Barclay

Historic theological seminary in Tainan– empty on a Sunday.

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

A Couple More Merchant House pictures…

It has a weather vane!  (I can identify with weather vanes….)

The merchant house overlooks an elementary school park and has these perfectly trimmed trees out on the lawn in contrast to the wild and wily ones at the tree house.

The Tree House

“I like the idea of trees as these delicately balanced monstrosities perched over everything.” –Tim (who is found here).

Here are my so-so shots of the Anping Tree House. On the day we went, the three degrees cooler in the shade could be felt beneath the roof which essentially is made up of extended branches and the leaves of the banyan trees.

Shadows on the outside wall.

I suspect once upon a time there was a door here one could actually enter.

The roots dangle down through the empty rooms, forming curtains that caught the waning afternoon light and swayed gently in the breeze.

The steel beams support the tree roof.

The trees trace the angle of the rooftops.

Close-up of a tree trunk with berries.

A few representative shots from Tainan

Hopefully I’ll get around to really blogging these properly sooner rather than later, but for my colleague who is thinking about showing his buddy around Tainan… Here are some more attractions:

An-Ping otherwise known as Fort Zeelandia (which my cousin, when she took me there, was shocked that I hadn’t seen it before… “What do you DO when you’re here?”

“Uh, family stuff… You know, eat!”

“Oh, right.” Our standing joke is that coming back to Tainan involves significant weight gain in a short period of time because the food is just THAT yummy!)

The fort has a nice twisty staircase and a building with relics inside like ancient swords with those curvy handles whose names are totally escaping me at the moment, but I’m sleep-deprived as usual, so forgive me…

The tree house that has banyan trees growing out of and through it. As well as the merchant house which has exhibits featuring wax figures doing things like gathering salt, signing treaties, and crushing sugar cane.

Tainan Temples

This is a public building where my cousin told me as a child their school used to come here for exercises and special events . You can definitely see the Japanese architecture here.

These shots are from our visit to the 5 Concubines temple which is devoted to the memory of the five concubines that hung themselves out of devotion to their prince when he committed suicide at the fall of the dynasty.  Um… Okay, so they probably wouldn’t have lasted in the new regime either, but eeks!

A clock with its own weathervane outside the Museum of Literature‘s coffee shop.  We did stop in at the Museum of Literature, but were all a bit dazed by that point.  I remember walking past photographs of authors and wishing that I was actually a good Chinese student who was literate.  There were a couple of neat quotes in English though.

Notice the wedding couple getting their photos taken in the hollow of the modern statue’s embrace?

Another wedding couple at the Confucius Temple.

This link has more info on temples in Tainan.

My Father’s Old House…

There is a certain wistful nostalgia that we have when we think of our childhood homes. My father is certainly not immune to this. He was downright grumpy with me upon my first visit to his house because my appreciation was considerably dampened by the mosquitos feasting on me and the lack of a flushing toilet… However, upon a quick visit, I realized what my father loved about his home. He told stories about the Japanese coming to my grandmother during the war and asking for the steel embedded in the window frames. On the last trip we went on when she was still alive, she was quite happily content, sitting on the front porch.

Here are some photos of the front yard with the flora and fauna.

Interesting long-rooted vine.

This is a water plant of some kind.

Within each of these buds, a red tongued blossom is waiting…

Doesn’t this look soft?!

Down in the depths of the old well, the ferns grow. No worries, I didn’t lose my balance to get this shot!

On the wayside

The flower shop by my father’s old home. Any idea what these interesting cup flowers are?

Our shadows on the crumbling wall of my relative’s grandmother’s home (I think…)

Decorated by the local elementary school, I believe my relative said this is actually a private residence.

The street behind the temple where my relatives have their little everything shop.

On the way back at twilight– I liked the way this stoplight was broken just enough for the light within to gleam like a wannabe sunset.

The open gutter by the side of the road in Hsingkang. I love how impatiens are wildflowers in Taiwan– they bloom by the roadsides. It’s interesting being here– I understand my mother’s garden choices more, when I see flowers that are familiar, as if I’m not really quite so far away from home in the comfortable company of roses or begonias or impatiens.

Bong-Tzu on Ching Ming Jie

We had Friday off this weekend, because it was Ching Ming Jie, the grave-sweeping day when people traditionally feed up their ancestors and clean their graves. My family doesn’t seem to be particularly observant of this holiday, perhaps due to a generally Christian orientation. We made a speedy visit to our bong tzu (ETA:  My mother tells me bong tzu basically means house of the dead in Taiwanese– for the longest time I thought it was the name of the area our little house of the dead resides in, but it’s a generic term that can apply to graves, tombs, etc.) right before I was spirited back to Taipei.

This is where the ashes rest. There are also old graves next to this little house of the dead that are over a hundred years old of our first family member who came to Taiwan from China long long ago.

My family’s bong-tzu is by a couple of rivers and we used to have to get off by the highway and climb a rusty, falling-apart skeleton of a train bridge across the first river. I distinctly remember visiting on one of our first visits to Taiwan, seeing the rainbow scum of oil on the water, a dead fish floating by all in-between the railroad ties that I gingerly stepped on, wishing there was at least something of a railing to hold onto. The heavy scent of decay that clung to the oozing water. My mother told me they used to fish in it.

Since then, the bridge has been torn down, and we have crossed through a different way from a new road, past the fiercely barking dog of the local farmer, following the leftover rails from the trains that used to take sugarcane from the fields to the factory. When my cousin visited last summer, he had to carefully make his way over a floating bridge made of styrofoam tied together. Then there is the walk through the high grasses with their seeds all a-stickle, clinging to our pant legs.

We always return though. Inside the ashes of our ancestors lie on step-shelves– the kind that people display awards or trophies on. They are lined up inside sealed wooden boxes with their names burned into the side facing us. We sign the little book with the date to show we were there, and then bow three times and remember them. My grandfather filled the corridors of the house with the sound of his wooden slippers clacking on the mottled stone floors. My grandmother spraying an arc of water from an orange hose to tend her flowers. My great-grandfather prized his orchids. My great-grandmother’s voice slightly shrill as she repeated dinh, “sweet” over and over for me as we popped long-yen (dragon’s eye or longan) into our mouths. My fourth uncle, soft-spoken, who gave me a dress with a white mouse on it, and a red frilly dress when I was four and horribly vain.

For a few moments in that tiny house of the dead, we keep them company, offering them our flowers and that bittersweet mix of love and sadness at the spaces they left outside of their small wooden boxes and that silent little house.

Lucky Dog

My mom and I were having a conversation the other night when I interrupted her to say something a bit like this…

“Mom, I met someone last Friday night!”

“Ooh?!” (My mother has a very eloquent “Ooh?!”)

“Yes, he came right up to me and he was sooo cute!”

“Where were you?”

“The everything store. I just couldn’t resist him. He had these dark eyes and we just sort of connected like kindred spirits. He came right up to me and started kissing me. I almost decided to take him home with me, in spite of the fact that my room is total mess…”

“So it was a bunny?” (My mother knows me all too well.)

“No, a dog. A really really cute puppy!”

He’d just dashed into the store as if he owned it, and began lavishing tons of affection on me. The guys in the store ended up chasing him a bit when he ventured to explore the back, and told me that he wasn’t their dog, so if I wanted him, I could take him. I realized he was indeed a stray when my hand turned black from petting him. Poor doggie. They said he was a puppy, but probably wouldn’t grow too much bigger.

I had visions of being motivated to go out for walks and wake up in the mornings… Then practicalities started to intrude– I rent out a (currently extremely messy) room, and don’t really know the landlady’s policy on dogs. I’m also afraid that I might be allergic (I’ve given up on ever being able to own a cat). Also, I had a total of 70NT (around two US dollars) on me, since I was a dork and forgot to pay a visit to the magical money machine. So I didn’t really have enough to buy dinner, a leash, and dog shampoo… It was also too late to take him to a vet for a check-up and he probably had fleas (dogs who reach over and nibble their sides are probably nibbling for fleas, right?)

I was contemplating on the logistics of getting him up to my apartment with me, and not freaking him out by shutting him up in a room then leaving the poor puppy while I ran off for money and the above necessities. Then, lo and behold, the smart dog went to venture out to the sidewalk again and met another girl, who after inquiring as to whether he belonged to anyone, slung him over the scooter seat sandwiched between her and her boy and took him home.

Upon some research, I think he was a Taiwan dog mix, (this website’s description claims they have psychic powers of communication), though he was sandy-haired. Half a week later, I decided I would have named him “Lucky” (to quote the guys in the store after the girl took him home).

As my mom mentioned, our family seems to be attractive to stray dogs. On one of our walks with my grandfather to the park in Tainan, my two cousins ended up getting followed by three friendly strays. As the house already had three or four dogs (two or three of which had been rescued from the streets I think), they were forbidden to have more. So the three dogs followed us down the slides, sidewalks, and finally my cousins went to my aunt’s house leaving them around the front door while they slipped out the back and came back to my grandfather’s house. The only dog owned by that side of the family here now is the ultra-cute Shao Hei (which means “little black” when the dog is snowy white, but it’s something of a joke.)

Then there was the dog that led us through Guandu Nature park who was just a friendly tour guide for us this fall. He seemed quite at home and content there.

Though I have seen a few stray dogs in the park, there are certainly less stray animals than I remember when I was visiting Taiwan ten years ago. There seem to be more active animal protection policies in place–from what I hear there is a spaying and neutering program. When I arrived back in Taiwan this fall, I spent a while in the airport waiting for my ride and saw a little promotional video kiosk by the Taiwan government which was essentially a PR piece on the great new conditions of shelters for stray animals in Taiwan. At the time, I found it rather random, but apparently there has been cause for outcry in the abuse of strays by animal control here in the past.

According to this article, some stray dogs are being eaten. When I was in Korea, one of my fellow ex-pat colleagues was taken out for dog soup and learned that there dogs are bred specifically for food and are drugged up and killed in a way that is extremely stressful for the dog, since the hormones or chemicals released by a stressed dog were… um… supposed to be an enhancement for… uhh… “stamina.” My roommates also told me that they’ve heard about restaurants that have dog meat on the menu. I think it’s supposed to be marketed as “fragrant meat” (shiang rou) or something like that.

My mother also cautioned me that if I had taken the dog, I wouldn’t have been able to return to the US with it. However, after some research, taking a dog back to the US turns out to be a decently painless process.

Here is an article about a group doing research into where stray dogs in Taiwan can be found.

If you’d like to adopt an animal or learn how to care for your animals, AnimalsTaiwan has a lot of information.

Dogs in Taiwan seems to have information for the Taiwanese dog owner, like vet links and dog playgrounds, though I think the Bow Wow Cafeteria closed. (I used to walk by it and find it vaguely amusing to see the dogs gamboling in the windows.)

Oh, and regarding the bunny my mother mentioned? I am acquainted with a rescued rabbit that’s available to a good home. Drop me a comment or an e-mail if you’re longing for a friendly rabbit.

And Lucky– I hope you’re happy and spoiled in a real family who treats you like a prince amongst dogs, since it couldn’t work out between us… sniff. I suppose I’ll just dog-watch in the park, maybe we’ll run into each other again some day.