Shiny Stuff

Today is my birthday, I am 60 years old and I can definitely say that I am more than halfway through this job called life.

I have less than one month left in Tainan and less than 2 weeks before my wife arrives in Taiwan. I have to step it up on doing blog entries if I'm going to finish before I leave. So the blog will come out more often than MWF, maybe back to everyday. Forwarned is forarmed.

Every once in a while, I see an English word used in Taiwan that seems out of place. Usually the translation from Chinese to English misses some nuance in English. One such word is the word: "shiny".

I think of the word "shiny" as being dismissive or deprecating, like in the sentences:

His bald head was as shiny as a cue ball.

or

The cop with the shiny badge didn't look so tough now.

So it was strange to see "shiny" as a superlative. After a little research, I have an explanation. (It's probably full of shit but I like it.) In Chinese Characters, the store's name "Shiny Tea" is given as

嚮茶
the first character is an old version of the current character for xiang4

向 
which means 'in the direction" . There is another version of this character for xiang4
曏
in this version the sub character on top
日
is the character for the Sun, and of course looking in the direction of the sun is nothing if not "shiny".  With more than 2ooo years of Chinese characters there are plenty of older versions to choose from. This use of old versions is like the use of olde English as a marketing ploy(Ye Olde Shoppe... ).

Beside this chain of Tea Shoppes there are other users, shiny furniture:

 Maybe I'm stretching it with the next example,  I don't know what this "pole shine" is all about.

 















Here I am with my buddy in KaoHsiung. It was my first time in Taiwan at Mickey Ds. I have to say that a McChicken Sandwich, a Soft Cone, an Apple Turnover and a black coffee tastes EXACTLY the same in Taiwan as in the US. Although why someone would choose McDonalds is still a mystery to me.

Aquariums

In this big wide world where we have no control, it would be nice to have a small beautiful world where we are in complete control. And so we have aquariums!

They can be simple ones like at the Chinese Language Center.

Or ones with complex themes like this one from the KaoHsiung Museum of Science and Technology.

One of the most popular fish are fancy guppies. My father and I used to raise these guppies, their easy to breed and hard to kill.

At least in Tainan, there are lots of  tropical fish shops, there must be some great home aquariums out there.

Being an island, Taiwan also has some colorful saltwater aquariums, I saw Nemo is this one.

Some of the fish are huge, I have to confess that I have caught wild fish that were smaller and ate them.

There is one aquarium shop that I can recommend just because they have a good name.

I know aquariums are prescribed for tired eyes as watching the fish glide across the screen is soothing. After a hard day squinting at small Chinese characters I can appreciate the need for some soothing eye exercises.

Also, everyone knows that,  ghosts can not make turns and an aquarium at the entrance will block a ghost from entering. Just like with mirrors, they will seen their own reflection and run with fright!

More and more fun with English

The folder was getting kind of full, so here's another batch.

This dentist seems to have a very committed attitude.

Here we have a motorcycle club, I doubt they could become a Hell's Angels chapter unless they had an attitude readjustment.

If you are going to sell hamburgers, I can't stress enough the importance of spelling.

I doubt this health club is going to increase the number of buff people on the streets of Tainan. But maybe a "clud" can do what a club can't.

This one hits close to home. My last name is "Ess", there have been times when someone has spelt it incorrectly replacing the first letter with a vowel closer to the beginning of the alphabet. Little did I know that it stood for "Authorized Service Shop".

Ts'ai-Liao Fossil Museum of Tainan County

Right in Tainan County there a Fossil Museum. The first documented fossil finds in Taiwan were in 1931 and they are of the Pleistocene era of 1.8 million to 10,000 years ago. Long after the dinosaurs died out about 70 million years ago.

There are fossils of Elephants, Rhino, sharks, whales, crocodiles, big cats, bears ... Taiwan must have been a wild play in those days. (It's still kind of wild today, but in a different way.)

In 1971 there was a big discovery when bones of human ancestors were found. They were dated to be comtemporary with Peking Man or as he is now called Shandingdongren. The skull fragments are from an ancestor now called "Tsochen Man" (or ZouZhen in pinyin) after the town where the remains were found.

Besides a display of all the mammals found at the site there is an extensive collections of sea creature fossils. You can go to any market in Taiwan and see the still living versions.

Seashells

Getting there might be complicated, unless you take the Hsin Nan Bus from the their storefront across from the Tainan Railway Station on Jhongshan Rd.. Get off at the "Hua Shi Guan"(Fossil Museum) stop. Take the same bus back.

Advertising

Advertising always is trying to tell a story, sometimes they are pretty good.

In this resturant sign the customer can choose where their beef comes from. US beef is associated with "Mad Cow Disease".

McDonald's serves very hot coffee because for the coffee conosissuer the hotter coffer has more taste. So in Taiwan there is a chain of coffee houses called 85C
as 85C is close to boiling for water(100C).

Here's an independent coffee shop:

This is a hat store, what kind of hat you wear says something about you. Clever

I thought the sign below was a misspelling but actually it is one of those made up words.  On the web it says they are a skin care products company.

















Here's a nice advertisement from a optician shop. Glasses improves even the looks of Osama.

Hyphenation

Chinese is traditionally written top-to-bottom and then right-to-left. But nowadays you can see almost any combination. Especially with computer material, the trend is like English, left-to-right and then top-to-bottom. One place where the traditional method works well is in storefront signs.

Compared to Chinese characters all with their own same-sized rectangular space, English words must be considered too long. They do not fit well in the long vertical signs in front of each store. So they have to be split to fit, this is usually done without the hyphen("-") because that would just make the word longer. Here are some signs that got into trouble.

When I saw this one I thought of getting a real bad hand at cards. Actually SOBDEALL is a high class clothier here in Asia.

The word "romantic" is a good sales word but this one seems like something that afflicted Julius Ceasar's army.

Maybe this one is for the Tony Soprano's victory tour. See how nicely the Chinese characters fill the available space.

Mixing Chinese and English can leading to some interesting situation. In the sign below, what are we taming? Dogs, a smoking habit, an insolent wife? Actually in the old romanization the first two characters are TA MING, meaning something like "big brightness", the last two characters translate to clinic. So half is untranslated and half is translated. ( "Brilliance" would have been a better translation.)

Here we have the English translation going down the sign.

And in this one, it's going up the sign.

This could make English crossword puzzles more interesting, not just across and
down, but now across, down and up.

Finally we have KILN, there is no family name close to this word. It is a corruption of the word MILK, spelt backwards and with N being pretty close to M. Got to say on your toes.

















My teacher passed out these youtube links about Taiwan, they are pretty good, especially the 4th one.

1.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ir83dKyhl_0&feature=player_embedded

2.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CxR_FgjnxeY&feature=player_embedded

3.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hld2VMaWuwM&feature=player_embedded

4.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLlNCEjt1vg&feature=player_embedded

 

More Good Ideas

From the folder of GoodIdeas" we have some accumulation.

I saw this at one of the relatives's house, I've been looking for one myself but no luck so far. (Salty toothpaste is one of the popular flavors in Taiwan. I think this is the old idea that if it taste bad then it must be good for you.)

This clever device extracts a bowl from a pan of boiling water. In the age before the microwave the typical way to heat a bowl was to place it in a pan of boiling water. The boiling water conducts the heat at a low temperature so what's in the bowl never burns. But then the bowl is hot too, so a tool to remove it from the pan is needed. (Actually a mircowave works on the same principle, the microwaves are at the frequency absorded by water(H20) molecules.)

Again recycling, this drip system is perfect for plants with small water requirements, like orchids.  The water is put in the top bottle and drips into the plant in the lower bottle.

In this picture, what looks like flourescent tube lights is actually a very straight array of white LEDs. A case of old technology being mimiced by the new. The energy of the LEDs is less than that of the old flourescent tubes.

With so many motorcycles, there is a theft problem. So many users add this big
bicycle lock to keep the bike from being rolled away. Big hassle.

Some bikes now have this feature built into the front wheel. We all know that locks don't work if they aren't used.

Finally something from the "Bad Ideas" folder. This elevator on a construction site is a metal cage connected by a cable to an electric motor on the roof. I particularly like the shock absorber at the bottom of the elevator.

Trip to Ilan 2

We spend the night in Jiaosi, Jiaosi is famous for the hot springs that run through it. These are public parks with music, food, night markets, ...

The night market had products that were unique to the East coast of Taiwan, I hadn't seen them in Tainan.

While there in Jiaosi, Taiwan had a 6.8 earthquake and it was the biggest I experienced in Taiwan(so far). The East coast is the interface between the Asian plate and the Philippine plate and earthquakes there are more frequent and severe.

In the morning we walked up the mountains of Wufongci Park. On this Sunday morning there we lots of people getting their exercise on the mountain.

There are three falls, each at a higher level, we didn't make it to the top but got to the second waterfall.

At the higher levels there is so much water they just stick a pipe in the stream and drain it in to a sink and let it flow.

No need for a valve:

We then took the train to Keelung, where we hit the night market. It seemed to be a food only night market. The crowds were so thick you couldn't move at some times. The food was great I felt like I was having my own Anthony Bourdain experience.