I didn’t even wear/ bring my jacket to work today.

In other weather news, it’s supposed to rain every day until I leave. Looks like I’ll be holding onto my crappy umbrella.

I sold my speakers on Monday. The rice cooker and bicycle are not going as fast. I’ve probably gotten ~$22 of use out of each of them (what I paid) over the last few months so if I have to just give them away, I won’t be too distressed. But it’s still better for them to be used by someone else.

With my no-earbuds-on-transportation rule and my battery appearing to be kaput on my laptop and a good likelihood that I’ll finish my fast-reading book before the flight only to start one that doesn’t look as exciting, I’m not sure how painful the flight home will be. Oh and I’m going to try to stay awake the whole time because to stay in the right time zone the whole flight home, that’s what I should do. For some people, trying to sleep on a plane is the problem. That is not my problem.

than half ignorance.

The cab driver last night took me on a pretty circuitous route (though, I think it was because he was a bad–rather than a malice–cab driver) and then short-changed me when I paid him. What did I do? Get out the cab and go to my apartment because that’s all I could do. Because I don’t speak Chinese.

It would have been easier if I just thought he was giving me a fair deal. Oh well.

So people hand out leaflets and fliers for stores on the street here. Normally they see me and don’t shove it quite as far under my nose as most people. Today I had a new experience: the guy actually pulled it away from the path I was walking. Yeah, you may not want to take this, but it doesn’t matter because I won’t let you even if you did. Thanks, buddy.

Glasses in Taiwan are cheap, cheap enough that even though my company just introduced a vision plan, decent frames here might well still be cheaper taking in consideration the co-pay and price limit on the vision plan glasses.

So I went out last night and walked through a few spectacle stores.

But, like I said before so many glasses just suck. Oh well.

I remember discussing differences in traffic density with with Colin a few years ago. Apparently not a lot of difference in number of cars can make a big difference in traffic and congestion. Basically, it’s a pretty non-linear scale, Colin was saying.

It seems that people-density on buses wouldn’t be this–on a bus with a 100 person limit, 20 less people would be quite a bit less crowded.

This week on #902 was very odd, however. Monday I literally couldn’t get on the bus it was so crowded. Tuesday I was scrunching in every time the doors opened to not be hit by them. Yesterday was quite comfortable and today I got a seat from the beginning–something that has literally never happened in over three months of riding this bus. What can make such a difference? For your reference, there aren’t any holidays right now, nor coming up; the weather was approximately similar all days this week and I got on the bus close to the same time every day. It seems odd that the bus can have a 50+ person swing based on, apparently, nothing.

the Faroe Islands, which is a region of Denmark but is almost 200 miles from the nearest inhabited islands, which are Shetland (and are quite a bit farther from Denmark). There’s a ferry there from Iceland, so maybe I’ll have to add this on to my future Iceland trip.

I forgot to post last week’s weird autonomous region of the week the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture of China.

my newest joke: “I came back into town after being away for a while and I had to get my affairs back in order. But it was hard, let me tell you. Those women did not like organization.”

also.

I’m just going to say it: the lady at the 7-11 in my work’s building freaks me out. She’s a short Taiwanese woman who says “welcome!” (in Chinese) like the rest of the employees do when someone enters, but she looks at me with these crazy eyes. I don’t like those crazy eyes.

I have two weekends left and I’ll be heading to Kinmen for the first of them. It seems like a pretty unique place.

Also, I’ll be able to walk to the airport (I live dead-center in that link. You can see the Songshan domestic airport near the top right).

I spent the weekend in Taroko (pronounced “Ta-loo-ga”) Gorge.

Basically, on the east side of the island, there’s a mountain range made up of marble and limestone. Into it are a number of steep gorges cut by many rivers. So what you have is very steep lush green and marble and limestone walls and gorgeous, often-crystalline rivers at the bottom, often with large marble boulders in them. It’s really magnificent. I’d recommend a visit.

I left early Saturday and took the train down. It goes up north and east till it hits the coast and then south along the east coast. Often it is just about the only thing between a range of mountains and the ocean. The ride itself is pretty amazing.

I got to Hualien and sort of wandering around a little bit until I found the scooter rental shops. I could confidently answer their first question, about whether I’d ridden a scooter in Taipei before [1], but the first few still didn’t want to rent me a scooter without a local drivers license. (To their credit, this may or may not be what the law specifies–I’m really not sure.) The third place rented me a scooter without much problem: a Kymco 125cc.

So I set off out of town and onto the highway toward Taroko…or at least I thought so. I realized it was getting more built up instead of less. I asked someone at the next light: “Taroko??” He did not point the direction we were going.

So now going in the right direction, I discovered the joys of trucks passing me and kicking up stuff in my face and fun like that. After an hour or so I hit the park gates, stopped to get some maps at the visitor center, I headed off to Tiansiang, some 18km from the park entrance and the one small town with a couple hotels, a hostel and a couple restaurants. Up the mountain passes I went on my scooter, gradually growing more comfortable at every turn.

Once in Tiansiang, I went around for a while trying to find my hostel, and eventually found it, the Catholic Hostel, where I had a reservation[2]. No one was around and the desk bell wasn’t bringing anyone rushing. Eventually, someone came around the reception area and I paid and got my key and whatnot.

The first place I tried to go was the Baiyang Waterfall Trail, but it was closed, so I made my way to the Lotus Pond trail. Lotus Pond’s a mountain pond hidden up in the mountains of Taroko. 3km or so each way–should have been easy to do in the 3 hours I had. After a nice easy walk for half an hour, I crossed a single person suspension bridge. It was the first of many of these that I cross in the park–they were sort of like the ones you seen in Indiana Jones, but just a little less rickety.

Then the trail got hard–steep steps for nearly 2.1km. Or I presume so. After a while I realized I wasn’t going to make it up and back before dark and I was alone, without a flashlight, on steep stairs and without cell phone reception. Not exactly worth the risk. I made it almost to the top of the hill when I turned around and the views from there left me wondering how places like that exist. Pretty magnificent. I first heard, then saw, wild monkeys in a tree across a small ravine from the hiking trail as I neared the top.

Soaked in sweat, even though it was about 60 degrees out, I headed back to the hostel to cool down and relax a bit. I read a bit of my book, Born on a Blue Day by Daniel Tammet [3], the only book I’d brought on the trip and after reading for a while, I realized I was about to finish it. With my no music on transportation rule, I would be left without a book and without music for the train ride home. Great…

It was dark when I put the book down and I decided to get some food and then have an early night so I could see everything I wanted to see the next morning. My dinner wasn’t very good and was only notable because at one point I felt something crawling on my hand and looked down to see the single biggest wasp/ hornet I’d ever seen crawling on my jacket–easily 3 inches long and uniform brown. I can’t find any pictures online or a description of what it was exactly but it seemed to be injured–it wouldn’t fly away, so I brushed it onto the floor and kept an eye on it.

I woke up at 6am and showered in the shared and open-to-the-outdoors showers at the hostel. It was chilly, even with hot water. I wanted to go to the Wenshan Hot Springs. The route is described like this: down steep stairs to a suspension bridge, walk across it, along a cliff and then you’re at these hot springs are carved out of marble and sit within the river (though I imagine the water is piped down from whereever the hot spring actually is). I thought it be great to go and sit in the early on this Sunday morning, but the trail was closed. Disaster. I headed back to the hostel, packed up my stuff and dropped my key before heading to probably the most famous trail in the park, the Tunnel of Nine Turns. It was only 7:30am so I had it all to myself. Pretty amazing views of the gorge and river from this short trail.

Just outside of the park are the Chingshui Cliffs–a section of highway north of Taroko (Hualien is south) that is cut into these marble and lush green mountains as they hit the ocean. I decided to ride up and down these before the road got too heavy with traffic and then hit up the last couple hiking trails before heading to catch my train. They ended up being stunning. Like the PCH but more sheer and more beautiful. There were even a couple points where you could walk down to the black sand beaches via a series of steps.

Back in the park, I walked the Shakadang trail, along a ridiculously clear greenish-blue river, and then the Eternal Spring shrine/ monastery trail. Both had something new to see.

Then it was back to Hualien on the scooter, back to Taipei on the train, back to my room on the MRT. The only part of the return journey that had a hitch at all was when my seat was either double booked or my reservation only went through the next station. I’m not sure, but eventually the conductor showed the girl who also had car 9, seat 31 on her ticket to a different seat.

[1] Thanks to my coworker, I had actually had a little experience with a scooter in Taiwan. I’d asked him to teach me how to ride a scooter prior to this trip. His lesson was sort of like this: “Here’s how you turn it on. Here’s how you open the seat compartment. Okay, have fun; I’m going back inside.”

[2] I called the Catholic hostel once a month or so back, trying to reserve a room for a previous weekend. A man answered. After a few words from each of us in different languages it was obvious that he didn’t speak English. After an apology (which he probably didn’t understand, I now realize), I hung up. This time, I was determined so I got a coworker to call and make a reservation for me. After the call she explained how it had gone: she had called and talked to the person working there and made a reservation, saying it was for her American coworker and one bed and the night of the 2nd, etc. The worker seemed to be ending the call so she asked, “Do you want me to spell out his name so you can write it down?” The response: “No, I got it: one bed, foreigner.”

[3] Separate post about this book later.

I missed one bus while stuck waiting to cross the street yesterday. The second came much after it should have (the normal spacing is about 15 minutes apart, this was 25) and I literally couldn’t fit inside, so I took a taxi to work. It was 13 times as much (wasteful!) and the taxi driver even laughed at me for not speaking Chinese. (Note: I didn’t try to speak English to him–I had the address written out in Chinese.) Good start to the day.

You are asked this in a Chinese-speaking area.

Are you alone? then “yes”. Otherwise, “no”.

Despite it being near typhoon-like conditions outside now, it’s apparently going to be nice near Taroko this weekend and with only three weekends left, that’s good enough for me. I got a coworker to reserve a bed in the hostel (they don’t speak English–as I discovered last time I tried to call) and she’ll write out some things in Chinese for me. I’ve checked out the trains and route–for the more visually oriented I’ll take the train NE from Taipei to the coast and the down the coast to Hualien; the park is back up north a little bit around Tienhsiang–and will book tickets this evening. I’m planning on playing it by ear as far as local transport goes–either rent a scooter or take the bus + walk a lot. Apparently I’m fine to rent a scooter with an international driver’s permit (and if not, apparently the places there will rent scooters to just about anyone). It’s going to be chilly up in the gorge–I’m going to bring my yet-to-be-used hat and gloves.

Maybe this will go smoothly; I’m not expecting that though.

(note 1: I have a backlog of photo essays that I wanted to post. Here’s the oldest. )

(note 2: The lighting and social situation at the stadium were troublesome: the ring was brightly lit while the stands were dark. Taking photos of people didn’t seem to sit well with them and with the darkness, my camera used a secondary light to help focusing, so I had to switch to manual focusing and focus blind (by guessing the distance) much of the time while taking hip shots. Basically these aren’t all the best photos…)

(note 3: click to see bigger versions.)

Muay Thai is Thai Boxing. It involves punching, kicking, elbowing, kneeing and pretty much any other way to try to injure your opponent. It’s pretty violent. I saw a thing on TV on the science behind martial arts in movies with a panel of the top martial artists in various disciplines and found that a Thai Boxer could inflict the blow with the most force of any of them. His knee blow to your chest could pretty much instantly stop your heart. These are wiry and strong individuals.

When I was in Bangkok, I went to an event. Each night has a few rounds–mine had 9, with the welterweights being the heaviest of the day and in the 7th match. It’s well known that the boxing is a rip off; foreigners are charged somewhere between 3 and 10 times as much as locals to get in. They’re also highly encouraged to sit ring side, which isn’t all that much more expensive than the caged in 3rd tier. However, culturally, the most interesting thing going on is in that 3rd tier.

I made my way up to the third tier which smelled heavily of menthol eucalyptus, sweat, fruit and various drinks being sold and spilled all around.

When I got there, I found a spot and sat down. Fairly soon, a local began telling me that I didn’t want to sit there because everyone would be standing, shouting and betting during the matches. I told him I did want to sit there and that I’d stand when I had to. He told me I couldn’t sit there. I ignored this suggestion.

The prefight routines were highly ritualized: bowing to each other, bowing to their corners, circle punching slowly while walking in circles; high, sweeping knee lifts while walking around in circles and other similar activities.

(more…)

And today is November 26, 96 to be exact.

(The oddest part is that lunar calendar has been dropped in favor of the Western calendar, officially at least, but the Western years haven’t.)

I learned on Friday about the Taipei Golden Horse Film Festival. Pretty much immediately after I found that some of the movies I most wanted to see (”Darjeeling Limited”, I’m Not There, Persepolis) were either sold out or at times that I couldn’t go to. Doh!

Another one that I was psyched to see (Ki-Duk Kim made the amazing “Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter…and Spring”) is only showing in Korean with Chinese subtitles.

However! Not all is lost. I did go to see Steve Buscemi’s Interview last night and I bought a ticket for the Sigur Ros movie. I’m still undecided about whether to see This is England or not.

I wasn’t actually expecting a ton from Interview, as it seemed like a pretentious indie two-person character piece, but it turned out to be alright. It was pretty engaging and well-written and the ending wasn’t quite what I expected.

I also found out that Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead is showing in at least one regular theater here (not as part of the film festival, that is) so maybe I’ll go see that in the next few weeks.

That’s what this old gentleman’s pink jacket said under a stitched Hello Kitty outline.

Japan is weird, a list:

1. Most restaurants have displays of their food made up of entirely plastic food
2. There is a neighborhood in Asakusa, Tokyo that is entirely restaurant supply places
3. The restaurant supply places are the suppliers for most of your fake foods
4. Within these fake food restaurant supply stores, you may purchase other oddities made to look like food, such as keyrings (I have an eel sushi key ring)
5. Among the oddities are fake food USB devices. Who needs a small, inexpensive USB flash drive when you can have a relatively expensive fake hamburger one

USB fake sushi:

USB fake hamburger:

I will talk about things that are Japan-related and things that are not Japan related. I had dreams of more well organized posts with photos and everything, but I’ll post now with possibly expanding on some of these topics later.

My ear is feeling (ie hearing) a bit better. I’ve started listening to ear buds again in limited (very quiet) contexts. First song back: “King of Pain”.

The rest of the Japan trip was pretty good.

I mean, it was great. It’s a crazy place. One coworker said something like it’s a very odd combination of a repressed/ conservative culture and a wild/ unashamed culture. Very strange.

Some of the stranger places included the hot bath that had a mildly electrified pool, the sushi place that required you to eat at least 7 dishes (of 2 pieces a piece) of mostly sushimi in less than 20 minutes, the Diago-ji temple that had a painting that I thought was a garden; either that, or it had a garden that was completely unreal in how beautifu