This week is English Week at Yang Ming, which means that every morning there is a different English language competition, like storytelling, singing, reading aloud, drama, etc. As an English teacher, I have to help judge this thing, so I spent my entire morning today and yesterday judging the singing and drama competitions.
I was so psyched when I heard that I was going to judge the singing. It practically negated the fact that they made me come in on my day off to judge. The competition is from grades 1-6, but the vast majority of competitors in the singing competition were from grades 1 and 2 (older kids are too self-conscious I suppose). SO CUTE. A lot of them sang children's songs, but there were some really quality musical selections, like the girl who sang "I Will Follow Him" in angel wings and a halo, with accompanying dance moves. Partway through the song she switched to "we will follow him," and I realized that she wasn't singing the original, but rather the version from Sister Act, where the "him" is God and the "we" is "me and this chorus of nuns." Even better!
The musical selections also included a strange profusion of songs that referenced the American South. When you are a small Taiwanese child with sort of hazy English pronunciation, it's pretty hard to sell lines about how you were born in Louisiana, or how you come from Alabama with a banjo on your knee, or best of all, about how you wish the country roads would take you back to "West Madimba." (a number of kids picked this song, but nobody came remotely close to being able to say "Virginia" properly)
Fun Fact: As far as I can tell, everybody in Asia knows "Take Me Home, Country Roads." Any KTV (read: karaoke joint) worth its salt has this song available for selection, and I have a vivid memory of singing it with Japanese friends in a Beijing taxi at 3 in the morning.
Other highlights of the singing contest: the 6th grade boy who sang Shakira, the minuscule 2nd grade girl who belted all of our ears off, the 3rd grade girl who sang a medley of songs that she made herself, and the 14-person-strong group of 6th graders who performed "Doe, a Deer" with an elaborate Sound of Music-style dance routine and an instrumental ensemble backing them up. Wowser.
Only 4 groups entered the drama competition, but they were all pretty awesome. By far the most unusual was the group of 6th grade boys who performed Little Red Riding Hood: Little Red was a boy in a hooded red T-shirt and a grass skirt, Grandma was another boy in a shower cap, and the hunter who saved them from the wolf had a drawn-on beard and a machine gun. In a slightly nontraditional ending, the hunter left the wolf with a bomb in his hand and ran away. Shades of Wile E. Coyote!
Besides the extraordinary range of musical and dramatic performances that I witnessed this week at school, I also got to spend Tuesday night with some other Fulbrighters at a performance of Hairspray given by the English department of Tajen University. It's quite ambitious for a group of Taiwanese college students to put on a play in English that is so long and slang-filled, not to mention all of the singing and dancing, so I was pretty impressed by the fact that they managed to pull it off at all. The language was sometimes a little unintelligible, and they sang and danced about as well as you'd expect a bunch of English majors to, but it was a lot of fun. The part that I was most interested in, however, was that an all-Taiwanese cast was putting on a play that is all about racial inequality between whites and blacks, considering the negative attitude towards dark skin in Taiwan. In the end, however, the moral of the story was less "down with discrimination!" and more "yay, we put on a whole play in English!"
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
Sunday, April 19, 2009
Kenting, Take 2
Last weekend, Gered and I went on another trip to Kenting with Gered's host cousin, Ken, Ken's girlfriend, Yufen, and his other friend, Xiaobai. Xiaobai is an important friend because he has a (really sweet) car, so we all drove down there together. Once in Kenting, we got some lunch, which Ken and Xiaobai ordered. Much to the dismay of us Americans, this meant things like a big plate of intestines, or fried fish-egg patties. Mmmm, pass me some more of that delicious rice!
Post-lunch, we went to this place where you can buy coupons to get a discount on the myriad activities available in Kenting, mostly different kinds of water/boaty things. Ken and Xiaobai were running the show, so we just sat around and let them figure it out. I asked Ken what we were going to do that day, expecting that it would involve boats. He told me something that I didn't understand, but Xiaobai helpfully stepped in to explain in English, "we're going to the sexy man show!" Whatttttt. It turns out that apparently one of the big things to do in Kenting is go see performances by transvestites? Hm.
Anyway, it did end up that we were going to do some water sports in addition to the sexy man show, so that afternoon we got all suited up and headed down to the beach. I wasn't sure what was appropriate beachwear for Taiwan, but Yufen told me that she was just going to wear a bikini with shorts and a tank top over it. It turns out that this is pretty much the ladies' beach uniform of Taiwan. Almost every girl at the beach was wearing approximately this outfit (or more, like jeans and a T-shirt), and only a scandalous few were -gasp!- not wearing a tank top over their bathing suits. NOBODY was going without the shorts part of the outfit, however. Why have a cute bikini when nobody is going to see it? Most girls solved this in part by wearing white tank tops so at least you could see the color of their bathing suit, but still. Taiwan is randomly conservative about dress...girls will go out wearing the teeniest little shorts, but if you put your collarbone and shoulders on display? Scandal!
Anyway, my well-clothed self got to do several exciting water activities that day, all involving being pulled by a jetski on some large inflatable boat-thing. (In addition to life jackets, they give you helmets! That is how you know it's going to be fun) We did one that was just like tubing for a lot of people at once, where the boat had sides but not a front or back. Gered and I were on the back, so we were constantly hanging on for dear life and trying desperately not to slip off into the water. Then we did the banana boat, where they bring you out on a giant banana-shaped inflatable thing and then suddenly turn so it flips over. The last one was the roughest - it was another boat, one with a back and not too prone to tipping, but also extremely prone to bounciness, so if you didn't hold on to the handles with all your power, you would bounce right off into the ocean. By the time we were all finished, my arms were so completely drained of strength that they felt like giant wet noodles. Perfect time to play some volleyball against random beach dudes, aka totally get our butts kicked at volleyball!
After a little time to collapse at the hotel, we headed back out on the town, getting food on a stick for dinner and going to the sexy man show. Now, I can appreciate the humor of men dressed in women's clothing as much as the next person, but the sexy man show was just awkward. We felt quite relieved to be sitting in the back row, where we could not be embarrassingly danced on or pulled up as audience volunteers. Also, some mo-rons brought their children along, which was extra awkward. Does your 10-year-old really need to see men dancing around in lingerie? I think not. Anyway, it was a Kenting Experience. Kenting seems to have a lot of Thai influence, so I suppose ladyboys are just one more aspect of that.
In contrast with the activities of Saturday night, I spent Sunday morning going to church! Once I realized that our Kenting trip coincided with Easter weekend, I got the pastor at Kaohsiung's bilingual church to help me find a church to go to in Kenting. Kenting doesn't have any English-speaking churches, so the one I went to was a teeny little all-Chinese church in Hengchun (setting of Cape No. 7, the biggest movie in Taiwan!). I wrote my name and information down on the registration card, and so during the service they called my name by surprise. I guess I must have looked confused, because the pastor started asking this young guy to translate for me, and there was a lot of confusion, and then finally I piped up in Chinese, "I can speak Chinese!" and everyone clapped! It was cute. I understood the service pretty well, so it was good. I have been picking up a lot of Chinese vocab going to Taiwanese churches, like how to say things like "resurrection." The best part was when the pastor made us, in addition to clapping along to the song, raise our fists and go "huh!" after each phrase. Everybody was having a lot of fun.
We spent the rest of the day driving around and stopping to look at pretty places in Kenting, of which there are many. I was pretty wiped out from all of the boat stuff the day before, so I spent almost all of the time sleeping in the car, only to be prodded out when we arrived at some new scenic spot. We also went to see this natural flame, where a vent of natural gas had been lit, providing a constant small fire in the ground. Apparently people go there to make popcorn, but unfortunately we hadn't brought any.
I was pretty glad to go home at the end because I was soooo tired (my arms were not fully functional for several days), but in general I would count this trip to Kenting as a pretty good one, considering that it did not end with extreme sickness and hospitalization. Yay!
Post-lunch, we went to this place where you can buy coupons to get a discount on the myriad activities available in Kenting, mostly different kinds of water/boaty things. Ken and Xiaobai were running the show, so we just sat around and let them figure it out. I asked Ken what we were going to do that day, expecting that it would involve boats. He told me something that I didn't understand, but Xiaobai helpfully stepped in to explain in English, "we're going to the sexy man show!" Whatttttt. It turns out that apparently one of the big things to do in Kenting is go see performances by transvestites? Hm.
Anyway, it did end up that we were going to do some water sports in addition to the sexy man show, so that afternoon we got all suited up and headed down to the beach. I wasn't sure what was appropriate beachwear for Taiwan, but Yufen told me that she was just going to wear a bikini with shorts and a tank top over it. It turns out that this is pretty much the ladies' beach uniform of Taiwan. Almost every girl at the beach was wearing approximately this outfit (or more, like jeans and a T-shirt), and only a scandalous few were -gasp!- not wearing a tank top over their bathing suits. NOBODY was going without the shorts part of the outfit, however. Why have a cute bikini when nobody is going to see it? Most girls solved this in part by wearing white tank tops so at least you could see the color of their bathing suit, but still. Taiwan is randomly conservative about dress...girls will go out wearing the teeniest little shorts, but if you put your collarbone and shoulders on display? Scandal!
Anyway, my well-clothed self got to do several exciting water activities that day, all involving being pulled by a jetski on some large inflatable boat-thing. (In addition to life jackets, they give you helmets! That is how you know it's going to be fun) We did one that was just like tubing for a lot of people at once, where the boat had sides but not a front or back. Gered and I were on the back, so we were constantly hanging on for dear life and trying desperately not to slip off into the water. Then we did the banana boat, where they bring you out on a giant banana-shaped inflatable thing and then suddenly turn so it flips over. The last one was the roughest - it was another boat, one with a back and not too prone to tipping, but also extremely prone to bounciness, so if you didn't hold on to the handles with all your power, you would bounce right off into the ocean. By the time we were all finished, my arms were so completely drained of strength that they felt like giant wet noodles. Perfect time to play some volleyball against random beach dudes, aka totally get our butts kicked at volleyball!
After a little time to collapse at the hotel, we headed back out on the town, getting food on a stick for dinner and going to the sexy man show. Now, I can appreciate the humor of men dressed in women's clothing as much as the next person, but the sexy man show was just awkward. We felt quite relieved to be sitting in the back row, where we could not be embarrassingly danced on or pulled up as audience volunteers. Also, some mo-rons brought their children along, which was extra awkward. Does your 10-year-old really need to see men dancing around in lingerie? I think not. Anyway, it was a Kenting Experience. Kenting seems to have a lot of Thai influence, so I suppose ladyboys are just one more aspect of that.
In contrast with the activities of Saturday night, I spent Sunday morning going to church! Once I realized that our Kenting trip coincided with Easter weekend, I got the pastor at Kaohsiung's bilingual church to help me find a church to go to in Kenting. Kenting doesn't have any English-speaking churches, so the one I went to was a teeny little all-Chinese church in Hengchun (setting of Cape No. 7, the biggest movie in Taiwan!). I wrote my name and information down on the registration card, and so during the service they called my name by surprise. I guess I must have looked confused, because the pastor started asking this young guy to translate for me, and there was a lot of confusion, and then finally I piped up in Chinese, "I can speak Chinese!" and everyone clapped! It was cute. I understood the service pretty well, so it was good. I have been picking up a lot of Chinese vocab going to Taiwanese churches, like how to say things like "resurrection." The best part was when the pastor made us, in addition to clapping along to the song, raise our fists and go "huh!" after each phrase. Everybody was having a lot of fun.
We spent the rest of the day driving around and stopping to look at pretty places in Kenting, of which there are many. I was pretty wiped out from all of the boat stuff the day before, so I spent almost all of the time sleeping in the car, only to be prodded out when we arrived at some new scenic spot. We also went to see this natural flame, where a vent of natural gas had been lit, providing a constant small fire in the ground. Apparently people go there to make popcorn, but unfortunately we hadn't brought any.
I was pretty glad to go home at the end because I was soooo tired (my arms were not fully functional for several days), but in general I would count this trip to Kenting as a pretty good one, considering that it did not end with extreme sickness and hospitalization. Yay!
Saturday, April 4, 2009
Alishan!
Alishan (shan means mountain in Chinese) is one of the most well-known tourist destinations in Taiwan. According to Patty, going to Alishan is a must-do for foreign tourists. Since I have a year in Taiwan, I felt I would be remiss if I did not get to Alishan at some point. That point was last weekend, which also happened to be during Alishan's high season, when its famous cherry trees are blooming.
I woke up at an unnaturally early hour on Friday, but still managed to be late enough that we just barely caught the 7 am train out of Kaohsiung to Chiayi. Since we were going during the busy season, all of the hotel rooms in Alishan proper were booked up, so our destination was a small town called Rueili, still in the Alishan National Scenic Area, but not so close to Alishan itself. I had intended to take a bus to Rueili, but the lady at the Chiayi bus station informed me that I could not do this because the road to Rueili was under construction and the bus couldn't go through. Super. I called our hotel and tried to convince them to pick us up at the next nearest bus station, but that turned out to be too far away. The hotel advised us to take the Alishan Forest Railway, but the tickets were sold out, and standing room on a little train for two hours didn't sound that great. Resourceful adventurers that we are, we opted for a third option: hire a van.
Now, my van-hiring experiences in mainland China were fairly lackluster, but at least if we had a van we could sit down, right? It turned out that the van we hired was actually the nicest van-for-hire that I have ever experienced in Asia, not that that's saying much, mainly that the seats were not falling off and I could still feel all of my appendages at the end of the ride. So off we went in our van, up and up and up on the road to Rueili. Chiayi and Alishan are at tremendously different altitudes, so the roads are all of the steep, winding mountain road variety. As if this weren't exciting enough, we had the added excitement of taking all kinds of extra random shortcuts (presumably to avoid the construction, but maybe just for fun). On the bright side, we got there about an hour faster than if we had taken the train. Neato!
When we arrived at the hotel in Rueili, I approached the desk, assuming that I should do the talking since I had made the reservation. Instead, the staff focused their attention on Vicky, the only Asian-American in our posse. Helloooo, racial profiling! Later I talked to the guy and told him that I was the one who he talked to on the phone, and he was like, no way! I am fairly sure that they thought Vicky was me. Ooch.
Our rooms were Japanese style, aka no beds, but we did have a little balcony where we chilled and ate lunch. After lunch, we wanted to go hiking, so the hotel boss-man offered to drive us to a place where we could hike. I thought this was a little bit funny (couldn't we just walk there, since that's the goal?), but it turned out to be a good call, since the roads were all extra-mountainous. Even without the walk there, the hike that we went on was extremely rigorous, with all kinds of steps going down the mountain and back up again. The trail was purported to have a bat cave and a waterfall, but the bat cave was really just a little overhang, and the waterfall was just a trickle. We were feeling kind of pooped, but Gered was convinced that there was a real waterfall somewhere up the trail, so he ventured on up quite a ways until he found it, then came back down, and then we all climbed up together until we were feeling REALLY pooped. But we saw some good waterfalls!
Craziest part of the hike: I went off the trail a little bit and climbed a stalk of bamboo, and out of nowhere there was an explosion! At first I thought I was getting shot at, but later we hypothesized that maybe someone had booby-trapped their bamboo. (there was some sort of no trespassing sign that I didn't notice until afterwards) WEIRD.
When we finally made it home, we enjoyed some dinner, followed by a hotel-run firefly tour, in which a large horde of people with flashlights trooped off to look for fireflies. After fireflies, there was tea, sweet potatoes, and a 9:30 bedtime. Tired day!!
One of the things that you just *have* to do in Alishan is get up early and see the sunrise from Jhushan. However, there were no hotels available anywhere near there, so we settled for getting up early to see the sunrise from wherever we could see it near our hotel. Unsurprisingly, the best place to see the sunrise is up the mountain, so it was a very uphill walk, taking us through some rather lovely tea plantations. We got confused and failed to find the spot where you are supposed to go to see the sunrise, but it was nice anyway.
Tea is grown on mountain slopes, so the best way to cultivate it is in little rows following the contour of the land:
This tea has people growing in it!
We got back to the hotel for a Chinese-style breakfast, of which we ate everything except the plate of pickled radishes, which we tried a little bit and found to be weird and not particularly breakfasty. Consequently, the owner of the hotel stopped by our table to tell us all about the pickled radishes and why it was a specialty of the region, made with local vinegar, yada yada yada, and we should not scorn them merely because they are "not like [our] hamburgers." Because of course in America, we traditionally eat hamburgers for breakfast, and we are unwilling to eat anything less American than that!
Hired another van to get to Alishan, which conveniently passed through Fencihu on the way, where our hotel was. We wanted to drop off some luggage, but unfortunately, Gered hadn't brought his travel guide with the hotel name in it, and I didn't actually remember which hotel it was. After a confused phone call to a likely-looking number in Gered's phone, it turned out that we were basically right outside the hotel. Cool.
Since it was cherry blossom season, Alishan was unsurprisingly jam-packed with tourists, although surprisingly lacking in actual cherry blossoms. Huh. There were a lot of very old and very tall trees, and overpriced, non-delicious lunch. Fortunately Alishan has both Starbucks AND 7-11, so we were able to get ice cream, yay! Bought some of Alishan's specialty items, including tea and peanuts covered with Alishan wasabi. Any wasabi peas you find in America are shamefully wimpy in comparison...these guys might make you cry a little bit, but they will clear your sinuses right up! I brought a bag back and have yet to find anyone except me who will eat them. Alishan also featured a posse of unhappy-looking aboriginal people doing traditional dances in traditional clothing (which for the men is rather scanty) in the chilly weather. Also apparently they could not round enough enough women to be in the dance group, because there was one dancer in female costume who was DEFINITELY a dude (and a truly unfortunate-looking lady), but at least appeared to be pretty happy about the dancing.
Alishan has a number of specialties: cherry blossoms, wasabi, tea, the Fencihu lunchbox, the sunrise on the mountain, the mist (yes, mist is a specialty in Taiwan), but most of all the Alishan Forest Railway. I caught my first glimpse of the Alishan Forest Railway in the video they showed on the plane as we made our descent into Taiwan, and the Taipei airport even had a small model Alishan Forest Railway that you could take a picture with. I decided right away that riding the Alishan Forest Railway was a must-do for my stay in Taiwan.
And here comes the train! Through the mist! Next to the blossoming trees! Three kinds of specialty in one picture!
I was sooo sleepy on the train (remember waking up at 5:30?), but Gered poked me and reminded me that I ought to stay awake after having looked forward to this for so long, so I held my eyelids open for the switchbacks down the mountain. It was pretty neat.
Fencihu was a chill little town...we got some dinner and ice cream spring rolls made by a cute little girl and went to ask around about buses back to Chiayi the next day. In the process, I accidentally made friends with a table of random dudes, who invite us to share some kaoliang (local Taiwanese liquor) with them. Dan and Vicky and I have little paper cups of kaoliang with these guys, and it turns out they are from Kaohsiung too! They are pretty funny, but they are chewing betel nut, which is gross, and one of them annoyingly refuses to believe that Vicky is really an American.
Back at the hotel, it turns out that we only have hand towels. Makes showering fun! Oh well, at least we can entertain ourselves with the giant karaoke screen!
On Sunday, we got a little breakfast and left early in the morning without ever having tried the famous Fencihu lunchbox (it has rice and vegetables and an egg and a chicken leg...I am not sure why it is so special). OH NO. We make mental notes not to ever tell any Taiwanese people that we went to Alishan without eating the Fencihu lunchbox, and happily groove back to Kaohsiung to go to Bagel Bagel instead.
I woke up at an unnaturally early hour on Friday, but still managed to be late enough that we just barely caught the 7 am train out of Kaohsiung to Chiayi. Since we were going during the busy season, all of the hotel rooms in Alishan proper were booked up, so our destination was a small town called Rueili, still in the Alishan National Scenic Area, but not so close to Alishan itself. I had intended to take a bus to Rueili, but the lady at the Chiayi bus station informed me that I could not do this because the road to Rueili was under construction and the bus couldn't go through. Super. I called our hotel and tried to convince them to pick us up at the next nearest bus station, but that turned out to be too far away. The hotel advised us to take the Alishan Forest Railway, but the tickets were sold out, and standing room on a little train for two hours didn't sound that great. Resourceful adventurers that we are, we opted for a third option: hire a van.
Now, my van-hiring experiences in mainland China were fairly lackluster, but at least if we had a van we could sit down, right? It turned out that the van we hired was actually the nicest van-for-hire that I have ever experienced in Asia, not that that's saying much, mainly that the seats were not falling off and I could still feel all of my appendages at the end of the ride. So off we went in our van, up and up and up on the road to Rueili. Chiayi and Alishan are at tremendously different altitudes, so the roads are all of the steep, winding mountain road variety. As if this weren't exciting enough, we had the added excitement of taking all kinds of extra random shortcuts (presumably to avoid the construction, but maybe just for fun). On the bright side, we got there about an hour faster than if we had taken the train. Neato!
When we arrived at the hotel in Rueili, I approached the desk, assuming that I should do the talking since I had made the reservation. Instead, the staff focused their attention on Vicky, the only Asian-American in our posse. Helloooo, racial profiling! Later I talked to the guy and told him that I was the one who he talked to on the phone, and he was like, no way! I am fairly sure that they thought Vicky was me. Ooch.
Our rooms were Japanese style, aka no beds, but we did have a little balcony where we chilled and ate lunch. After lunch, we wanted to go hiking, so the hotel boss-man offered to drive us to a place where we could hike. I thought this was a little bit funny (couldn't we just walk there, since that's the goal?), but it turned out to be a good call, since the roads were all extra-mountainous. Even without the walk there, the hike that we went on was extremely rigorous, with all kinds of steps going down the mountain and back up again. The trail was purported to have a bat cave and a waterfall, but the bat cave was really just a little overhang, and the waterfall was just a trickle. We were feeling kind of pooped, but Gered was convinced that there was a real waterfall somewhere up the trail, so he ventured on up quite a ways until he found it, then came back down, and then we all climbed up together until we were feeling REALLY pooped. But we saw some good waterfalls!
Craziest part of the hike: I went off the trail a little bit and climbed a stalk of bamboo, and out of nowhere there was an explosion! At first I thought I was getting shot at, but later we hypothesized that maybe someone had booby-trapped their bamboo. (there was some sort of no trespassing sign that I didn't notice until afterwards) WEIRD.
When we finally made it home, we enjoyed some dinner, followed by a hotel-run firefly tour, in which a large horde of people with flashlights trooped off to look for fireflies. After fireflies, there was tea, sweet potatoes, and a 9:30 bedtime. Tired day!!
One of the things that you just *have* to do in Alishan is get up early and see the sunrise from Jhushan. However, there were no hotels available anywhere near there, so we settled for getting up early to see the sunrise from wherever we could see it near our hotel. Unsurprisingly, the best place to see the sunrise is up the mountain, so it was a very uphill walk, taking us through some rather lovely tea plantations. We got confused and failed to find the spot where you are supposed to go to see the sunrise, but it was nice anyway.
Tea is grown on mountain slopes, so the best way to cultivate it is in little rows following the contour of the land:
This tea has people growing in it!
We got back to the hotel for a Chinese-style breakfast, of which we ate everything except the plate of pickled radishes, which we tried a little bit and found to be weird and not particularly breakfasty. Consequently, the owner of the hotel stopped by our table to tell us all about the pickled radishes and why it was a specialty of the region, made with local vinegar, yada yada yada, and we should not scorn them merely because they are "not like [our] hamburgers." Because of course in America, we traditionally eat hamburgers for breakfast, and we are unwilling to eat anything less American than that!
Hired another van to get to Alishan, which conveniently passed through Fencihu on the way, where our hotel was. We wanted to drop off some luggage, but unfortunately, Gered hadn't brought his travel guide with the hotel name in it, and I didn't actually remember which hotel it was. After a confused phone call to a likely-looking number in Gered's phone, it turned out that we were basically right outside the hotel. Cool.
Since it was cherry blossom season, Alishan was unsurprisingly jam-packed with tourists, although surprisingly lacking in actual cherry blossoms. Huh. There were a lot of very old and very tall trees, and overpriced, non-delicious lunch. Fortunately Alishan has both Starbucks AND 7-11, so we were able to get ice cream, yay! Bought some of Alishan's specialty items, including tea and peanuts covered with Alishan wasabi. Any wasabi peas you find in America are shamefully wimpy in comparison...these guys might make you cry a little bit, but they will clear your sinuses right up! I brought a bag back and have yet to find anyone except me who will eat them. Alishan also featured a posse of unhappy-looking aboriginal people doing traditional dances in traditional clothing (which for the men is rather scanty) in the chilly weather. Also apparently they could not round enough enough women to be in the dance group, because there was one dancer in female costume who was DEFINITELY a dude (and a truly unfortunate-looking lady), but at least appeared to be pretty happy about the dancing.
Alishan has a number of specialties: cherry blossoms, wasabi, tea, the Fencihu lunchbox, the sunrise on the mountain, the mist (yes, mist is a specialty in Taiwan), but most of all the Alishan Forest Railway. I caught my first glimpse of the Alishan Forest Railway in the video they showed on the plane as we made our descent into Taiwan, and the Taipei airport even had a small model Alishan Forest Railway that you could take a picture with. I decided right away that riding the Alishan Forest Railway was a must-do for my stay in Taiwan.
And here comes the train! Through the mist! Next to the blossoming trees! Three kinds of specialty in one picture!
I was sooo sleepy on the train (remember waking up at 5:30?), but Gered poked me and reminded me that I ought to stay awake after having looked forward to this for so long, so I held my eyelids open for the switchbacks down the mountain. It was pretty neat.
Fencihu was a chill little town...we got some dinner and ice cream spring rolls made by a cute little girl and went to ask around about buses back to Chiayi the next day. In the process, I accidentally made friends with a table of random dudes, who invite us to share some kaoliang (local Taiwanese liquor) with them. Dan and Vicky and I have little paper cups of kaoliang with these guys, and it turns out they are from Kaohsiung too! They are pretty funny, but they are chewing betel nut, which is gross, and one of them annoyingly refuses to believe that Vicky is really an American.
Back at the hotel, it turns out that we only have hand towels. Makes showering fun! Oh well, at least we can entertain ourselves with the giant karaoke screen!
On Sunday, we got a little breakfast and left early in the morning without ever having tried the famous Fencihu lunchbox (it has rice and vegetables and an egg and a chicken leg...I am not sure why it is so special). OH NO. We make mental notes not to ever tell any Taiwanese people that we went to Alishan without eating the Fencihu lunchbox, and happily groove back to Kaohsiung to go to Bagel Bagel instead.
Friday, April 3, 2009
Gettin' Cultured
Kaohsiung has a bit of a reputation in Taiwan for being an uncultured backwater, so the city government is always trying to promote cultural activities in the hopes that perhaps more people will come to see Kaohsiung as a sweet and happenin' place to live as opposed to a dirty industrial hicktown. This is a slow process; even Patty, a Kaohsiung native, has told me that Kaohsiung "has no culture." Part of the attempt to fill this perceived culture void is the Kaohsiung Cultural Center, which is essentially a big park with a performance hall in the center, and which is conveniently located directly outside of my apartment.
Yesterday, the Cultural Center was a bustling hub of activity as people set up for a big ballet performance. The performance was inside, but outside the hall there were gajillions of chairs set up in rows, along with large screens upon which the performance was broadcast. In this way, even random passerby could have the chance to witness an impressive ballet performance, totally free. I love living next to the Cultural Center! But it's not just a home for the fine arts; the Kaohsiung Cultural Center plays host to a wide variety of activities on a daily basis.
Good Things to Do in the Cultural Center, as based on my observations:
-ride a bike
-rollerskate
-practice martial arts, whether individually or in a group
-dance in unison with a posse of Taiwanese ladies (morning only)
-go to the Saturday night art market (more of a craft fair, really)
-get a massage from the blind masseuses
-breakdance
-walk your small, probably clothed dog/cat/rabbit (note: cat on a leash = unhappy cat)
-yell in unison (and in a tuneful interval!) with another person for as long as you can...this is probably good for your qi or something, cuz some guys were doing it yesterday
-practice your trick bartending skillz, like juggling bottles
and of course, you can always:
-stand around slapping yourself
Seriously, a common activity here. Purportedly gets your qi flowing and burns those calories! Now who would dare say that we don't have any culture?
Yesterday, the Cultural Center was a bustling hub of activity as people set up for a big ballet performance. The performance was inside, but outside the hall there were gajillions of chairs set up in rows, along with large screens upon which the performance was broadcast. In this way, even random passerby could have the chance to witness an impressive ballet performance, totally free. I love living next to the Cultural Center! But it's not just a home for the fine arts; the Kaohsiung Cultural Center plays host to a wide variety of activities on a daily basis.
Good Things to Do in the Cultural Center, as based on my observations:
-ride a bike
-rollerskate
-practice martial arts, whether individually or in a group
-dance in unison with a posse of Taiwanese ladies (morning only)
-go to the Saturday night art market (more of a craft fair, really)
-get a massage from the blind masseuses
-breakdance
-walk your small, probably clothed dog/cat/rabbit (note: cat on a leash = unhappy cat)
-yell in unison (and in a tuneful interval!) with another person for as long as you can...this is probably good for your qi or something, cuz some guys were doing it yesterday
-practice your trick bartending skillz, like juggling bottles
and of course, you can always:
-stand around slapping yourself
Seriously, a common activity here. Purportedly gets your qi flowing and burns those calories! Now who would dare say that we don't have any culture?
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