All Good Things

You have reached the end of the Taiwan blog.

I miss Taiwan. I’ve been back for a month now and have adjusted to cold weather, quiet nights, understanding what people say to me, and seeing real trees. I can drive a car and only occasionally wonder why I can’t make a left turn from the far right lane at a red light. But I do miss Taiwan.

I don’t think there will be another blog for a while. Clearly I’m not that talented at remembering to write in one anyway. For anyone interested in what life after Taiwan holds for me, I can tell you that I will be working at the Merry Go Round Playhouse in upstate New York for the summer. After that, it’s anyone’s guess.

So that’s all, folks. Thanks for reading!

Cambodia

OK, I give up on being a competent blogger. I’m going to pretend that it’s because I’m spending my time doing more productive things… right. Anyway, let’s all just pretend that Dad and I were in Cambodia last week instead of last month and I am now promptly telling you about it.

It was a great trip in a lot of ways, but unfortunately we spent most of it sick. No, we didn’t drink the water… Anyway, we managed to see a few sights despite that handicap. My camera also got sick in Cambodia (I don’t know if it drank the water) so my pictures aren’t the best. It quit altogether while we were at the Bayon, which was the most interesting temple in my opinion. So without further ado, here are a few pictures. The rest, of course, are here.

We started out in Phnom Penh…

then took a boat….

to Siem Reap. From there we traveled on foot or by tuk tuk…

to Angkor Wat…

Ta Prohm…

and the Bayon.

We also saw monkeys.

The End.

Kenting Picture Post

As I mentioned earlier, about a month ago Gretchen and I went to Kenting for the weekend. Kenting is on the southern tip of the island. Since it was, after all, a month ago, I’m not going to go overboard with the details. Instead, here are a few pictures.

We took the High Speed Rail down to Kaohsiung….

and from there took a bus to Kenting. On the bus ride we got to watch wonderfully entertaining shows like “Jacky Go Go Go!”

We stayed in a hotel with a beach view…

and one small bed with a curtain, which may have been meant to keep the non-existent mosquitoes away, or may have been for romantic ambience, I’m not sure…

While in Kenting, we saw beatiful scenery…

big leaves…

pigs…

and some kind of mysterious pineapple-like fruit which I attempted to knock down with a stick.

After an intense wrestling match with the tree… success! We now had a bug-infested fruit.

Being good law-abiding folk, we did not do… whatever this is.

Of course, we also found some time to relax on the beach.

The end. More pictures can be found in my Taiwan 2008 album on flickr.

I’m baaaaaaaaaack!

As of Thursday night, I’m back in Minnesota. Predictably, I am way behind with the blogging. So I will be putting an end to this Taiwan blog shortly, but I have two last things I want to write about as soon as I get my pictures uploaded: a short weekend trip to Kenting, and a longer trip to Cambodia with my dad.

It’s sort of nice to be back, but it’s so strange. So many tall white people who can understand everything I say. So few cars. It’s quiet here, and impossibly dark at night.

So stay tuned, I promise I’ll get around to those last few blog entries after I’m finished with my usual procrastination routine.

The New Year and Luzhou’s Great Outdoors

Happy Chinese New Year! Gong Xi Fa Cai! I hope the Year of the Rat is good to you all.

On this special holiday when everyone else in the country is spending quality time at home with their families, I celebrated by running 4 miles in the cold rain. It was not as miserable as it sounds, I promise.

Actually, it was quite lovely. Growing up in the thriving jungle-like ecosystem of the Minneapolis suburbs, I took many things for granted, like seeing the occasional small animal. Or… tree. And being alone on a hiking trail or bike path. That is why this is my favorite little corner of Luzhou, and why I am grateful that the rain kept the sane people inside so I could enjoy the solitude today. It’s not Taroko Gorge and it’s not the North Shore, but Luzhou has its charms now and then.

Yeah… don’t ask me about the last one.

Long Awaited China Blog

I suppose now that more than a month has passed I should say something about my trip to China with my mom.

Beijing was a disappointment to us. I will be perfectly content to skip that city altogether on my next trip.

First of all, it’s smoggy. Seriously smoggy. But don’t worry, they’re going to fix that before the olympics, no problem. The athletes have nothing to fear. Also, the whole area is such a tourist trap. There are people on practically every corner waiting to shove something in your face to buy. The Great Wall, for example. Fortunately, we went on a Christmas hike on a section of the “wild wall” which hasn’t been restored, so we got to see how amazing the wall could really be, but later we went on a bus tour that took us to Badaling. When I finally gasp my way to the highest tower on a section of the Great Wall, I don’t want my view obstructed by someone trying to sell me a “I climbed the Great Wall” T-shirt. (Okay, yeah, I bought a T-shirt.)

Beijing was also a very cold reminder that I will have some readjusting to do when I get back to Minnesota. Which will be soon. I will tell you the details of that in the near future. Which, given my blogging track record, probably means 7 or 8 months after I get back.

Anyway, I submit to you the following picture as a summary of Beijing. Unclear skies, the olympic dream, and the Great Wall swarming with tourists.

One final complaint about Beijing and China in general is the lack of 7/11s and other such convenience stores. For someone accustomed to Taiwan, this flaw makes the place seem virtually unfit for human habitation. Where, I ask you, is a girl supposed to satisfy a 3:00 AM Snickers bar craving?

The major purpose of the trip for me was returning to Hangzhou, where my family lived 20 years ago. A lady never reveals her age, so I’ll just say that 20 years ago I was older than 3 but younger than 5. So my memories are hazy at best, and of very random things. Still, it is a very significant part of my life since it sparked the interest in Asia that eventually led me here.

I didn’t have high hopes for Hangzhou after Beijing, but I ended up loving it. I even found myself entertaining fantasies of living there. I think I’m calling it quits in Asia for a while, but if I were looking for a new location on this side of the world, Hangzhou would be high on my list.

My mom brought a bunch of old pictures with her, and we wandered around trying to recreate them. Here is an example from a part of Hangzhou which hasn’t changed too much (I’m a little bit taller though).

Then:

Now:

That seems to be about the only unchanged part of the city. It is unbelieveable, even to me who only sort of remembers it, how much Hangzhou has modernized. Many of the places in the photos simply don’t exist anymore, others have changed radically. A good example is the Hangzhou Foreign Language School where my parents taught. Here is the building in which it was located 20 years ago:

Here is just one portion of the current campus.

I have to include some sheep pictures, just because this statue with the sheep is my clearest memory of Hangzhou. For some reason, while all my other memories are distant and fuzzy, those sheep made a serious impression.

1987:

2007 (The sheep are sadly neglected by most these days, but my love for them will never fade) :

That is all the blogging I have in me for now. Many more pictures, as always, here. Peace out.

It seems that WordPress is blocked in China. Fortunately, I am crafty enough to overcome that barrier in ways that certainly no Chinese person has ever thought of.

All just to say, Merry Christmas! I hope all of my readers are having a wonderful holiday season!

Hong Kong

I’m in Hong Kong! I got in last night and on Friday I will leave for Beijing where I’ll meet my mom.

So far, mostly what I’ve done is get lost. I’m sure no one who knows me is shocked. I did finally figure out how to get around though, so I hope to fit in a few more sights tomorrow.

Today I went to Avenue of the Stars, which is like the Hollywood Walk of Fame for the Hong Kong film industry. I learned important things, such as the fact that my hands are considerably larger than Jet Li’s but about the same as Jackie Chan’s.

I also went to the Hong Kong Museum of History, which is about the best history museum I’ve been to. I would definitely put it on a must-see list for anyone spending time in Hong Kong. It was very interesting to me how Taiwan and Hong Kong, although they are very similar and could both be considered to have a Chinese culture, have very different histories. On the one hand, Hong Kong had a closer relationship to China for most of its history. Taiwan’s original inhabitants are Austronesian, not Chinese, and for centuries the Chinese people who came to Taiwan were criminals or ethnic minorities or people displaced from their homes for other reasons. No Chinese government was established in Taiwan until the 17th century. Hong Kong, it seems, was under Chinese jurisdiction beginning in the Qin dynasty, which was in the 3rd century BC. On the other hand, Hong Kong has obviously had more western influence, having been a British colony from the Opium Wars until 1997. Taiwan was colonized by both the Spanish and the Dutch, but you might say that neither colonization really took. The Spanish were there for 17 years and the Dutch for 38. Both Hong Kong and Taiwan were also occupied by Japan for a while, but in Hong Kong the occupation only lasted 4 years and in Taiwan it lasted 50.

OK, I am going to quit now before I give away how rudimentary my grasp on East Asian History really is.

I will let you wait in eager suspense to find out what I do tomorrow, but here is a small taste of what’s to come: I plan to ride… (drumroll….) the world’s longest outdoor covered escalator. Oh, what an amazing cross-cultural experience that will be!

A Gorge-ous Marathon

This weekend, along with my friend Gretchen and about four thousand other individuals, I ran the half marathon of the Taroko International Marathon. As you may recall, Taroko Gorge is the beautiful National Park where Dad, Quinn, and I spent last Christmas. It made for a wonderfully scenic, albeit hilly, marathon.

We spent three days in Hualien, so we spent plenty of time speculating about what it would be like to live there rather than Taipei. Quieter, cleaner, prettier. Soberer, or whatever word one uses to describe a sorely lacking bar scene.

I was pretty nervous for the actual half marathon, since it was my first distance racing experience and I didn’t feel adequately prepared at all. The marathon and the half marathon started together, so the crowd at the beginning was huge. I was actually still on my way to the starting line when the gun fired, but five minutes later when I passed through the gate I was far from the last person to start.

The first 5 km (2.5 km out from the gate and 2.5 back) was flat and easy but boring. We got to run by a cement factory, woohoo! Then we started the long uphill climb into Taroko. We were actually running over many of the same places we hiked over Christmas. I was glad I had been there before or I would have wished I could skip the running to just sit around and enjoy the view. But I kept plugging along.

The 10 km marker came up surprisingly soon. I looked at my watch and realized to my shock that I wasn’t inching along at the pace of a geriatric snail. More like a young athletic snail on caffeine. After that I took several walk breaks. The uphill kept getting steeper and I tried to conserve some energy for running back down.

I was still a few kilometers from the finish line when the Kenyan winner of the full marathon flew by me. He ran 42 km 12 minutes faster than I ran my 21 km race. The elite runners really are quite a sight to see.

Anyway, I was pretty happy with my time, given that it was my first race and I hadn’t been preparing for it long. I was inspired to run more, and although I will be leaving Taiwan before next year’s Taroko Marathon, I’d like to come back and run it again some year.

After the race (and after some lost wandering around Hualien trying to find our hotel) Gretchen and I thought it would be a brilliant idea to get massages. These two blind ladies came to our hotel room to massage us for 40 minutes. Sounds nice and relaxing, right? Wrong! I had no idea a massage could be so painful! I just kept telling myself “I got though a half marathon, somehow I can get through this massage…” I must admit I did feel much better afterwards. Except for the sore spots on my head which lasted a few days after she “massaged” my temples.

Anyway, here’s a picture (from someone else) of the starting line, and one of me after the marathon:

Happy Birthday Confucius

To all my fellow teachers out there, have a wonderful Teacher’s Day!