Tag: Taiwan

I’ve already recounted my tale of the Giant Rat of Sogo, in which I was trapped for 4.5 hours in a rat-infested department store, but what I failed to mention were the “magic” rocks.

We were in the bedding department, negotiating the purchase of a house-warming gift. The negotiations were in Chinese, so I was bored and pondering the other items in the area when I came across the item pictured here. I made the mistake of having my wife ask what it was.

The story I got was, to put it mildly, absurd. This special pad is filled with amazing, magical rocks from brazil, that exhibit an miraculous healing properties.

When the pad interactions with your body heat and humidity, it generates a natural electrical field and negative ions, which promote health and well-being.

It’s good to see that snake-oil merchants haven’t been put out of business or relegated into cyberspace, they’ve settled into major department stores in Taiwan.

The sales girls were so keen to sell me this pad that they insisted that we take it home and try it out for two days. I know there are no magic rocks or demonstrable health benefits derived from negative ion bombardment or electrical stimulation – at least not of the type they were claiming, but I thought it would make an interesting blog post.

So I tried the pad in the spirit of scientific inquiry – zip, nadda, nothing. It gets a bit warm and sweaty, which is not a good thing in Taiwan.

So we returned it, especially since it cost over US$ 200. Yes, that’s not a typo. Two-hundred US dollars. Even more frightening: They make entire mattresses out of the stuff. I couldn’t stand to even find out how much that cost!

Finally, I did a little research on the “magic” rocks. It’s nothing more than tourmaline, a semi-precious gemstone with no “magical” properties whatsoever. (The phenomena of being both pyroelectric (generating electricity from heat/cold) and piezoelectric (generating electricity from mechanical stress) are completely natural, explainable and scientific. None of which renders healing properties any more than magnets do.) Being pyroelectric does mean it is great for collecting dust, though.

I couldn’t make this stuff up if I tried. People are just falling all over themselves to believe nonsense.

Technorati Tags: Blog, Taiwan, Travel

Continued from Part I

So, I was complaining about the “green fever” that’s sweeping Taiwan, and why it doesn’t make sense when implemented in a knee-jerk fashion or without the benefit of scientific inquiry.

The in-laws wanted us to eat more food at home. They feel it’s valuable family time. My wishes that I want to go try different places that I can’t get back in Arizona didn’t enter into their equation.

Fair enough, maybe it’s true that we needed more “family time.”

I’m sure they get just as much out of “family time” with me as I do from them… which is nothing. Their Chinese is far beyond my comprehension, and their English is insufficient to hold a conversation with me. Having a dinner conversation with my wife as translator is not fun for either of us.

I don’t like my in-law’s cooking, either.

On the last night I ate at home with them, they insisted on having a meal at home and they prepared several dishes, plus, without really asking me one way or the other, a separate dish of pork chops just for me. (Never mind my fears about getting diseases passed on via toilet paper fed to pigs.) The problem is, while I love pork chops, or steak, or whatever type of “western” food my mother-in-law prepares… she doesn’t know how to cook it.

What I got was thin strips of shoe leather marinaded in turpentine.

Since I have no part to play in the dinner conversation, it takes an extra special effort not to show my… delight… at the special food made just for me.

[Hang with me, I haven’t really lost my train of environmentalism thought, we’re just taking a necessary detour.]

One alternative would be for me to cook for them. That would be fine, I enjoy cooking and I make many tasty dishes. I know they’d eat them and, even if they hated them, they’d smile and carry on… and they don’t have blogs to write about it in, either.

The problem is, you can’t get the ingredients here and they have no ovens to cook in.

Chinese cooking does not traditionally use an oven so it’s no surprise that homes aren’t equipped with them.

They do have a toaster oven. It may be older than I am, and has a cubic volume of about 10“X8”X6“=480”³ It’s hard enough to reheat pre-cooked bacon or toast a slice of bread in, let alone cook anything that requires heat.

It should go without saying that there’s no microwave. “Microwaves are unnatural and sneak out of the ovens and are dangerous. A friend told me that and they wouldn’t lie.” Never mind the fact that the physics of microwaves makes it impossible for them to “sneak out” of the oven enclosure. (I later learned that friend actually owns a microwave. I wonder what the word for “hypocrite” is in Chinese?)

So, after the dinner, I was talking to my wife about my shoe leather marinaded in turpentine. (Which, it turns out, my wife actually cooked, under her mother’s supervision.) Thoughtfully, she did at least sneak a little salt onto the chops. Her mother wouldn’t let her use it because, apparently, just a pinch of salt will kill you stone dead, instantly. (Let’s just ignore the facts that the elements of table salt are crucial for life and that they body contains approximately 7 tablespoons at all times or that it is particularly important to maintain salt intake when you’re in a hot, sweaty climate like Taiwan.)

But here’s where we get fully back on that environmental track. My wife did something before frying my pork chops that was unconscionable to my mother-in-law’s way of thinking: They had just used the same skillet to cook some of their food and my wife washed the skillet with soap before reusing it!

Yes. Using soap is a no-no. Apparently, they don’t wash their dishes with soap anymore. “All those detergents are bad for the environment.” They just wash ’em off with water and if they’re greasy, they use the rinse water from the family rice. “Starchy water has been proven to be the best thing to remove grease.” Yes, it is an old-time remedy to remove grease, but “best” is a comical use of the word.

So here’s what would be a typical evening: Sitting around the house, being eaten alive by malarial mosquitoes (despite your all-natural bug spray), eating all-natural pork that’s fed on human and animal waste, off all-naturally dirty dishes.

It’s an all-natural lifestyle that reminds me of a Monty Python skit, which goes something like this: “To study the penguins, his team spent six months in Antartica living like penguins… and consequently dying like penguins.”

That’s how it feels here. They’re trying to take one big collective step into the stone age so we can live and die just like cavemen without the benefits of thousands of years of progress. “Natural” doesn’t always mean “good”. Malaria, Cholera and Typhoid are “all-natural,” too.

I unashamedly proclaim that the history of western science and technology is characterized by the word “progress.”

It hasn’t achieved utopia, and it isn’t without its tradeoffs, but we don’t die on average under the age of 30 anymore or live our lives malnourished and struggling all our lives just to get food and survive.

Progress brings new problems and new challenges, but this almost new-age nonsense to chuck it all and live the simple, natural life is a deluded ideal that completely disregards the weight of history. The “good old days” generally sucked.

I can’t say for certain that my in-laws behavior is “typical”, but based on commercials, the products on the market and interactions with other people, this mentality is being ingrained in the popular culture.

Not coincidentally, that was the last meal I would eat in my in-laws house on this trip.

(It’s also a pity on the first week or so I didn’t know about the rice water for cleaning the dishes, which they collected in a pot in the sink. Naturally, I saw it as dirty water in a dirty pot in need of washing in the sink with the rest of the dirty dishes, and would rise soda bottles out and dump the rinse water in it, and sometimes even place my dirty plates in it. I didn’t know.)

Technorati Tags: Blog, Taiwan, Travel

On my first trip to Taiwan, using a film camera, I took nearly 40 photographs, most of them awful.

On this trip, using two digital cameras (and the trip being almost 3 times as long), I saved almost 2,000 photos, after having deleted at least another 1,000 for a variety of reasons.

Somehow most of them are still awful.

I’ve just posted the last of the photos from this trip to flickr, in my Taiwan 2007 set. Now I just have to figure out why my iPhoto says I took 1578 photos and the flickr set only contains 1545 – a slight imbalance of 33 photos.

Incidentally, I post (or try to post) every photo I decide to keep not because the world might be watching, but as a backup just in case someone went wrong with the MacBook, the sole copy of the original photos. (I have other backup strategies, but it’s an expedient one when traveling.)

Since i had time on my hands, I’ve gone back and made sure that all my photos from my last trip are now in the Taiwan 2005 set. I’m thinking of looking around and finding similar photos (a “then and now” sort of thing) and highlighting them.

Technorati Tags: Blog, Photos, Taiwan, Travel

One of the interesting aspects of riding on the buses in Taipei are the TV monitors they have to entertain you – or distract you from the driving. Several buses run a series of short animated films, some of them quite funny, others quite bizarre. Some give their URL at the end, but I couldn’t get to any of them while I was in Taiwan.

I only remember one of them and I tried it again this morning and it works. The site is designed to dell animations for cell phones, but a few of their animations are available to watch online, so without further ado, check out coolsofun.com.tw. (They’re even subtitled in English.)

There’s usually just one sample video per category. Still, it’s a good example of what you’re subjected to on the bus continuously.

Technorati Tags: Blog, Taiwan, Travel

I hate jet lag.

We took off at around 11:00PM in Taiwan, and after dinner, managed to sleep at pretty much the normal time.

By what was 10:00AM for our bodies and time for the day to really get going, we landed at 7:00PM in Los Angeles. There were no sanctioned connecting flights that night and we we’ve been forced to spend the night in a hotel. By the time we got through immigrations, customs and to the hotel, it was 10:00PM and everything in the area was closing.

It’s tough forcing yourself into sleep, but we managed… for a while. It’s just after 2:00AM and there’s no hope of me going back to sleep. My body says it’s 5:00PM and time for dinner. Argh.

Technorati Tags: Blog, Taiwan, Travel

We’re five or so hours into our flight, five or so hours to go. We took off at about 11:00PM local time and it was easy to get to sleep on the flight after dinner.

For some reason, no matter how tired I am, no matter how closely the flight’s “sleep time” matches my body clock, I just can’t sleep for more that a few hours at a stretch and so here I am, trying to clear up several posts I’d started as “place markers” for later completion.

As departures go, it was less sorrowful that some, but Michelle took it really hard. Last time I don’t think she understood the concept of absence, this time she clearly does and broke into fits of hysterical crying when it was time to go. We still hadn’t loaded the cars and Batrina tried to cheer Michelle up by offering to play with her. It broke my heart as Michelle, who just couldn’t stop crying, sobbed out, “I can’t, it’s time for me to go!”

The drive out of Taipei to the airport is a long one and frequently a complicated one.

On my first trip to Taiwan, I was flying out alone as Irene was continuing to visit for a few more weeks. The night before we had “staged” my proposal to Irene in front of her family and friends. I had already asked her and she had accepted before I went to Taiwan, but we were saving the moment till her parents were present – and then we saved it until it was time for me to leave the country to diminish any awkwardness they might feel. It was the moment they had to realize that their daughter wasn’t coming back to live in Taiwan after he schooling ended.

In those days the four of us could easily fit in the family car. (Johnny kept such weird hours that we hardly saw him.)

Nowadays, with two kids, car seats, luggage for four and the need for the whole family (plus Johnny’s girlfriend) to stay together till departure, we have to take two cars and enlist the aide of close family friends. Mr. Huang drove the family car with the kids, while Johnny and Batrina rode with them. (Michelle, in particular, adores them both and doesn’t get to spend as much time with them as anyone else.)

Irene, her mother and I rode with the family friends.

The talk in these situations usually turns to politics on the way out of town and since the conversation is in Chinese, I have time for my thoughts and reflections undisturbed by any need to interact with the others.

What thoughts did I think? Well, that’s the subject of another post, but a couple things immediately came to mind. As someone who pops in and pops out of Taiwan on a semi-regular basis, while I cannot have the perspective of a true denizen, I do have the position of seeing snapshots in time as things change.

There have been lots of changes in Taipei & Taiwan since 1998.

• My in-laws have hot water 24 hours a day
• Taipei traffic has actually improved (but still crazy by western standards)
• The country elected a president from a party not descended from the Chinese invaders of the 1940’s
• The island had a massive earthquake, the impact of which is still being felt today.
• The old, uneven and broken down sidewalks in Taipei were torn out and replaced.
• The new sidewalks are inexorably becoming like the old ones.
• The MRT system was taken from one short line and a LOT of holes and construction to a wonderful system and is now under another phase of major construction. (More holes in the ground.)
• Street signs in Taipei have been mostly standardized.
• You don’t see nearly as much of Chiang Kai-Shek anymore.
• Buildings have been torn down and rebuilt at an amazing rate

There are more, but for now that lays the groundwork of my later post(s)…

Technorati Tags: Blog, Taiwan, Travel

Beef Noodle Soup… it seems like such a simple dish and yet somehow it takes on almost mystic proportions. It bears a superficial resemblance to Japanese ramen soup but really seems to be wholly Chinese. It’s not quite pot roast soup with noodles, but then again, it is.

On our last trip we just missed the Taipei beef noodle contest which disappointed me greatly.

After going to the water park, we decided to eat beef noodle and choose a restaurant not exactly at random, but darned close. By shear chance, it turns out we picked the 2006 winner of the Taipei best beef noodle soup.

It was, without doubt, the best beef noodle soup I’ve ever tasted. I was starving after the water park so I might have been more forgiving than usual. We went back on another day for a second tasting and it was equally as good.

Much though I enjoy beef noodle soup, the others I’ve had have always got a slightly off flavor to them. There’s some spice that doesn’t quite compliment the beef, and more so the broth itself. I’ve had an idealized taste for what I’d do to beef noodle (without the competency to cook it myself) and this was a near as close as I could imagine. Now it’s time to start reverse-engineering.

Excellent! Strongly recommended.

老董牛肉麵
Lau Dong’s Beef Noodle (“Dong” is a surname, can be spelled “Tung”, “Lau” is old, so this is “Old Dong’s Beef Noodle” – it’s best not to think about it no matter how you spell it.)

Technorati Tags: Blog, Food, Restaurant, Review, Taiwan, Travel

It’s been terribly hot in the mornings the last few days. “Sweltering” would be a more accurate word. (One of the Taiwan blogs I regularly read, The View from Taiwan, summed it up beautifully:

That rain last week induced seasonal affective disorder. Glad its gone and we are now in the sit-in-the-house-and-sweat season.

Ah, but he’s in Taichung and I’m in Taipei, where we have the sewage water treatment-cum-water park, The Taipei Water Park! (link takes you to a map of the park)

I couldn’t return home without a day frolicking in the crystal clear, and wonderfully cold, water. It’s a great little park, there are about 4 slides, several water cannons, big buckets dumping water on your head, those little spray things for the kids, all in a pool about the size (I’d estimate) of an olympic swimming pool, but only about 1-1.5 feet deep.

And it’s a screaming deal at NT$ 50 per person for all day! (That’s US$ 1.52 at today’s exchange rate!) If that isn’t enough, you get admission to the Museum of Drinking Water, too!

We went on Friday, thinking that, since school is still in session that it might not be crowded. Wrong. Several school classes were on field trips there. Apparently it was for schools specializing in English, (are there any others in Taipei, anymore?) because several of the teachers were waiguoren.

There’s a story here that’s not about having a lot of fun at the water park on a sunny day.

It has to do with not really grasping the customs of another culture. For example, the kids, who were all kindergarten or maybe first-grade age were dressing next to the pool. More specifically, they were dressing and undressing. That in itself is jarringly out of place to my western perspective. I certainly wouldn’t let my Michelle, at age 5, be stark naked at the water park and don’t expect it from others.

Remember, also that in Taiwan, it’s really not uncommon to see women in the men’s restrooms. They’re in there cleaning, or helping their sons learn to urinate or whatever. Many restrooms aren’t exactly “uni-sex”, but they blur the line considerably. The attitude about what is “permissible” public exposure is hard to grasp. I prefer to stick to my own prudish upbringing.

That said, as we entered the place, the signs for men and women directed everyone to the same room, which looked like what I’d call a locker room. It had lockers, seats, mirrors and hair dryers. It looked all the world like a changing area except for the fact that it was filled with women.

I asked Irene, “surely this isn’t the changing room?”

She replied, “I think you go into the actual bathroom and change.”

The men’s bathroom was a tiny room with one urinal, one sink and a stall. That didn’t seem adequate to a bunch of guys changing their clothes, but what other options did I have? The stall was a squat toilet. What does that mean? It means the floor was awash in urine.

As I attempt to find a way to change into my swimming trunks without soaking my street clothes in someone else’s urine, a crowd of kids arrives in the bathroom. To my surprise, I hear one of the kids say (in quite good English), “I need to use the toilet!”

The other kids are talking English, too, but the first voice repeats himself. Finally, I hear an adult. “What’s the problem?”

“I need to use the toilet.”

“Go ahead, then.”

“There’s someone in there.”

“Who is it?”

Then there’s a bit of a commotion and I begin to see the top of this kid’s head trying to wiggle under the toilet door.

Adult (more amused than aghast): “Don’t stick your head under there! Just ask who’s in there!”

I’m glad that endeavour was stopped quickly, I was at that moment, standing with one foot on my sandal, the other kind of propped on the garbage pail while trying to get my pants off without touching the floor.

Kid: “Who’s in the toilet?”

Me: “No one you know.”

Adult (to kid): “Who’s in there?”

Kid: “I think it’s Teacher Stan.”

Adult: “Oh, you’ll just have to wait.”

Me: “I promise, it’s not Teacher Stan.”

Kid: “Yes, it’s Teacher Stan.”

At this point I’ve finally finished and have to make my exit. I step out and there’s about 8 Taiwanese kids crammed into this 4’X 6′ bathroom and a foreign teacher. His expression was amusing because clearly he was expecting Teacher Stan (who obviously has a sense of humor) and not an unknown foreigner. It’s probably the last thing he expected to see that day.

So, was I supposed to change in the stall? No. There were changing room/showers outside next to the pool, but we couldn’t see them until we were outside. And thereby is the moral of this story. If this had been back home, I would have continued to search until I found changing area because I know there must be one, but in Taiwan, it’s too easy to assume (wrongly)(even my wife did it) that things are done half-assed.

The park itself isn’t half-assed, and, apart from the obvious insurance liability, I don’t understand why we don’t have a lot more water play areas like this back home.

Playing in the water in Taiwan does have a dark side, though.

Technorati Tags: Blog, Kids, Taiwan, Travel

It’s our last full day in Taiwan and Irene and the kids are visiting with friends. I took the opportunity to go walking and catching up on writing blog posts, which are now dangerously backed up.

First order of business was a trip to MOS Burger for lunch.

Ordering went smoothly and I was quite pleased with myself. The place was a bit crowded, and as I was by myself, at sat at the counter staring out into the street. My burger arrived minus my french fries. (I believe I’ve mentioned before, MOS always cooks you fries after you order them, so they always take a while.)

It took an unusually long time for my fries to arrive, although I’m not sure what the disconnect was. I had finished my burger before there was any activity on the fries front. First, a girl came in and (as it was crowded) sat down next to me. They give you little numbers to sit on the table. I was 85, the girl who came and sat next to me was (coincidentally) #58. She hadn’t been sitting there long when the MOS employee arrived with a large order of fries and asked her (this much I understand) “You have a large order of fries?”

She indicated in the negative. The employee looked perplexed. The phrase “I’m supposed to have a large order of fries and it’s been a long time, perhaps you’ve confused her ’58’ with my ’85’ and those are mine? Especially since only waiguoren or large families ever order large fries.” was far beyond my abilities to say in Chinese, and even a simple “I should have fries” stumped me because I’ve never studied the concept of “should” in the language.

I tried to indicate that I might be the owner of the fries, but he looked at his sheet, looked at my number and left. he went from table to table, asking if anyone had a large order of fries. He went upstairs for the tables up there. He came back a few minutes later, still carrying the fries. He took them back behind the counter and threw them away.

I don’t know why I bother with the large order of fries. They may be fresh, but the have no salt on them, which doesn’t make for very good-tasting fries.

Nonetheless, I’d paid for them and positive that those had been my fries, I was formulating how I was going to express that. I got out my receipt and checked it and was preparing to go to the manager, (who had taken my order in the first place) when I heard the employees ask him about the fries. he immediately responded, “They’re for the waiguoren.”

So, they cooked me another batch of fries.

That’s not what this story is about.

It was hot, I had nothing better to do, and all I had left were my fries, so I was eating them slowly, daydreaming, when I noticed a faint glimmer – a shine like a flash in a mirror on a sunny day. It came from my finger. I looked closely, and there, like a tiny crystal dream was a single grain of salt.

I couldn’t believe it. It must have gotten there from the fries. I set about inspecting each and every one. Each fry had exactly 1 to 3 grains of salt. I could only imagine them being placed there, one-by-one, by some amazingly intricate Japanese machine designed just for that purpose.

As I counted each grain of salt, I removed it from the fry. (1 to 3 grains of salt doesn’t alter the flavor of the fry enough to bother with.) I placed each grain in a little spot on the corner of my tray.

When I reached the last fry, I had enough collected to rub the fry in the salt and it tasted delicious!

Technorati Tags: Blog, Taiwan, Travel

So, as part of my Sisyphean task to photograph every Costco in the world, I needed to get to the third Costco in Taipei and the fourth and last remaining Costco for me to photograph in Taiwan.

The problem, as explained in my original post, Costco – The Plan, was that none of the Costcos in Taipei are conveniently located near subway stations.

On my last trip, I was able to locate Costco #3 on my map of Taipei, extrapolate GPS coordinates, and make the 1+ mile trek.

The fourth Costco presented a greater challenge, as it was far enough outside of Taipei that I could not find a map of the area. Freak chance presented with an opening when, returning from Keelung by freeway at night, I saw the Costco lights in the distance and managed to snap a GPS waypoint along the freeway. Using that coordinate and Google Earth, I made my best guess for the location, built a series of waypoints between the nearest subway station and the Costco and waited my chance to make the 4.3km hike through unfamiliar territory.

My plan was to make the trek tomorrow, but, as I had time this morning, I decided I’d time how long it took to get to the subway station, and when I arrived, I decided I’d hike to the first waypoint to determine how accurate my Google Earth-derived coordinates were.

I also had a secondary motive: to see what bus routes were in the area. It seems that something as logical as a bus map is not part of the Taipei bus system, instead they have abstract route charts that only make sense if you know the names of the streets and are already familiar with the area. As it’s been alternating between brutally hot and humid and torrential rain, I hoped to have a backup plan for either getting to or from the Costco. By studying the bus signs and taking notes I hoped my wife or father-in-law could make sense of the bus routes in the area.

The first waypoint was about 1.7km from the station and I’m happy to report that Google Earth and the GPS brought me dead on target.

I plotted the waypoints without paying much attention to the distances, so when I checked to make sure the next waypoint was where where I expected it before returning home, I was surprised to find was only 220m away – too close for me to just turn around and not check before returning. Again, the coordinate was spot on.

The next was only 300m away, and I had found a potential bus route to take me back to the station, so I decided to press on a bit more.

You can probably guess where this is going. The next waypoint was only 200m further on, so I kept going. By now I was positive that busses Blue 15 and Blue 23 would return me to the station, so I decided to commit to the last 2 legs of the journey.

The next leg was only 800m away as the crow flies. (It turned out to be farther because the road curved around a river.) The final leg being only 400m away, and I was on the Costco in no time.

Too bad it was too early in the morning and they were closed.

Still, I got my photo, and then the bus pulled up to the stop, so I hopped on board, hoping my readings of the bus signs wasn’t wrong. It wasn’t.

Mission Accomplished!

Technorati Tags: Blog, Taiwan, Travel