Status Report

I've been in Tainan for 2 months so I thought it would be good to give a status report:

Weather

The weather is getting cooler, I haven't had to use the air conditioning for about a week now. There's often a strong breeze that cools everything. It still hasn't rained much. It still hot in the afternoon. With the cooler weather I can wear some of the long pants I brought, until now I have wearing shorts for 2 months. I also have some long sleeve shirts that I haven't worn yet. People in Tainan think it's getting quite cool but for people who have lived in Minnesota and Alaska it's still very nice.

School

We have now completed week six of our 10 week quarter. I neither at the top or bottom of my class of 12, I think I'm about in the middle. I spend a lot of time studying because I don't think I'm as quick as my fellow students. On the other hand, they are all still youngsters with much more than class on their minds.

Food

I can eat very well on less than 300NT($10) per day. And that 300NT might include some beer on the weekend. I'm still making holes in my belt as I lose weight. I walk like a fiend for exercise. I'm being more selective about what to eat, going back to favorite places. The fruit stand it where I stockup by refrigerator. I like the pamello, Lian Hu(wax apples), Asian pears and New Zealand apples.

Lodging

My rent is less than 6000NT(~$200) per month. I pay for electric but the last month's electricity bill was 680NT(~$20) and it should be less in the future as I use less AC.

Visa

I paid next quarter's(8 weeks) tuition 2100NT($650) and extended my tourist visa until December 30th. I have to extend it every 60 days, and have to maintain a good academic record to extend the visa.

Summary

All in all it is way cheaper to live in Taiwan than in the US.

I've kept up the blog fairly consistently for 2 months now, but I think there are some other projects I'd like to do so the blog with become more irregular. Nothing in the blog is ever very urgent so I think if you just check it once a week that will be more than enough.

New projects

1. I found the NCKU Math library, I would say it's at least as large as the UW Math library but not as big as the UM Math library.

2. There's a group of old men playing Xiang Qi(Chinese Chess) in the park, I'm hanging out there more.

My Room

I had a chance to accurately measure the square footage of my dorm room. It was easy because my room is a rectangle so only two measurements are required. The length is: 14.76 feet, the width is 8.6 feet, So the square footage is about 127 square feet.

Here is a video of my room, it's not long.

Ciggies

One of the best things that has changed from when we were in Taiwan 15 years ago it that there is less smoking. I can remember smoking was everywhere, in restaurants, on the street, in the bus terminals ... I remember one particular nasty exchange with an old fart wouldn't stop smoking in the medical clinic waiting room.
He's probably dead now.

That seems to have changed now. Smoking is still a habit of the lower classes but I see less and less of it. Maybe because I'm in more of an academic setting now.

Of all the litter I see in on the Taiwan street empty ciggie packs are the most prevalent. But you can't expect those that are killing themselves with pollution to be too concerned about littering. The next two images from a disposed(litter) carton that I picked up off the street. My camera couldn't focus well on the small pack pictures, so someone conveniently litter a whole carton with is bigger 3 inch by 3 inch picture.

Because Taiwan has a Universal National Health Program(unlike the USA) reducing smoking is a government funded, sponsored program. One part of the campaign are these graphic pictures on every pack of ciggies. This one shows the heart of a smoker. (The one with month cancer is even scarier.)

This one tells about smoking effect on reducing sexual libdo. Nice graphic.

This one is about the effect of smoking on pregnant women and their unborn child.

Here is a new sign at the RR station as part of the antismoking campaign.

Hua Ren Joke

Someone sent me this joke:

My translation of this is:

Right now in Asia there are a few places where Chinese people are assembled,
these countries are:

Hong Kong...........: Where everything is allowed unless the law forbids it.

Singapore............: Where everything is forbidden unless the law allows it.

Taiwan.................: Where everything is allowed, including what the law forbids.

Mainland China....: Where everything is forbidden, including what the law allows.

Now starts my commentary and not anyone else's BEGIN

Of course, in old China there was never any law except what the Emperor declared. So this governing with laws is a new thing for Chinese, each of the above countries has its own way. The question is whether to be governed by law or by man.

Mainland China is now governed by the Communist Party and although there may be laws on the books, they don't matter if the Communist Party thinks otherwise. In this, Mainland China is similar to old China, they are now in the Communist Party Dynasty. Like the Emperors of old, what the Communist Party says is law. The current Emperor and Head of the Communist Party picks his successor to be the new Emperor and Head of the Communist Party. In old China, an Emperor may have many sons and he chose the one to be the new Emperor upon his death(It was not always the eldest). Similarly now, the Head of the Communist Party picks his successor and grooms him to be the next Emperor and Head of the Communist Party. Nowadays the Emperors of the current Communist Party Dynasty don't wait until they die before passing the position. (Mao Tse Tung is the exception, he held on to the very end as in the tradition of old China.)

So although Mainland China has laws, they are not as important as what the Emperor thinks. In many cases they are for show or economic niceities. Think of copyrights, freedom of expression, fair taxation, bribery, ... all have laws on the books but they mean nothing if not enforced.

Hong Kong was a British Colony for maybe 150 years and the British brough laws but the laws were mostly to promote trade/business. What else are colonies for? The Hong Kongese learned from the masters and anything to make a pound seems OK as long as there is no law against it.

Hong Kong reverted to China in 1999 and is slowly being absorbed.

Singapore is another one party state and another former British colony. The laws are for creating wealth and in more recent times to maintain the current one party state. In this sense, those in power have learned how to use laws for their own purposes. Justice, fairness, equality ... are just not their purposes.

We visited Singapore 15 years ago and at that time they were going to cane some teenages for graffiti. Chewing gum was illegal and you had to surrender it at the airport terminal! I remember they had just made wearing seat belts mandatory, our taxi driver drapped it across his shoulder for show but then refused to click it. Quiet rebellion.

Going back hundreds of years, Taiwan was China's colony and the purpose of colonies is to make money. So Taiwan's history during the Ming to Qing Dynasties reads like a wild wild west of uprisings, revolts, triads and intrigues. But with the surrender of Taiwan to Japan in 1895, Taiwan lived under a brutal but fair task master. There is sometimes a nostalgia for those old times.

When the Nationalists were routed from Mainland China in 1949 they took refuge on Taiwan. They brought with them all the corruption and terror that the Communists used against them to oust them from the mainland. Until the death of Chiang Kai-sek in 1975, Taiwan lived under Emperor Chiang in the old China mode. With his death, the Taiwanese made a gradual transition to a democratic state that they have now.

Because of it's recent history and governance by foreign forces, the Taiwanese attitude to government is to avoid it at all costs. So laws are massively not obeyed and therefore unenforceable. But you can't be a modern state without laws and Taiwan is moving(slowly) in that direction of enforcing laws for the good all.

END

(I'm not planning trips to China or Singapore.)

Foreign Restaurants

Here are some Foreign Restaurant that I have checked out.

I had shrimp spaghetti here because I recognised the characters for shrimp on the Chinese menu. It was OK but the white sauce could have used more cheese and there was no Parmesean on the table. Chinese don't really like cheese much but noodles are common to both Chinese and Italians. But according to legend, Marco Polo stole the recipe for noodles from the Chinese in the first place. Cost:
120 NT approximately $4 US.

The shrimp were with head and shell intact. For Chinese, with a pealed shrimp you can't be sure whether it is fresh or not. So even at an Italian restaurant it is the Chinese way of serving shrimp.

I went here on a Saturday and the tables were all reserved so I went back on Thursday. I was the only customer so I got full attention. I had ground lamb meat and spicy onions with nan. It was good but the portion was small compared to the Indian buffets I remember from the US. The small meal costs 374 NT, the most I've spent for a single meal in Tainan. OK once, but Chinese food is a better deal for me.

I had pho at this Vietnamese Restaurant. The proprietress from Vietnam says there are lots of Vietnamese in this neighbourhood. The noodles that the Chinese call He Fen are exactly the rice noodles the Vietnamese use in pho. There's a certain camaraderie of foreigners in a foreign country. No matter what foreign country they come from we are still just outsiders in Taiwan. Cost 50NT approximately $1.50 US.

This Bavaria Restaurant has seen better days. It is now closed but it got me thinking: Just what is Bavaria food? The sign in Chinese Characters actually says "European food" but that seems too broad a category. What what would "Asisan Food" be?  It's just across the street from the NCKU campus.

Our Class Field Trip

This past weekend we had the  Chinese Language School Autumn Session Field Trip. In Taiwan there aren't any "proms",  so these field trips are the biggest school affairs. Everyone is pysched to find out about their fellow classmates, outside of the school schedule. There were five buses, I guess there were 200 students and may be 12 teachers as "chaperone". We all met at school and then tour buses took us to a Hutoupi Scenic Area, which was a park. We had group competitions like:

1. Chinese Charades
2. Chinese scavenger hunt
3. Speaking Chinese with a mouth full of water
4. Giving instuctions in Chinese to a blind folded person, ....

I don't think we did very well but we had lots of fun.  In one scavenger hunt, our group had to collect 4 kisses by foreigners with makeup on their lips on my arm. The expression of the kissee faces as they had to kiss my arm was priceless. Usually if people don't understand what you are saying in Chinese they just agree, then at the last moment they found out what they had agreed to. Originally, I thought they had to kiss me on the lips! Accurate Chinese translation is a good skill. My expression must have been more than priceless!



Here's where we went, the gray area is Tainan City where we all live. The red flag is the Hutoupi Scenic Area.

On a really hot day we had to barbecue our own food. No shade for the wicked.

My Boy Scout training came in handy getting the charcoal working. Here is 9 members of my class:

Here is the class with 11 members of the 12 classmates, the students are:

Back row; American(recent high school graduate), Me, Thailand,Japanese, German
Front row:Thailand,Korean, Thailand, Solvenia, Russian, Indonesian





















In the picture below the class is the same but our teacher is in the back row and the head of the Chinese Foreign Language Institute is in white.

Back row: USA, German, Solvenia, Teacher, Russian, Me, Japan
Front row: Korea, Thailand, Thailand, Thailand, Head of Department

We are good group, because I'm the oldest they call me: baba. Guess what that means?

I was a little reluctant to put my fellow classmates photos online but they all were talking about how they would "facebook" their photos, so I guess I'm not out of step here, I still haven't told any of my classmates that I'm "blogging". But given the number of photos we all took, facebook will see spike in uploads from Tainan.

City Gates

In the olden days, what defined a city was a wall separating the inhabitants from the surroundings and gates allowing for controlled entry. With WWI and the use of airplanes the value of the walls and gates to safety was gone.

In Tainan, during the 1930's of Japanese time, the city walls and gates were torn down to make room for new roads. A few of the gates and sections of wall were relocated and some remnants are still around town.

The biggest gate in it's original site is the Grand East Gate shown below. It sits in its own park with traffic on both sides. The temple was added on top is post WWII.

The Lesser South Gate also sits on its original site that is also now a park. The
the long tunnel under the gate was a good control point if the walls could be held.
Some of the linestone blocks used to build the wall have fossils in them. How did the ancients explain fossils before the idea of deep time came up in the 1800's? I don't know.

The Lesser East Gate was moved to the NCKU campus in 1970. How was that done? Brick by brick and reconstructed? How many man hours did that take? The Lesser East Gate is outside my language classes, I pass it every day. The tunnel is maybe 40 feet long and I doubt an SUV could get through it.

Like the Great Wall of China, this remnant of the South Wall is made from whatever was available, there is a section still visible at the University of Tainan Campus. You can see that it was a haphazard affair. I'm sure cannons, like those at the Eternal Golden Fort in the 1800's would not be stopped by such a wall.

The final remnant of the city walls is the Lesser Western Gate. It took 2 maps and a guide book to find this one. It's part of an alley now but still has a plaque and is in good shape. Inside the passage way the walls are the fossiliferous limestone, same as at the Lesser Southern Gate.

Revenge of the Coneheads

There's no harder working guy in Tainan that the lowly traffic cone. They are everywhere doing a miriage of lowly jobs. Here we have a cone reserving a parking spot outside somebody's residency. Owning a car in Taiwan is nothing, owning a parking spot is tough. If you left it ungaurded anyone could snatch it and who knows when they would give it up. This is like calling "dibs". The poor cone is saddled with a used scooter tire to add heft.






















They have the flexibility to work together and rope off areas in a nonthreatening way. Communication is the key.

There is no need for immovable barriers, they only need to indicate what is restricted and then it is restricted. Hit this metal plate, especially when it's wet could do in a scooter. Thank God there are cones on duty.

But sometimes, for the really big jobs, we have to bring in the big guns. Like "traffic scarecrow man".






















All in all, it's a tough life for the cones on the hot streets of Tainan.

LEDs

I use to think that neon lights were just the thing for Chinese Characters on street signs. But neon lights are just too high maintenance. In the 1980's I use to see them but I haven't seen any this time.

I also haven't see any incandescent lights. When Taiwan was starting it's technological development in the 1950's, I think it decided it couldn't afford those inefficient incandescent lights. Almost all the lights in Taiwan are now fluorescent. In some homes now I see the energy saving high efficient versions same as you can buy at Costco.

At the local hardware store you can but the incandescent light bulbs.

The new technology that seems to have grown in just the 2 months that I have been here are LED displays. Here are two short clips:

I have some using Chinese Characters for the future but these are so sophisticated that they must have been programmed by a computer.

Japanese Buildings

When I was in Taipei last weekend, I heard about how there are 2 Taiwans. The modern fast moving Northern part and the traditional, slower moving Southern part. Tainan is the epitome of this slower more traditional Taiwan.

One place where you see this is in the number of buildings from the Japanese time that are still in use. We've already seen the Tainan Train Station, but the rail system itself was built during Japanese time. And the Anping Fort is also from Japanese time.

Below is the Tainan Martial Arts Morals Hall built in the traditional style in 1936. It is now used for cultural and educational events.



















Below is the Second Branch of the Fire Department built in 1936. At that time the tower was the highest in Tainan and fires could be spotted. Still ready to go put out fires today.
























Here is the current Museum of Taiwanese Literature and Perservation of Cultural Properties. Construction started in 1913 and was the government seat. Still in use today with a library, displays, ...
























Here is (appropriately) the History Department Building across from the Foreign Language Building where I have my classes. You can always tell the old buildings because they have the high ceiling for when air conditioning was not yet invented.

I know on the Campuses of University of Minnesota and University of Washington there are buildings from more than 100 years ago that are still going strong. But there are also building built in the last 50 years that are now gone. They don't make them like they use to.



















The Southern United States wouldn't be as populous as it is now except for the invention of air conditioning. I remember going to TSU(Texas Southern University) in Houston in 1972 and we'd all take the bus downtown to the department store and ride the escalators because they had the only air conditioning in town.


Here's the old Hayashi Department Building. It is made of yellow brick but hasn't been cleaned in a long time and now is covered in grime. But still standing. This is in the western part of Tainan and close to the port on the Taiwan straits. As the railroad has become more important, the center of Tainan has move to the East and now is closer to the RR than the port.

Beauty

The word "beauty" creates special problems with store signs. I wouldn't say it is pronounced as it is spelt.


















When you do spell it phonetically there can be problems:



















Of course most usage is spelt correctly like the sign below. But as a mathematician I can tell you from experience that "infinite" is a lot.



















Pizza is big in Taiwan and so is American slang like this one.
























When I saw the one below I thought is was a simple misspelling but looking closer you can see that this is a Tea shop and the owner has purposely created a new word from Tea + Pizza. It gets the attention that correct spelling would not. It certainly caught me!

Current Fruit

For the weekend I loaded up on fruit. Here some of the load. The big yellow one is pamello, the same as we could get at Costco. It's sweeter than the green one called youzi. Because it's bigger for the same amount of work you get more flesh. It costs more 29 NT per jin for the pamello .vs. 24 per jin for the youzi.

The jin is an old Chinese unit of measurement and is now the same as 600 grams. I once bought 2 youzi from an old woman on the street. She quoted me the price per jin. She weighed youzi, then divide the number of kilograms by 6 and then multiplied the result by the price per jin. She did it all on a scrape of paper, it was fun to watch a 70 something woman do division without a calculator. Of course a price per kilogram would have been too easy, we all need to remember division.

The apple is just too good a fruit to pass up even if it isn't local.

The purple fruit was beautiful but I don't know its name in English in  Chinese ut's called "small dragon fruit". This was a good opportunity for more fruit surgery.

 

First we get our equipment  our equipment ready to go.

 

It easily cuts through, revealing this dark purple flesh  with small black seeds.

The flesh scoops out easily and though colorful it has almost no flavor. The juice looks exactly like beet juice. And stains like beet juice.

Another fruit that is now in season in the lian wu or waxed apple.

Vegetarian in Tainan

This weekend I decided to check out some of the vegetarian restaurants. Armed with a list from the web and some google maps, I strapped on my hiking boots and started out.

This one was easy to find. They had about forty dishes that you used to fill up a plate or a bian dang. They weighed the plate and came up with a price. Very convenient, everybody likes buffet style.



















This plate costs 70 NT or about $2 US. What looks like meat or fish is toufu, mushrooms, ... It was very tasty, I'll probably go back it's just a few blocks off the NCKU campus.




















I almost gave up trying to find this place. But I turned a corner and there it was.
It has an endorsement from a Buddhist nun out front and a western chef gnome so you know it's got to be good. The plant life in front also if a nice touch.

The menu was in both English and Chinese, with a crayon you checked off what you wanted. They were very accommodating, trying to speak English and very helpful. (Unlike some Chinese restaurant that want you to demonstrate you can read the menu before they let you sit down. It's like taking a test to see if you are good enough to eat at their establishment.)

I order the curried rice and a fried mash potato and it came with cream of corn soup. It was good, a little spicy, tofu that looked like and had the consistency of chicken.

They had a full range of tofu in different forms. With takeout a possibility.

The third place I gave up on, google maps sometimes gets confused and points to places that couldn't possible be correct. Also anything on the web has a limit life span before it's obsolete.

I have a couple more places to check out from the web, once you start looking for the Chinese places you have a whole new set of possibilites. Here's the characters to search for:

More gates

Alright this is my last post about gates keeping the parks save from motorcycles. I'm done obsessing about this topic but I just want to get these last photos into the record.

Here is the Cadillac of gates. Long, sturdy, with ancillary bars on the flanks.


















Around NCKU we have these fun gates, their depth works to keep out "at angle" approaches. The curb holds the flanks.



















So guess which speaks with more effect in the gate below:

1. a sign saying no motorcycles

or

2. off center gates that allow the motorcycles to enter.



















The gate below works well because of the small adjustment on the ground. It's just enough elevation to raise the bars of the new mountain bikes so their handle bars hit the gate.
























I saw this type of sign at an intersection and had to laugh because neither bicyclists nor pedestrians have the right of way on the streets of Tainan. But then I saw it again in the middle of this park where motorcycles and cars are forbidden. Then I realized that the sign was meant to have bicycles give the right of way to pedestrians on the common sidewalk/path. It doesn't apply to motorcycles and cars at all. It's all clear to me now.

Graffiti - One Tunnel

Again by accident, I came across an Railroad underpass with tons of graffiti at Dongmen Road. I think the City of Tainan has just given up on this problem. And I can understand their predicament. The tunnel isn't used much because there aren't many pedestrians in Tainan especially away from the main RR station. The walls are textured stone about 50 feet long, so washing is out of the question. And painting them over would just give the artist a new canvass. What to do?

I think these paints are acrylics. No paint and run effort here.


















Seems to have cartoon influences.























Why do I get the feeling that this artist does drugs?









































Even the artist over paints his/her own work.


















And there was another ten images that I could have shown from this one pedestrian underpass.