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."
Sunday, September 27, 2009
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
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.
Friday, September 11, 2009
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.
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.
Thursday, September 3, 2009
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
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
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