Rainbow on a Rainy Day in Taipei

That’s the Grand Hotel and the Taipei Story House in the background, with the Taipei Fine Arts Museum invisible on the side.  Catching this image made me quite happy on that particular rainy day.  That, the exhibits at TFAM, and the pleasant company of my cousinlet were all really lovely.  I really enjoyed the watercolors by Ma Pai Sui (this link’s examples aren’t quite as cool as the work I saw in the museum) and Yang Cheng-Yuan there .  There were also some funky-fun exhibits in the basement– one freaky dark sound installation that had speakers lining a dark room, each playing something different–a classical choral piece, radio static, interviews in Spanish or Portuguese, soundscapes, etc.  There was also a large exhibit that had lots of fun things in it which allowed the viewers to be a bit more interactive– scrawling messages, signatures, pictures and cartoons into a huge blank book, taking a post-it that says “the sky is not big enough for two suns” and other things that were more clearly don’t touch…

I was disappointed that they aren’t publishing a book based on their exhibit of modern ink painting last spring.  It had some incredible work in it.

Anyway, I approve of cheery umbrellas on rainy days.

Around Tai Da

National Taiwan University, or Tai Da, is regarded as the best university in Taiwan.  It’s kind of a mellow place to hang out when one isn’t sweating over taking the GRE test with a bunch of stressed out Taiwanese students poring over their English cram school booklets.  According to my father, it was a bastion of studying students who had no time for fun in his day (though he shoots some incredibly mean pool, so I suspect he learned SOMETHING outside of the library!).

Note the yellow-green spike on the palm tree?  It’s turning over a new leaf.

The main avenue of palms that proudly lead up to the library.

Note: Not a squirrel.  This photo credit may actually go to my colleague B.  I handed over the camera at some point and he crept up to this twitchy lizard.

White flowers in Taiwan always seem to be sweetly fragrant.

Trees!

There were all these tadpoles bobbling through the pool along with a couple of floating pomelos that looked as if they were some kind of offering that had yet to be received.

The resting remains of one of the first presidents of Tai Da.  It’s interesting that it has Western classical architecture.

Double-decker bike parking!

It’s not all fun and games!

Protecting the “squirrels”

I remember these broken glass-topped walls used to be everywhere in Taiwan.  When I visited Tai Da, my co-worker told me that the girls’ dorm is nearby.  Apparently he used to spend a lot of time in this area admiring the (and here he paused) squirrels.

When I was planning on coming to Taiwan, my father tried dissuading me by painting the country as lawless and dangerous.  Times certainly have changed.  I haven’t seen too many walls with broken glass on top anymore.

Taiwanese Manners

Since Yanni needed some advice on meeting a Taiwanese mother-in-law, I figured I’d list things that got me into trouble with more traditional family members.

1.  Do not leave chopsticks sticking up in your bowl.  It’s the way food is presented to dead ancestors, so a definite no-no at the dinner table.  (I got into trouble with my grandma over this…  This, and thinking that it would be cool to make the faces she did without her dentures in when she happened to be upset with me because I was a smart-alecky kid who didn’t have proper manners…)

2.  Hold the rice bowl with your thumb at the side and your fingers beneath the bottom.

3.  Do not wear red to a funeral or at all when a relative dies.  Dark colors or muted light colors are fine.  (I was prepared for the funeral, just not the everyday no-red rule.  This resulted in an emergency visit to a boutique for a plain white shirt.)

Other things I’ve heard/observed include:

4.  Give and receive gifts with both hands to show respect.

5.  Gifts are generally opened by the receiver later when the giver isn’t present.

6.  Don’t write names in red pen (this one I first ran into in Korea and then in Taiwan–  apparently it’s either how names of the condemned are written or names of the dead are written, I’m not sure which.)

7.  Apparently giving a gift of a tie to a guy is a very personal thing and would mean you want to “tie” them to you… (the female equivalent is presently escaping me)

8.  Don’t give a gift of a knife– it can “cut” the relationship… Or you can take a coin as a token payment.

Of course, this is hardly exhaustive and I do encourage visitors to add in comments for the gaps I’m sure I’ve missed.

Sometimes in Taiwan, I feel like people seem to expect me to know what I’m supposed to do automatically because I look Taiwanese or my parents grew up here.  However, growing up, considering the only Taiwanese people I knew were related to me and we only saw them on long weekends, there were significant gaps in my education.  Since I have the social grace of an elephant with its foot stuck in its mouth pretty much anywhere, yeah, I wouldn’t rely on me to be a proper Miss Taiwanese Manners.  Most awkward situations are bettered by a sheepish grin.

Good luck Yanni!!!

Arranging things…

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ETA: AAAGH! WordPress ate my post! Waaah!….

Um. I’ll have to do something about that. Naughty wordpress (or it could just be me leaving things to sit on my computer too long.) sniffle. Off to read “One Art” again I suppose.

ETA some more: It’s gone as certainly as a significant moment, and I’m stuck in the opposite of l’esprit d’escalier. Drat. It was a pretty post, if I do say so myself.

Who needs a limo?

Taken at Tai Da.

Shucking Oysters

When we wandered around Anping, we ran into the overpowering salty mineral scent of the sea. A quick look showed us that it was coming from these ladies who were shucking oysters, which I can’t think of without the rather well-quoted Ernest Hemingway from A Moveable Feast…

I closed up the story in my notebook and put it in my inside pocket and I asked the waiter for a dozen portugaises and a half-carafe of the dry white wine they had there. After writing a story I was always empty and both sad and happy, as though I had made love, and I was sure this was a very good story although I would not know truly how good until I read it over the next day.

As I ate the oysters with their strong taste of the sea and their faint metallic taste that the cold white wine washed away, leaving only the sea taste and the succulent texture, and as I drank their cold liquid from each shell and washed it down with the crisp taste of the wine, I lost the empty feeling and began to be happy and to make plans.

–as quoted by Tom Anderson at This Sphere

I certainly wish I felt happy after writing a story and that anything I wrote was truly good. Maybe I should just eat oysters?

I had no idea oysters would be in huge barnacled clumps.

It certainly looks like work to slip the knife through the gap between the edges of the shell, but not end up cutting the oyster within. They were experts though, smoothly severing the two halves and slipping the flesh out.

Rinsing the oysters.

Also, is it just me, or is there a painting of oyster shuckers by someone famous like Picasso?

By Anping

Puppets and lions for sale…

Pigeons. Racing pigeons by setting them free far from home and seeing whose pigeon returns to the coop fastest is a fond pastime in the countryside.

Chickens…

Pottery– there was a make-your-own pottery shop which I found tempting.

Pottery wheels!

A dragon on the Matzu temple, outside of which were many stalls selling things.

a quick shot of the temple interior, which was heavy with incense.

Neither of the horticulture students I was with could identify this flower, which makes me think of Lorca’s handkerchiefs… For some reason I also find myself thinking of all those old movies where ladies wave their handkerchiefs to trains of men moving on to wars. It’s just such a neat shape.

Serendipity

The other morning I was taking my dry shirts in from the overhang porch where our clothes dry on hanging bamboo and PVC poles. Tired and slightly hurried, I grabbed the hangers and wafted them into the dim apartment. As I turned from the corridor, I noticed something interesting on my shirt. A closer look in the light revealed a perfectly still moth. Being diseased with shutterbug, I had to get a photo of it. I hung the shirts on my doorknob, grabbed the camera, and realized that my light was terrible. I wasn’t sure if the moth was dead or alive, considering how it hadn’t budged down the hall to my room.

I took it outside to the sunlit open window of the porch, and snapped a photo. Then I turned the shirt to the side to get a better profile view of its yellow and black speckled body. With a flick of its wings, it was off, fluttering into the blue.

I guess it was just deep in a dream of… What do moths eat? Oh, right… shirts.

Fort Zeelandia

Dutch is such a happy boingy language, and “Zeelandia” is such a marvelous word. Linguistic compliments aside, An-Ping Fort, a.k.a. Fort Zeelandia is fun to visit too. It is a bit of a workout with lots of tall stairs to climb… These greeted us once we were in the park:

A couple of more stairs and a stroll around led us to the guard tower.

Inside the tower, more steep stairs awaited us…

No wonder fairy tales have princesses stuck in towers, princes have to prove themselves fit to get up all the stairs (assuming one isn’t Rapunzel’s prince, who got stuck with hair… )

And while they’re in towers, at least princesses have a view (assuming one isn’t Sleeping Beauty and stuck in one’s own dreams, where there is hopefully some adventuring and good dancing…)

Unfortunately when I was there, the tower was plagued with vaguely dirty windows, so my apologies for the following…

The fort has old cannons standing at the ready for tourist photo-ops. The water that used to come up to the fort walls has disappeared and been pushed further away.

The Matzu temple with its rings of stands which included the little ice cream stand where you had to hit a button to stop a spinning arrow on a wheel activated by one’s 20NT to see if you got 1-5 scoops of plum ice cream which isn’t really creamy… but sweet.

I thought it was rather neat that the angles of the rooftop extended outwards, whilst the walls folded in. I always thought it would be lovely to have a turret to myself and see the sun rise and set from windows of the same room. Etown college, when I was a dorky music camper with my cousin had a lovely bit of a tower in the library which was long enough ago that now it seems slightly like a dream to have been in a different redbrick building that had views of trees and campus instead of the motley rooftops of the outskirts of Tainan where the sea has receded. (end random aside)

It must have been beautiful to look out on the sea. Now the water is distant, hovering perhaps at the edge of things except for the canal which is a bit twisty.

So are the stairs going down…

Marvelous umbrella-like trimmed trees with a statue of I’m guessing Koxinga.

Umbrella trees closer up… Don’t they look like something that would belong in Alice in Wonderland?

The outer wall is the oldest part of the fort sans major restorative work, I think, and the trees infiltrating it are some of the original old trees.

“Remains of the city wall: …The height is about 10 meters and the wall was made by red bricks mixed with sticky rice, syrup and oyster shell ash.” –Anping Harbor Scenic Site: Anping Fort

There’s a remnant of the old well in this semicircle of wall, though the cover isn’t particularly photogenic…

There are fun trees in the park, and some excavation sites that are essentially large holes of dirt with placards around them.

ETA: An interesting link by the Taiwan Review that discusses the Fort as a center for administration by the Dutch, and the significance of Dutch rule on Taiwanese history and development.

Old and newer maps of Taiwan and the Fort