Tuesday, May 27, 2008

Indy!

Saw the latest Indiana Jones movie on Sunday. It was good, but not as good as the old ones. Harrison Ford is a little too old to be running around fighting communists, but I gotta say I like Shia LeBeouf as Indy Jr. Before heading to the movies, I checked out the Taipei Museum of Contemporary Art. Small museum but still worth checking out on a rainy afternoon. I've mentioned this before, but one of the best things about Taipei is how cheap the public attractions are. It cost me about $1.75 to get into MOCA and most other museums are in a similar price range. Way more affordable than the $10 it costs to visit the Portland Art Museum.

While I like the cheap museums here, I HATE the mosquitoes. I'm allergic to them anyway, but the ones here are especially horrible and evil. I got a bunch of bites when I was out on Friday night and by Sunday about 1/2 of them started blistering and the other 1/2 turned into huge, blood red splotches. And they itched liked crazy! I thought I might have to make a trip to the doctor, but luckily they are looking a bit better now and not itching so much. I'm going to have to bathe in deet while I'm in Vietnam.

Speaking of Vietnam, the plan is to do an overnight Mekong Delta tour while I'm there. It'll be a combination of travel by car, boat, and bike including spending the night with a local family. I head to Vietnam on Thursday morning, can't wait to check it out!

Friday, May 23, 2008

Jianguo jade and flower market

Been a week since my last post, guess I'm falling behind on blogging as my last day approaches. Haven't been doing anything too exciting although I made another trip to the weekend jade and flower market last Sunday. I've been before and it's a great place to spend a few hours wandering around. The market is huge with one section selling jade and a few other precious stones, while the other section sells flowers and gardening supplies.

The jade market is one of the largest in Asia, with ~600 vendors selling some amazing jade carvings, necklaces, and bracelets. Prices range from a few dollars to several hundred depending on the piece and the quality of the jade. I took a jade class a few months ago to learn the basics of determining quality, so I can spot obvious fakes (plastic, glass, poorly treated low quality jade) but luckily Taipei has some of the most honest vendors around. Last time I was there I bought a necklace featuring the Buddha holding a lotus leaf. This time around I bought a jade ring, about 8mm wide, made of higher quality jade than my necklace. You'll see me wearing it when I get back to Portland.

Across the street from the jade market is the best flower market ever. Stall after stall of trees, orchids, cut flowers, pots and vases, and everything else related to flowers. Taiwan has beautiful orchids and they're dirt cheap. You can buy an orchid plant for as little as $1.50 and the plants that sell for $30-50 back home cost about $5 here. My flatmate told me that a lot of orchid breeding is done in Taiwan so there is a much wider variety of colors and shapes than you typically find in the US. I love, love, love orchids and lilies (also readily available at the market). I wish I could live in the flower market.

I'm not sure what jianguo translate to in English, but last night I learned a little bit about Taipei street names. I live on heping which means "peace," zhongxiao roughly translates to "filial piety," and xinyi is "justice," representing some of the eight Confucian virtues. Now you know.

Friday, May 16, 2008

30 days

Let the countdown begin - I have just 30 days left in Taipei. Time seemed to drag on endlessly when I first got here and didn't know anyone or anything, but since I've gotten settled, time has flown by. I can't believe I only have one month left before I return to Portland. One month left and so much I still need to do! Haven't been to Alishan or Taroko Gorge, never made it to Haulien, only been to the hot springs once... Going to be a very busy month if I'm going to get all that stuff done. I also have one more trip planned, this time to Vietnam. Will be staying with a friend in Ho Chi Minh City for a few days and exploring the surrounding area for a few days. I've had a great time here, I'll be a little sad to leave. According to the lines on my palms, it's good for my career to be overseas. Combine that with the fact that I love traveling and I think I have a case for coming back to Asia...

Monday, May 12, 2008

Yingge

Had another good weekend in Taipei. I spent Friday night hanging out with friends and then on Saturday I finally made to Yingge, a small town about a half hour south of Taipei known for its ceramics. First stop was the ceramics museum, one of the coolest buildings in Taiwan. While most buildings in Taiwan are ugly concrete blocks, the museum is a beautifully airy and open combination of wood, steel, concrete, glass, and water. In addition to the museum, there is also a large sculpture park and a couple of underground galleries on the park grounds. I think it's a place worth visiting if you're ever in Taiwan.

After wandering through the museum, my friend Jessie and I headed to the ceramics old street to check out the teapots as a teapot is the one thing I wanted to bring back from Taiwan. There were several shops selling teapots of various quality, but we eventually found one that had a nice selection of small handmade pots and cups. After spending over an hour and a half in that one shop comparing teapots, picking out cups, tea tasting, and getting instructions on the proper way to care for the teapots and make tea, we each left with a pot and two little cups. While most people in the US drop a tea bag in boiling water and call it good, tea preparation and drinking is an art in Taiwan and was a cool of the shop owner to spend so much time with us explaining everything. It's was also good that Jessie is Taiwanese so she translated everything for me as we went. Thank goodness for local friends. After we made our purchases, the shop owner even drove us back to the train station. Gotta love that kind of customer service.

When I got back to my apartment, some teenage boy and I have never seen before followed me into the building and asked me to help him up the stairs because something was wrong with his foot. He seemed nervous and I was wondering if he was going to try to steal my purse or my purchases. Decided I would help him out, but if he tried to steal the teapot I just spent an intensive hour and a half picking out I was prepared to kick his ass. But we made it up the stairs without incident and my teapot is safely packed and awaiting the trip back to the US.



Thursday, May 8, 2008

Is that the ice cream truck?

Every once in a while I hear a vehicle playing music as it drives through the neighborhood. A kind of simple, sunny, happy music you would associate with carousels or ice cream trucks. So I was thinking, "Great, they must be selling something. Maybe ice cream or Hong Kong sweets, or something else delicious." I even had a picture in my head of a little slightly beat up, brightly colored van roaming the streets and selling tasty treats out of the back. Alas, when I finally found the source of the music I was in for a surprise because the vehicle was... drum roll please... a giant yellow garbage truck.

I suppose they play music to let people know the truck is in the neighborhood in case someone forgot to take out their trash. Not a bad idea really, although as a foreigner I find the choice of music a little odd. I've run into the weird music thing a couple of times here, most memorably on a train. As the train approached each stop, it would play calypso music. You're sitting there surreptitiously checking out your fellow passengers and the next thing you know you're singing, "Day-o, day-ay-ay-o, daylight come and he wanna go home." Anyone remember that scene from Beetlejuice? Anyhow, I have yet to see a real ice cream truck in Taipei.

On a completely unrelated note, I got an email from the couple I gave my cat, Aya, to when I left. It's like an open adoption and they give me updates on how Aya's doing, pictures too. I felt terrible about giving her away when I came here, but I'm glad she's got a good home with people who enjoy having her.

Monday, May 5, 2008

Movie madness

Saw a lot of movies last week here in Taipei. My flatmate Katrina owns a bar that shows movies on Tuesday night so last Tuesday I dropped in to check out a Taiwanese film called the The Wayward Cloud. It won some awards in Germany, but honestly I'm not sure why. The plot revolves around a porn actor and a girl he likes meeting during a water shortage in Taiwan that causes the sale of watermelons and watermelon juice to skyrocket. The film contains a lot of porn and musical numbers, and has very little dialogue. As one person explained it to me, the movie is about how porn and easy sex (watermelons) have become so pervasive in modern society while true love (water) is hard to find. Hmm, yeah, maybe. I would suggest passing on this film should you come across it at your local video store.

On Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday it was off to check out some films at the Urban Nomad Film Festival. On Wednesday they showed a homemade Finnish Star Wars parody called Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning. Unfortunately, the English subtitles weren't working and watching a movie in Finnish with Chinese subtitles isn't very interesting, so I kept falling asleep and headed home early. On Thursday they showed a mini documentary, called Dengue Fever, about an LA band of the same name. The band plays music that is a mix of Cambodian pop and 60's surfer music and the film follows the band's first trip to Cambodia to share the music with the people who inspired it. Cool music and an interesting film.

Friday was a Chinese film called Mei Mei about a gay drag queen of the same name living and performing in mainland China. It was interesting in the sense that it gave a glimpse of how homosexuality is viewed in China, but I didn't find it particularly engaging and left before the end. From there it was off to Barcode, Room 18, and Luxy for a late night at the clubs.

Saturday night a group of us went out to dinner at a Yunnan/Burmese restaurant and then to a club called Underworld to check out a friend's band play. If you've never had Burmese food, I would recommend checking it out. One of my friends knows the owners so we just grabbed a table and ate whatever they brought out - steamed cabbage, fried eggplant sprinkled with vinegar, some sort of marinated pork and pork tendon dish, pickled veggies, a chicken curry, and a dish of sliced liver, tongue, and other assorted meats. My favorite was the eggplant, but it was all pretty good and a nice change from the typical Chinese/Taiwanese fare. As for the band, they were called Blood Orange and I wasn't quite sure what to make of them since hard metal + trumpet is a strange combination. They played some softer songs that I could get into, but the death metal stuff isn't my cup of tea. Anyhow, I headed some around midnight, went to bed, and enjoyed a nice lazy Sunday of drinking tea, doing laundry, and watching a bunch of episodes of CSI.