KaoHsiung

Over the break I made several visits to KaoHsiung to visit Florence's sister and her husband. KaoHsiung is Taiwan's largest port with about 1.5 million residents. This make KaoHsiung almost twice as large as Tainan. The biggest difference for me was that the streets in KaoHsiung are much wider than those in Tainan. Tainan is the old capital of Taiwan and most of the roads were laid out before cars were invented. KaoHsiung as grown mostly since WWII so there was plenty of reason to make the roads wide.

This view is from a Fort on Salt Mountain on the coast. In the distance you can see the Tuntex Sky Tower. KaoHsiung is on the southern coast of Taiwan and exactly opposite Taipei in the north.

Being a port city it port city,

it has a lot of large ships in
the harbor. Everything from
oil transports, container
transports and fishing fleets.









But the coast line in the city has
a long island that is a park for
picnics, bicycles, ...
The park is a couple miles long.








 We took the Ferry from KaoHsiung to the island and did some good bicycling.

The Tuntex Sky Tower is kind of KaoHsiung's answer to Taipei's 101. The Tuntex has this distinctive design of space between two legs.

KaoHsiung also has a Metro Rapid Transit system just like Taipei(but unlike Tainan) This picture is from the Formosa Station of the MRT.

While I was there, KaoHsiung was celebrating the 30 year anniversary of the "Formosa Incident". On December 10th, 1979 there was a demostration in KaoHsiung(at this site) protesting that Taiwan was still under Martial Law and this was 35 years after WWII was over. Chiang Kai-Shek was still alive and Taiwan was under control of the KMT and Chiang used the powers of martial law to keep it that.

The leaders of the Formosa were sent to jail for years but eventually became the leaders of the DPP. The current mayor of KaoHsiung was arrested at that time and she spent 8 years in jail. KaoHsiung is a DPP stronghold, the Taiwanese Language, Hoklo, is spoken there probably more that Chinese.

Christmas Decorations

 According to government statistics only 8% of Taiwanese consider themselves Christian so its hard to understand why Christmas is such a big deal in Taiwan. But everyone likes to get presents and merchants are always looking for reasons to sell, so maybe it's not so strange. Of course Santa, Christmas trees and decorations aren't religious anyway.
 






















I waited until Christmas was over to put this blog together, like every where, Christmas decoration prices go down as we get closer to the holiday. And most of the Christmas decorations have years of use because they are artificial.  So I was thinking there might be a last minute push, but although they Christmas started appearing a month ago, I think it peak about a week before the 25th. How long will they stay up? We'll see.

Here is the Tainan City traffic circle in front of the Train Station.

Here's the tree at my dorm:

Here's the tree at the Chinese Language Center:

Here's one of the trees at the NCKU Library:

Here's a tree from Jiaosi made with recycled plastic:

Here's a futuristic tree sculpture in the Tainan Train Station:

Here's a big tree at the local department store:

But the best Christmas decoration for me was a plant growing in the wild at the WuFengCi Park in Jiaosi:

Graffiti by Stencilling

Just when I thought the City of Tainan wasn't doing anything about graffiti, I saw 2 guys painting over some graffiti that I had snapped earlier.

Then I realized that it wasn't the city of Tainan cleaning the wall, it was the owner who was developing the empty lot behind the wall, he was looking for businesses to locate there.

One form of graffiti that I see is 'graffiti by stencil', the art is probably cut in cardboard and then taped to the walk and spray painted. Here are some examples, I never get the point, I guess it's art for art's sake.

I think this Chen Shui Bian, the past president of Taiwan who is now on trial for taking bribes.

This one is nice in one color.

I suppose with two colors it requires two stencils.

Parks

I am lucky to have a park very close to my dormitory, I walk past it on the way to school. In the morning when it is still cool there is a lot exercisers, taiqi practicioners, dog walkers, ... At night when it cools down again there might be ballroom dancing, card games, Chinese chess, ..., more dog walking.

The little dog in this sign looks like a Disney offspring from the movie "Lady and the Tramp".  Not too many people clean up after their dogs.

In the park there are the typical exercise equipment for kids. But they usually are busy only on the weekends as the kids get home from school after dark.

One of the strangest exercise equipment is the sole foot massage. This is a very important part of the body to exercise.

It consists of a walkway made up of small round stones set in concrete. You walk on the stones and the pressure of the stone tops presses into your sole. It can be painfull at first but as your foot toughens its suppose to be good. I tried it once and decided it was too painfull.

Because most people are apartment dwellers the parks are as close as they can get to a small piece of nature. So there is usually landscaping around a pond. It has only rained about twice in the past 2 months so recently the pond is drying out.

Often the landscape includes these big metamorphic rocks that are weathered by water. Taiwan being on the convergence of 3 geological plates has these rocks thrusted to the surface. A few million years at the surface and the water smooths their surfaces.

Gardens

Just walking the streets of Tainan you might get the impression that everything is chaotic and messy. I think this partly because Taiwanese seem to rarely throw out anything so stuff just accumulates.

But once in a while you turn the corner and there is a peaceful world of a garden. Maybe it has something to so with Feng Shui or it's just some personal statement.
Here are some of the relaxing sites here in Tainan. Sometimes when I'm in the neighborhood, I purposely go by these sites just to get another look.

This one is in front of temple.

This one is on the NCKU campus.

This is the entrance to a apartment building.

This is the entrance to a resturant.

The next two are in somebody's back yard and you can see them from the walkway over the train tracks.

I have some zoom on my camera.

Bu Shis

In my neighborhood there are two High Schools and a couple of Junior High Schools and Elementary School. This means that late in the afternoon the streets can be choked when school lets out. There will be students walking home, riding their bicycles or being picked up by their parents. In a dense city like Tainan there are no school buses.

For the nearest High School, classes start at 8AM and they let out at 5PM, that's a 9 hour school day! But it doesn't stop there. Many of the High Schoolers will go to one of the many "BuXi", pronounced "bushees", which are the after school cram schools. These let out at about 8PM so that's another 2.5 hours of schooling. Then they can go home and start their homework! It's a tough life being a student in Taiwan, but I think it must also be tough for the parents to keep their child motivated throughout their precollege schooling.

And that is the whole point. The competition to get into college is so hard that it takes these long school days and BuXis to make it.

Here are some of the store fronts for the BuXis in my neighborhood. One of the subjects they cram for is English so they like to use a little English in their storefront.

At first I thought this was a Math research center

The owner of the BuXi's name is Bai, he's missing the apostrophe s.

This is a very optimistic outlook. Even the impossible is nothing. I think it's a purposely chosen phrase as a kind of play on words.

A hopeful message

The fine print says "Teaching All Comers Without Discrimination".

Might Brains, not Mighty Mouse





















Even the younger students have their own BuXis

Taiwan Baseball

Baseball has been in Taiwan since Japanese time, the first game was played in 1906.  It's been especially popular since the success of the Taiwan Little Leaguers in the 1970s. It's one of the few institutions that unite all Taiwanese. It so important the Little Leaguers are displayed on the 500NT bill(blog entry for 10/06/09).


The Chinese Professional League consists of 4 teams, one of which is the Tainan Uni-President 7-11 Lions that plays at the Tainan Municipal Baseball Stadium. Here are some pictures of that stadium, first we have ceremonial arch.

Cute pictures of the Lions mascot.

An endorsement of noodles by a baeball player, you don't see that in the US. But I believe the player in this picture  is Wang Chien-ming who actually pitches for the New York Yankees but is a native of Tainan.

In May of 2008 Taiwan legalized a sports lottery and for the first half of this year the sales reach NT$8 billion or US$247 million and 60% of those sales were for baseball. Some Taiwanese love to gamble.

But in the past month after the Season Final Series, 20 players from the La New Bears and Brother Elephants were arrested for taking bribes from gansters and fixing the games, usually by beating the point spread. Here's a picture of the sport lottery office new my neighborhood. It's been kind of empty since the arrests.

But this isn't the first such scandal.

Last Year the T-Rex team was banned over match fixing by the management and 3 three players.

In 1996 the China Times Eagles were disbanded for match fixing.

There have been 5 times in the past 20 years of the Chinese Professional Baseball League that players have been investigsted for throwing games.

For me, the question is why do people gamble on games that they know could be fixed. Aren't there more favorable odds in just flipping pennies?

Traffic Stats

This my last blog with lots of stats, I promise. I just find stats a lot more convincing than listening to somebody speculate. It takes almost no effort to speculate but to collect the stats takes lots of effort. If your going to believe someone, believe the one who spent some effort putting together their argument.

This chart, to me, documents the charge of Taiwan from a developing country to a developed country. From 1981 to 2007, stroke is replaced as the major killer by cancer. Cancer is probably the leading cause of death in all developed countries.
Accidents go down and lifestyle/environmental diseases go up.

My personal time in Tainan leads me to think that accidents are a major killer but the stats prove me wrong. And the accident mortality rate is actually down! One data point(my experience) doesn't determine a trend.

Taiwan has a large fishing industry, fishing has always been a dangerous profession. That's why there are so many drowning/submersions in the stats below.

The next 3 tables are from a report by Professor Cheng-Min Feng at National Chiao-Tung University in HsinChu.

As this table below shows, as the number of vehicles increased the number of fatalities decreased, so you might argue that drivers are becoming better. (No, I wouldn't go that far.) Accidents and injures go up with the number of cars, why do fatalities go down?

Helmet laws, better Emergency Response, more mass transit, ... It's hard to say.

I like the stats that most causes are the driver. Duh!

So what form a transportation is safest. The injury rate for motorcyclist is staggering compared to the number of accidents. "Momma don't let your babies growup to be motorcyclists."

But of course it is exact the young, the new drivers that ride motorcycles and they are the ones die early. As seen in the table below.