SYMMETRY

I'm down to my last few days in Taiwan and it is ending much as it began. The rains have been back this week in full force and there was even a mini 台风 (taifeng - which is actually the source of the English word 'typhoon') last night. Today was my last day of classes and I had my oral and written exams this week, mirroring the entrance exams I took when I arrived. It has been good for me to be under a little pressure as it has helped me study harder and concentrate better, but it has been a very busy couple of weeks and I haven't had the time to post pictures of recent doings and seeings. Almost two weeks ago, my friend Carrie took me to 三峽 (Sanxia) in Taipei County, where we crossed a bridge bordered by these charming stone dragons.

I like how they are guarding baby dragons on one side and soccer balls on the other. That's pretty much all that matters, right?

Our first stop in Sanxia was to the lovely Li Mei-Shu Memorial Gallery where we admired the realist works of one of modern Taiwan's most famous painters and got a tour of the place by his very sentimental and quite genial son. Next up was Sanxia Zushi temple.

There was some sort of festival/dance/performance going on, but inside, it was calm and cool, if a bit dark.

All of the stone pillars were carved with different scenes or designs. Here, you see the classic lecherous and corpulent old bureaucrat scenario. So cross-cultural.

Most of them were comparatively more aesthetically pleasing.

But the performance was the real highlight. There were a half dozen or so of these dancers, elaborately dressed, and absolutely fierce. They all wore face paint and boars teeth and snarled as they posed (you can see this best on the one at left). As they performed, confetti and spirit money fluttered to the ground (some is mid-air at right).

The performers, who Carrie told me often drifted into this line of work after teenage delinquency, even had a team of stage managers to keep everything in place.

But perhaps I should just let you watch. A large urn of incense obscures much of the performance in this first video and it's a little shaky, but I kept it for the cool spinning leap in the beginning.


Sanshih Temple 1 from Le Kougre and Vimeo.

I took the second video from a better angle, but it got cut off because the performers were getting dangerously close to us and we had to back off. It was a little frightening, I must admit, but in an entirely compelling way. I liked being close to the action.



Sanshih Temple 2 from Le Kougre and Vimeo.

Rains cut the show short and there was a rush to get everything under cover. Carrie and I meandered over to Sanxia Old Street and did some window shopping. I ate some matcha ice cream on a Taiwanese-style croissant cone. Yum.

The next day, I met up with Fiona and E-train in Danshui. I already posted the delightful picture of the no-graffiti sign on Yanming mountain, but I just got these pictures of Fiona and I enjoying some local cuisine, and hanging out at the Lovers Bridge on the harbor.

I'm going to miss my 台湾的朋友门!

ENGRISH (especially for Jessica)

I wasn't going to eat this, but then... there was nothing else to do....

Back in B'ton Jessie and I spent many a happy hour looking at the weird translations at engrish.com and in that spirit I have been doing some collecting over the last few months. Of course the best engrish is always fleeting (one favorite was the woman wearing a "girly chud" t-shirt) and for every time I am camera-ready there are a dozen more times when I am without (as with a shirt announcing "The Socks and Cocks Show"), but I hope this will give you a taste of all the absurdity that assaults the native English-speaker here.

No? but it looks so hungry! [from the bathroom at my school]

I'm not afraid of growing old, but this does make me a little apprehensive (the small print on the borders reads "It is your life of darkness") [from a bar near Taidian MRT]

What a disappointment! This article totally wasn't what I thought it would be [from Cosmopolitan Taiwan]

If you say so, but it sounds kind of painful [from Ximending]

I was going to argue, but then I realized the logic was impeccable (the small print reads "Hunger is the best sauce")

I like these so much better than those Emo Sour Cream and Onion ones [from Carrefour]

I realize there is some sort of urban-outfitters-type-irony going on here, but still...

This isn't really Engrish, but I find it quite amusing that the books in the foreground are Complete Dental Prosthodontics and Interior Plantscaping - just a little light reading for a Nescafe Afternoon [from Yuanshan station]

That sounds like me all right, and it looks like my Adventures in Engrish are only beginning... [from my new school in mainland China]

熊貓 (bear-cat) of the month

I always did think Gene was the cuddliest of the bunch
(thanks for the picture pops!)

FALL 2007 WEST COAST DOMINATION TOUR

SEE!!!
The Kougar, in x-treme high definition!
HEAR!!!
All the stories that were too hot to blog!
EXPERIENCE!!!
Fear! Elation! And the absence of sobriety!

Seattle: August 13th-20th
Los Angeles: August 21st-24th
San Francisco: August 24th - 31st

And then on to
BEIJING: September 1st - June-ish 2008

I don't have a U.S. mobile phone anymore, so it will be a little difficult to get in touch with everyone, but I can be contacted through e-mail or through my gracious hosts. Please let me know soon if you want to make plans so we can coordinate early. Everyone will be invited to whatever sort of farewell soirée I have in Seattle on the 18th or 19th (I still don't think it fair that I get to have the party and travel to exotic destinations, but you shan't hear me complaining).

Doesn't this look sad?


I agree. DON'T LET THIS HAPPEN. I HAVE FAITH IN YOU.
Now open up your day planners and your hearts and see if you can't find a little room for a lonely predator. I think you can.

HAVE I REALLY BEEN IN JAPAN ALL THIS TIME?

It certainly felt that way when I ran across this comics convention on my campus this weekend. It seems manga is popular in Taiwan too, and that lots of kids are very into dressing up as their favorite characters. They didn't even seem to notice that it was a humid 93 degrees outside (although honestly, I've kind of stopped noticing too), because they were just too busy being absolutely adorable.

Although I preferred to get candid shots, everyone was posing and patiently having their pictures taken by the swarms of kids and handful of grown-ups armed with cameras and camera phones. I can't imagine what it was like inside the convention.

I don't know that these pictures adequately illustrate the amount of variety, but the costumes were all over the place. Historical, futuristic, sexy, sad, human, elven, triangle-headed, film-inspired, and just really, really cute. That settles it. I must be in Japan.

THINGS YOU MIGHT NOT KNOW ABOUT ASIA

1. People often wear masks

Actual masks, like the ones doctors wear, not the mask of sociability that hides the true self or whatever (although without Oprah here something tells me that there is quite a bit less fretting over self-realization). You can buy them in all kinds of colors and patterns at many shops and stalls.


When someone has a cold or anything else possibly contagious, they wear a mask out to work, to school, to market... People also wear them while riding scooters, and lady drivers also wear detachable sleeves over their arms to protect them from the sun and from exhaust. I'm skeptical as to whether this prevents transmission of anything or just makes people feel a little more comfortable living in close quarters. I'm no more comfortable though, as it is difficult enough to understand people when their voices are not muffled by a thick layer of cotton. And I know I shouldn't say this so lightly, but doesn't a face mask emblazoned with Hello Kitty (or, dear god, Spongeboat Squarepants, or just this) reek of cheerful fascism?

2. Racist toothpaste is widely available


The characters 黑人 (above the caricature) mean 'black person' and the name 'Darlie' was changed from the original 'Darkie'. How this company has survived I cannot imagine, but it is probably the best selling toothpaste in most of Asia.

3. There is fruit of inconceivable deliciousness


Mangoes, melons, pineapples, lychees, peaches, dragonfruits, tomatoes (and also the not so tasty bitter melon) and that's just in this cart. I eat a small mango almost every morning with my breakfast and it is never anything but sweet, ripe perfection. They have some seriously premium fruit too. A gift box of 6 gigantic, flawless apples goes for $30 (U.S.) in my local grocery store.

Am I playing pop anthropology tour guide to evade discussing my humdrum existence? Quite possibly, but I have been up to a few things in the last weeks: museums and restaurants and hanging out with ex-cons. It is more my frustration at not making the progress I would like to make in Chinese that has kept me from doing much epic blogging.

Of course the sure cure for low spirits is stuffing your face, so the night before last Carrie and I went to a vegetarian buffet of remarkable tastiness and refused to leave until empty plates were stacked in towers around us.


Carrie with our first course (after the salad), including: taro cake, red bean bun, green onion crepe, dumpling, green beans, exotic mushrooms, and fried sweet potato.


Me with the first course. I photoshopped out the anticipatory drool.


My second plate full, which included lotus root, black beans, okra with chili sauce, edamame in sesame oil, bamboo shoots, and tofu skin rolls.


Our shared dessert: pineapple, matcha green tea ice cream, red bean pastry, green tea and coffee flavored jellies, watermelon juice and some kind of spirulina drink, and some other things I don't know how to describe.

There was more eating and socializing last night when I went to the seaside town of 淡水 (Danshui) with Fiona and E-Train to walk along the boardwalk smelling the fresh ocean air and sampling local edibles. Here is Fiona with a cup of caramelized red and white taro and sweet potato. It wasn't quite what I was expecting, but I still liked it.


We all taxed our respective language skills in talking for hours about cultural differences in parenting, about history, about animal costumes, and about filial piety. I like being out of the university setting and having fairly basic, yet very profound conversations about the kinds of topics that so interest me. I enjoy theory, but I also think that if you strip socio-cultural anthropology of most of its big words it becomes very accessible and even intuitive for just about anyone with a brain. As scintillating as was the conversation, yesterday evening's language highlight must have been Fiona using her electronic dictionary to find, and then pronounce aloud, the word 'constipation'.

After hanging out in the harbor for a good long while, we drove to the top of 阳明山(Yangmingshan), the highest mountain in Taipei County. There was a wonderful cool breeze and the city looked vast yet tiny below us. This sign was posted on the viewing platform:


I searched in vain for white ducks and calligraphy brushes, but in the end had no choice but to respect this particular prohibition.

THIS WEEKEND I WENT TO ... THE BATHROOM?

Actually, I went to the jade market, but wouldn't you know it, 浴室 and 玉市 sound exactly alike, even down to the tones. I have wondered before and shall continue to do so as long as I continue to struggle with this cruel and seemingly senseless language: when you have a word with such a strong connotation as bathroom, why would you allow any other word to come even close to it in sound? As a student, I feel darned uncomfortable announcing to the teacher that I bought some trinkets at the bathroom/jade market. Granted, context usually works to sort things out, but still. I mean in English I might say 'ass' and mean 'donkey' but I'm still thinking about the other kind, and I'm pretty sure the hearer is doing the same.

Do we have any word in English that sounds remotely like bathroom or toilet? Things like that are passed like precious gems across generations of 2nd graders and are the bread and butter of lazy comedians, but I don't know whether or not it is the same in Chinese. This language is chock-full of homonyms, but are they as easily made into punchlines? Do children giggle when their parents tell them they are going to the 'jade market'? If I happen to have a friend who has a habit of post-beer-drinking-sleep-peeing could I say that once he "went to the jade market all over the dishwasher"? I'm just asking. Hypothetically of course.

p.s. There was an earthquake here last night, but just a wee one. Apparently they are quite common, as are stormy/smoggy sunsets like tonight's...