We found this, and more, on a recent hike up Elephant Mountain in which I had too much fun with the macro setting on the camera (click for photos). Creeps me out though… felt like slapping the daylights out of every slightest itch for the next half an hour. But that hike was our one break in a very busy two weeks or so. The latest:

• Chou-chou had worms, that meant a trip to the vet, and that meant we discovered just how much Chou-chou hates rectal thermometers.
• Some obsessive parents at the school are driving us and our boss insane. First time we’d seen him mad, actually. Nice to know he feels he doesn’t have to hide it from us, and the ensuing process of dealing with said parents is great experience in negotiating disagreement in this context.
• Our research practicum is arranged. Weekly (or so) debriefing meetings with our practicum supervisor will include weekly cultural experiences. He invited us to accompany him on his upcoming visit to a traditional Chinese doctor this Tuesday. Traditional tea houses, museums, temples, and other stuff are all in the works – definitely our preferred kinds of classrooms.
• Hundreds of thousands of people protested downtown last night again, demanding that Taiwan’s president step down. The subway was packed with people in red. Even their dogs were wearing red.

Anyway, more later.

We’re starting our last (for now) semester of grad classes. We’ve got an anthropology course, a world religions course, and a China research practicum. So it should be interesting, and for better or worse, our brains will occasionally excrete something from our studies onto the blog. From one of the anthropology texts today:

…we may mistakenly assume that our own desires are love of the people… themselves. …Western people tend to divide their world into three categories: scenery, machinery, and people. The first of these includes mountains, trees, weather, and other parts of the environment about which they talk, but which they cannot manipulate. These are enjoyed in a disinterested sort of way. Machines are tools people use in their lives to get their work done. These include cars, refrigerators, computers, and farm animals. Westerners enjoy and value these highly, and take care of them so long as they are useful and do the job… [But] not all human beings are seen as “people.” Westerners often see people of other cultures as part of the scenery. [Tourism example.] … Moreover, westerners often see migrant labourers and subordinates as machinery whose value lies in their productivity. When their productivity drops they are discarded… Basically, westerners only see friends and relatives as people – as humans valued for their friendships.

I could rant and rave for days and then be harshly self-critical for days more regarding stuff this quote touches on. Relationships with friends and family can still be “machinery”; we may ultimately maintain certain relationships because they provide for emotional or psychological felt-needs (conscious or subconscious) rather than actually relating in unconditional love. We don’t value them, but what they do for us. That’s selfish whether we realize what we’re doing or not, and it’s treating people like machines. I’d better stop before I start and just say that treating all people like people is hard.

Sometimes we (people) legitimately become part of one another’s “scenery” (imagine a packed subway car) or relate as “machines” (like when we’re doing our jobs). Living in an “ultra-urban” environment, I can think of plenty of instances where we become one another’s scenery out of necessity. But even allowing for legitimate examples like these, I think we can and should still acknowledge one another’s “people-ness” – as in, one another’s uniqueness and unfathomable value – even if in the moment we are playing scenery or machinery roles. I don’t mean just in smiles and sincerely kind words at the checkout counter (though we don’t do enough of that), but in our lifestyles, how we spend our time and resources, whether or not our lives have room for people who aren’t providing something for us (material or emotional). I think this requires seeing people from a certain perspective.

The couple in the photo is Mr. Hou and Mrs. Cai (married women keep their names here). They make really good egg-hotsauce-sesame-pancake-things that we eat a lot. We don’t know anything else about them – I hope that’s only because of the language barrier.

Pronounced: f�ng hu�ng
Means: phoenix

Up another local mountain this morning for a hike, some fresher air, and scenery. Smaller temples and graves often dot these mountains, and you expect to find some on every hike. This hike was a little different than last because up one overgrown, slippery stone path there was an unattended grave with a big cross on it. Christian grave? We don’t know but we’ll get Mingdaw to translate the inscriptions. We managed to get some interesting photo detail at one of the temples. It had a nice but cloudy view of the Taipei basin and guy playing some soothing recorder music while we were up there. That gave it a kind of surreal atmosphere, but it was much appreciated.

You can read about this hike here:

• Snake soup, hiking, temples

There’s a video below the photo gallery. Scroll down to read or write comments!

Our first visit to Huaxi St. AKA Snake Alley AKA Hua Hiss St. We ate snake soup.

You can read about this little adventure here:

• Snake soup, hiking, temples

Scroll down to read or write comments!

Longshan Temple is big, busy, has some great artwork and architecture, and was first built in 1738. The outer court boasts waterfall fountains full of big colourful fish. The detail in the wood and ironwork was quite impressive to an architecturally-illiterate person like me. Some of the main supporting columns are covered with single giant spiralling dragons and countless smaller characters. Since it was so busy and a popular spot for local tourism, we were able to get photos of common religious activity that otherwise would feel a little too intrusive: incense and food offerings, casting lots, etc.

You can read about this temple visit here:

• Snake soup, hiking, temples

There’s a video below the photo gallery. Scroll down to read or write comments!

Extra day off for working through last week’s, so we played tourists: hiked a local mountain, experienced the infamous “Snake Alley,” and visited one of Taiwan’s oldest and most famous temples.

Huaxi St. a.k.a. “Snake Alley” a.k.a. Hua Hiss St.
We ate snake; it tastes and feels like canned tuna without the the fishy taste and with a whole lot more bones. There was a scary moment when the lady almost served us shots of snake blood instead of snake soup – “No no! Ròu! Ròu!” (meat! meat! – reason #583 way we need to learn this language!) The snake blood drinks are supposed to increase virility, hence the presence of sex shops and the number of prostitutes in the surrounding area.

Snake Alley is one street over two blocks that’s been converted into a nightmarket type venue specializing in seafood and snake restaurants, with a few hard-to-miss sex shops thrown in. It’s seen a fair share of controversy in recent years: from animal rights protesters lobbying for the snakes to feminists lobbying for the (scores of thousands of) local prostitutes to social activists protesting the government’s removal of a shantytown to make way for a park. This sign from said park hints at the character of some of the area’s population, and how the government feels about it.

Our friends here were never very enthusiastic about us checking out this (in)famous tourist attraction: this used to be a really scuzzy part of town, and it some ways it still is. Huaxi St. is now paved, well lit, and more toned down than it was ten years ago. They still have the snake shows at night where they play with the snakes and draw a crowd. But they don’t kill them, skin them, drain the blood and body fluids into mixed drinks right there as a public attraction and sell them to the crowds. Though they do have large flatscreen T.V.’s playing recent footage of the good ol’ days (1990′s), and you can still get fresh meat and blood drinks everyday. They wouldn’t let us take pictures of any live snakes (there were lots), but we did get some of the dead one who became our lunch. Snake Alley photos here.

Xianjiyan Mountain
Up another local mountain this morning for a hike, some fresher air, and scenery. Smaller temples and graves often dot these mountains, and you expect to find some on every hike. This hike was a little different than last because up one overgrown, slippery stone path there was an unattended grave with a big cross on it. Christian grave? We don’t know but we’ll get Mingdaw to translate the inscriptions. We managed to get some interesting photo detail at one of the temples. It had a nice but cloudy view of the Taipei basin and guy playing some soothing recorder music while we were up there. That gave it a kind of surreal atmosphere, but it was much appreciated. Photos and music are here.

Longshan Temple
Longshan Temple is big, busy, has some great artwork and architecture, and was first built in 1738. The outer court boasts waterfall fountains full of big colourful fish. The detail in the wood and ironwork was quite impressive to an architecturally-illiterate person like me. Some of the main supporting columns are covered with single giant spiralling dragons and countless smaller characters. Since it was so busy and a popular spot for local tourism, we were able to score some great photos (click here) of common religious activity: incense and food offerings, casting lots, etc.

Today we finally made it to see the National Palace Museum here in Taipei. One website says that the National Palace Museum is “one of the four best museums in the world, in a class with the Louvre, the British Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.”

This museum is amazing. It has a HUGE collection of Chinese artifacts, which date from as early as 6000 BC up to the early 1900′s. Their collection totals around 700,000 items, but the museum is only big enough to display a small percentage of their collection at one time. The Museum’s website states, “It has been calculated that for any given time period, the percentage of items that can be put on display in proportion to the entire National Palace Museum collection is as follows: calligraphy and paintings, approximately 15%; antiquities, approximately 6.4%; books, approximately 0.07%; and documents even less.” They rotate exhibits every few months, but it would still take approximately 12 years of visits in order to view their whole collection. Due to the space crunch, several portions of the museum are currently being renovated and expanded. This was actually GOOD news for us, because it means that the tickets we purchased today are good for one free visit between now and December 31st.

We’ll probably actually make many more visits between now and the end of January, as we didn’t give ourselves nearly enough time today and we still need to take the guided tour. We also want to do some more reading about China’s history, so that we can have a better understanding of each of the dynasty’s and the major events. So our plan is to read up on a certain period, and then go visit the museum and look at their exhibits related to the time period covered by the reading. We hope that this will help give us a better context for what we’re seeing at the museum, and that what we see at the museum will help us understand how the events of the period were being expressed in art, craftwork, and writing.

Some of the coolest things that we saw today were the miniature carvings. One of these carvings is actually an olive pit (maybe a little larger than a pit from a kalamata olive) that has been fashioned into a boat. The picture doesn’t do justice to the amazingly intricate detail of the carving. There were also tiny bottles with intricate paintings. However, these paintings aren’t on the exterior of the bottle…they are painted on the inside of the bottle, using a tiny brush inserted through the bottle opening. Among the oddest things we saw today was this rock that looks exactly like a slab of some of the pork we find semi-regularly in our lunches. Meat layer, fat layer, skin and all. Apparently, it’s one of the museum’s most famous pieces.

Tomorrow promises to be interesting as well. We’re planning on visiting the Wanhua district of Taipei, which is one of the oldest neighborhoods. Among the things we’ll see there are the Longshan Temple, one of the oldest and most popular temples in Taiwan, and Huahsi Street. Huahsi street is more popularly nicknamed “Snake Alley.” Why? Check back here tomorrow to find out!!!

Pronounced: d? p?n t�
Means: to sneeze

The folks in Texas want a video asap, so I’ve gotta figure out how to do video. Recently realized we have editing software that came with the camera. Also figured out YouTube today. So the video stuff around here is all re-done; videos aren’t unedited anymore and you don’t have to download them. Just click the box.
Of the dozens of sword dancers we see every morning, these guys weren’t the flashiest, but this is a typical daily sight in our neighbourhood. That one older guy seems about 3 seconds behind though.

There’s new stuff on the video page, including some Chou-chou, and we have a YouTube channel. I’m still learning with the editing… I reduced the video quality too much on these ones but it was my first try. The next ones will be better, and they should be coming soon since we’re supposed to be sending something to Texas asap.