Christmas Island

Living in Taiwan has provided me with a lot of "first time" experiences. The first time I've taught. The first time I've been self sufficient (mostly, anyway). The first time I've eaten pig's liver or blood congealed in rice (which is surprisingly flavorless). And this week I realized it's also the first time I've spent Christmas away from home.

It hasn't been terribly off-putting, partly because I've been distracted this week by adding ten teaching hours to my weekly schedule and partly because the atmosphere here isn't quite Christmas-y. I have been engaged in a number of Christmas activities, and in honor of the season I'll share them now.

1. Baked cookies with my classmate, Amelia, and her two roommates. Lots of (burnt) sugar cookies and more successful ones made from oatmeal and jam. While we waited for the cookies to finish in their Easy-Bake-sized oven we did arts and crafts decorations for their tree using spare passport photos and construction paper. We also looked up tons of old Christmas movie songs online (Amelia - Mr. Magoo; me- Muppet Christmas Carol).

2. TLI, my Chinese school, had a Christmas party, complete with turkey stew, chocolate fondue, deep fried sweet potatoes and curried vegetables (just to cover the highlights). One of the school officials got things rolling by blowing a Horn of Gondor she bought in Israel (my apologies to religious studies folk, I've forgotten the instrument's name) and singing carols in Chinese.

3. Christmas brunch held by a friend of a friend who is now a friend. Eggs and veggies, country hash browns, raspberry and cream cheese stuffed french toast alongside mimosas and coffee and Bailey's. All before hurrying to work. The event was changed from ladies-only to "almost ladies" to accomodate me and another guy. I've never before been grateful to be considered an "almost lady."

4. Joy, the buxiban where I teach English, also had a Christmas party. All teachers and students brought a dish and a gift, respectively for potluck and raffle. When two Chinese teachers asked if I was bringing hamburger and french fries I indignantly decided to make use of the packaged Cajun food I got in my birthday care package. While the smell of instant red beans and rice gave the apartment a homey smell, the pot cooled to a pretty solid mass by the time of the party itself. Most of the kids snubbed it. Sure, they'll eat tofu that is literally rotten (cho dofu) but what I do with beans is weird. I won a glitter pen in the raffle though. The boy who contributed it doodled a skull and crossbones in the attached Christmas card.

5. That same night I was introduced to a wonderful holiday tradition - Christmas Adam. The celebration follows the logic that December 24th (Christmas Eve, if you will) is for family, so the 23rd is for friends. Mostly the same brunch crowd with many extensions, and I have every intention of passing Christmas Adam along to my friends once I'm back home.

6. Christmas Eve at Katie Beth's, Christmas morning at Elizabeth's (yet another expat from New Jersey) and Christmas dinner (after seven grueling hours with children) prepared by Maggie, a very sweet Taiwanese woman engaged to a burly South African named Dawid. Taiwanese food, wine, Love Actually, and then a 3 am phone call to the US to catch the Darby Christmas party.

It may have been an unusual Christmas, and potluck fried rice may not measure up to my dad's green beans en brouchette or my uncle's stuffed potatoes, but Taiwan made for a pretty good Christmas. At the very least, I wound up with a glitter pen and a knit cap (thanks, Elizabeth). Now let's see how New Year's will measure up.

Happy holidays, everybody.

Big Gun

2012 seems to be the most discussed movie here in Taiwan right now. This is pretty disappointing since I haven't heard a thing about it that seems worht discussing, but whenever one of my English students, or Chinese teachers, my roommate or anyone else for that matter, tries to bring it up there's a moment of confusion about what exactly to call it. My students in particular cant sort out whether to break it into smaller numbers - Twenty Twelve - or just take it on one digit at a time - Teacher, have you seen Two Zero One Two?

We started talking about movies in my Chinese class, and our teacher brought up "The Day After Tomorrow." In Chinese there's an actual word for the day after tomorrow - "houtian" - so Tiffany, one of my classmates, joked that it must have been really easy to translate when it opened here. Our laoshi assured us that while in mainland China they just directly translate movie titles, in Taiwan they try to be more poetic, and to capture the essence of the movie. So instead of just "Houtian," in Taiwan they called it "What Will Happen After Tomorrow?"

"Also, like, 'Top Gun,'" she said, "In China, they just call it 'Big Gun.' Here we call it, oh I don't remember. But it's much better."

Winter in the City

Although the temperature gets a bit lower, and the sky gets a little hazier from pollution, winter in Kaohsiung is more an idea than a season. And the people here certainly try to live up to that idea - on the streets and sidewalks people are bundled tightly in scarves and down jackets and acting as though the island isn't tropical. I've donned a jacket a few times myself, but more often than not it's for riding on my scooter since windchill is a vicious thing when there's no windshield or heater to protect you.

The most visible natural sign that it's winter is the haze that's settled over the city. The last rains for the year are over, and the dust and pollution from the streets have risen into the air to wait for the February rains to wash them out again. Mountains in the distance and skyscrapers nearby are nearly invisible, washed out by the grey that's been creeping higher and higher from the horizon over the past few weeks.

Every store is decked out in sequins and holly, and in the past few days it seems like every coffeeshop I find (and I have the supernatural power to find them anywhere) is playing Christmas-y pop music. I even hung around one shop after finishing my cup just so I could listen to all of "I'll be Home for Christmas." Even the cram school I work for has started to hang up fake pine boughs and cover walls in construction paper to make the main office look like a giant gingerbread house. Since few of the kids actually know anything about the holiday, I'm wondering if I can riff off the Hansel and Gretel story and tell them that Mrs. Claus puts children who scream in class into pressure cookers to render them down for candycanes.

A New You

After being here for three months, I finally got a haircut. Aside from generally disliking having realy long hair, it's a huge inconvenience here - the heat and air funk combined with wearing a helmet all the time just contributes to overall gross feelings. I finally got so fed up with it that I went to the first place a classmate suggested - Carrefour, a French-run department store that attracts Kaohsiung's affluent.

The price wasn't bad, but the drawback was that the woman spoke no English. In the end I got what I wanted - short hair. But she took so much that I look like a monastery novice. No offense to anyone interested in becoming a monk, but right now I don't think the life or the look is for me.

Things got interesting that evening though when I went in to teach and one of the students came up to me and said "Hello, teacher, what is your name?" To be fair, he wasn't one of my students, but I've been at Joy almost a month now and the kid thought it was my first day. The next morning in Chinese class, my teacher Xu laoshi thought I was a new student when she saw me from behind. Add to this my roommate's comment that I now look like Tom Cruise, and I humbly present my new thesis on Taiwanese culture: Foreigners all look the same. Change one thing, and you're a whole new person.

The Ahmedabad Effect

There are a couple Chinese phrases that I immediately forget every time I hear them. Since most of my non-English interaction takes place in restaurants or other food-centered arenas, it's not that surprising that both have to do with meals. I've mastered how to ask for take out: the phrase sounds like asking "Why die?" And asking for tea or coffee on ice is no challenge -"bing," 冰 (although getting the tone wrong would mean asking for a soldier or a disease, most of the girls who work tea stands can figure out I mean). But I can never remember how to ask for a drink to be hot, and I'm at a total loss when I need to explain that I'd like to actually eat inside of a restaurant instead of just toting around a parcel of food.

At a lo mein shop I tried gesturing to the seats inside, which just confused the chefs taking my order, when the woman behind me said, "Sorry, what exactly are you asking for?"

Considering how many kids are put in after hours "cram schools" that employ nearly all the foreigners in the city, it doesn't really surprise me that so many people in Kaohsiung speak English. What does surprise me is the way these people materialize exactly when they're needed.

I've dubbed this phenomenon "the Ahmedabad Effect" - essentially when a stranger suddenly interprets a language you can't understand and surprises you be solving a problem explaining a situation. While we were in India in 2007, Katie, Meagan and I routinely wound up in situations where we had no idea what the hell was going on, be it buying overnight train tickets or literally crossing the street. Every time a person would appear almost magically to show us what we needed to do or explain what was happening.

The lesson: to survive in a foreign country you just need to do a few things. 1) Be white, 2) look obviously confused about what's going on around you and 3) be very, very gracious to whoever helps out. If you're just rude about it they may decide to never help confused white people again, and then we'd all be in trouble.

Shut up. Adorable.

If there's just one reason to be jealous of Taiwanese students, it's the National Sun Yat-sen University (國立中山大學, Guólì Zhōngshān Dàxué) here in Kaohsiung. The campus is built into forested mountains that slope down directly into beaches, not far from Kaohsiung's main port. The setting easily trumps Millsaps' Bowl.

A few minutes from the university is a small open-air coffee shop hanging over a cliff. From the tables and bar there's nothing visible except the ocean and the roofs of a few houses and a temple. The owner immigrated from Ecuador after marrying his wife, a Taiwanese citizen, and the two of them run the shop and sell imported coffee, the strongest I've had since moving here.

The most entertaining thing about driving to and leaving the cafe are the buses that fly down the mountain roads. Not only do they add an element of danger that makes driving here at any given time exciting, crossing paths with a bus always throws me off for a moment as I come face to face with their giant eyes and smiles. Every one of the buses has a grinning kitten's face painted on its front.

Everywhere I look in the city there are disgustingly cute figures. Dentist offices have dancing and smiling molars on their signs. The mascots for this summer's World Games were a pair of blue and pink teletubbies (event winners took home plush dolls of each instead of a medal or trophy). There are motorcycle helmets with Powerpuff Girls, and turn in any given direction and you'll see either Spongebob or Stitch (from, of course, Lilo and Stitch).

Cuteness is not an age specific obsession - I see business women in power suits carrying pencil bags covered in crudely drawn laughing daisies or dandelion puffballs. If it has huge eyes and a swollen head then it makes for the perfect accessory.

If I want to see the ocean, or have a cup of real coffee, I have to run the risk of getting hit by grinning buses. It's a hell of a challenge trying to stay focused on the road while knowing a cat-bus is staring right you, reminding you that an entire population is in the grip of an adorable obsession.

The Pitfalls of an English Degree

I'm now convinced that going to college has made it damn near impossible for me to communicate with anyone who isn't a native English speaker. After four years of dealing with professors and academic articles, I now have to try and simplify my speech as much as possible. I never realized how much of day-to-day speech is made up of metaphors, euphemisms or sayings. How to explain how you "spend time"? Or how do you save a conversation after you've derailed it by accidentally using the word "theorist"?

As if an over-active vocabulary weren't enough to deal with, I also talk too fast. While we were out to dinner with a mixed group, Katie Beth and I wound up talking about a book she was reading that deals with Vlad the Impaler, and the word "vampire" came up more than once. She turned to a Taiwanese guy sitting with us and asked if he was able to follow what we were saying and he replied, "Yeah, you were saying you don't eat spicy food."

So, I'm going to choose to blame the piles of textbooks and novels that I allegedly read for my classes. After all that time trying to sound smart, I finally just backslid into gibberish. Because when it boils down to it, studying literature is no help when you're trying to explain the difference between a chili pepper and a "blood-suck-ghost."

How did Anthony Bourdain get such an awesome job?

Some fun tidbits, largely food-inspired:

• Bread is a pretty new sensation here. A decade ago there were no bakeries on the island, and now there are bread and cake shops everywhere. Taiwanese bakers are very liberal in their interpretation of bread, covering rolls in dried shredded pork, green onion, sliced hot dogs, olives, and just about any other style of food imagineable.
• The sandwich is considered the default meal for Americans, and popular perception here would have it that North Americans in general eat nothing that's not between two pieces of bread. Often when people ask my favorite food, before I can respond (and I've realized I don't have an answer), they always guess "Sanmingzhi?", the Chinese word for sandwich, failing to take into account the wide range of things you can stuff into a sanmingzhi.
• If a new word is introduced into Chinese, often the Chinese translation is made up of words or syllables that together sound like the new concept. For example, "sanmingzhi" (三明治) is composed of three characters that already existed, including the word for "three" (san, 三) and "bright" (ming, 明). Another example is the Chinese word for America, "Meiguo." Mei, 美, on its own means "beautiful," but with guo, 國 (which means country/government/national), it sounds vaguely similar to "America." On the upside, when people ask where I'm from I get to say I'm literally a "beautiful country person."
• 7/11 is deeply ingrained in daily life here. At any given 7/11 you can print out documents or photos, update your cell phone plan, and even pay water, gas or electric bills. You can also place an order at 7/11 for high quality foods, like gourmet moon cakes specially made for the upcoming Mid Autumn Festival.
• Beans and sweet potatoes figure heavily in desserts. One of the most delicious things I've had here is made from the shavings of frozen milk, mixed with sweetened red beans. And since I'm assuming an industrial ice shaver is too expensive to have in a home, I can only hope that Taiwanese dessert shacks start to catch on overseas.

Let me know if you've got any questions about anything, I'm sure it would help me come up with new post ideas. In the meantime, I'm hitting up all the street stalls I can find.

The Scooter, or, One Who Scoots

When you're on a scooter, every day becomes an adventure. I don't mean adventure in some quirky or even metaphorical way, I mean driving a scooter in this city is thrilling and death-defying.

Traffic rules seem to only lightly apply to scooter-drivers. If a scooter can reach a certain speed and safely maneuver then that speed is fine and no cause for concern. Scooters bob and dart around cars and buses like lesser fish do with porpoises and whales. The one rule that seems to hold most strictly is that a scooter can never turn left at a traffic light. At an intersection, if you want to go left, you pull over to a small box designated for scooters and wait for the opposite light to turn. Or if you're less patient you can take your scooter up a pedestrian crosswalk instead of waiting.

Scooter driving requires some accessorizing. First and most predictably is the helmet, from the hard plastic cap to the full-face motorcycle style. Helmet designs range from M&M logos, butterflies with skulls, Hello Kitty, abstract graphics, faces, and even the occasional pair of devil horns poking from the top. The more surprising scooter garb is the face mask - one of the latest Taiwanese trends is to don a surgical mask made of cloth, with any manner of pattern or design (with about the same diversity of the helmets). While Taiwan has had a freak out over swine flu similar to the US (here they're a bit more proper and call it H1N1), but the masks surely aren't that effective at purifying breath. The cloth is thin after all, doesn't really adhere to the face, nor would the risk of exposure be very high while scootering around the city. The next assumption is that the masks protect against air pollution, but the same holes pop up. The actual appeal of the masks lies in the Taiwanese notion of beauty - white is wonderful. The women here go to extremes to avoid any exposure to the sun, from masks and umbrellas to special removable sleeves that are also part of the scooter accoutrement.

If the air pollution gets any more visible though, I may go that extra mile and pick up a face mask. Can't wait to see how those tanlines turn out.

The Dalai Lama Comes to Kaohsiung

Early this week, the Dalai Lama arrived in Taiwan to address the devastation of Typhoon Morakot a few weeks ago. A lot of international news sources have been running the story since China is understandably pissed that the Taiwanese government allowed him a visa.

Although it was kept under wraps until the last minute, the Dalai Lama actually appeared in Kaohsiung on Tuesday morning and led an enormous prayer service in the Kaohsiung World Games Stadium, and Katie Beth and I managed to slip in just before the arena security starting turning people away to avoid fire code violation. From what I've heard, around 17,000 people were in attendance, though security cordoned off a few tiers of seating that were behind the impromptu stage, flanked by a pair of giant video screens. A tremendous percentage of the Taiwanese population identifies as Buddhist or Taoist, or even some nebulous combination of the two. We were in the back of the stadium, at the highest level, literally standing for the duration, but we were able to see close to four hundred Buddhist monks seated on the ground level, men and women both, all with shaved heads and differently styled robes.

When he finally came out, the Dalai Lama himself was very nonchalant about all the formality. He audibly laughed when some stage hands tried to move a small table out of his way and it promptly fell to pieces. At another point, when the camera cut from his translator back to him, the crowd suddenly realized he had just put on a huge red visor. As explanation he said, in English, "Um. . . very strong lights," while gesturing to the ceiling. The crowd found both of these events hysterical.

Since his speech was in Tibetan, Katie Beth provided commentary on his Chinese translation, and only a few points really stuck. He often returned to the point of connectedness, and stressed that everyone present should pray for the typhoon victims regardless of their race and regardless of their religion - there's no one unaffected by another person's suffering.

Afterward he led the crowd in a very long series of chants, he in Tibetan and everyone else in Chinese. I managed to sneak some recordings, if anyone can give me advice on how to post audio files on here. I also hope no angry Buddhists take offence, I just figured I wouldn't ever get the chance to record the Dalai Lama again.

If you're interested, the New York Times article is here: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/28/world/asia/28taiwan.html?_r=1&scp=2&sq=taiwan&st=cse

And the Al Jazeera article, here:
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/asia-pacific/2009/09/20099135742336272.html

The Road to Yilan

I ventured outside of Kaohsiung for the first time this weekend, and Katie Beth and I took the high speed rail to Taipei (covering the span of the island in less than two hours) where we met up with two of her Canadian friends, Nathan and Andrew, who had arrived in Taipei from Kaohisung earlier that morning. From there we all took a smaller train more resembling a subway rail along the eastern coast to Jiaohsi where we rented a pair of scooters.

Saturday afternoon we trekked up to the Wufengchi waterfalls and actually swam around in the largest pool while Taiwanese tourists walked past and stared. That night we drove further south to Yilan where we found a cheap hotel and ate dinner at a night market. In many ways the night market resembles a bazaar or the prototypical marketplace you'll find in any number of movies, except the stalls boast everything from knock-off watches and Buddhist beads to t-shirts with ridiculous and non-sensical English phrases - "Other Girls Wish NEWYORKDIVA", "Here I Am and There You Are", bedazzled Jelly Belly logos, etc.

The best draw though is the food. At the Yilan market we found salty sesame buns stuffed with meat that are cooked in huge heated urns, with the buns pressed and stuck to the urn's inside wall; "onion oil cakes", batter and green onions fried in oil and folded in half with a fried egg; pureed mango and milk; rolls filled with fruit and shrimp; and mini waffles. This isn't really remarkable though. Just as at any given state fair you can find turkey legs, roasted corn and cotton candy, at just about any city's night market (Kaohsiung is actually the home to several) you can find all the foods mentioned, along with duck heads, grilled squid, donuts, fruit, tofu, and rice-stuffed sausage that's surprisingly similar to boudin. Nathan seemed quite flustered when I told him that Cajun culture had the same thing. I think he's stuck in a "which came first" sort of loop - Tainwanese rice-sausage or Cajun boudin?

Ultimately Yilan didn't have much else for us to see, so the next morning we headed further south to track down a botanical garden mentioned in one of our guidebooks. Outside of Yilan mountains reared up on all sides, and though the roads kept climbing higher up the steep slopes, around every turn we saw higher and higher peaks, all covered in ferns and palms and dark, thick forest. We found out that visitors to the gardens have to register a day in advance to control human traffic, so we snuck down a forest past a few kilometers further down the mountain, and saw an older Taiwanese couple sitting in lawn chairs in a shallow stream. They flagged us down on our way out and offered us tea in Chinese.

With Katie Beth translating we learned that the couple picnics in the stream every Sunday. They passed around small cups of steaming oolong and they insisted that we try their roasted chicken and then the mangos they had cooling in the water. None of us could finish a cup without the husband quickly refilling it, and after fifteen minutes would not let us leave unless we accepted the whole chicken we'd been eating (we found it later it was indeed an entire chicken - a foot and half a head were nestled in the bottom of the plate). We tried to get them to take a picture with us, but they simply repeated "Bu yong, bu yong, bu yong," meaning "no need."

From there it was further south to Suao to check out the cold springs (chilly waters that are pumped into public bathing areas) before we finally drove back north to Jiaohsi. By the time our train arrived in Taipei it was past 10 pm, and we wound up riding back on an overnight bus, arriving in Kaohsiung at 3 am. Imagine a Greyhound bus with recliners and you've got the picture. The rest of the group was unimpressed with my Harry Potter similes.

Taiwan is the steepest island in the world, and I'm glad that I finally got to get a sense of its mountain ranges. The sense of height stacked on top of height, being able to see entire ledges off to the horizon and above those even higher peaks faintly outlined through clouds is staggering. With luck I'll get to do much more exploring. For now though I've got to adjust to living in a real city.

Ni hao, y'all

After five days in Kaohsiung, Taiwan's second biggest city, I'm finally making good on my promise to start a travel blog. While I already have in mind topics on which I'd like to focus more later on - food, religion, and scooters, off the top of my head - for now I'll just throw out noteworthy points from the past few days:

1. The city is huge and the most metropolitan place I've ever lived (albeit compared to Lafayette and Jackson).
2. "Kaohsiung" (高雄) literally translates to "tall hero."
3. This county was the hardest hit by Typhoon Morakot about two weeks ago, but the city itself is largely unscathed. Other areas of the island are still in pretty bad need of relief, and apparently many in Taiwan are calling for the president's resignation due to the dismal response.
4. I'm studying Mandarin 12 hours a week at the Taipei Language Institute under four different teachers, and all I've done so far is repeat syllables and occasionally whole words after them while trying to speak something that sounds vaguely similar to Mandarin. One of the teachers, Shi Laoshi, told me that I'll "struggle with pronunciation for three months." So I at least have a timeframe.
5. In Chinese and Taiwanese culture, when addressing a person you know as a professional, you refer to them by their surname followed by their title. For example, the above mentioned teacher is surnamed "Shi" and "laoshi" means teacher. Default titles are "xiansheng" (Mr., husband, gentlemen), "xiaojie" (Miss, young lady) and "taitai" (Mrs.). Of course, these words are meaningless if you don't pronounce the tones right.
6. Tones are hard.
7. I can recognize maybe thirty or forty written characters so far, but often two separate characters go together to make a different word (the characters for "small" and "heart" together translate to "caution") so I don't really have any idea what I'm reading.
8. Thankfully "tea" (cha, 茶) just means "tea," and there are signs for tea stands on nearly every street! Taiwan's climate is tropical, so every place mainly serves very sweet chilled tea, but there's green tea galore and Taiwan is famous for mountain teas and oolong (a tea that's between green and black in flavor and oxidation). I'm still keeping an eye out for any place that serves more traditional teas, but for now the fruit infused chilled greens on every corner will have to do.
9. I am in fact writing to you from the future. If anything cataclysmic happens, I'll contact those of you who I believe will be capable of altering history and saving our timeline in 12-13 hours. In spite of this, I don't believe we'll be able to prevent either the rise of Terminator-like robots or the assassination of Jon Stewart; both are inevitable.

I promise I'll try to keep things entertaining as I write about any adventures or interesting cultural points I come across. Feel free to let me know if you want to know more about something, or if you've got any questions or comments.