Monday, October 20, 2008

Yuan Shan

I have been tragically unable to find a mask for Halloween.  This weighs on my thoughts unexpectedly, since I haven't cared at all about Halloween for quite some time.  Madison's festivities were not the sort I prefer, and I forgot that it can be about having fun in a good, old-fashioned, sans-tear-gas kind of way.  I know there are masks, but they don't seem to be in my area.  Ideally, I would find some basic masquerade eye-mask and add ears and whiskers and wear black, but perhaps this dearth is a blessing in disguise.  It's still routinely 80º here, and a black sweater and black pants would probably turn me into a cat passing out from heat stroke.  I'll content myself with giving my A3 class Halloween related fake tattoos (if they want them).

My editing job is going well.  Last week I spent three hours rewriting a version of Rapunzel that my employer had on file.  The Taiwanese get confused by Western fairy tales.  "I don't understand," said my boss.  "How could she live for so many years if she was tied to a tree?" and "But how can he see again if his eyes have been poked out?"  These are fair points.  In the finished version, she was merely banished to the desert, and his eyes were not so much poked out as occluded by the thorns.  When she cried on him, the thorns were washed away.  

On Sunday, Katy and I went to Yuan Shan (Round Mountain - everyone says it with a bit of a smirk, so I assume "mountain" is sort of a euphemism for "hill with big ideas") and walked around.  About 1/5 of the way up the stairs, we stopped to take pictures and were overtaken by a gentleman who said in clear, heavily accented English, "It is so beautiful," and nodded to us.  I asked him if he came every day, and he said, "Yes, for more than 15 years."  He climbed on, and we continued taking pictures, but when we got to the next little clearing, he was sitting on a bench waiting for us.  He beckoned us over, and offered to lead us around the mountain.  This turned out to be a very good thing.  The paths on the mountain were warrenous.  He took us to the very top and showed us the tiny marker that indicated the peak, then wandered with us for a while.  He told us his name was Huà Yèfǔ, or George.  He worked for the China Times until he retired twenty years ago.  He said we could call him Huà Sir, which is a charming combination of English and Chinese.  Eventually, he took us to a place where he said we could get food ("It's free!") and something to drink.  I assumed he meant some kind of cafe or temple tourist something, but he led us down into yet another little clearing and shouted to the still out of sight occupants, "Chuān yīfu! Chuān yīfu!"  ("Put on clothes! Put on clothes!") I choked a little trying not to laugh.  When we got to the clearing, there were four or five shirtless elderly gentlemen and their wives all gathered laughing and talking and cooking and eating.  They have a little semi-permanent tent set up where they go every Sunday to have a potluck and drink coffee and whiskey and tea.  After lunch (we were, of course, invited, stuffed, and encouraged to "make ourselves at home"), the men all went off to play cards around a rickety old card table, and the women sat down and discussed a number of things I didn't catch, although some of it was about the two waiguoren in their midst.

The mountain (or hill with delusions of grandeur) itself was lovely.  There were enormous butterflies in iridescent black and brown and blue, and flowers, and greenery.  Every turn had a surprising little plaza with a couple playing tennis or a group singing karaoke.  Some of the plazas were deserted, and I liked those best of all (Katy will say to this: "You would").  There were funny little fuzzy snails and dragonflies and birds.  I didn't notice when the traffic sounds faded because the birds were so loud.

Katy and I had to leave, but George gave us his phone number so that when we are next in the area we can call him up and have him take us around a museum thing.  He kept calling it the President's house, but it sounded like it was no longer inhabited.  

We went home, showered, and went to a farewell party for some of her co-workers, after which I headed south to enjoy some tea in what I was told was a traditional tea house.  It was quite peaceful, apart from the rowdy crowd with whom I sat.  

We have had more adventures since, but for the sake of getting this post up, I will relate them in the next.

Tuesday, October 14, 2008

Symbolism

This is the top of a package of instant noodles that I bought for myself back when we didn't have a cook pot.  That symbol you're offended by? That means it's vegetarian.  I look for that symbol when I wander through the night markets, hoping to find a meal that doesn't include beef or pork.  It's an odd symbol to want to find, among the Hanzi characters of Taiwan and the Katakana characters that are sometimes scattered among the Japanese restaurants.  It's strange to look around and say to myself, "No, that means mutton, and that means fish...Ah, there, that means I can eat it!  Only if you flip it around and turn it a bit, it also means Very Bad Things."  The phrase "cognitive dissonance" comes to mind.  So I looked it up.  Turns out it has a pretty long and colorful history, but its existence here is mainly Buddhist

Speaking of history, Friday was Double Ten day here, so there were Taiwanese flags everywhere.  Katy and I went to the National Museum and looked at a lot of different kinds of art.  I bought a book of old Chinese paintings, hoping to learn more about drawing trees that don't look utterly foolish.  It started raining on the way there, and we caught a rainbow out the window of the bus.  While we were there, we met Jim, a docent at the museum who was (are you reading carefully?) a friend of the gentleman who is friends with my uncle who lives in Virginia.  My uncle got me in touch with Mr. Paxton, who suggested I ask for Jim if I was ever at the museum.  Jim, when we met him, asked if he could give our email addresses to a relative of his who was coming to Taiwan and wanted to know more about teaching here.  So now we also are in contact with Ray.  I'm going to need a chart soon.

In other news, I've posted pictures of my M2 class (aren't they cute?) performing for the camera.  I also took a picture of Rita, the librarian at the Sanchong school, and had pictures taken with Elegance, the manager of the Sanchong school.

On Sunday we went with Jenny (Katy's language partner, remember?) to the beach.  I always forget how much I miss large bodies of water until I'm standing on the shore of one.  There was a group of people drumming under a tent, and a woman flinging herself around in some kind of wild dance.  We walked  up and down the beach and teased the waves (we lost - you almost always do) and found strange life-forms in odd colors.

I came back and went to meet Marc, a teacher from School 8, who helped me buy an external hard-drive and pointed me towards a lot of movies (probably more than I can really watch in 3 months).  The hard-drive will come in handy in a month or so, when the new MacBooks finally reach Taiwan.  I am patient, I swear.

Sunday, October 12, 2008

Spoor


For those of you who missed it, I've updated Spoor.

Sunday, October 5, 2008

Animals and Children

Animals and Children

There are certain computer and video games in which you have to travel through an area using the information found in a journal left behind by some eccentric loner with occasionally very poor handwriting.  I got a little notebook to take notes in about my classes - not the official class notebooks in which I write my finished lesson plans, so I don't have to worry about making mistakes.  It was intended to be a book full of rough outlines of my lesson plans.  It's turning into that Eccentric Guide in a Spidery Hand.  It contains obscure phrases that correspond to certain computers which must be turned on in a certain order.  It stores the phone numbers of important people who can help you on your way.  It has mysterious admonitions in different colored ink, and occasional notes about the local language.  There are maps that only make sense if you're standing on a certain street.  And it's all in a little plastic-jacketed notebook graced by two stylized monochrome bears and a yellow bird.  The text on the front says: "a cute little milk&charcoal bear."  The bird says hello.

I started my A10 class since our last update.  It went very smoothly.  They're very advanced English speakers.  We talked about concepts like have to vs. got to vs. should and must.  I also have a job editing textbooks that starts tomorrow.  I don't yet know how that will go, but it's extra income doing nitpicky work that I can enjoy without giving it my soul.  More on that as I know more.

Katy got a little sick about a week and a half ago, but I'm managing to so far stay healthy.  Expect news of my ill health next week, now that I've made that claim.  Schools are breeding grounds for illness, and I have two schools, plus whatever bugs Katy brings back from hers.  Fortunately, fresh orange juice is readily available (and I'm thinking of getting a juicer and making it myself, we'll see) on the way to the MRT station at Minquan, so we're getting plenty of vitamin C.  Also, we have lots of garlic to put in our food.

Our food, which we're cooking ourselves, now.  We bought a wok, a sauce pan, and a rice cooker, and those are really all we need.  The Wellcome supermarket (I did not spell that wrong, there are two Ls in the name) has a pretty decent selection of vegetables to put in our stirfried concoctions.  Right now we've got carrots, pea pods, some kind of sprout that doesn't shrivel and die (or vanish) upon contact with heat, a very hearty cabbage that needs to be cooked for a long time, and some stringy mushrooms.  I'm hoping to find some spinach sometime soon, although I'm not sure what to do with it here.  It's not really a stirfry vegetable.  The supermarket also sells a lot of tofu, broccoli, tomatoes, and various other vegetables that I may have seen once in a dream.  We do most of our cooking at night, throwing rice into the Supa Fine rice cooker and vegetables into the wok and mixing them all up later.  Katy wanted me to point out that she also cooks.  I have proof, for those of you who doubt.  She made a very good dinner with carrots and other vegetables, and nothing was burned.

She and I and her conversation partner, Jenny, went to the Taipei zoo on Sunday last.  She told us it was the largest zoo in Asia.  They had no cephalopods.  I was deeply disappointed.  Nevertheless, it was a beautiful place.  We took the MRT there, and used our MRT cards to pay for admission.  These Easy Cards (a rough English translation of the Chinese casual way of referring to them) are possibly the most convenient things in the world.  We saw the Formosan animals first, which Jenny was kind enough to tolerate, but she was the most excited about the penguins.  I thought the lion and cub were entertaining, but the zoo's very colorful version of Chicago's Cows sort of took the cake.  It was a long trip, and we were tired when we got home, but it was fun.  Jenny seems very charming and friendly.  

Today is "Double Ten Day" ("Shuāng Shí Jié" in Chinese) which is Taiwan's national celebration of the ultimate collapse of the Qing Dynasty.  Everyone gets the day off.  Fireworks, military parades (probably what I saw them practicing for when I walked through the Art Park), etcetera.  Katy and I are going to the National Palace Museum.  We've heard good things.