B@Taiwan

Lost

2011-09-14T12:37:00.000+08:00

Last weekend, on the Sunday morning, early, we put on our go-to-meetin' finery and set off, map in hand, for family pictures on the kindergarten's dime, being our dime, as we pay the tuition and they don't just give services away for free. The invitation said 0900 in a such an obscene manner that you couldn't imagine. There's no good reason to be up that early on any Sunday. And to be lost amongst Chinese street signs makes the injury a double blow.

Car radio don't work, wife slept late, kids are hungry. And picky. We left the house at five minutes before we were to arrive across town at the photo studio. The street signs weren't making any sense. Our target was just this side of Chungde Road off to the right on a side street. We missed it the first time. As well as the second. The fourth time around the block, I opened Google Maps and experimented with several spellings before giving it up as a poor investment in my sanity.
After an exploration off to the right which turned up nothing more interesting than a hospital, I asked Maggie what the big, black box on the lower left represented. Turns out it was the B&Q on the Northeast side of town. There were other strange illustrations as well, perhaps the most interesting of which being an upside down isoceles triangle pointing at the character 北, which it may be helpful to point out indicates the general position of North on the map.
"What stupid Motherfucker puts 'North' at the bottom of a goddam map?" is a sentence pattern which you would be surprised to hear my sweet four-year old daughter spit out before she hears me repeat it a few more times and I hope it shall never come to that for as it is the only person I've encountered who sees this as normal is a Taiwanese photographer who uses a printed backdrop of a grand staircase in his studio for family portraits for people who want that fake I'm-in-the-money look.
There was no hurry to get there, though. Although all the graduating Kindy kids were supposed to be there, few could find the place.
Both the kids and both the adults in our family thought the photographer was an asshole. From the over the top costumes from 1001 Nights to the gimcracks the assistant put in Gretchen's hair we wanted out. I pulled Maggie aside, conferred with out eyes, and understood that we weren't buying any of it. And this was before he started whistling to get my daughter's attention as if she were a showdog.

Train Gone

2011-09-14T12:15:00.000+08:00

I just had a brain freeze. I mean a thought. One of thoseglorious ideas that you get when you’re flying down a dual carriageway athalf-past ten at night with your son on the back of your scooter and you can’treach into your pocket to get out your iPhone and once you do anyway you do asearch for Dragon Dictation at the red light and fail to find it and try torecord the thought but you don’t because you didn’t put it back on your phoneafter getting the phone replaced for a dicky battery so you attempt toredownload it and continue to have more and more great thoughts while the appisn’t downloading because of spotty reception and traffic, but when you get toyour basement parking lot and dismount you can’t download it because you’ve gottwo floors of concrete above you and the signal is non-existent and by thistime the revelation is getting weaker and weaker until you think it’s actuallya bad idea and not worth the hassle of even opening your lap top to record.

THIS is why I haven’t been blogging. Or writing at all. Orbeing creative in the least. I know better than to say it’s because I havekids.

What to do what to do.

Another school year has begun and everyone around me isfreaking out 24/7.

...and that was last week. Completely lost the train. Maybe later.

A Sketch From The Ocean Park

2010-10-10T19:21:00.002+08:00

The stars of the dolphin show at the ocean park in Hualien are likely more intelligent than the presenters. But they were both light years ahead of the volunteer from the audience, a ten-year-old boy who was asked to give an addition or multiplication problem whose answer would be ten or less. The dolphin was to give the answer with slaps of his tail. But the kid couldn't come up with the question, instead settling on the tired and true fallback of "I don't know." This went on for far too long before the bubbly host went for the fake and told the kid to whisper in her ear what his question for the bottle-nosed dolphin was. " Eight Plus Two" she shouted to game approval from the crowd of a couple hundred. The dolphin gave the answer with ten slaps of the tail and the crowd was about as excited as you could imagine. The audience volunteers were to be given prizes in exchange for their cooperation and an assistant emerged with a picture of the mascot with maybe a button attached to it. The reticent child spoke distinctly when he said into the microphone not "Thank You" but "Can I change it for something else?" to which a few dozen audience members quickly fell just short of booing to show the brat their disappointment. We all watched on the giant screen as he scampered up the steps of the arena to meet his approving mother.

The Road Not Taken

2010-08-13T15:53:00.000+08:00

We just finished up the poetry unit in summer school and I'm in the middle of grading exams. The first couple classes were ... well, dismal. The last class will not require curving and has provided some smiles and laughs. Especially question 21. Especially S's interpretation of the poem.

On The Road Not Taken, by Robert Frost
21. What do you think the poem means? What is the poet telling the reader about?

Refresh your memory if you haven't read it in awhile. It's good for you. Skip down to the end if you're lazy.

TWO roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;	5

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,	10

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.	15

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

And the student's response:

He is a traveler, I think. Maybe it's about love, so he needs to choose which would be the better one. He decided to break up with two girls at the same moment.

I'll admit there was a WTF moment upon reading the answer, but then I looked at a couple lines of the poem, figured, yeah, why not, and gave him full marks.

Yellow, in Chinese, can mean pornographic, as in "Two roads diverged in a yellow wood."
The line "...I stood/and looked down one as far as I could/To where it bent in the undergrowth/ Then took the other, as just as fair" certainly could be interpreted as being "Yellow" as they say around here.
But the next phrase about the fair one "...having perhaps the better claim/ Because it was grassy and wanted wear" hits it out of the park.

The student didn't use specific examples from the poem to defend his answer, but another one that could offer him some help would have been "And both that morning equally lay."

I shall indeed be "telling this with a sigh/somewhere ages and ages hence" whenever I teach this poem as a morality tale about running around with loose women. God bless that kid. Drove me crazy all year long and then provided me with the biggest gut laugh I've had in quite some time this morning.

Job Security

2010-06-07T00:11:00.001+08:00

I've been in Taiwan ten-and-a-half years and I'm STILL seeing mistakes
like this on the road? Perhaps I need to rethink my position. Is there
a market for grammatically-correct T-Shirts in Taiwan?

Successecities!

2010-01-15T10:04:00.003+08:00

I first got my Taiwanese learners' permit about 5 years ago so that I could legally drive the family car when it came time to take our first child home from the hospital. I went up and borrowed the test study guide, a collection of 90 pages' worth of questions from which the test is composed.

I had had a drivers license in the States since the 80's and laughed off the suggestion that it was something which needed to be studied for. The motorcycle test had been easy enough.

I got about halfway through the computerized test, though, and was humming a different tune. It was the most profane humming one has ever heard. By the end of the test, I was telling the computer to go plug it's USB into its mother, in similar language.

As I exited the test area I was sure that I could save the world by just giving the bastards my business card and telling them when they were ready to clean up the language on that piece of shit, I would be wiling to help them out. Then I let the door hit me on the ass on the way out.

Five years I waited, and they never called asking for my help in rewriting the test. I still shake my head about this lost business opportunity. I probably should have done a PowerPoint presentation to show the woman at the counter, but it would likely have had just about the same effect as shouting at her in the kind of English that one learns early on from his older brother.

It's time to take the kids back to America and show them the land of the free etc. But to do this properly will require a bit of driving. There's really no difference between driving without a license in America and driving without a license in Taiwan, except the American cops are more likely to know phrases like "step out of the car and put your hands behind your head" that make the eventuality of getting stopped by the fuzz more daunting than in my adopted home.

So, another trip to the DMV was in order. My learner's permit was expired, so I needed another physical exam consisting of an eye check and one deep knee bend with my hands held parallel to the ground administered by an extremely aged doctor in a clinic that was blaring a Sinead O'Connor tune on the radio.

I marched back with my sharp eyes and fully functioning knee joints and ran upstairs to sit down at the computer terminal where I had a choice of about 8 languages to take the test in. I figured English would be challenging enough, and put on the headphones to find out that the feministic voice on the recording was reading slightly different sentences than were on the computer screen, so I turned her all the way down and trusted the Force.

This time, I had no questions at all about taxi driving, or about how to load cargo on to a truck. Absent also, were questions about how many years I would need to have a private license before I tried to get a bus driver's license.

Dig:

True or False: Traffic laws maintain traffic order. The most important principle of maintaining traffic order is not only to understand but to obey the spirit of law can achieve an objective of good traffic safety.

The spirit of law being more important than the letter, or character.

True or False: Driving is both physically and mentally tiring. Only by leading a regular life, driving safety can be ensured.

Is that about eating enough roughage, or not working 6 days a week?

True or False: I find two drug dealers whispering in my taxi In order to help my country, I should think up a method to report the police station and not let them escape.

I don't pretend to understand how detaining a Ketamine dealer in Taiwan is going to help the USA, but as the openings for Western cab drivers are as few as they are far between, I don't have to worry about narking on one.

True or False: A car should break down because it runs out of oil or water.

I stared at this question for a full two minutes before I flipped a coin. I answered correctly, but have no record of what the correct answer was. Personally, I don't think it should ever run out of oil in the first place.

I missed three and scored 90%.

Wednesday, I went back for the road test. (here it is in Google Maps)

The road test is the most horrific thing that has happened to Taiwan ever. Worse than the White Terror. Those who have tried and failed to get past it speak of it in ominous tones and avoid eye contact. Something about an S curve.

Before you do the course, though, you have to be aware of and understand "The Rules:"

Self car should be parked at the assignment area to practiced in the test area is prohibited.
Bring your identification card, test admission, and some papers all the time for review and to be on time to test
While on your waiting interim should obey order not allowed to stay, to stroll, or to racket in the test area.
To explain the road test rules to score standard and to test route on pretest if any question please offer them in time.
A role call based on the number and check identificaiton photo then to get on car to test on order
In accord with the invigilator's instructions and respect their duties
A testee has reached over 30 score deduction that is judged that has failed his test should terminate his test and get off his car to sit on rear seat and then the invigilator will drive the car back to the initial test line
If there some illegalaties of insult or bribery occur to the inviligators while on the his test will be prosecuted right away
If someone help testees with gestures languages on the test will be rubbed off their scores
If one of them the cars facilities damaged while on his test should restore them or compensate their own prices
Those who are bare feet, bare shoulders or wear clogs, slippers that are not admitable. Also not allowed to smoke, to chew betelnuts on the test.
Those who are not obey the rules or use an inappropriate means to attend the test will be prosecuted by the item 70 of the traffic safety rules.

Many foreigners will leave at this point. The stout hearted, or those who don't read the rules, get into the car with an instructor or two. I was blessed with two invigilators. Each of them told the other one that they needed to practice their English on me, but neither made any serious attempt. They both rode in the car with me as we did a practice lap of the Test Course, explaining in triplicate over each other about how many points were deducted for each crossing of lines. The invigilator at the wheel demonstrated that if one were to cross one of the unseeable border lines between the road and the curb, sirens would blare, lights would flash, and a sign post would light up showing how you how many points had just been deducted from your total.

Lose 30, and you're driven back to the terminal in the back seat. In deep shame.

All those touchy-feely New Age self-help books talk about visualizing success or some such, and in the hours leading up to my test, I visualized a trip around the track like a pro drifter or the Stig in a Bugatti Veyron.

The S curve is created to test your ability to drive into those narrow alleys that you see on Penghu when you get lost heading out of Makong. (You're better off renting a motorbike there anyway.) This emasculating alleyway looked simple enough, but when I saw the sensor cord hidden by the edge of the curb, the Toyota suddenly seemed as wide as a Hummer.

There's no hurry at all, so it took about five minutes to drive 10 meters in and back 10 meters out. This was the hardest part of the test, without question, but I made it through without a buzz.

I backed out onto the road, hit the turn signal and ambled over to the next obstacle where I simulated backing into a parking garage space. This one was a bit more realistically narrow keeping in mind how difficult it is to park in some of the shopping malls. I lost my 16 points here with a jarring siren in my left ear that caught me by so by surprise that I farted. Fortunately, the invigilator was assessing this part of my performance from outside the car.

It's quite possible, though that it wasn't me. When you sit at the terminal pondering the instructions and trying to work out what an "invigilator" is, the empty course is alive with alarms. It could be the wind, it could be sticks falling from the trees. It's imaginable that a squirrel, frightened by my approaching rear wheels, scurried for cover and landed with all of his weight on the sensor setting off the alarm, and that my test was, in fact, flawless, because in the parallel parking, stopping on a hill, and slow and steady, I never made another mistake. I even managed to keep my head together and come to a complete stop at the fake railroad and pedestrian crossings that rounded out the test.

The three people who came out to watch me do the test all congratulated me on my fine motor skills and said something like, "If all drivers in Taiwan had the skill that you have demonstrated by passing this extremely difficult test on the first try, then Taiwan would be a much safer place."

I couldn't agree more.

Ten Years On/In Taiwan

2009-12-17T21:57:00.000+08:00

When I left Indianapolis a solid DECADE ago today, it was my intention to stay here for two years, complete two contracts at a chain school, take as my second contract bonus the proposed return ticket to the States and Start Over.

Things don't always work out the way we plan them for one reason or another.

From time to time, though not as often as before, people stop me and ask why I decided to come to Taiwan in the first place, and I usually say 921. 9/21 was the day that a massive quake struck the central part of the island back in 1999, killing thousands, and sending hundreds of foreign English teachers looking for safer surroundings.

At the time, I was teaching ESL at IUPUI in downtown Indianapolis and eager for a change. After lunch, I was supervising students in the language lab when I saw a headline on CNN about the massive tremor. And the events that brought me to Taiwan began to unfold. No reason to bore you with them now.

If I'd had a few more days to ruminate over them, I'd have collected a basketful of changes that I've seen in the past ten years, but honestly, it wasn't until I was signing homework books this evening that the numbers 12 and 17 placed so close together struck me as somewhat familiar. When it dawned on me why, my respiratory system attempted to sigh and gasp at the same time and my chewing gum went up my nose.

Now that I've been here 5 times longer than initially anticipated, I figure that I'm about halfway through my time here, having started a family and a business in just such an order. There's a list floating around somewhere of signs that you've been in Taiwan much too long. One of them is "Your friends and relatives stop asking when you're planning to move back."

I have no idea if anyone has ever asked me that question, because I surely can't remember the last time it happened. Once I got over here, there was so much on this side of the world that I figured I owed it to myself to go see, and Taiwan was the sort of place where you could live simply and save up some cash and go out and see stuff.

A beautiful woman who's as good with numbers as she is with people has the power to change everything. Except I still throw my socks on the floor. And here I am. Still. In 2009.

China still hasn't invaded, so I guess I'll stay on living here for the next little bit.

Health Care In Taiwan

2009-08-19T14:32:00.002+08:00

I live in Taiwan where we had two kids delivered two years apart for about $12,000NT, or 400US. That included the delivery, and three days care for mother and child in a private room.

She then spent the rest of her month off from work (paid) in a maternity center where she was fed 6 meals a day and the babies had round-the-clock care. It was clean, quiet, and the food was excellent. This was a private hospital, though, and it cost a whopping $500US or thereabouts. To insure my family of four, around US$90 is deducted from my paycheck every month. We go to see the doctor whenever we need to, and see whichever doctor we choose. Our family physician will recommend a specialist if needed, or I can just turn up at the hospital and ask to see a specialist. Each doctor's visit costs between $3-$5. Trips to the emergency room are unavoidable, but with a fifteen-dollar price tag, it's not an agonizing decision to make whether to stay at home to see if the swelling will go down, or go ahead and get an X-ray to see if the pint of ice cream really did break my hand.

When my kids are sick, I don't have to wonder if it's serious enough to call the doctor's office and make an appointment for god-knows-when, instead, my wife and I take them by the doctor after work. Convenient, huh? We work evenings, but the office is open until 10 at night. What time does your doctor go home?

There are several pediatricians in our district and there are absolutely no restrictions on who we can go to see.
Do we have time for one more? My knee surgery with general anesthetic cost about twelve bucks American. The MRI had cost me four. I honestly cannot understand why so many of my countrymen are allowing themselves to get so worked up over this. There's a lot of vitriol being slung, including footage of a woman yelling "Heil Hitler" at someone who was trying to talk about the health care system in Israel. Whoa!

I have yet to hear a rational argument as to how the current system in place in the States can provide better health care than I am enjoying in Taiwan. "Death Panels" and "Socialism" are just scary sounding catch-phrases that have nothing to do with the current situation. Taiwan is not a socialist country and National Health Care would take America no further down the road to Communism than Eisenhower's Highway Projects, or NASA have. The Death Panel bureaucrats do exist, but instead of being government employees, they're the ones who work for insurance companies that decide that your grandmother's bone marrow transplant is unnecessary.

Walk into any small town convenience store in America and there next to the cash register is a jar with the picture of a young, happy, child, whose parents cannot afford to pay for his new kidney. When you argue against Health Care, you are arguing for a slow death for the children who stare up at you from the counter. Pro Life? Yes, Please.

Typhoon Morakot

2009-08-17T23:19:00.000+08:00

This time last week, we were a giddy bunch. At my day job, there were no classes because the students had been taken on a field trip to Miaoli for a BBQ. As the day wore on, it became more and more obvious that our presence would not be required the next day, and a holiday atmosphere began to well up within the teacher's room. We talked about typhoon days from the past, and near-typhoon days on which coworkers had gone ahead and gotten too drunk to stand up and teach anyway and not been able to come in to teach. This is the life of the English teacher in Taiwan.

Last Thursday, I said have a nice weekend to job #1 and went to job #2, and didn't get wet, so my typhoon was going well. By 1900hrs, they had cancelled school for Friday and I was happier than a pig in shit. Come on, a three day weekend in a country where those are in short supply. Who could blame me for being enthusiastic for the storm?

The wind came through my neighborhood on Friday morning. I know this because I had left an empty water bottle outside my window for the purpose of watering plants which are no longer there. When the wind picked up, that bottle rattled around the safety cage like a bingo ball in a retirement center on Tuesday night.

All day Friday we stayed inside and played with the kids. My neighbor came upstairs and helped me finish a few beers before noon. Typhoon Day is that kind of a holiday. We watched movies, and ate dumplings. There were plenty of provisions thanks to a last minute shopping spree at Carrefour that ended around 2330. We didn't turn on the news until later that night when I called my brother on Skype to talk about the slowly passing storm.

The news was all the same, I said. Just like a snowstorm in the American South, I said. Same obvious news stories on each channel. There's a typhoon. It's raining. People who walk outside in the rain get wet. People on scooters are getting blown over. It's windy. Here's a picture of some rain in Taipei and a sign that fell on a car. There were the obligatory pictures of people shopping.

I can't remember if it was CNN or Wunderground where I first saw the phrase "over two meters of rain." In less than two days. That means, if I was standing in a hole 2 meters deep, I would be in over my head. I think that's what that means, though it sounds like a story problem, and I shut down at the start of a story problem.

The problem with this story is that I had no idea what was going on while it was going on. Saturday morning, we had a below average breakfast at some new place on Chung Ming Rd and I remarked dryly at the number of leaves the staff was clearing from their treeless tiny front yard.

Then, I started noticing the stories pop up on Facebook. The first was of this hotel falling into a river.

The guy who works at the Starbucks where I occasionally go for decaf told me that he was about100m away from the building when it went down. He was sure there was no one inside at the time. Good news as earlier reports had said there were perhaps a hundred trapped inside. He noted that most of the people staying in the hotel that day were tourists from China. No Comment.

The video above was our first clue that the effluvia was hitting the air moving device in Southern Taiwan. Then there was this one of the water under the high speed rail in Tainan County.

But it really wasn't until Monday, I think, that the gravity of the situation began to flow into our heads. Monday when we were all going back to work. Monday when the party was over.

700 missing in one single village.

Rajen Nair, a writer based in India, emailed looking for some first-hand accounts of the storm, and as I could only tell him what happened inside my apartment, I enlisted the fine folks at Facebook who came up with Tony Coolidge who writes about Living in Taiwan at LivingInTaiwan. His story is in The Guardian here.

Nair followed up with this harrowing survivor's account

After the storm passed, and before fingers began to be pointed with any vigor, Michael Turton, the omniscient blogger of The View From Taiwan, collected some serious money in a very short period of time and headed south with a van packed full of cleaning supplies. His updates are a testament to the hard work of volunteers who flocked to Tainan and Pingtong in the days after the landslides. In those early days that the Central Government was refusing aid offered by both the US and Japan, I was glad that American expats in Central Taiwan were able to put together a few drops in the bucket.

Now, ten days after what is now to be known as "8-8" (which is Taiwanese Father's Day) the first American military aircraft in 30 years has landed in Taiwan delivering much-needed supplies. The international community is being allowed to respond. The international press is not being kind to the Mayor/President/Mr Ma who is just over one year into his term as head of Taiwan. His lame excuse five days after the worst typhoon related disaster in five decades was that he had "warned residents to evacuate and they just didn't." Echoes of the mess in New Orleans were that most residents of the villages that have been wiped off the map were the elderly and the very young.

Typhoon Morakot

2009-08-17T20:50:00.000+08:00

Funny, there was just a typhoon here yesterday, now all I see on the map is a tropical storm north of here in Hsinchu or someplace.

Typhoon Mordecai?

2009-08-17T20:49:00.000+08:00

I was just thinking, FINALLY an Oldish Testament name for a typhoon that would reflect God's wrath and the whole nine yards. But, I misheard. It's Morekat. No, it's not. Morakot, which is not, as my coworker informed me "Indonesian for Makeup Day," is dumping an assload of water on my route home. The word came out shortly after seven this evening that school and work were cancelled tomorrow for Taipei and Taichung.

What's All This Then

2009-08-02T14:26:00.003+08:00

Speaking as an errant blogger who has no time set aside to blog specifically--and how else could I speak after a postless July when so much has been happening in Taiwan?--I've got to say I don't have time to post right at the moment because the kids are in their bathing suits and screaming with freshly inflated colorful swim rings around their middles wondering when they're going to get to go to the pool as the temperature has soared to 39C (102F) on this Sunday afternoon. Who am I to hold them back?

School Trip

2009-06-17T00:44:00.004+08:00

Our summer vacation is just around the corner--something like ten days off. Or is it 7? There are a couple days of report card writing and planning in early July, but then we're off. Received word a couple of days ago that the teachers were going to be taking an annual trip together on the first Monday that we have off. Destination? The old dictator's mausoleum. Can I just have the cash? Isn't there a beer factory someplace that gives tours? I'm sure there is. I KNOW there is.

Brought this up at the meeting. Not the beer, the trip to Dictator Chiang's digs. It seems that part of the attraction at least is that it was closed down for the period of time when the old man's party was out of power, and now only a limited number of people can go in and look around. I can't imagine what the atmosphere there must be like. Are there old waishenren men selling sausages along the pathways, and would they play ignore the foreigner or charge me the "special price?"

I told them no. I wavered a few moments ago, thinking it might be interesting for the list. I mean, I've been to Kruschev's grave & could find a few more despots around Asia to add to the macabre list, I guess.

But it's so hot now, and if they rent a bus, I'm nervous that it might have an operable KTV machine and that my colleagues would misuse it for their catterwauling. No, I couldn't possibly go. Good. Settled. Thank you, Internets.

Bathing in Bottled Water?

2009-05-01T17:19:00.001+08:00

The word is that rat poison has been dumped into the water supply at Tunghai University here in Taichung. University officials reacted by putting a cork in it. The hot water dispensers are shut off, no running water in sinks. No water for the dairy cows. No word on flushing the toilets. Jeez, what a mess.

UPDATE: The water at Tunghai University (which is way on the other side of town from me if you're worried) tested positive for rat poison.

The reason it tested positive is that the faceless loser debter pictured above (Taiwan News) between the law enforcement guys in the snazzy vests, a Mr Yeh, hung a bag of rat poison in a water tank at the university. He did this on the same day that he wrote a letter to the president of the university asking for NT$5 million and 50 taels of gold (FUN FACT: a tael is about 50 grams) to be placed at several locations around the city for him to pick up. He called back the next day and told the president to inform the other universities in the area that they'd better pay up, too, or they'd get some more of the same.

Well How About That?

2009-01-20T00:50:00.000+08:00

I saw this front page article on the demise of piracy in the Taipei Times on Sunday while I was getting my haircut. There should have been a warning about getting your haircut while reading the article, because when I got to the quote from Sean Spicer, a spokesman for the US Trade Representative's office in Washington, I nearly fell out of my chair and now have a very odd racing stripe that goes from behind one ear diagonally up around the back of my head up to the ...uhh...the place where there's less hair to cut. Here's the quote in it's glory:

“Taiwan was a haven for pirates. Today, it has strengthened its enforcement, strengthened its laws and demonstrated a commitment to becoming a haven for innovation and creativity,"

I can't wait to tell my students this after the holiday! This is just what we've all been waiting for! Goodbye rote memorization, hello critical thinking.

True enough, Taiwan used to be a place where you could buy movies on DVD while they were still playing in the theater. Movies which often featured the heads of audience members coming in late or standing up to take a phone call on the other side of the theater. You could buy them from seemingly unmanned stalls at the nightmarket. Haven't seen that in at least four years. I haven't been to the nightmarket in four years, either.

Enough is enough. All this talk of piracy and intellectual property has made me hungry for a nice schmitschmorrent.

Dirty Laundry

2009-01-20T00:29:00.000+08:00

I am much too stubborn and thick-headed to be living overseas. I should have known something was up after the first couple dozen run-ins with coworkers at a previous place of employment, but I have a head like a pig. Even when one of my Taiwanese friends fended off each of my "Why don't..." questions with "Taiwan's just like that," it never struck meto stop beating my head against a wall.

This may very well turn into another one of those whinging "Why aren't things more like the way they are back at home" posts. If that's not your bag, consider yourself warned.

Had lunch with my good friend Craig today and laid out for him the particulars that are paining me at the moment. Briefly, these are that I have a group of students that are in the highest level in the entire school system of a private school that currently has kindergarten through 9th grade classes. If the contents of the package matched the label, this would be fantastic. They are a good bunch of kids regardless. I've heard horror stories from my coworkers about hellions they have, and I feel blessed that my chief beef with my students is that one or two of them answer too many questions!

The ninth graders are approaching the Chinese New Year Break of their most stressful year of their academic careers. The holiday is a two-parter for me. I think I get ten days off, straight, then I have to come clock in for a week to teach three or four classes, before getting another couple days off before starting back right around Lincoln's birthday. I think it's 14 days off total--nothing to sneeze at. My ninth graders inform me that they get nine days off, then must come back to review for THE TEST.

Reviewing means taking practice test after practice test. They've been doing this since August for an entrance exam that is given in late-May this year. Their English classes have been cut back to make way for more review sessions. Enter the meat grinder, children.

But this is life. This is how things are. This is how things will always be and nothing I say or do is ever going to change anyone's mind about the wisdom of this system. I can stamp my little size 15 feet and pound my head until powdered rocks fall from my nose, but I'm never ever going to change anything.

But what would you be, if you didn't even try. You've GOT to try.

My kids yesterday were full of life in class. I told one particular boy to be quiet while I was out of the room testing, or I was going to make him sit with his desk facing the wall for the rest of the year--meaning until December 31st, 2009...four months after he was to begin high school. He had fun pretending to care about his work, and I had fun pretending to try to catch him not pretending hard enough.

Friday morning was a whole nuther ball game. We're doing "Life on the Mississippi," and I'm enjoying it quite a bit. A third of the class is ready for this, the other guys are floundering, but they try. Not Friday. I couldn't hear students reading over the sound of other students' snot faucets. My package of tissue ran out before eleven o'clock. Noses, I could hear. Voices, not so much.

Something was definitely wrong. I gently set down the Twain and promised not to go any further until they told me what was going on. One of them finally mumbled, "Teacher..." (She's a real battle-axe) The next word I managed to coax out was "homework." No one wanted to talk about it, but I dug in and waited. Turns out, about 22 of 26 students hadn't bothered to do their homework the night before, and the homeroom teacher was writing home to the parents about it. Yeah! Bitch! Naturally, I said, "What's the big deal? You guys NEVER do my homework." Not a one of them. Ever. In eighteen months. Of course, I didn't understand. The note was going in THE CORRESPONDANCE BOOK. Oh damnation! It's the equivalent of THE PERMANENT RECORD. If ever a group of students needed to be turned on to the Violent Femmes, it's this bunch. I gave them my specialty pep talk, which didn't fix anything, because I am foreign so I don't understand.

I used to not understand shit because I was too young. Then, I think I didn't understand because of my Y chromosome, which I still have. Now, everything I don't understand can be attributed to my place of birth: New Jersey.

Alright, to get back to the drama of English Classroom 4, after relaying the story of distress to a coworker, he told me that one of the kids in the class--who happens to be one of the brightest students I've met in Taiwan, and who, incidentally, had done her homework--spent the previous day's lunch hour being chewed out by the aforementioned ironclad homeroom teacher. The girl is at the top of the class in all of the classes that matter and often has her picture in the paper for passing this test or that. Academia briefly aside, she is also an accomplished swimmer and the only girl in school who knows the butterfly stroke. She didn't do so well on the practice test for the high school entrance exams which are five months off. Not doing so well means, the mercury didn't shoot out of the thing that measures how hot someone's score was. You would not believe the guilt trip that was laid on the poor girl. The whole school will lose face if you don't do better than that. You're going to let your parents down. You should be ashamed of yourself. And the klinker. Are you still practicing swimming on Saturday after school? QUIT IT.

The one opportunity this kid has to dive into the water and drown out the voices that are telling her what she must do is now being yanked away. All because of a test.

I'm sure that this is not all that is wrong with education in Taiwan, but it's the first thing to jump out at ya. For all of the faults of the American education system, I hope to the Flying Spaghetti Monster that my kids can escape into it by junior high.

The Frog March

2009-01-12T14:46:00.005+08:00

Yesterday was the second Wei-ya, or year-end party, I've been to with my current employer. It was everything that I expected it would be: loud, regimented, crowded, and with a short supply of libations. The invitation and map was mostly in Chinese, but I could read very clearly the times "11:10-11:40" --a little early for lunch, but I would be happy to look over such if it meant I could get back to my family early in the afternoon.

No, the fam didn't go with this time. Last year, we all went to an evening event and were seated directly in front of one of the speakers, making conversation at the table impossible. Then all the running around after the rugrats meant that I couldn't sit down at the table and sneak vodka into my juice from the flask a coworker had brought along.

All that was to be different this time. I went stag. I got in at about 11:30 and there was next to no one there. The whole thing didn't start until some time after noon. By that time, the fermented grape juice had been choked down, and most of the juice had been drunk twice. Someone at another table passed a beer to our table. That was 1.5 oz per person sitting there. Oh, except there were nine of us, rather than eight because someone refused to acknowledge the seating chart. So it was more like 1.33333333333333333333 something oz per. I won't factor in the Baptists.

The decision was made that someone should go to the 7-11 and buy some beer. Perhaps 12 or so. Perhaps someone with long legs who could get there and back quickly. And so I was chosen.

I rode the elevator down from the third floor with some colleagues of the boss, and stepped out into a sort of wedding procession. It was louder than hell on the first floor, and as I looked towards where that godawful music was coming from, I saw a man, maybe my age, maybe much older, being dragged out of the banquet hall by four big guys. He was in a fancy tux with lots of gold chains (because one's wedding is an auspicious event for which much gold must be borrowed/worn) and kid gloves. I stepped aside so as to let his entourage pass by, and then the lucky bride, five paces back, when the groom lifted his head up to me and said, "Hallooooo! How do you doooooooo? Today is my...my...my Wednesday!"

I nodded back and smiled, trying to remember the last time I'd had a such a Wednesday, and prounounced "gyong hee" in Taiwanese. My only phrase. It was, after all, his wedding day.

Gaza is Taiwan or Taiwan was Gaza

2008-12-30T13:08:00.003+08:00

I came across this on Haaretz the other day. The author compares the situation in Gaza today to that of Taiwan at the end of WWII when the communists and the KMT were fighting over who would control "China." When the dust settled, you had a large pool of young folks with nothing to do. In Taiwan, they learned how to make shoes, plastic baubles, bicycles, and then printed circuit board, which are shipped now to the rest of the world whether they choose to recognize the legitimacy of the government or not. In Gaza, there's no seaport because the Israeli government will not allow one to be built.

Dig this suggestion:

Gaza has no raw materials, but it does have the most valuable resource of the 21st century: a young, energetic population with free time. Just like Taiwan after the Chinese civil war. It is both necessary and possible to teach Gaza residents to test and develop software at competitive prices. High-tech exports require no physical shipping. You hit "send," and the file is on its way -

Good luck Gaza.

Beginning to Look a Lot Like Something

2008-12-24T14:06:00.002+08:00

China gave Taiwan a pair of pandas named Duan-Duan and Yuan-Yuan yesterday. It's just a goodwill gift because of the holiday season, naturally, but the names joined together mean "reunion." Not since when have I seen such subtlety in a holiday message. Crazy things are happening. Maybe none as crazy as Reuters not using Michael Turton's quote:

the pandas are the Olsen twins of reunification: cute, shallow, and high-maintenance.

The Pandas arrived in time for X'Mas, but won't be on display until Chinese New Year. Stay the HELL away from the Taipei Zoo at Chinese New Year. It's going to be a madhouse.

Speaking of madhouses, the school where I work had its Winter Carnival last weekend. I woke up the morning of, felt a little cold, and dressed with the calendar, not with the forecast. This bad habit of mine has resulted in more than one sweaty day with wool socks, four layers, gloves, and a scarf. Saturday was another manic day for the thermometer with the high getting up close to 70F. It was not a good day to be standing in the sun in heavy socks, long sleeves, heavy vest, and insanely stupid looking Dr Seuss hat. There are no pictures of me in the hat. I would not could not.

There were games to be played and night market food to be eaten. The students all came around and threw ping-pong balls at our X'mas tree hoping to win candy bars or lollipops. A splendid time was had by many. Being a bunch of foreign teachers in a booth set up between two booths staffed with gorgeous, young Taiwanese teachers did not hurt the mood one bit.

My wife came by with the kids at around 2:30 to have a go at some of the games and to see Santa's helper. Santa's helper was to be me as that had been the plan for about two months. And I was looking forward to wearing a disguise to talk to my kids and find out what they wanted for Christmas. Because I'm sure they would never guess that it was me, you know, being fat with a beard and a deep voice. Friday afternoon, less than 24 hours before the whole thing was to get underway, I was given the costume to try on. First time. The sleeves came a little beyond my elbows, and the legs of my pants were what one would need on a typhoon day. The belt buckle, placed where it belongs, left the other end of the belt lost and lonely at the three o'clock point on my hip. The fake boot calf cuffs were not big enough to go around my extremely muscular and --for a right jolly old elf--sexy legs. A substitute Santa was needed and found faster than you can say wardrobe malfunction. I suggested that the new guy, a Canadian, and geographically a much better choice as it seems, bring along a flask with some Early Times so that his breath could match the appearance of the costume which hadn't been washed since its last outing.

Poor guy. I'm glad he's still talking to me. From my post between the honeys, I watched him as he marched back and forth handing out Mentos from his sack. A dark swath of sweat began to appear on the back of the costume. I've never known Santa to be much of a mingler. I guess I always assumed he'd had phlebitis or something and just liked to sit down when talking to the youth of the world. About an hour or so into this, he'd had enough and struck for a folding chair and a tent. He wasn't doing as brisk a business as we were, but we were giving out Hershey's, 3 Musketeers, Milky Way, Snickers, M&M's and Dum-Dums.

He was provided with some toys to give out to the kids as well. This I found out when I got home that evening. Both of my kids went for their consultation, though Gretchen didn't want to climb on his lap as she's a two-year-old and didn't feel comfortable with weirdoes in red suits. That comes later. They got the thing and brought it home. LOVED it. I'm not going to say "only in Taiwan will you get this as a gift at a school carnival" but we got this as a gift at a school carnival in Taiwan. Given to my children, aged two and four, were two pacifiers stuffed with LED lights and with rainbow cord to wrap around their necks.

First, why does a four-year-old need a pacifier? Why does a pacifier need to have colorful flashing lights? Who in their right mind would design a pacifier with a cord meant to be worn around the neck? Imagine the lawsuits in America if these ever hit the market.

It was stunning. True enough, it's fun to turn off the lights and swing the thing around in the dark and watch the flashing lights, but neither of my kids are ready for the Pink Floyd laser light show. I just can't figure it out.

Now, to contrast my story that winds up with me looking a gift horse in the oddly designed mouth, let me tell you about my office-mate's deal this year.

He decided a few weeks ago that on Christmas Day, his classes would participate in a gift exchange. It's a good idea to lay down some ground rules here. Last year, it didn't work out so well between the elementary school and the junior high. Imagine you prepare a battery operated computer game for the exchange and what you get back is a cellophane bag with a pencil and an eraser in it. I think that's called a trade imbalance. So, my coworker set price limits, thinking that this would keep things even.

Not so fast. A couple days after he set down the rules, the gifts started coming in. One of the first was an iPod Shuffle--a little more than the 15 dollar ceiling set by the teacher. We've been talking about this for a couple weeks now. How is this kid going to feel when he gets a pencil box or something in exchange for an iPod shuffle. I suggested that he be asked to take it back and get something cheaper. The student's response has been, it doesn't matter, my mom paid for it, I don't care. We're dumbfounded by this. Is it arrogance, is it apathy? What is wrong with this kid?

Well, today we find out. I never knew who it was before, but it's a kid that I'd had about five years ago at a previous job when he was just a beginner. Bright kid. His mom is really nice as well. This information just made the whole situation all the more confusing. But there is an explanation that throws on a whole new light. His mom won 10,000 NT in the lottery a few weeks ago and she gave the money to her son. He feels that he didn't do anything to earn the money and it's in his pocket only by the good grace of fortune. He wanted to share this with his classmates and the gift exchange gave him the perfect outlet to do so.

So this kid, named Charles, is offering up a lesson for his classmates on giving without expecting anything in return. I wonder if anyone in Beijing reads this blog. The difference between Charles' iPod and their Renunion Pandas seems to be as black and white.

Democrats Abroad Organizational Meeting, Taiwan

2008-12-17T12:42:00.001+08:00

Any American citizens interested in joining Democrats Abroad in Taiwan is welcome to attend the meeting in Taipei January 17th. BUT you must first register at the Democrats Abroad website.

From the Facebook Page:

Organize! Run for leadership positions! Vote!

DA Taiwan is going to hold an annual general meeting on January 17th, 2009 from 2 p.m. to about 5 p.m. in Taipei to elect board members and to take the formal steps necessary to upgrade our DA Taiwan country committee to being a full "voting" committee. The event will be at Famous Larry's Pizza, Yanji St, Lane 137, No. 2 (台北市延吉街137巷2號), Ph: 2771-1032.

We finally have the membership numbers and a lot of energy, and now is the perfect time to hold elections and follow the necessary steps to ensure we have DA Taiwan back in full swing again! We can share information about what we've been doing and definitely want to hear back from you!

Candidates Needed! We will need candidates for director and supervisor positions. The chair and vice-chair positions must be of the opposite gender under Democratic Party rules, and so we do hope we can get a good, balanced mix of candidates. Let us know ASAP if your interested in running, so that we can start putting together ballot information.

Not in Taipei? If you are not in Taipei but want to run for the board, keep in mind that modern telecommunications can help ensure your active involvement. If getting to the meeting is geographically difficult, we will also try to ensure your vote is counted via proxy voting.

Other Opportunities! In addition to the formal elected positions, there is a lot of room for you to get involved as a committee member on one of the standing or ad-hoc committees to be established. There are so many geographic and demographic reasons why you can be an enormous help in reaching American voters living in Taiwan!

More information will be distributed soon on the venue location, procedures, draft bylaws and other formalities.

You must be an American citizen over 18 to join and participate. In addition to replying to this invite, you MUST also register with Democrats Abroad at www.democratsabroad.org, do it today!

Mr Hu, Do You Ever Read My Blog?

2008-12-15T13:06:00.000+08:00

Hi Mr Mayor,

We don't talk much because I have no idea where your office is. I think you've done a lot to make Taichung beautiful and classier. There's the baseball stadium, the new ampitheater, the opera house that's gonna get built sometime, the new city hall down the street from my house. I hear that work on the MRT is to begin next year? Is this so? Awesome. Keep up the good work.

There's something I've been meaning to ask, though. You've started well with the bike paths across town. Very good for recreational biking. But I know you like to think big. And Bigger. Check out this video from YouTube.

The former parks and recreation director from Bogota, Colombia shares his experiences with Ciclovia, car free Sundays in his city. They now have over 75 miles of streets closed to cars one day every week to promote community interaction, health, and to decrease the amount of CO2 expelled into the atmosphere. It's Fantastic!

The Taichung Metropolitan Park up on the hill is very nice. I like what you've done with the place. But how many people are riding their bicycles up the hill to get there? The roads are too dangerous. Too many taxis, too many blue trucks. Let's kick them off at least some of the roads for one Sunday a month and see how we like it. After 6 months, maybe we can expand to twice a month. Who knows, by the time you leave office, you might be able to enjoy riding your bike on the streets with fellow Taichungers one Sunday a month.

Don't Know Why I Do The Things I Do

2008-12-06T23:38:00.003+08:00

This scene is played out every day somewhere in Taiwan, but thankfully not so often in front of me. A man pulls his wife from the car by a fistful of hair while the other hand strikes at her with a cell phone, a shoe, a sandwich. A crowd gathers. The faces say, "Oh, what a shame," and "such a loss of face."

The faces with eyes that see are attached to heads with skulls which protect brains which command limbs to move and speech to come forth, but such impassive faces behave as if the last 30 minutes of a Steven Segal movie on AXN are hindering their internal debate on whether to have noodles or fried rice take out for dinner.

I'm writing this as an observation of how things are NOW in TAIWAN with a dose of cultural arrogance that in MY country on the side of the planet where I was born, this sort of thing would not stand. If I close my eyes real tight, I believe that at some point in my upbringing, we looked out for one another and I'm not just remembering the Hallmark version of existence.

I've lived here for nine years this month and just as I know that I will always be an outsider, I see myself as a passive observer of events and blog sporadically as a way of venting my frustrations with culture shock. The blogosphere is a pillow into which I scream. I don't have a thing, it's just, you know.... Up to this point, when confronted with the spectacle of public domestic violence, I've been a disgusted observer but have contented myself in dilluting the disgust with snark.

A few weeks back, there was an incident at the doctor's office. A ten year old girl didn't want to have a shot--afraid of needles, just like my boy. The mother, as we all sat and watched, grabbed the girl by the hair and beat her senseless with the other hand, at one point pounding the girl's head into the wall.

Shocked that all of this was going on within three meters of the doctor (note to self, look up Hippocratic Oath + Taiwan) and while all of his support staff and shocked patients looked on, I did nothing but hold my kids tight and tell them that I loved them both very much but not all boys and girls have someone to look out for them. I also asked how to say, "For the sake of your daughter, I hope you get breast cancer," but to her credit, my wife wouldn't translate, telling me it was the wrong thing to say. I'll admit to thinking it over and again to myself for a few minutes.

What burns me though, is that in these public situations when somone is obviously in need of assistance and there are human beings within reach of offering such, it doesn't happen. As closely packed as we are on this island, we insulate ourselves and refuse to reach out to make contact with a stranger who could benefit from it.

And here's me, the hyperjudgemental Westerner damning those rubberneckers left and right without lifting a finger on my own.

Each time I pound my palm with my fist and jab the air with my forefinger, declaring that this would NEVER be accepted in my country, by Jah, I am patiently reminded that we're NOT in America and people here just don't care because they don't.

Perhaps one doesn't need to look too far to see reasons to fear helping strangers. The White Terror that gripped the island for decades is not a far-distant memory for many people who recall a time when helping the wrong person could ruin your life. Plus, there are so many gangsters running around unfettered that helping someone who is getting their ass kicked just might result in you getting your own ass kicked.

Anyway, this evening, the dog and I were out for a walk, heading to the laundry. As we came around a corner, we noticed a crowd gathered near a car that was parked sickly askew. A man whose grip had found the scalp of his spouse in losing himself was in teh middle of a ring of people who told me that nothing was wrong when I asked. "That's his wife," said a guy about my age, pointing at a woman whose face I never saw, but who cried out with anguish at each tug as her husband tried to pull her up the stairs into the building.

A quick check was enough to convince me that these were not gangsters roughing up a hooker, but a case of domestic violence in which one or both of the parties involved were not communicating very well at the moment. Leica, the wonder beagle went to work and licked the face of the woman, giving me my introduction. I pulled the man up by the shoulders and placed myself between him and his target. He looked to be about 60 years old and wore a mask such as is common for people to wear on cold or heavily polluted days when they're riding their scooters.

I had at least a 30kg advantage over the guy who never once made eye contact with me, his eyes overflowing with rage. His shoulders were very tense and he tried to get around me to continue what he'd been doing before some idiot interrupted him. He was shouting in Taiwanese so I have no clue what was going on, but after shouting "Hare Krishna" at him a few times, I kept reassuring him that I wasn't going to hurt him and that he just needed to breathe. I told him he was a man and that real men don't hit women. Whatever was going on in his family obviously none of my business and I didn't want to hear. At some point, I caught a glimpse of his wife running down the street and around the corner out of sight. I patted him on the back and tried to let him know that everything was going to be ok and it was ok to calm down. He eventually did and went inside.

I'm not sharing this for any kind of recognition of my skill as a peacekeeper. Immediately after the disturbance, I was shaking like ... uhhh...like one of those electric football games from the '70's...but I was asking myself why I had gotten involved this time. I didn't know any of the people involved; it was not really even my neighborhood. After every other time that I see this sort of thing happen, I feel like such a coward for not doing anything at all, and I recognize that I did this for the purely selfish reason that I did not want to look at myself in the mirror again tomorrow knowing that I could have done something but hadn't.

I had to explain to Maggie why I was so late coming back from the walk and I told her what had transpired. She sort of rolled her eyes and said, a Taiwanese man would never do that. "But Why Not?" I continue to ask. I want other people to see me in super hero mode and think to themselves that they can do it too. Again, Maggie sadly shook her head, "It's because you're a foreigner," she said. Taiwanese men won't stand up in such situations.

It may be the messianic complex that "all" foreigners have, it could be adrenaline, it could be wild-eyed idealism...or it could be the wine...but kiss my ass. If it were my sister, mother, wife, daughter, son, getting beaten, I hope to hell that if weren't there, someone would have the balls to stand up and do what's right!

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

To report cases of domestic abuse in Taiwan, please phone 113.
The domestic violence help line provides 24 hour emergency assistance in cases of domestic abuse and legal and psychological services for injured parties.

Live Nude Girls!

2008-12-04T16:04:00.003+08:00

No, not really, but ChinaSmack shows that the Emperor may not be wearing all that much in the line of clothes. Oh, sorry, not an emperor. What is the term for the supreme authority of a political unit having an extensive territory or comprising a number of territories or nations? Oh right. An emperor.

Power. You can smell it over there. It smells like this guy. According to a friend who has been living near Shenzhen, due to this posting, the government official no longer has a job. Yep, they're cleaning house. Which reminds me, I still haven't seen Kung Fu Hustle or Shaolin Soccer. I wonder where I could find these movies.

Oh, maybe in China. Anyway. ChinaSmack. What a great site. Coming soon to an island under me?

:-) Conjunction

2008-12-02T09:19:00.004+08:00

Last Friday, I read that there was to be some sort of planetary boogie woogie on Monday evening involving Jupiter, Venus, and the Moon. I've been trying to keep up with what planets can be seen in the sky in case there are clear skies in the evening, which isn't very often. Yesterday was a gorgeous day, however.

I left the junior high school headed for a class at a bike factory up the road at about 5:15 yesterday and looked up to see the planets lined up about two-o'clock-high in the sky to the West. I nearly broke my neck, so I pulled over to have a gawk or two, then figured I ought to get on to class.

At the next red light, I reached out to the person next to me and tapped her on the throttle hand. I smiled and pointed to the sky. She couldn't see me smile, of course, because of my helmet, and she looked at everything below tree level to figure out what the hell the weird foreigner was gesturing at.

I could see horror in her eyes; will this ape try to speak English to me? What horrible thing is he going to do to me? Her daughter on the back was, thankfully, more level headed, and saw what I was pointing at. She smiled and gave me a thumbs up.

After class, I got out and saw that the group were still together and above the horizon, so I sped home and ran up to the roof to see if I could get anything halfway decent, and here's what it was. Close enough for jazz, I say. The crane in the foreground is atop a new high rise apartment building across Wenshin Rd from our place.

From what I've read, the position of the planets and moon switched by the time this was visible in the States, so it looked more like a :-( Most likely because of the recession.

***********30 MINUTES OF FAMOUS UPDATE********************

The above picture was picked up by the Wonkette last week. Thanks to Mr Turton for the heads up.

Smackdowngate

2008-10-22T08:31:00.003+08:00

Went home yesterday and got a chance to look at some of the footage of the "attack" in Tainan yesterday. My first hint that something was amiss (apart from an email from the Maddog) was that the folks at TVBS News were talking about the alleged melee much more than they were showing any footage of it, and the footage that I did see there, showed a crowd of people shouting at the ARATS guy, then cut to him lying on the ground. "See, see? He was PUSHED!" Ummm....hang on.

Another video on a different station shows the old guy walking backwards, the only hand on him that seems to be holding him up is the only one near him, and he suddenly goes down as if he tripped over a root.

See for yourself at the BBC

In this AP Footage from YouTube, it looks a little like he was pushed. . . but the hand appears to belong to his minder.

All headlines across the Internets suggest differently. The BBC says "Taiwanese Attack Chinese Envoy." The New York Times headline at least isn't as sensational, "Taiwan: Chinese Official Jostled" The article does say he was knocked to the ground. "Chinese Envoy Attacked in Taiwanese Temple" is how they put it at the Financial Times. Seems a bit odd, though, as it was at the Confucius Temple in Tainan where the kerfuffle occurred. I know several people who would adamantly claim that there is absolutely nothing Taiwanese about a Confucius Temple.

You know, in my manic search through the headlines, I don't see anything that says "Chinese Envoy Trips and Falls in Tainan." I'm not surprised. Who wants to buy a newspaper with a headline about an old person falling?

The Taipei Times article "ARATS Man Jostled, Jeered at in Tainan" does state that it's not clear if he pushed or fell.

Yesterday I wrote that the pushing down of old men is not condoned by the anyone on the staff of B@Taiwan. I paused to think, though, that if Dick Cheney were to be shoved by a Taiwanese protester I would have no problem with it. The jostling, I think, needs to be put into a context that means something to me for me to condone it. My own views on Taiwanese Independence are somewhat wishy-washy at the moment, though I hope all who know me understand that I have an affection for freedom and democracy. Is it okay to knock down someone with whom you have a political disagreement? Maybe.

What? The Guy Smelled ARATS!

2008-10-21T11:14:00.005+08:00

Here's a refreshing article from this morning's Taipei Times. Zhang Mingqing, the vice-chairman for Beijing's Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Straits (ARATS) was giving a speech in Tainan yesterday when the stage was rushed and an ABC (CORRECTION: ABT--not Chinese, Taiwanese--oops) held up a sign that said “Taiwan is independent [sic], not a part of China,” [sic?--oic, he misspelled independent on the sign in the picture HA silly protestor]

The protester, a Mr Chang, formerly of the US of A is in Taiwan learning Taiwanese and doing a bit of graduate work down there in Tainan.

The ARATS guy's appearances have all been canceled as the protesters have all promised to follow him wherever he went and do guerilla street theater about poison milk, or carry huge puppets of Jackie Chan and Yao Ming or whatever it is that protesters do at protests.

The quote missing from the article is when Zhang said to the young man with the sign "Aren't you lucky to be in a country where you have the freedom to state your opinion in public without the fear of being stuffed into a canvas bag and taken to one of our reducation camps?" And then the whole crowd started chanting "USA! USA! USA!" Funny place, Taiwan.

**ESCALATION**--Ummm.....ok, protesting against the ARATS guy who personally put PCP or Communist Cocaine in the babies' powdered milk is one thing. Holding up signs in front of him on stage to show your displeasure...sure, why not? Getting your Pro-Independence POV on the TV is AOK. But, DUDE! Knocking the old man down at the Confucious Temple in Tainan? That's about as honorable as a legislative session in Taipei.

We @ B@Taiwan do not endorse knocking down old men from the Mainland or the Heartland. C'mon, he's not Reginald Denny, for Chrissakes!

Do It

2008-10-03T22:01:00.001+08:00

Why Do I Have a Job?

2008-09-30T20:14:00.003+08:00

I risked accusations of perversion by taking this snap in the midst of traffic. I chased the girl through 8 traffic lights hoping one of them would be red and that she wouldn't be a lawbreaker. She was not, to say the least, Physically Hard To Watch, though it may be physically hard to see what the rest of the shirt says. So I'll tell ya:

EVER WANTED TO BE
AT THE WHEEL
OF A 450 FOOTER

QUIT TO LOSE

No, I have no idea what this is all about. But if you think this is the end of my cornfusion today, you are mist achin.

At class tonight, I was given a wrapper with a horrid collection of crackers inside. They were "cheddar flavor" atrocities from a Philippine company called CTC House. Here's what's on their wrapper.

SUCH OF THESE SERIAL NICE CAKES OF CTC DIFFERENT DELICIOUS TASTES SHALL MEET YOUR APPETITE, THE KIND OR PIECE EACH IS FULL OF AROMA & FINESS, WELCOME TO TASTE IT & COMPARE IT WITH THE OTHERS, ALL OF THE CAKE ARE UNDER A STRICT QUALITY CONTROL FOR SERVING YOUR TASTE, KINDLY GIVE US YOUR ADVICE BY CONSUMER TELELINEOR BY MAIL FOR OUR BETTERMENT, THANKS.

And one from the scooters:

This is a New Concept for creative your life...Duke 125

It's not John 3:16, but it'll do. I hope to see someone wearing a rainbow wig and holding up a sign that reads "Duke 125" as the Cubs lay waste to the Dodgers tomorrow!

The Winds of Change

2008-09-28T19:49:00.008+08:00

I've never given money to a political campaign except for the time that I bought a George H. W. Bush T-shirt in high school for the purpose of spray painting rude things on it. That changed yesterday. I paid a bit more than I did for the shirt, and I got a tiny little button to show for it, but I also got to sit in a packed Mexican Restaurant (El Gallo in Tianmu...just opened last week and already awesome!) with people who not only think that Sarah Palin is as hilarious as she is horrifying, but that our guy represents a breath of much needed fresh air.

I took my son to see more foreigners than he has ever seen in his life. The Tianmu neighborhood in Taipei is nothing at all like anyplace in Taichung. You can't swing a cat without hitting a cracker. There were white folks, black folks, Asian folks, Latino folks, all hanging out together clapping and laughing and reminscing. Frank thought it was a little boring until the snacks arrived, though he enjoyed climbing under the table and playing with his dad's new friends.

The headlining speaker was Terry MacMillan. Not that one, but not at all disappointing. She's the field director for the campaign in East Asia, currently living in Japan, and was kind enough to come to Taiwan on the eve of the year's largest typhoon to add her enthusiasm to an event that was brimming with it. She made quite a splash.

The weather was beautiful as we set out from Taichung. Such beautiful blue skies are such a rare sight in Taichung that it's worth taking note of and oohing and ahhing. The wisps of what clouds there were spread themselves thinly across the sky in hopes perhaps for maximum coverage, but they failed spectacularly and instead produced an effect not at all unlike the Sydney Opera House.

We had just met a videographer with the Discovery Channel in Taiwan to shoot footage for a special on natural disasters. He was headed down to Kaoshuing, and hoped to find a place to stay in Taidong to get the footage he was looking for, though it was likely that he'd be getting mostly the storm's aftermath as it was forecast to hit at nighttime. As our train pulled out of Taichung HSR station headed north, we looked at the sky and couldn't help feeling that the poor guy had wasted his trip. How could there be a wallop-packing storm lurking off the East Coast with a sky as pleasant as this?
Living in the cement forests of Taichung, it's often easy to forget how beautiful Taiwan is. A ride on the rails is the quickest way to lift the shade. Zipping along at typhoon wind gust speed we passed rice paddies, taro fields, plots of pineapples, little villages, and then more hillsides with tufts of unruly bamboo sticking up here and there. From my seat on the train, twentysome meters above the ground, I couldn't see any beer cans, empty or otherwise, or discarded blue flip-flops, or 7-11 bags.

Nothing is permanent except change, so when we came out of one of the tunnels below Hsinchu we shouldn't have been all that shocked to see the dark and forboding grey clouds of Jangmi flying overhead like an Imperial Star Cruiser (seriously, check out this video...why is the liberal media hiding this???) By the time we got to the Zhishan MRT station, there was a mist that hung in the air. The storm had, at some point,taken a turn to the north and was not expected to hit near Kaoshuing, but more likely at Yilan, a little east of Taipei.

When Frank and I went out in search of El Gallo, it was sprinkling, and the weather didn't deteriorate for the trip back to our hotel, but a few hours later the wind picked up and whipped rain against the windows. At breakfast the next morning, water ran down the windows of the hotel breakfast nook--housed in a leaking illegal structure on the eighth floor--like in the rinse cycle at a car wash.

Our plans for a Sunday in Tamshui were washed out and we had to hot foot it over to the train station to get a seat on a train before the system was closed at three in the afternoon. The MRT was running at half speed, which perhaps meant a train every 12 minutes or so. The HSR started south at great guns, but somewhere in Hsinchu County we got hit with a wind gust and the train immediately slowed down, followed by announcements in Chinese, English, and Taiwanese that the train would be slowing down due to the wind.

The tall stands of bamboo that I had seen on the way up bent gracefully under the sustained high winds until they looked like their tops had been tied to tent stakes higher up the mountainside and gusts of wind raced each other across rice fields as if the crop was radio controlled.

Safe home in Taichung,we watched as signs and awnings around the neighborhood took leave of their moorings and hung awkwardly in front of the businesses they represent. Up and down the street were the sounds of metal against metal. On the teevee were images of snips of women being blown down the street, knocked over, and dragged a few more feet. Homes are flooded, people on scooters falling over, and bridges still standing.

School is cancelled on Monday. Another long weekend thanks to Dame Nature.Thank you, Baby.

Democrats Abroad--Fund Raiser in Taipei This Saturday

2008-09-23T20:19:00.003+08:00

Attention all you good Democrats that stumble upon this page. There's an Obama fundraiser at El Gallo in Taipei on this Saturday. For only 2500NT you can eat Mexican food and hobnob with fellow Taiwan expat Dems. A chance like this doesn't come around so often around here.

Here's the 411:

1. Friends of Obama Fundraiser in Tianmu at the new El Gallo restaurant!

The election is very close and even here in Taiwan, we can help make a difference. Bring your friends and family to El Gallo at No. 42, Chung Shan N. Road, Sec. 7 for dinner on Saturday, September 27 from 7 to 9 pm to hear from the Obama Campaign and celebrate the upcoming election! Please RSVP to Amy Cooper at acooper@pstrategies.com or call 0988062292 .

Giving levels -

Underwriter - $25,000 NT per couple ($800US)
Hosts - $15,000 NT per couple ($500US)
Benefactor - $7,500 NT per couple ($250US)
Ticket price - $2,500 NT per person ($80US)

Typhoon Sinlaku

2008-09-14T00:33:00.004+08:00

Just in case you're checking in from Stateside, or wherever, this typhoon is one long lasting lad. There was a PTA at school on Friday night, which we all hoped would be canned because of the weather. The wind was pretty wicked all afternoon, but not much rain until after about 9 on Friday night. Schools were closed on Saturday, so I got to sleep until 7 when my alarm went off. Howling wind off and on all day.
Now it's almost 0100 Sunday morning, and the wind is picking up again. I looked at the satellite picture and am pretty surprised to see that the storm doesn't seem to have moved too much. We didn't get as much rain yesterday as some parts just north of here. Looks like 50mm here vs over 300 up north.
Everyone is safe and dry in my house.

UPDATE: Sunday morning. There's a little water on the kitchen floor where it came in from the balcony. The typhoon is still parked over Taiwan. Not much rain at the moment, but the wind woke me up this morning. This effects my breakfast plans, but I'm not bitter.

REUPDATED: Sunday evening now. The radar picture looks the same now as it did yesterday. We've had rain off and on all day today, but it's rain of the perpendicular rather than horizontal variety. There have been moments of wind here and there, but mostly a heavy drizzle. No, that's not right. How does the Central Weather Bureau put it? Heavy Rainfall? Check. Extremely Heavy Rainfall? Yep. Torrential Rainfall? Oh yeah. Extremely Torrential Rainfall! Oh My God YES! YES! YES! That's what we've had today. Extremely Torrential Rainfall. The light purple on the precipitation map means 300+mm today in the mountains above Taichung. Took a trip to go retrieve my raincoat this evening, and saw water up to the bottom of the bridge in the canal. Not only that, I saw a couple cram schools open for business with roomsful of kids getting their learn on. On a typhoon day. On Full Moon Festival.

Did You Know?

2008-08-15T11:14:00.003+08:00

There's this guy named Michael Phelps, have you heard of him? Apparently he's a pretty good swimmer, but I wouldn't know because I'M FOLLOWING THE FREAKING OLYMPICS IN CHINESE TAIPEI! Bloody hell. They've been replaying Chinese Taipei's loss to Japan on two channels all morning, and there loss to Hong Kong in ping pong on another channel. Just learned from CNN that Future Wheaties Cover Boy Michael Phelps just won his sixth gold medal of the games, and 12th overall.

Wait...Hong Kong has their own Olympic team? Well, that's good news. When Mr Ma gives Taiwan back to China, maybe Taiwan's athletes can finally compete under their own name.

The baseball controversy at the moment involves the scheduling for the Chinese Taipei team, who lost to Japan last night, and is now playing the Mainland team this morning. This is a problem because the Chinese will be well rested, and the CT team want an insurance excuse for doing poorly. Nothing Nothing in the top of the 4th.

None of this changes the fact that the Atlanta Braves suck.

Finally

2008-08-12T10:54:00.004+08:00

Well, after all that bitching, I finally found something that resembles "coverage." Channel 9 here is showing a repeat of the athletes walking into the stadium in Beijing. And now we're in a commerical in the middle of the US contingent. It's such a coincidence that none of the people who run any of the TV stations in Taiwan come from families where their mother can remember exactly who their father is.

Back from the commercial break and here's China! Nice outfit. Yellow Apparel. I can't figure out why there is a mariachi band playing them in. The Chinese leaders look a bit drab.

Interesting. The 8 women carried the Olympic flag all the way around the track, and then handed it over to the goose stepping military guys to raise it. I'm surprised not to have read anything about this before. I don't think I've seen soldiers involved in the flag raising before. I mean, they were good marchers and everything, but...well, this will surely be an Olympics full of firsts.

There is live archery on Channel 7 at the moment. Lots of empty seats. That's a shame.

Back to the opening ceremony. The fireworks were by far the most impressive I've ever seen. The torch lighting was pretty cool as well,

Testing My Meddle

2008-08-09T11:36:00.004+08:00

Just for a couple weeks, actually. The NBC Olympics site is only available to people within the US, which means that I may be stuck working myself into an imaginary frenzy watching the Chinese Taipei badminton team. Does anyone know of a work around or another source for sports coverage.

Hmmm...I suppose I could try ESPN. CNN just isn't cutting it.

Update. 8/10--Broadcast teevee shows that Canada and Taiwan are tied at two apiece in the top of the third. But I've got a sneaking suspicion that this isn't the Big O, as I don't see anything that says "Beijing" behind home plate, and the graphics say something about NBAF, but it's way too fast for me to read what the hell it's all about. Let's just assume that this isn't Olympic coverage on channel 70 (Taichung Cable).

OH! OH! Channel 55 is showing the Chinese Taipei someone or other (update Baseball team) arriving in an airport somewhere. Autographing a baseball as large as my daughter's head. Huh. That sure looked like Beijing to me. This is the sort of confusion that has plagued me for almost nine frigging years.

According to Salon, folks back home are having difficulty seeing the games live ("Show the Games Live") The article led me to Silcon Allley Insider with info on where to watch the games online. From there I went to wwiTV.com and ran into one of those things that the runners try to jump over. I don't know what they're called because I can't see the games in English yet. To get CCTV from China, you need to download a plugin, but none exists for Firefox for MacOS. So, I opened Safari. A trip back to the same site, and they suggest downloading the Windows Media Viewer for Mac. Normally, I would say "Why" but today, the answer is simply, "beach volleyball." Pig.

Now, I'm another step closer. I downloaded a free trial of Flip4Mac, a WMV application.

You Tube. Blocked. But here's a work around. Neat. It got me into the Beijing2008 Channel, but all the videos say no longer available. I wonder if this is because I'm living in a country that doesn't want to reunify with China. I can get the channel in Firefox and in Safari, but it says the video is no longer available.

I'm going to have an ice cream bar and think about things for a minute.

Typhoon Fun Wang

2008-07-27T19:44:00.004+08:00

Last year was Typhoon Long Wang, this year Fun Wang. Next year Typhoon Wang Dang Sweet PoonTang. This is s dream for anyone whose sense of humor is stuck in 7th grade.

The storm hasn't hit yet, but the winds outside my apartment are beginning to pick up. Yesterday the man on the teevee said that the storm wasn't going to be that big at all. This morning I think someone said it was going to be a super typhoon. And by "someone" I might as well just say it was my wife reporting what she heard on her favorite partisan news station (and you know how those bastards lie).

It's looking like we're going to have our second typhoon day in three weeks--kind of cool in that we get long weekends, but I kind of prefer having my typhoons on Friday so the length of the weekend is apparent from the onset. Still, a surprise day off is a surprise day off.

Update: Here's the storm's projected path. The dotted line goes right through Taichung. Fortunately there's a couple heaps of mountains between where it is now and where I am now, so it's likely that the storm will get a lot weaker by the time it get here.

Taichung City schools and businesses are closed tomorrow anyway, just in case.

July 28, 0930--The Yahoo says the storm made landfall shortly after daybreak. In Taichung now, there is a mist of rain, if any. No one has to work today (except for the college kids manning the 7-11's) so there is no traffic on the street. It's quiet.

Not so quiet on the East Coast, where fire trucks are driving through villages urging residents to evacuate ahead of floodwaters. There are already crews with rubber rafts in some places floating around ostensibly rescuing people.

The rain is audible now, but nothing worth staying home for. I'm sure there's more to come.

BEST NEWS EVAR!

2008-07-25T12:19:00.005+08:00

Good news from the Taiwan Baseball Blog is that God's team, the Chicago Cubs, have signed a local boy. The news is that the kids fastball isn't so fast and his control is "so-so" in localspeak. So, does this mean an end to the dominance of Wang Chien-ming and the bastard New York Yankees on Taiwan television? Doubtful, but...but, just wait til next year after the Cubs win the World Series in four straight. THEN we will have some Cubs baseball on Taiwan Teevee! Hope is alive.

UPDATE: Ok, according to the article, RHP Hsin-Hong Tsai from Chiayi County, is actually the THIRD Taiwanese dude to get picked by the team that is currently leading the NL Central Division. THREE! The Yankees have ONE! And he's probably out for the rest of the season. So, write letters to your cable operators (you know how well this works) and tell them to drop the loser Yankees and latch on to the boys in blue. Call early, call often!

Local Crooks (unelected)

2008-07-24T12:25:00.003+08:00

Here's a classic: local contractor inks a big deal with the Taipei City Government to replace manhole covers in the Tianmu neighborhood (where all the lousy foreigners are in Taipei). Being a good businessman, the contractor looks for ways to cut costs, and replaces the steel manhole covers with wooden circles covered in tar.

C'mon! What's the worst that could happen? How about a simile, anyone? Yes, Taipei City Councilor Wang Chih-ping (汪志冰) what do you have?

“Roads with wooden manhole covers are like soft sandwiches. Who will be held responsible if cars or pedestrians fall into the manholes?”

I wonder which soft sandwiches he's talking about. I like the duck ones.

(Contractor used wooden manhole covers, city says, Taipei Times)

Not Clear on the Concept?

2008-07-24T10:15:00.003+08:00

I haven't had the time or the inclination to stop in at this new McDonald's near the intersection of Wenshin Rd and Nantun Rd. in Taichung, but the juxtaposition of the golden arches with the three letters is quickly piquing my curiosity.

McHot tubs ? French Fried Manicure? Big Macsage? Is this part of Mickey D's new healthy image? Do they have these in the States?

I mean is the idea that you can go in for your McFried stuff and then after lunch someone will unclog your pores or arteries? Anyone?

Typhoon Kalamegi

2008-07-18T08:52:00.003+08:00

It was a little shocking to see a wake in the courtyard this morning. There is pretty severe flooding all over the city. Up the street from our buxiban, a section of the road collapsed next to a construction project, and at least five cars were destroyed. On the teevee there are pictures of cars floating in the water collected in railway underpasses. School and work was canceled about seven this morning, and I got the call around eight that said my junior high would be following the policy. I've worked in schools before that didn't follow the policy, so it's always nice to be sure. Folks without kids can take the day to see Batman.

The man on the teevee says in Nantou County they've had 1000mm+ of rain. The city hasn't canceled jack today. Taichung has had a mere 504mm and is in a state. The rain has eased off since I got up at seven, but there have been some pretty strong gusts of wind in the last little bit.

And There They Go

2008-07-14T16:25:00.003+08:00

They came, they saw, they bought pineapple cakes, pork buns, and filthy Western Books.

The Taiwan News article knows how many came when they got here (753) and what they bought (stuff) and what they complained about at the airport (long lines... GMAFB) but they didn't have a head count on how many left at the end of their 8 or 10 day package tours.

A few days ago the Taipei Times reported that "each Chinese tourist in the Nanjing group on average has pumped in approximately NT$60,000 into Taiwan’s economy."

They also had a quote from another young lady who was miffed about something in the airport. Apparently someone's bags were too heavy:

“This is probably the worst airport I have ever seen!” a female passenger said. “Why do we have to weigh our luggage here and pay the overweight charge at the other side of the counter?”

Duhh! So we can pay the person who weighs the bags (and his assistant) as well as the person who takes the money (and his assistant). What, how do they do things in China?

Both stories ratted out someone noting that behind the cakes, and the food, and smutty romance novels, red coral was a hot seller. I hope it was the famous Taiwanese Plastic Red Coral.

UPDATE! Taiwan's population has grown by 3 and China's has fallen by a similar number. Or not, if "one remains at large" is as ominous as it sounds.

Here they are somewhere

2008-07-07T15:18:00.003+08:00

Well, between 653 to "over 750" tourists from the Mainland have had their first weekends in paradise with either polite discussions or not with Falungong supporters in Taipei. I'm guessing the final count on how many tourists turn up missing won't be complete for a couple weeks, as they are allowed to stay in the country for 8-10 days, according to the Taiwan News article "Chinese visitors given clean bill of health." The headline kind of conjures images of the physical examinations from the Ellis Island days.

Cooler heads have prevailed in Kaoshuing, as the mayor counseled area business owners to act "non-chalant, the Chinese are coming." Apparently, flying the PRC flag over your business is too over, and she advised folks to "act naturally." I think there are some who would argue the point that in going overboard, business owners were acting naturally.

Betel Nut Girls (God Bless Them) were requested to wear more conservative attire while the tourists were in town, lest someone get the wrong impression. So, they're cleaning up the toilets, but taking away the scantily clad broads. I'm not so sure this is an even trade.

The Reds Are Coming

2008-07-02T08:55:00.001+08:00

With the new KMT president now in place, the times they are a changin'. This weekend, the skies are open and will be filled with tourists coming from the Mainland to spend their hard-earned torture dollars on ... what can they buy in Taiwan that they can't buy in China now? Pirated CDs? Huh-uh. Counterfeit handbags? Nahh. Taiwanese hookers? Nope. What is the big draw?

The biggest draw for Chinese tourists is Taiwan’s conflict with China and the life of dictator Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石), Alishan, Sun Moon Lake and their people.

Thanks for clearing THAT up.

Government employees are working overtime to renovate the Japanese colonial airport in Taipei that will be servicing the visitors. Also, they're cleaning the toilets at tourist sites around the island.

Huh. Yeah, I've noticed they're a little skanky. Umm. So yeah, uhh, way to go putting your best face forward. I like this other quote from the article:

After half a century of separation, many Taiwanese have contradictory ideas about Chinese: They are eager to show off Taiwan’s democracy, wealth, culture and sophistication, but some worry that the Chinese are backward, rude and may bring diseases to their homeland.

AND "those Chinese" eat stinky tofu, spit on the streets, pee in the gutter, drive like maniacs, pollute their atmosphere, and they're probably after our women as well.

Taiwan School Tuff on Kidz!

2008-06-27T12:31:00.003+08:00

Let's hear it for the Humanistic Education Foundation of Taiwan! Bless their little hearts, they didn't get the memo that sez "Taiwan is just like that" when it came out. There's an article in Taipei Times today under the headline: Junior high school kids overworked, foundation warns.

Check out this gem from HEF president Shih Ying (史英):

Prolonged study hours have zero benefits on a student’s ability to learn.

It seems that over 80% of Taiwan's junior high school kids spend more than 45 hours a week in school. If my math is correct, that's 5 hours longer than a 40 hour workweek. HEF recommends the 888 daily plan (in addition to being my nickname, 888 is a number that stands for good luck...although my coworker has never heard this..there I go again makin' shit up.) The three 8's are 8 hours in class, 8 hours asleep, and 8 hours of leisure time, presumably spent in front of a television set, but it's a nice sentiment.

The educators also say that "excess study hours have adverse effects on a student’s cognitive and interpersonal development" and that the teen years mark "a crucial time to develop independent and critical thinking."

Yeah, well. Good luck with that. I think that right after hell freezes over and the education department decides to cut the school day in half, the enrollment in cram schools is going to go through the roof.

The Air Up Thair

2008-06-15T16:09:00.003+08:00

Taiwan and China sitting in a tree K-I-S-S-I-N-G. The big news this week has been an opening of direct air travel from Taiwan to China and vice versa. (Before, folks so inclined, had to fly into China via a third country, or failing that, Hong Kong) Not such big news last week was that China Airlines was to cut its long-haul routes by 10%. If we were serious bloggers (we're not, duh) we'd suggest that these two news stories are related.

What's Next....Moonies?

2008-06-03T12:09:00.001+08:00

It's too funny. I mentioned to Maggie a few months ago when I felt like I had a little more breathing space that it might be nice to take Franklin to church to give him a sense of "community." I'm a Unitarian, so I could , conceivably, go anywhere as long as nobody tries to assimilate me. It was agreed in principle that I'd take Franklin to a church sometime. Well, we just never got around to it. Even looked at St Paul's kindergarten for awhile, but thought better of it.

A couple weeks ago, a couple walked in the door of our school while I was off teaching a business class or something. Maggie said they were a nice couple and wanted to talk about their church. Fair enough. Through the Unitarians, I've become more accustomed to accepting other people's religious beliefs, so I figured, whoever it was, I'd be happy to talk to them. They left some literature which I never got around to looking at. They came back again on another day when I wasn't there. This time, Maggie wanted to find out some more about them. They didn't dress like Mormons, she said, nor did they have name tags that said "Elder Jedediah." To be sure, though, she asked them if they drank coffee. Not that we had any to offer. Or coke. They said both were ok. She was satisfied that they weren't Mormons and told them to come back after nine one day.

They did.

Very sincere looking couple walks in the door, asks if they should take of their shoes. I told them not to bother, we could just sit on the chairs at the entrance for a chat. I asked them who they were representin'. The Nitwit Dude said "We're Jehovah's Witnesses." To my great credit, I didn't bat an eye. (As I did at my high school reunion when Terry Robertson told me he was an undertaker). We had our chat. Franklin alternated between sitting behind me asking questions ("Are they your friends, Daddy?" "Too soon to tell, buddy, I just met them today.") and watching an HD Quicktime video of the Space Shuttle taking off for the ISS (During which he discovered that by pressing a certain key, he could make a dinging sound which would in turn evoke a response from Daddy.)

Every foreigner we come across in our daily path is supposed to be a friend of Daddy's. Although I can see the humor in the innocence of such a suggestion, knowing some of the foreigners in Taiwan, I think it's a habit that needs to be controlled sooner or later. The JDubs, to their credit, didn't claim the title of Daddy's friends when they came earlier.

I have a conversation strategy when I meet Mormons on the street. I see no reason to be unfriendly to them. In fact, when I first came to Taiwan, the Mormons were extraordinarily helpful to me as I navigated the city. They were omnipresent and knew where everything was. Plus, since they spoke English, I could understand their directions. God Bless the Mormons! Now, however, I don't need directions. When I meet a Mormon on the street, or at the hot dog place, we talk about where we're from, how long we've been in town. The usual. I used to ask what they thought of Mitt Romney, but that doesn't seem like an important issue anymore.

As I don't really like talking to people that much, I use these encounters as an exercise in controlling a conversation. If we can talk about travel, food, music, being a missionary, I'm happy to talk to them. I visited Nauvoo, Illinois as a child and saw the prison cell where Joseph Smith was held until a lynch mob could be rounded up, so I am able to connect with them geographically. I make my excuses when the conversation tips towards the book of Mormon, however, and tell them that I'm late for my date at the coffee house down the street.

Lately, I've seen them trolling Starbucks trying to win converts, or backsliding, I'm not sure which.

So, when the J-Dubs sat down, I asked as many questions as I could about their lives and let them get in a couple independent clauses about how the Bible can help me with class control and teach me the balance between permissiveness and heavy-handedness.

I found out that they have been making inroads in the aboriginal community showing them a "different way." There was something odd about the way he said that the aborigines worshiped the moon, but I let it pass. He also said that recently there's been a tremendous interest in the Witness Protection Program (work with me) because of the failing economy. He claimed that this was because people are out of work and finding more time to contemplate the larger questions of existence and Man's place in God's Creation. I suggested perhaps folks are interested in praying to a different god to improve business. The suggestion went away and was not looked after.

I told him I was thinking of starting my own church in Taiwan and that so far I've only been able to find about three members. Unitarians aren't very energetic proselytizers, so I don't see much progress on this front any time soon.

The weather started getting worse, and I made my apologies. It was time to head to the grocery and home. They stood and said they'd be back. I'll have some Taiwan Beer in the fridge waiting for them to see just how large their beverage universe is.

Bad Blogger--Out of the Loop

2008-06-02T12:31:00.005+08:00

This shows how closely I follow the local news. This Taichung MRT thing (台中捷運) has been in the planning stages since 1990. In the past, my adult students told me that such a thing was probably 20 years in the future, if ever. Wikipedia says that the Green Line's construction was to begin in October 2007, but has been delayed indefinitely. (Hmmm...I wonder if they'll do the Blue Line first, now?)

The entry also points out that a proposed 2012 completion date could be a fantasy. Whenever it's completed, the first route will apparently go from Songzhu Rd in Beitun, down to the High Speed Rail Station in Wuer with 15 stations along a 16 km route.

On April 18th, the Taipei Times reported that the Taichung MRT lines were to be extended to include Dali and Taiping, our suburbs to the East and Southeast, as well as out to Taichung Harbor on the West Coast. The same article notes that 1km of rail line costs about NT$4 billion.

Yeah, so a couple years ago, students said two decades. Last week, a different group of students told me ten years, and last night, my wife put her chips down on five years. This probably means, five years for one line, ten for two, and twenty for all three. I'll breathe that fresh air when it replaces the scooter fumes.

Here are some artist's renditions of what a station might look like. And here's a little more from Tealit on the HSR coupling with MRT in cities up and down the island.

All I know is, if you are graduating in 2015 and looking for a place to go teach English, Taichung may or may not have an MRT system by then. Plan accordingly.

Powerful quake strikes off Taiwan - Asia-Pacific - msnbc.com

2008-06-01T11:11:00.000+08:00

Apparently there was an earthquake this morning. I woke up about 30 minutes before this and lay back in bed to read the news for a while. Nobody here felt anything, and the house is not a wreck. Relax.

Don't You Know the Gas Rate's Goin' Up Up Up Up Up!

2008-05-27T20:17:00.007+08:00

To live in this town is tough tough tough tough tough tough tough.

Gas lines around the block reminding me of the 70's. The gubmint raises the price of 92 octane by 3.6NT tonight at midnight, and it looks like some folks will be on line until then, waiting, with their engines running, to gas up. I got mine.

Jeezis. I'm wondering how I can work a bicycle into my daily schedule. It's not apparent yet. If my math is correct, gas at 30.7 NT per liter is about $3.60 a gallon. That's what 95 octane is at the moment. On June 1st, everything is to go up 6.7NT. That will be over $4US per gallon. I filled up tonight for NT$180, or six American smackers. I think they're called smackers.

If not, leave me a comment.

Updated Math (Thanks to the Mathdog)

I calculate the pre-midnight price of 95 octane in US$/gallon to be $3.80
and the post-midnight price to be $4.25.


There's more than gas. Updated other prices from Taiwan Matters
Increases in the price of cement (a more than 10% increase), gasoline (20%),
electricity (20 - 30%), natural gas (30%), fertilizer (50%!), and many other
commodities are imminent, and their effects will be widely felt.

English Tour at Taiwan's Museum of Natural Science

2008-05-15T10:33:00.003+08:00

If you have free time on 5/18 or 6/14, head on over to the Science Museum to learn about Chinese Medicine, Chinese Science and Technology, and Chinese Spirtual Life. The activity is from 1:30-5:00 p.m. on both days. Space is limited to 35 people. Must be 18 or older and hold a foreign passport. Price of admission is NT$250. For information and reservation click here.

My Fat Dog

2008-05-14T09:35:00.003+08:00

There's a beagle in my family and all the stories about beagles are true. That is, the stories about their baleful howls, their energetic wooves, their naughty, naughty nature. Bad dog! The stories about them flying Fokker Tri-planes are, as far as I can tell, entirely fabricated.

Leica the dog was Leica little boy before there was a Franklin the little boy. He was the little boy in our house because the wife said he was, and when you are in love you make allowances for such irrational statements. I'm sure someone besides my wife has said that dogs are like boot camp for prospective parents. True enough, having a beagle around the apartment taught me a lot about cleaning up shit and piss and slobber. Oh, is the book chewed up? Well, that happens. Spontaneous explosive vomit? That's ok, the newspaper which I've deftly placed in front of your mouth caught the full blast.

My dog has made me awesome.

Did I mention that we live in an apartment? Houndsight is 20/20, isn't it? If I were you, I wouldn't get a dog this size to live in an apartment. Nor would I get a Maltese or a Toy Poodle, but more on that later. Leica, now having two younger, human siblings to play with, gets a workout running around the apartment at night, dodging scooters, chasing cockroaches, and retrieving phantom tennis balls.

He also sheds enough on a daily basis to knit a sweater for our daughter Gretchen, who, not being Catholic, really has no use for a hairshirt. Maggie wants to shave the beagle. I'd like to shave him like a poodle. There will be photos when this happens.

But even hairless, it will be unmistakable that he's packed on the pounds over the years. Maggie fed him from the table whenever he came begging, and when Frank didn't finish his meals after three hours, Leica got the leftovers. This has been stopped, thankfully, but the weight problem remains. His weight control dog food combined with a lack of real exercise equals no change.

We're aware of the situation. We get it. Fat dog, bad. Fit dog, good. We're living with the problem. It's as obvious as a mole with six inches of hair growing out of it. It's as obvious as I am tall, yet people remind me of it twice a day. My dog is fat? Thank you. Thank you very much. Sideways.

Now, the other day, Frank and I were taking the big beagle for a walk around the neighborhood when we bumped into an unknown neighbor with a white haired rat on a rope. It sounded like she said it was a Maltese Rat. The rodent began making Arf Arf Arf noises that sound like a normal sized-dog would make, only much higher pitched. It also made an utterance that would pass for a growl in a dog school for dogs learning how to mince about and be camp. The owner told me that my dog was fat, and that I should take him out for exercise. She also told me that Leica is fed way too much. And that he should lose some weight.

Frank was with me, so I kept it clean. Her rat kept making its little noises and looking quite bitchy, so I told her (the owner, not her wuvwy wittle pookims) that her dog wasn't loved enough and that was probably why the dog was such an unpleasant creature to be around. Everyone knows that the personality of the dog is a direct indication of the personality of the owner, and how the owner treats the animal. Right? I told her that she needs to try to show more affection to the dog and that one day it will be a pleasant creature. To date, I don't know if she's taken me at my word. At the moment though, I could see where the dog got it's curled lip from.

My lunch break is at an end and I don't have time right now to tell you the story about the mother and her fat son who got out of the car at the pet shop and told Leica that he was too heavy.

Happy Mothers' Day

2008-05-10T08:47:00.004+08:00

Though long gone, still fondly remembered. The Mothers of Invention.

Freak Out
Absolutely Free
Cruisin' with Ruben and the Jets
We're Only in it for the Money
Burnt Weeny Sandwich
Uncle Meat
Weasels Ripped My Flesh
200 Motels
The Grand Wazoo
Just Another Band From LA
Waka Jawaka
Fillmore East
Apostrophe
Overnite Sensation

If you live in Taiwan, you'll never find this stuff in stores. Not even special order Zappa. As far as the folks who import music in Taiwan are concerned, Zappa does not exist. The guy at the record shop told me that the music importers and distributors in Taipei refuse to bring it into the country. So, happy Mother-'s Day to those mother-'s as well.

The present-day composer refuses to die. Thanks to file sharing.

----------------
Now playing: The Mothers of Invention - Progress?
via FoxyTunes

Ready, Set, Stress

2008-04-23T18:29:00.002+08:00

If it's Taiwan, it must be Test Season. They usually show up soon after the mosquitoes. At our After School gig, the first graders had tests on last Wednesday and Thursday. Half of our kids got 100's on both of their tests and were treated to McDonald's Happy Meals. Not bad. Not a good habit for our overachievers, unless we want a nation of Fatties. But that's neither here nor there, nor here, nor now. That's for their spotty future self to sort out. Happy Meal equals Happy Student Equals Happy Till.

Is everybody Happy? Sssssssurrrrrr......NOPE. There was a kid on Wednesday who left with his mom and dad nipping at his heels upbraiding him on the sidewalk for his dismal performance on the math test. Seven year old kid. Didn't work hard enough. His future is headed straight for the toilet. Can you believe that he would show his face in public after scoring a 96? You've noticed I haven't mentioned the boy's name for fear of causing further loss of face to his family.

96! Not GOOD ENOUGH, MATE!

Shit man, my brother Pete and I would have never graduated. We'd've wound up working in a gas station.

In other child abuse news. We've got a policy...because this is how Taiwan is and it's foolish for anyone to complain because what is ever going to change but check this out anyway. We've got this policy for our first grade students that they have to read a book every day before they go home. GREAT, huh? I thought so, too, that's why I okayed it. I didn't have a choice, but it makes me feel good. Just like in a marriage. So, they have to read a book out loud before they go home. There's a kid, will call him "Potato Head Bobby," who is always the last to go home. Always stuck here reading. HATES reading now. I think it might be because he has to read a 90 page book every day before goes home. No pictures.

That's Taiwan!

Groovy New Learning Tool

2008-04-23T16:46:00.004+08:00

Got a link to this in the mail today. NCIKU "more than a dictionary" indeed. It's a handy little website for all of your Mandarin learning needs...as long as you're not in need of Traditional characters, apparently. You can enter characters with mouse strokes. You can browse a thematic glossary and listen to pronunciation samples. You can ask questions. You can chat. What else do you want?

Ok, traditional characters would be nice.

UPDATE: Just heard back from Clark at nciku. Nice guy, that Clark. He says that they are currently developing an interface with Traditional characters as well as one for the Korean language. I'm not saying "the squeaky wheel gets the grease" but there you go. Go enjoy it. And then, when the Traditional version shows up, go learn some more. Then when you get tired of the Taiwan scene, go to Korea. Learn Asian languages forever. And then go back to America to bag groceries when you retire. The end.

Here We Go

2008-03-27T10:45:00.003+08:00

I don't read the China Post. I don't support their politics, and as a Right Wing Rag, I find their crossword puzzles way too easy. I saw an article in the Taipei Times about election anxiety and the business boom that many shrinks are experiencing right about now, but the only reference was in the China Post's online edition so here it is.

I was awakened at 5:00 this morning by horrific screaming. My Chinese has improved over the past several years, but I haven't been exposed to much Hysterical Mandarin since I left my previous employers and I couldn't quite make out what the screams were apart from, "I DON"T WANT TO GO!!!!!!"

At such an early hour, who has a clear mind? All I could think was that some sort of purge had begun. It turns out she's a new resident, a little unstable, and she had been accusing the security guards of breaking into her apartment and ransacking the place. So, nothing nefarious. The end.

In From the Cold Into the Cold

2008-02-12T16:13:00.000+08:00

I swear to god it's colder inside this building than it is outside. WTF? Just had a conversation with some of the folks downstairs re: the purpose of shelter. The people who designed this building put together a very modern looking thing with a swooping roof and a lovely covered bridge that is reminiscent of traditional Chinese architecture. I was knocked out when I saw the place.

But now, it's 12.2 Celsius outside. I took my gloves off a few minutes ago so I could rant about how cold it is inside and now my fingers are almost numb. Why?

All the windows are open. Everywhere. Except in my classroom. There are windows on both ends of the hall, double doors on the first and second floor, windows in the stairwells, and along all the hallways. All of them. Wide. Assed. Open.

The locals complain about the cold all the time so I can't understand the reflexive opening of windows. When I come in in the morning, I close them in the office, and close the office door. If I step out of the room for thirty seconds, I return to find that the doors and windows are open again, even if the office is empty. I don't know how my office mates are doing this to me. Or why.

Can anyone explain to me the reasoning behind this practice?

Someone just tried to. She told me that Westerners are all used to the cold weather outside and that we go inside where it's nice and warm and that's what we're accustomed to. But in Taiwan, people are used to it being cold inside all the time, so it doesn't bother them. Because there's no heat. There's no heat, y'see, so they're inviting more cold in. And a mighty wind.

But it's hotter than hell in the summer. Aren't the Taiwanese used to hot weather? Why do they have air conditioning? Huh?

Someone back me up here. I'm not being ridiculous, am I?

Magnum Photos KTV Culture

2008-02-12T11:24:00.001+08:00

One night and one roll of film taken by Chien-chi Chang in a KTV in Taiwan. The sound you will hear is called "singing." Totes safe for work, but keep the volume down, k?

Feeling Good

2008-02-09T11:13:00.000+08:00

Flashcard Workshop

2008-01-30T11:39:00.000+08:00

An Observation About Uniforms

2008-01-30T10:27:00.000+08:00

The billingual school where I teach has an elementary school and a junior high school and a complement of uniforms that are the color of socks that have been entrusted to me to wash. 25% grey sweat pants and top with a white stripe sandwiched by two navies on the leg and sleeve.

The uniforms are universally despised by the students, but this is Taiwan, and I don't see any of them making any obvious modifications.

I like my students. They're really good kids, especially when compared to the kids in another class one of whom, when asked by their teacher to write a sentence from the workbook on the blackboard, responded with "Fuck You!" as well as the very aggressive two-handed gesture that goes along with it. This was one of the girls.

Some of the boys in the class did not wish to be outdone, especially in a pissing contest with girls about being offensive. Seriously, where's the honor in being beaten by a girl when it comes to being vile and pernicious? So, one joker decided to introduce a running gag where every time the teacher left the room, he told the teacher to "take his time" while masturbating in the toilet.

All semester we listened to his complaints that he had difficulty controlling his students, and we agreed that we had similar problems, but he didn't tell us the whole story until he handed in his notice. I'm sorry to see him go, he was a nice guy, one of the most patient people I've ever met, and an excellent conversationalist.

Up until the day he told us about the animals he was tending to in class, I thought my students were a gang of unruly gorillas. I mean, some of them spoke Chinese in class! I mean, I mean, some of them talked without raising their hands! Good GAWD people, some of them used to come to class without a textbook! My biggest complaint was that there was a kid who blurted out the answer to every single question I asked, even when the question was framed with multiple references to the inquisitee, so charged with competitiveness is the atmosphere here, this kid was launching himself out of his chair before the question was completely asked. This was my biggest complaint. No one ever said Fuck, shit, or even "Got Dandruff, some of it itches" until I taught them.

So, I didn't appreciate my students until well into the semester when I realized how bad it could have been if the dice had fallen another way. And I made sure to tell them all that no matter how much I had complained about them, as a group, they have really done a fine job.

So, yeah, I like my students. I've got three groups of mostly 8th graders mostly trying to keep a low profile and get through the day without being asked to do anything that might cause them to look stupid in front of some pimply uncoordinated member of the opposite sex. Just like 14 year olds anywhere in the world.

But, goddam, those uniforms! Institutionalized. Grey pants, shirts, socks, faces, answers, souls. Every day. But not Saturday.

Nope, Saturday is the day for the Jr High kids to be peacocks. During the school year I only saw them on Saturday one time and I was shocked by the difference in their mood & attitude. It was refreshing to sit in front of a class of brightly colored kids with smiles on their faces.

Today is Wednesday, but it's Winter Camp time. That is, most schools around the city are out for Chinese New Year, but my guys are here getting a jump on their college entrance exams or something. No school for them on Saturday during winter break, so Wednesday is the day when they all drop their uniforms off at my house so that I can make them as grey as my socks, and they look like Western 8th graders.

I'm walking a fine line here. Not wanting to judge books by their covers and all that, but when the covers are all different, their eyes are brighter, and I can't help but like them a little more.

Yesterday, a student half-heartedly flipped me the bird yesterday from a bridge at the school. To make sure things don't get out of hand, I chased him down and threw him off a roof. Then I gave him three demerits. Oh Yeah Baby!

What does it all mean? Probably only that I've finished my exams, report cards, and next semester's plan and I'm procrastinating on the last task of the week. Ok, I'll get on it.

Sucker Punch

2008-01-28T07:31:00.000+08:00

Hypothetical attack on U.S. outlined by China - Air Force News, opinions, editorials, news from Iraq, photos, reports - Air Force Times: "The democratic Republic of China, commonly called Taiwan — which America backs and the communist People’s Republic of China considers part of its territory — frequently irritates Chinese leaders with calls for greater independence from the mainland. But while the American military mulls its options, Chinese missiles hit runways, fuel lines, barracks and supply depots at U.S. Air Force bases in Japan and South Korea. Long-range warheads destroy American satellites, crippling Air Force surveillance and communication networks. A nuclear fireball erupts high above the Pacific Ocean, ionizing the atmosphere and scrambling radars and radio feeds."

Active Learning vs Learning Activism

2007-12-27T09:46:00.001+08:00

Students were apathetic when I was in junior high school, so I'm not saying that what I'm seeing in my classes is anything new or surprising. I was shocked, however, a few weeks ago when I found that out of a class of 11 students (small groups are great, but I'm not crazy about the prime number) no one could name more than two countries that have the Bomb. The same group tells me that Anne Frank was just some girl who died, "Big Deal."

I know that they've had some exposure to the Global Warming issue because their previous teacher told me they watched An Inconvenient Truth in class. How much of it sunk in I couldn't say. Might have just been a flavor of the week sort of activity.

The majority of the students I've met in Taiwan are just interested in getting through the next test so they can move up to the next rung. Several essays last week on "A Good Experience" recounted glory days of fifth grade when they got the only 100 on a science test, or came in 6th place in their class for the first time. When the sea levels rise, I suspect it will be much easier to float one's boat.

While American 8th graders don't do much trig or calculus, I suspect they know more about the coming Peak Oil crisis than do Taiwanese students, or even many American adults. There was a National Geographic article back in June 2004 about the end of Cheap Oil and the impact it would have on US--that is humanity as a whole. I liked the pictures, too, and then I moved on.

But a total stranger contacted me about a now defunct webzine Taiphoon (they haven't published since 2004) that I had linked on my graffiti page. We agreed that the lack of activism is disheartening. I thought that Taiwan, being an island and everything, would be an obvious leader in the fight against rising sea levels. He said global warming is nothing compared to what's going to happen when oil production fails to meet worldwide demand in the next 2-50 years.

He then sent me an ungodly amount of links to various articles about the Peak Oil crisis. Apparently this is something that's getting a lot of play in some countries, and very little in others. No one wants to break the bad news in an Election Year, eh? Remember when Jimmy Carter said:

I ask Congress to give me authority for mandatory conservation and for standby
gasoline rationing. To further conserve energy, I'm proposing tonight an
extra $10 billion over the next decade to strengthen our public transportation systems. And I'm asking you for your good and for your nation's security to take no unnecessary trips, to use carpools or public transportation whenever you can, to park your car one extra day per week, to obey the speed limit, and to set your thermostats to save fuel. Every act of energy conservation like this is more than just common sense -- I tell you it is an act of patriotism.

Well, that was in July 1979 (click here for the full text of his televised address) If you're old enough to remember Howard Cosell, you know what happened next. Americans didn't like to be told not to drive the cars and they elected a smiling former governor from California who removed price controls and failed to fill up oil reserves with cheap oil. Oops.

I saw an old episode of Real Time with Bill Maher the other day. Sheryl Crow and Laurie David were hyping some global warming information spreading event or other via sattelite in Alabama of all places. Maher asked a question that gets right to the heart of the problem: "If every American was told that to end Global Warming all he would have to do was to not use his TV remote ever again, do you think he would do it?" Well, what do you think?

The following question, as far as I know, has not been addressed by any of the candidates. How'd they get around that?

I worry about stuff naturally. It's my nature. I shouldn't worry about most of the things, like getting docked 10NT per minute I'm late to work, or that students aren't turning in their writing assignments anywhere near on time. But, when I see a group of kids plugged into their iPods standing on a railroad track with a steadily approaching freight train bearing down upon them, I feel twitchy. Should I be worried that much of the world is oblivious to the Peak Oil situation?

Well, I am, because I have two beautiful children, and I wonder what will become of them and where we will end up. Is Taiwan the place to live in a post-oil age? If the Peak has already happened, when do I need to high tail it back to America, and then WTF is an English teacher to do?

http://www.rustletheleaf.com/ eco comic with lesson plans suitable for all ages.

http://www.esletc.com/-- injecting awareness into the ESL classroom.

Here's a warm & fuzzy Peak Oil essay from countercurrents.org

Also, ABC (Australia) has a great Peak Oil episode on their 4 Corners news program.

So This Is Xmas...and What Have We Done?

2007-12-24T08:30:00.001+08:00

In the history of music, there have been bigger train wrecks; there have been performances that have gone so poorly that they sparked riots. The day is not yet over.

At the beginning of the semester, I distributed a questionnaire to the 8th grade students at the billingual jr high where I teach in the daytime. The questions were a way for me to gauge the abilities of my students to express themselves, first, and get an idea of what they expected from their English class. In one section, they were to check off activites they would like to participate in throughout the semester.

The start was a little rocky as we got used to each other. The paradigm shifted for good once I heard classroom horror stories from my coworker Hussein, a native of Nigeria. His Taiwanese students have put him through the wringer and he's leaving at Chinese New Year. I don't blame him one bit, but I have thanked him several times--perhaps to excess--for letting me see that a couple students answering out of turn or speaking Chinese on occasion was nothing to have an aneurysm over.

A couple weeks ago, Walter, an exceedingly bright kid in the highest level English class at the school, and an expert at being a royal pain in the ass, reminded me in the middle of a workbook assignment that I hadn't done something. "Umm, um, you remember at the beginning of the semester how you gave us that survey and you asked us what we wanted to do in this class an done of the things was 'Sing an English Song' and I checked that on mine and when are you going to teach us an English song?" I sat back on my stool and thoughtfully stroked my beard.

"You wanna learn a Christmas song?" I asked him, and got shouts of encouragement from the majority. "Ok, I'll see what I can do." I loaded my iPod with an Xmas playlist and brought it the next day when we listened to snippets of several dozen songs. We managed to pare the list down to "Jingle Bell Rock" by Randy Travis, "Sleigh Ride" by Debbie Gibson, and "Cat Hair Balls" by Ren & Stimpy. I couldn't find the lyrics to Cat Hair Balls online.

Walter didn't want to Jingle Bell Rock because he'd learned it in kindergarten in California. The Debbie Gibson thing was a little too much for me to hear over and over again. There was a very vocal lobby for Cat Hair Balls, and the chorus could be heard for several days echoing up and down the hall at break time.

In a flash of brilliance, I thought of another song that would be easier for them to remember and one which would be easy enough for my other two classes to particpate in as well. Then, the flash of brilliance grew brighter...and singed off my eyebrows. I spoke to my supervisor, "Hey, my students are learning an English Xmas song. Wouldn't it be fun if they sang it in front of their Jr High assembly?" There are about 150 students or so in the junior high, and they regularly stand in front of them solo to recite Chinese poems or obscure English adages. My supervior volleyed back, "How about if they sing in front of the whole Academy on Monday morning?" SUPER! My Lee Press-On Beard was beginning to melt to my face.

I whipped up and off-the-cuff arrangement of the song for 45 singers. Two sections, boys and girls. Mostly unison, but in verses 2 & 3, the kids split girls singing the chorus on 2, boys on 3, with the opposite singing verses. Clear enough? Good, let's move on.

I told them if they needed to bring the lyric sheet, they could, but they should memorize the song anyway. I gave them tips about standing straight, and keeping their faces "bright" so they wouldn't go flat. We worked on breathing. We were improving. I watched a couple Seiji Ozawa concerts to refresh my conducting skills. The students sang in the hallways between class. The song was downloaded by several of them. I heard that students from different classes wanted to join in the fun and that there were raucous rehearsals on the bus to and from school.

Friday we had a dress rehearsal. The only one before the big event. 12:30. Naptime for the students. They grudgingly accepted because they wanted to do a good job. The supervisor wanted a copy of the song on CD, so I had made her one several days earlier. When she finished her lunch and showed up at 12:35, the students were arranged on the steps and ready to start practicing. She told me she had to go back to her office for the CD. Then, there was the small problem of the CD player. One was found and an extension cord was sent for and extended. By 12:50 we were just about ready. We finally had a microphone and PA set up for the CD player to be heard.

The dress rehearsal could commence. The students, by this point, realized that they were not going to get a nap in that day and that a R*****k was underway. We got through the song. They did ok. As long as they could hear the music they could keep together. The only thing that was different so far from practicing in class was the appearance of an additional two conductors on either side of their teacher, neither of whom was all that good at keeping time, and a choreographer who thought the boys on the left should raise their left hands, and the boys on the right should raise their right hands. The girls locked elbows. I was faced with the equivalent of a carful of rank and knew better than to protest or suggest anything in front of the students.

The railroad ties were beginning to wobble.

Sunday night, as my nose was running like a faucet I was jerked back to the reality that I had to show up for work 20 minutes early this morning. R*****k!

We were on after the flag raising. The supervisor told the students where to stand. Her supervisor manned the PA. I looked back to him to make eye contact so that would have an idea when he was going to hit play for the backing track. Then, I heard the volume come up on the end of the first line. The flash of brilliance shifted in color. I was now holding a turd. The boys on the right couldn't hear the boys on the left. The girls in the middle couldn't hear the music. I hope the students sitting at my feet in the audience couldn't hear me cursing under my breath. There was no way to get the attention of anyone who could turn up the volume. Each break between verse and chorus the students could hear a snippet of the backing track and could hear that they were 3/4 of a line off. Half the group decided to skip ahead and sing with the CD, the other half thought it better to stay right where they were. The other half were just moving their lips.

We got through it with only two conductors.

That's all I have time for right now. I'm not interested in relating the details of the dressing down I received afterwards for presenting such a poor Christmas program.

*****************
But, I will add a postscript.

In my second class this morning, I asked the students how they think they did, and they answered honestly that it was their new worst experience (we had a writing project last month entitled "My Worst Experience") and that they would write about it next time. So, some good will come out of this. The students themselves felt terrible about how things went. Their Chinese teacher did nothing to make them feel better. I was ready to laugh it off. Their Chinese teacher chewed them up one side and down the other, telling them that they had brought shame upon themselves and the school. She told them that their presence on stage was foul. That the only reason that they were up there was because they wanted to be, and all they had done was waste everyone's time.

I have no words to describe how I felt upon hearing this sad, sad news. But, as the saying goes, "That's Taiwan!"

The NMiC Movement

2007-12-17T15:08:00.000+08:00

I'd heard the story about an American family that decided to go for a year without buying anything made in China. Apparently this is not easy to do in America. Damn near impossible in Taiwan, I'm thinking. Used to be that everything in my toybox had Made in Taiwan stamped on the bottom. Nowadays when I see something that's still Made in Taiwan it's actually something of a happy shock. Factories have been relocating pretty steadily to China for the last decade or so, searching for, you guessed it, Cheap Labor.

Did a little more reading. The family is Canadian, but living in Puerto Rico. I thought they were American. Ok, Norte Americanos.

The safety issue is one that concerns me now. The news about toys in the States being recalled due to levels of paint in them makes me look with no small amount of suspicion at the toys my children are playing with at home and at the baby sitter's. The US has the Consumer Product Safety Division with this list of recalled toys. It's quite a lengthy list.

I am told that Taiwan has a similar Bureau dedicated to the task of determining which products are safe and which ones aren't, but I'm also told that the agents are buyable. So there's really no telling how much dangerous crap there is floating around. I mean, besides the dangerous crap that is floating around an obstructing my view of the mountains.

You may find this interesting. NotMadeinChina.net has all the horror stories you might expect to find about relgious oppression in China, along with loads of links to consumer safety sites and businesses that manufacture things in places that are ... well, not China.

Included is a Letter to Toys R Us which implores the corporation to stop using manufacturers in China for their cheap labor and maximization of profit. That's right, you too can participate all for the price of a First Class Stamp.

Why Boycott China? Well, one of my students puts it rather bluntly when he pronounces, almost daily, that "China Sucks." Can never quite move the conversation past this point. By buying stuff from small, local manufactuerers, you may be paying a little more, but you theoretically would be getting a better product and keeping locals in work, adding to the local economy etc.

Chinese people are, for the most part, I'm guessing, nice. I mean, to think that the greater part of 1.6 billion people were evil bastards would be just too pessimistic for even me.

Where to start? Well, if you're in Taiwan, a good start would be to refuse the chopsticks and little plastic spoons they give you with every order of takeaway food. If you don't have any bowls at home, go buy some for crissake. Same thing with those plastic bags. The only reason my wife takes me shopping is so that she can have someone to send out to the car to get the shopping bag she forgot to take into the store.

Look, I'm nowhere near flush with time to write a well organized blog posting, so this is what you get. Don't buy stuff from China if you can help it. Why? because my student says that China Sucks. I don't know, I haven' t been. Gary? What do you think?

UN Crisis! Oh...just the environment...

2007-12-15T17:55:00.001+08:00

Check out the interesting crop from MSNBC just now (Dec. 15th 6pm) The article is obviously about the talks winding up in Bali, but the protesters holding paper flags from the "nations of the world" have included Taiwan. Isn't that nice? I mean, in light of the UN not letting Taiwan in and everything.
(UN eyes climate pact by 2009)

My Buddy Leica

2007-12-01T13:38:00.000+08:00

All the Best Beagles Have Chinese Eyes.

Down in Kenting

2007-11-27T13:16:00.000+08:00

So far I've managed to get down to Kenting about once every four years. Yes, that's a nuclear plant next to the beach with two wind turbines in the background. Taiwan is a country of contradictions.

Someone sitting next to me in the car said that this was probably a UFO. I won't say her name, but we've been married for 5 years or something. Nice cloud, though, what?

From time to time, Taiwan presents something outstanding. Cloud Gate Dance Theater, The One NT Big Mac Meal, and the National Aquarium Park in Hengcheng are just a few examples. My son is nuts for Finding Nemo and would barely sit still until we found the sharks. I don't recall if I'd ever gone to an aquarium before, but the displays here are certainly awe inspiring. They could stand a little work with the bilinguallity of their exhibits.

Typhoon Krosa

2007-10-06T11:18:00.000+08:00

It started getting breezy around here two days ago and by yesterday morning the wind whipping by my classroom had taken to howling and interrupting class every few minutes for the students to gawk out the window at the trees across the road as they danced like sea anenomes, tenuously rooted to the ground below, but willing to pick up and go if a better offer could be produced.

I swear kids these days and their short attention spans. All I said was HOLY CHRIST LOOK AT THAT TREE and half the class had bolted to the windows on the west side of our third floor classroom to take a look. I never used to look out the windows at typhoons when I was in eighth grade.

Cruising to job #2 last night Wenshin Rd was littered with scales from palm trees and cars slowed to a crawl so that an inventory could be taken. Every third driver was an accounting major at one point in their life and all that work on the abacus has trained them to count fallen leaves faster than Rain Man.

The rain held off until I got home but the wind pushed me and my bike all over the road. Again, I discovered that the faster I was moving forward the less I was pushed side to side. I don't recommend this and in the end I chalked it up to being rather lucky.

This morning. Rain again. Not a lot of it, but when the wind is blasting at 115mph the sheets of white obscure the shops on the other side of the street. Without the gusts, water is coming down at a 30 degree angle. Maggie says the park behind our place has lost a few trees. On the ride in this morning, I see that a few residences have lost their trashcans and the leaves that tile the streets in dark and light green are joined by translucent pink plastic trashbags and chunks of styrofoam that had come with small appliances.

Saturday afternoon and evening we had Hollywood FX weather coming from all directions. This was the first time that I've ever noticed the rain falling up. As the wind roared up the street and up the side of my building, turned raindrops the size of popcorn inside out and carried them up three or four stories to my level and beyond. Whatever trick of the light there may have been, drops headed in one direction appeared grey, while the ones coming up at me shone white.

Fortunately, none of the illegal structures in my neighborhood were removed entirely from the legal structures to which they are moored in pleasant weather. Some of the plexiglass roofs were, however, torn to shreds and the air was thick at times with pieces of plastic the size of my jazz hands. I remain stunned by the number of scooters one sees on the street on a day such as this.

A bit of rain blew in through the kitchen door and required some mopping up, but this was not overly burdensome as sweeping and mopping is part of the Saturday afternoon routine at our place. I ran downstairs for about three beers while I waited for the courtyard fountain to come back on so I could see what would happen if you photographed it with the wind gusting through the courtyard at a hundred miles an hour.

While doing so I nearly got to see the effect of a 3x6 piece of industrial roofing on...ok, not on me, but on the fish in the pond I was standing next to.

Hey Americans! Vote Early, Vote Often

2007-10-01T12:35:00.000+08:00

I've been hoping to play a more active role in Expat Voter Registration in Taichung especially with the way things played out in 2000, then in 2004. Let's see what we can put together now.

Anyone interested in voting in the elections in 2008 (General Election-Tuesday, November 4th, unless Cheney declares martial law and cancels them/ Primary Elections-- look to be starting on February 5th) should check out Project Vote Smart to see how the incumbents in their neighborhood have been voting.

Here's a Candidate Comparison Chart, but it seems incomplete without Ron Paul represented. Here's another.

Feeling sufficiently interested and/or angry enough to get off your butt and request and overseas ballot? Good for you. At VoteFromAbroad.org you can fill out a form for an absentee ballot from your home county and download it as a PDF file or have it faxed to you. After filling in your picks, just mail that sucker back before the due date and you can work to ensure that the world stay safe for democracy or whatever.

The Federal Voting Assistance Page (FVAP.gov) has online forms for absentee ballots and more.

Typhoon in the Vicinty

2007-09-18T13:59:00.000+08:00

We're receiving a pissing of rain this afternoon from Typhoon Wipha which is just north of the island curving north towards Shanghai and then Korea. Typhoons in the late summer are commonplace and rarely cause much destruction here other than some blown out windows on occasion, and some downed bits and pieces of palm tree a little more often.

I've been noticing the rain a lot more these days, as I'm working further afield and the luxury of a cab ride is more difficult to justify than it was when I was just headed down the road. Still, it's nice to arrive warm and dry for a teaching gig.

The rain on Monday night was just beautiful. A fine mist hung in the air like snow on an old black and white television. Even cruising down Chung Ming South Road at moderate speed on the scooter, the rain just felt like a cool spray as you see above tea shops or in flower markets. Refreshing at the end of a hot summer.

On my scooter rides to and from classes, I have time to think about the rain and its effect on my clothing. The effect is usually quite noticeable as I haven't been able to find a satisfactory raincoat in Taiwan these past eight years. I'm eternally optimistic. The one I wore today was crap, but I have another to try tomorrow. Last week, I just went without, telling myself that if I drove fast enough, the rain drops that hit my body would just be blown dry in the airstream created by my trusty 150cc Symco something-or-other moving rapidly down side streets. It seems to work quite well, crouching behind the faring , until I reach a red light. If I can be bothered to stop for such a thing, I get soaked. Tonight, I looked around and noticed that traffic laws mean less and less the worse the weather is. A cop yelled at me for turning left the other day from his shelter on the opposite corner. "Sorry, sir, can't hear you." He wouldn't have ventured out for moon cakes, that's certain.

The rain coat that let me down today was borrowed a week or two ago from the Early Bird. Kiwi Luke left it behind to go gallivanting in Australia, so it's meant to be an extended loan. Problem is, standing up, it hangs to just below my knees, and when I'm straddling my scooter, it rides up to just as far above them. Of course, if the faring theory held water, this wouldn't be a problem. What happens, though, is that all the water that hits me in the shoulders gathers in a pool on my lap, and what doesn't pour down my leg when I put my foot down at red lights, seeps through the zipper and saturates my crotch. This is far from ideal.

Fortunately, my school was only a short distance out of the way as I moved from the jr high to the bike factory, and there waiting for me was my attire for yoga class. Perfect for stretching, but a little too comfortable for teaching a bunch of engineers about Rhetorical Questions. Did I have another choice? No, I didn't. (Rhetorical questions can be used in writing to make the author sound more intelligent...so says the textbook.) The clothes were there to be changed into, and the car was there to be driven and I did. Raincoat problem sorted.

Until it was time to head home. The fine misty rain that I had wanted to bottle in sonnet form had given way to a boisterous and unapologetic downpour. Great big drops that would leave welts on the face of a lesser man fell at a velocity so great that it is above even my ability to comprehend. I bravely mounted my scooter (goddam, I wish I could just call it a motorcycle like the locals do, instead of sounding like such a twit) and headed off home through sometimes flooded and often half-flooded streets.

My legs and naughty bits received the same treatment as earlier in the day, but, as I had not properly buttoned the top snap, there was additional evidence of moisture running down the front of my gray t-shirt as well as a good quart of water sloshing around in each sleeve held in by the elastic cuffs.

I'm dryish now, even after bathing my son who today learned how to fling water from a plastic cup in such a way that it can reach the ceiling in the opposite corner of the bathroom. I looked at him and delivered the Bushism "Bring it on." He did.

Now, any of you anonymous readers out there that feel like sending me a rain coat from whatever part of the globe you feel understands what 3x is really meant to mean, I thank you for your generosity, but no thank you. I'm going to buy a cheap tent and cut some holes in it.

Update: That nasty typhoon is heading for the East Coast of China now. According to MSNBC, (page has a picture of regionally produced raingear) a million folks are being evacuated. Heckuva job 小咖啡色.

Ration of Greenth for the Year, Our Visit to Tunghai University

2007-09-16T19:42:00.000+08:00

On Saturday, my wife and I took our son up to Tunghai University to see the cows. The man cleaning out the dairy ran us out before we could take any pictures of the Holsteins they have up there and I spent the rest of the day taking pictures of the greenery. We spent about three hours walking around and I only saw one piece of litter. Tunghai University's grounds will definitely be on a list of favorite places to visit with the kids.

Taichung is such a grey city, it's nice to know that such a beautiful place exists nearby.

There is grass that you can walk in barefoot without fear of laceration.

Whose Airliner?

2007-08-20T10:31:00.000+08:00

The headline sports a big "C" and a little "a." Surely this means the plane that caught on fire in Okinawa was from the PRC?

China airliner on fire at Japan airport - Asia-Pacific - MSNBC.com: "TOKYO - A plane belonging to Taiwan's China Airlines Ltd. caught fire at an airport on Japan's southern island of Okinawa on Monday, Japanese media said."

Uhh...nope.

Ok, they've changed the headline to Taiwanese airliner burns at an airport in Okinawa. Good for you MSNBC.

Kyodo news agency reports no injuries.

Chinese Language Tool

2007-08-15T08:33:00.000+08:00

Got Firefox? I don't think IE does this. MDBG, the free online Chinese Dictionary is now searchable via the Google search box. It's pretty cool. You can either enter English or Chinese characters or Pinyin, click search, and up pops a page with a list of possibilities. You can then click on the correct word and it takes you to a page from which the characters can be copied for pasting.
使用方便.

Snarky Tofu: Taiwan's Linguistic Inscrutability Complex

2007-08-13T13:24:00.000+08:00

Snarky Tofu: Taiwan's Linguistic Inscrutability Complex

JoSamBro has aptly renamed his blog. His latest entry is on the local habit of reminding us "out country people" that we are not part of their club by switching to Taiwanese when they discover that we can understand Mandarin.

This has happened to me a couple times in situations where I have known the conversants (I'm a blogger, I make up words), and in each case of linguo-switching it was pretty obvious that they were making the switch to talk about me. One guy was the security guard in my building and he was complaining to his co-worker about the foreigner who complains too much. Something like that. The other was a disagreeable coworker in a previous life. It'd be nice if people wouldn't talk about you behind your back in front of your face, but these aren't nice people doing it.

Someone once let me borrow the phrase "Consider the source" in situations where negative comments are offered up about you. Judge for yourself if this person's opinion of you really matters. Of course, this makes you a judgemental prick, as well. Hmm...

I've found myself in situations where everyone knows that I speak Mandarin, but they insist on speaking Taiwanese. Perhaps they are more comfortable with the regional dialect. That's fine, I'm more comfortable reading my book in the back seat of the car. Actually, I'd be more comfortable in the front seat.

If anyone wants to speak to me, they know what language I'm most capable of using.

I have learned a few phrases in Taiwanese, and from hanging out with my in-laws, I have improved my listening comprehension to about 25%. That is, I can follow the ebb and flow of a conversation to a certain extent after which it becomes lulling. Occasionally, I will interrupt and ask what a phrase was that I've heard over and over again as if that phrase will unlock the conversation. Sometimes it does, sometimes they switch to Mandarin for awhile.

Linguistic Assumption is something I've encountered more often with Mandarin, though. A few months after I arrived, I was entering a classroom and a student's mother told her friend that I was very handsome. I turned immediately and said, "xie-xie." She was definitely a MILF (Mom I'd Love to Fluster)

Another time, I stepped onto an elevator in that building back in a previous life. A younger woman turned to her friend and said, "Ni kan, zhe-ge waiguoren yingai bu hwei jiang zhong wen. (Look at this foreigner, he probably doesn't speak Chinese.)" To which I replied in her right ear" "Yingai bu hwei, ba! (Y'know, you're probably right!)" The poor girl got flustered.

I guess what you have to do is just pick up a few phrases of Taiwanese that you can uncork in certain situations. I usually squeeze a few out when I meet a new group of people. Tinki bei bai, hoh? A-nei hoh? Swee! Tinyabo! (Nice weather, eh? Is that right? Beautiful! I don't understand.) This suggests that I know a little Taiwanese, and they often reckon it's better to talk about the A-do-ga when he's out of ear shot rather than sooner. My MILF (Manager I Loved to Filet) at that other school told me every time I spoke to her in Taiwanese that she would no longer be able to say bad things about me. I told her that she shouldn't be saying those things about anybody. But, she's a bitch.

Chinese Buffalo

2007-06-18T22:44:00.000+08:00

I just Stumbled Upon an English curiosity which I used on a group of adults in class about a year ago. Goes like this:

Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo

It was an interesting class for a Friday afternoon for a group of students who swore they they were getting too much vocabulary.

After looking over the article on Wikipedia, I saw a link to another similar article about a Lion-Eating Poet in a Stone Den. 96 characters, all pronounced as Shi, though in different tones. « Shī Shì shí shī shǐ »

《施氏吃獅子記》

有一位住在石室裏的詩人叫施氏，愛吃獅子，決心要吃十隻獅子。
他常常去市場看獅子。
十點鐘，剛好有十隻獅子到了市場。
那時候，剛好施氏也到了市場。
他看見那十隻獅子，便放箭，把那十隻獅子殺死了。
他拾起那十隻獅子的屍體，帶到石室。
石室濕了水，施氏叫侍從把石室擦乾。
石室擦乾了，他才試試吃那十隻獅子。
吃的時候，才發現那十隻獅子，原來是十隻石頭的獅子屍體。
試試解釋這件事吧。

Follow the link for an explanation and translation.

It's In Your Genes

2007-06-05T14:29:00.000+08:00

Got Mandarin troubles? Blame your parents. If they'd had the sense to be Asian before you were born, then you might be picking up on your tones a bit quicker.

Says Prof Robert Ladd of Edinburgh University:

we suggest that there might be something that would make it easier or more natural, in some way we don't understand, for an individual to learn and use a tonal language than a non-tonal one

However, my kids should be ok...

It remains true that any normal human infant will acquire the language of any community in which it's raised, regardless of its genetic makeup.

Not that I'm calling my infant or toddler normal.

Story Time at the Elementary School

2007-05-04T12:47:00.000+08:00

The elementary school adjacent to our buxiban has twelve 2nd grade classes with 35 students in each one of them. These are the kids that are to be the bread and butter of our lives, so it seems like a good idea to go get to know them. When a parent of one of our students from a former life walked in our front door and offered to introduce me to the second grade teachers, I jumped at the chance. Well, it seemed like a good idea.

I've been getting up at six almost every morning for the last three weeks to drive from my house to the school and meet the aixin mama. Aixin mama (pron. "Eye Sheen"--Chinese English: Love/Heart) is a volunteer position for mothers and some fathers in the neighborhood who are interested in taking a more active role in students' lives. They are the crossing guards who risk their necks in early morning traffic to help kids navigate the intersections adjacent to the school. They might help to distribute snacks or milk to the class that they are assigned to for a day. When teachers gather for their morning meeting at 8o'clock, the aixin mamas hang out in the classroom to make sure students are writing down their daily assignments in their homework books, then they spend about half an hour reading a story or something along those lines.

I have become an aixin baba, and have been pressed into service reading stories or something along those lines. Actually, the nice lady across the street at the lunchbox stand tells me that my position is gushr baba (story father). So I am.

Apart from Wednesday which is Casual/Laundry Day, students wear uniforms to school four days a week. Each uniform has a name plate sewn onto it with 5 digits. A student with 30432 on his shirt is a third grader in class #4 who is the 32nd on the class role. The way things "used to be" is that all the "good" students were placed in the first class, and the best teacher was put in charge of them. When you saw a student with a high class number 31125, say, you could tell immediately that he didn't do well on his placement tests, or didn't turn in homework.

It is my understanding--by the way feel free to correct me if you have different information-- that in Jr high schools today, students in each class are ranked from best to worst and are given their class rating to wear on their badge; low numbers for good students, high numbers for ne'er-do-wells. Talk about negative reinforcement, and labeling!

Back to my second graders. As of this morning, I've worked my way through 9 of the 12 classes. This morning was class number 2-12 and I was feeling a little anxious; 2-10 and 2-11 were a little...hellish. I found that this class, today at least, was a well-behaved bunch, or at least manageable. Only one kid flipped me the bird, but no one told me to eat shit, and there were no boys jumping on their desks and grabbing their private parts while doing the chicken dance.

My contact at the school walks me to class every morning after we meet at about 7:40 and I exchange greetings with the kids from other classes whom I've met previously. Before the start of the school day, the exterior of the school is swarming with kids watering plants, sweeping the paths, picking up trash, and generally going through the motions of respecting their school. It a) teaches the students responsibility, and b) supplies free janitorial services to a tight-fisted educational system. 1st & 2nd graders normally just clean their classrooms. 5th & 6th graders get toilet duty. After one bathroom break, the place smells like a men's room at an NFL game.

When we arrive in the classroom, there are introductions amid gasps of awe at the giant hitting his head on the blackboard lights. Sometimes I feel like Gandalf.

The desks are normally arranged in 5 rows of seven, and I can compare sections of the classroom with one another as well. I'm used to teaching to a horse shoe shaped class, so coming up with ways of engaging the whole class with this kind of a set up has been something of a challenge. I want to do a high energy demo for them, because that's what they should expect when they come to my buxiban, but space for movement is limited as you can imagine.

It's a little slow starting with hellos and howareyous and I'mfinethankyouandyous and whatnot, but I play a little TeacherSays and decide whether boys and girls know who's who. After that, I've been drilling some color flashcards with them, and pitting the boys against the girls to see who can be the loudest, or quietest.

I wrap the class up with about ten minutes of TicTacToe stretched out by Rock,Paper,Scissors. I had to vamp for an extra 15 minutes for one particularly fiendish class last week. The teacher was obviously happy to pawn those kids off on someone else while she disappeared to smoke half a pack of cigarettes.

Out of 35 students, there are usually between 5 and 10 that show an interest in what's going on. In the good classes, the other ones sit politely and soak it in. Each class has its clown, some have two. In classes with three or more clowns, the top two are vying for the title of Ass. It's no holds barred.

Yesterday, the teacher stuck around through my shtick. Ten minutes in, she noticed that some students had their homework books out or were playing games. Not the rudest bunch in the school by far, but the teacher stepped in and ordered them to put all their gear away and to stand up and bow to the teacher. Twas a nice gesture, but I'd seen it once before in the class full of demons, so I was credulous. The rest of the session went extraordinarily well.

This morning, I managed to defuse the two clowns in class, and had the whole group eating out of the palm of my hand. I was even letting them win TicTacToe, when in flew a bumblebee the size of a Cessna. Under my capable watch, pandemonium was not reached, but damn near. Each class is equipped with electric oscillating fans bolted to the ceiling. Each time the behemoth flew under a fan, the wind sheer sent it darting down amongst the children who dove from their desks. "Kill it! Kill it!" the chanted. I told them to be calm and that it wouldn't sting them. No one would believe me, so I calmly opened the top window and assisted the bee on its way out to visit another class. I was the hero of the day and some of the students felt it would be ok if I stayed on for the whole day.

Not me. I needed a cup of coffee.

Negative Feedback

2007-05-03T20:55:00.000+08:00

Paul Rowe offers an interesting look at what may be the root of Taiwanese students' quietness in the classroom in this letter to the Taipei Times from April 17th.

Taipei Times - archives:

The majority of students perceive themselves as unsuccessful. Even the student who gets the second highest grades in the class is disappointed. Second place is not best. Even the highest scorer is sometimes not satisfied because 99 percent is not 100 percent. Constant testing and the resulting negative feedback explain why Taiwanese students are silent in class. Throughout their schooling, students are pounded with negative feedback.

He goes on to suggest that the solution is to provide students with copious amounts of praise. In his TalkFest experiment, 7 months of praise produced positive results within a group of 7th and 8th graders in Hualien, when they were given the opportunity to practice their English for five minutes 1-on-1 with a foreign teacher.

I agree that foreign teachers who offer their students even small amounts of positive reinforcement are often filling a void. Recently I have been working on a similar problem with my elementary students. In the large chain school where I taught for 6 years before coming to my senses, students were rewarded each lesson with reward cards of various denomination which could be traded in for anything from paper cups for the water fountain (10 cards) to erasers, pencil boxes, & yo-yos up to large stuffed animals (2000 cards). We bribed the kids to open their mouths in class by giving them ten cards for answering a question here, 20 cards for winning a game there. One teacher who almost lasted a year at the school once gave out about 500 cards per student in one of her classes just to keep them quiet. The system produced students who could answer the question "How are you?" in .375 seconds. Anything to get the card.

In my new school, we debated whether to give away toys or reward cards at all. The reward cards are just one more bit of book keeping to keep up with, and giving toys away, we decided, would distract our students from the reason they come to English class. (No, not "My mom makes me come." The other reason: presumably "to learn English.") We decided against such frivolity.

My instincts were reinforced when I picked up a copy of David Paul's Teaching English to Children in Asia. Paul lists a number of reasons why rewards don't work in the classroom. Namely, they're shallow, divisive, they weaken students peripheral learning and make them less likely to take risks if they are focused only on the accumulation of artificial wealth. The kids aren't supposed to come to school for dime store toys, anyway, they're supposed to come and learn something.

I mention toys and prizes and rewards because they are discussed in Chapter 8 with praise. Here are the bullet points on the Problems with Praise, roughly paraphrased:

Praise leads to less risk taking--students want to be praised and don't want to be criticized, so they won't answer questions if they won't hear "Well done!"
Praise increases dependency--kids focus on the teacher's reaction, rather than learning the task at hand.
Praise increases insecurity--telling a student "good job" increases pressure to live up to the assessment, and the possibility of not living up to your expectations breeds insecurity.
Praise can weaken a child's ability to communicate--kids become self-conscious of how they're doing in a conversation because they constantly wait to hear whether or not they've constructed a sentence properly and will wait for a "Very Good" before moving on.
Praise divides the class--kids who don't get as much as their classmates see themselves as inferior, and after awhile, become so.

Now, let's hear everyone say "YOU THINK TOO MUCH!" All together now! Good.

A class entirely devoid of praise seems rather extreme. Every day I see kids who get zero praise all day long and it breaks my heart. All I want to do is to sit them down and tell them that they are valuable individuals rather than soul-less automatons. But, if you think that fighting City Hall is tough, try going up against 5,000 years of Chinese culture.

So, if not praise, what? The author suggests that encouraging words "directed at the work itself, rather than the child" are better at getting students more involved in learning for learning's sake. Instead of saying "Way to go, dude!" when the student offers "I have two brothers," reply with something like, "You have two brothers, huh? That's great, what are their names?" thereby extending the exercise rather than ending it at the correct answer.

I'm not sure how well this works yet, as I keep falling into the old trap of saying "Alright, Gimme Five!" These things take time to learn.

Formerly Creepy Crawly

2007-05-02T21:31:00.000+08:00

Saw this guy limping by the front door this morning. From one side to the other, he was about as big as my cell phone and seemed to be on his last legs. The guy who runs the noodle shop next door offered his foot to corral the critter, then he stomped on it.

Here Comes Big Al

2007-05-02T14:27:00.000+08:00

Al Gore's documentary played in Taichung for all of a week; I hope that this time around he is able to generate more of a buzz. The China Post Reports speeches in Taipei and Kaoshuing, but my wife suggested that he would give a speech in Taichung as well.

China Post - 台灣新聞 , Taiwan , News: "Gore is expected to give one speech each in Taipei and Kaohsiung between Sept. 13 and 20, she said. There will also be a summit forum held at the Yushan National Park in central Taiwan, which President Chen Shui-bian will be invited to attend."

When Bill Clinton came a few years back, I was disappointed to learn that the only people who would be allowed near the autographing table were folks who spent NT$10,000 in the bookstore. Lots of celebrities. I woke up at four in the morning, but fortunately I didn't get on the bus.

Better luck this time?

So It Goes!

2007-04-13T06:53:00.000+08:00

The American writer Kurt Vonnegut, Jr died yesterday. In researching Unitarians yesterday, I came across his name and face once or twice. Then, upon checking the news, I saw that he had died. So it goes.

This is one of my favorite quotes:

I say in speeches that a plausible mission of artists is to make people appreciate being alive at least a little bit. I am then asked if I know of any artists who pulled that off. I reply, "The Beatles did."

Over the years, I seem to have lent out all of my Vonnegut and am left with a dog-eared-- and chewed--copy of Welcome to the Monkey House. I don't mind sharing, those books will be in print forever.

Got an email from a friend who suggested pulling out my Vonnegut and re-reading something in tribute. At first I was reticent; I had just picked up a borrowed/stolen copy of The Illuminatus Trilogy (book theft goes both ways) which I had previously been unsuccessful in getting beyond the first or second page. A hundred pages in now, and I'm sufficiently invested in time and pages that the death of a favorite author strikes me as a terrible inconvenience. I'm still not sure what to do about it and find my attention vacillating between the collection of short stories and the masonic conspiracy tome.

Taiwan X-Cup #10

2007-04-10T21:17:00.000+08:00

Taiwan X-Fun magazine's X-Cup #10 came out last week with a nod to 16 foreign artists (full disclosure: I'm on pages 60-63) from 12 different countries (if you count Mercury and Taiwan) living and working in Taiwan. There's some really good stuff in there--photography, graffiti, sculpture, video. I've come to know the work of several of the graffiti artists, but I'm blown away by what all everyone else is up to.

Dazed-j, & Jaz Loh Jason , of Singapore; Benjamin Brard, & Gilles Falisse, France. Dabs1, Mercury LSB , Paul Batt,& James Voges, from the US; Harley Smart , Keith Jones, & Beans and Bueller, from Canada; PFL, of England; Aoki Yuka, Japan; TC Lin, naturalized Taiwanese; Syko Song, Korea; and Tobie Openshaw, South Africa.

If you're in Taiwan, pick up a copy of the magazine, it's only 100NT; if you're not on the island, and don't feel like flying over, check out their websites.

Private School

2007-04-07T14:34:00.000+08:00

One of my students is sitting at the front desk during a lesson break talking to Maggie. She says that her private junior high school charges every student NT$800 "air-conditioning" repair fee. Every month. In a class with 30 students, they can afford to buy a new unit every month, charging that kind of money.

Taiwanese Humor

2007-04-06T16:00:00.000+08:00

晴天需要好好學英文的原因
> （一）
>
> 一位在美的留學生，想要考國際駕照。
>
> 在考試時因為過於緊張，看到地上標線是向左轉。
>
> 他不放心的問道:turn left？
>
> 監考官回答：Right！於是他立刻向右轉。
>
> 很抱歉他只有下次再來。

A guy goes to get his driver's license in the States. He's nervous as hell because his English isn't exactly up to speed. During the road test, he sees a left turn arrow. He asks the instructor, "Turn left?" He answers, "Right." The student failed the test. Better luck next time.

> （二）
>
> 某人刻苦學習英語，終有小成。(One day a Taiwanese guy bumps into a foreigner on the street.)
>
> 一日上街不慎与一老外相撞，忙說：I am sorry.
>
> 老外應道：I am sorry too.
>
> 某人聽後又道：I am sorry three.
>
> 老外不解，問：What are you sorry for?
>
> 某人無奈，道：I am sorry five.
>

> (三）
>
> 某男，亦粗通英文，至使館，有表要填，有一欄是sex。
>
> 該男思之久已，毅然下筆：Once a week。
>
> 簽證官觀后暴笑，曰：This item should be filled in with male or female.
>
> 該男頓時赧顏，思之，填下：Female.
>
> 官楞之，曰：Shouldn't it be male?
>
> 男急釋曰：I am a normal man, so i have sex with female

Taiwan Media Culture

2007-04-02T14:38:00.000+08:00

Just came across this series of examples of the local media at work. I'm just kind of let down that the compiler didn't include Elton John arriving at CKS. Elton, you are still my hero.

I nominate "Taiwanese Media Ethics" for World's Shortest Book.

Pessimism?

2007-04-02T09:06:00.000+08:00

The best descriptive line about Taiwan I've seen in awhile comes from Notes From a Small Island:

Taiwan is a handsome teenager with no confidence and everyone goes on about the greasy spots without mentioning the beautiful face.

That's about it. I had three of those spotty teenagers in class this morning. They have the answers, but just try to get them to evict the words to form them from their voiceboxes. Phew.

The pervasive pessimism of the expat community is raised, and NSFI bemoans the fact that perky optimism seems to be no match for the general gloom by locals and expats alike.

When did my perky optimism disappear, or has that candle really been entirely snuffed out? I know that I had it for the first year or so into my Time in Taiwan, but then a combination of workplace politics, exhaust, and lack of sunlight crept up on me in my second year.

When I got here seven years ago, foreigners weren't talking to each other on the street. Except for the Mormons. You could always tell someone fresh off the boat by their cheery greetings they gave to Western Strangers they happened across in SOGO, the night market, or McDonald's. Personally, I felt that the expat community was about the size of a small town back in the States and it kinda seemed natural to serve up a howdy to every round-eye I met. It's just not done.

I think it's because so many foreigners in Taiwan are freaks. Now, don't get all insulted. I'm sure no one reading this fits that description. But, if your cow udder keeps getting in the way of the keyboard, you might stop wondering why people won't look you in the eye.

Locals ask me all the time if I'm used to Taiwan. I think this means, have you gotten over stage X of culture shock. I can never remember what the stages are, so I usually ask my friend Craig who can rattle them off like nobody's business. But, today is Sunday and I know he's busy, so I'll look them up.

TravelWithKids came up first, here's their list, which seems like a downward spiral of negativity:

Vacation
Denial
Anger
Escape
Depression

or, closer to home (playing fast and loose with terminology here--in this case "home"
being Taiwan) this list from WHOSE Travel, Taiwan with some helpful tips on getting over yourself and learning to be happy wherever you're stuck. Ouch, that didn't come out right at all.

Honeymoon
Disillusionment
Understanding
Integration
Re-Entry

or, according to Paul Pedersen , a Professor of Education in the Department of Counseling and Human Services at Syracuse University in New York, and author of the weighty tome The Five Stages of Culture Shock

The Honeymoon Stage
The Disintegration Stage
The Reintegration Stage
The Autonomy Stage
The Interdependence Stage

Pedersen's book costs $115 and is printable on demand, in case you're interested.

Yeah, so the locals ask and I don't know if I'm understanding, integrated, autonomous, or what. I think if I was "used to it" I wouldn't find myself scoffing so much as I see people enjoying their days off at the electronics store watching Kenny G on the plasma TV, or standing in line at Baskin Robbins for an hour to get a US dollar off on an ice cream cone because it's the 31st of the month. I think if I was used to the place, I wouldn't ask myself "Why?" so often, and would instead take the Taiwanese approach of "Oh well, that's Taiwan."

The answer I usually give is that the whole world is the same. Every country has its share of good folks, and bad folks. There are consumers of mindless tripe here just as there are in America. Taiwan has any number of news programs that do nothing but pander to one side or the other. America has FoxNews. (Personally, I'll take the local variety there, because it's so easy to tune out.)

Oh lord I've been rambling. Ok, quick five good things about Taiwan:

Culture (no, really, I like to joke about Taiwanese culture, too, but there's some good stuff going on here) Cloud Gate Dance Theater--Ju Ming Museum--Ang Lee--
Taiwanese Food--Slow Cooked Chicken (tu yao ji) which I'm moments away from making into a lasagna, thus the rushed ending to this post--Taiwanese breakfast burritos--blood rice
Beautiful Scenery--Most of the East Coast--the mountains--the outlying islands--hotties
Location, Location, Location-- work a year, save some cash, travel around Asia for two months...that's awesome
The People--sorry, I was really reaching for number five, because I'm hungry. Honestly, not all Taiwanese people point at you and say "Look at that guy with the big nose!" And not every Taiwanese person is going to cheat on his taxes, or cheat you on the price of a motorcycle, or some dumb trinket in the night market. My wife is awesome (and married) and her family are kind caring, and have I mentioned what a great cook my mother-in-law is? Some teenagers can be a bit wearing on a Saturday morning, but they're not all like that, and the ones who are, mostly grow out of it.

Taichung International Seeks Expansion

2007-03-28T15:32:00.000+08:00

As in...International Airport. The old domestic airport which brought planes over my apartment up and moved one day in 2004. So, one bit of noise has disappeared from the block. I wish the advertising trucks would head off with them.

A student told me a few weeks ago that the airport in Shalu--that's the international one--isn't doing very good business because passengers can take off on International flights, but cannot return to Taiwan? Runways to short? I asked the student how the planes got to Taichung in the first place to pick up the passengers to take them away.

Sorry my mind was wandering. Where was I?

It seems that this international airport is making life in Central Taiwan a bit more convenient.
For example, last December Mandarin Airlines began operating flights between Taichung and Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. International airline Hong Kong Express Airways, meanwhile, offers flights between Hong Kong and Taichung.

So, a visa run straight from Taichung? No need to ride the bus for two hours to Taipei. If my math is correct, this may shave four hours off travel time to North America.

I think that the director of the Taichung Airport Office has one of the coolest English names I've seen recently..."Clone" Chang. Awesome.

Who's the looniest teacher you've ever worked with?

2007-03-25T19:02:00.000+08:00

Nut Job Teacher Stories over at Dave's ESL Cafe is a long posting, but fun to dip your toes into for a few days. There are about seven pages of horror as of today. I've gone through the first couple pages and haven't seen anything that looks too familiar yet.
Link via this post at TEFL Logue.

Language Log: The Chinese episode

2007-03-25T18:28:00.000+08:00

Before the US entered WWII, it was necessary for a group of US military advisers to learn Mandarin in a hurry.

The group went half-way around the world by slow boat taking 35 days and then over the hump to China with Hockett managing their Chinese instruction all the way. When they finally arrived the officers were using a respectable amount of colloquial Mandarin and were able to carry out their training assignment.

Language Log: The Chinese episode

See? It just takes the right motivation to learn Chinese. Even a jackass can do it.

Lonely Planet TV--Taiwan

2007-03-22T16:15:00.000+08:00

Lonely Planet Travel Writer JoSamBro has done a piece on Taiwanese culture for Lonely Planet TV. It's a 3 minute thumbnail of life in Taiwan. Fantastic video.

Fruit and Firecrackers

2007-03-02T00:47:00.000+08:00

You may recall that I've been working on opening a buxiban here in town. It's done. This morning was deemed an auspicious time for the kai gong (open work) ritual for the New Year. My father-in-law did his thing and came up with 5-7 a.m. as being the luckiest time to set of a magazine of firecrackers bigger than my ass to announce to the good gods that we're here to do business or to scare off nasty demons. Fortunately, I had to stay home with the kids in case they didn't remain sleeping, but they did, and I didn't have to leave my warm bed.

For this morning's bai-bai (prayer) Maggie burned God money in an incinerator that's about the size of those tins that the popcorn comes in at Xmas time. She set up a table in front of the school on which she put a big basket of fruit (the basket, a product of Seminole basketweavers, came from my sister-in-law Shari in Florida several years ago). My mother-in-law called to tell us what kind of fruit we needed to include for what reason.

Pineapple in Taiwanese is Onglai which means "very busy" so that our business will be very good. Apples were in the basket for a good reason which is escaping us at the moment. Tangerines bring big luck and big fortune. Plums bai zao nian nian hao every year will be good.
Pears have gone the same way as the apples. I'll try to retrieve them when the mother-in-law phones again.

Our relatives bought us huge baskets of flowers and plastic pineapples to hang from the awning as a way of celebrating the opening of a new business. In addition, we received orchids from the chief of police in Changhua, the principal of one of the high schools in the neighborhood, and a supervisor in the Taipei City Police Department; friends of the family.

All of this in hopes of a good first spring for our school.

Happy Pig Year

2007-02-18T19:44:00.000+08:00

Here's an elaborate red envelope loaded and ready for action. Nine days off means nine days at home with the kids. More posts when the feeling moves.

One Guy's Opinion...Oh! Did You See The Colts?

2007-01-23T19:22:00.000+08:00

I had a demonstration class at a bicycle components manufacturer this evening. I was told to prepare two classes for 5-6 people, one intermediate, one "High-Intermediate." I got one high-intermediate student, and three intermediate students. No sweat, they were a great bunch to teach for a half an hour. It was one of those situations where there is no syllabus, no placement test, no text book, please make it interactive. That sort of thing. With Free Coffee...and ducats.

The first session went off without a hitch. They both did, actually. Thanks. In the second session, we did a quick little activity on Starting a Conversation. We talked about when, why, and how, and then why not. Not to stereotype engineers (there's a but coming), because we all know where the world would be without them, but the average engineer in my experience in Taiwan is not the most gregarious individual. Or robust. That said, at least two of my in-laws are engineers and wonderfully amusing people to be around (love you guys, mean it).

What I was trying to get at was "What are some situations in which you would be likely to start a conversation with a foreigner-stranger?" Immediately you have alarm bells. They don't want to talk to strange foreigners. Having done my share of human resources work in Taiwan, I know exactly where they're coming from. But once we got Stranger (ie someone you don't know very well) and Strange Foreigner (ie Canadian) straightened out, it was rough for them to figure out just when they would want to initiate a conversation with a foreigner.

Years ago, I mentioned over a beer that I had recommended that my students talk to honkies that they see on the street, y'know, just to ask them where they are from, stuff like that. The North Americans I was sitting with were aghast. "Oh for Fuck's Sake, Man! Don't do THAT!" I won't mention what country they were from, I'll just say that they often have a tendency to place overmuch emphasis on the minutiae of money. (I must be very careful with my stereotypes here. I may have already alienated the engineers in the world, and next thing you know the Canadians will be after me. Oh, now I've gone and done it.) What this gentleman was objecting to was the fact that he wasn't paid to speak to the locals outside of the class, & if they wanted to practice their English with him, they were going to have to pony up.

Now I can't imagine why anyone would want to pay money to have a conversation with that guy, but this is Taiwan. Personally, it depends on what kind of mood I'm in. There are a few kids that I meet on my daily travels that like to come out and say hello and see what's up. It takes a lot of guts to go up to someone and speak to them in their native language. Especially if you don't know if that person is going to bite your head off. I am as polite as I can be to anyone who politely approaches me and wants to practice their English for a minute or two. The hosptial and the bathroom are off-limits, I told the students tonight.

Like most everyone else, I'm turned off by parents who twist their kid's arms behind their back to get them to say "Hi Uncle." And the folks zipping by moo-ing at me, I can do without. I never would have learned Chinese if people weren't willing to speak to me on the street. Some folks over the years have been rude bastards, but I kept plugging away.

So, where does an engineer go for hot one-on-one English conversation? There's a public computer station, but that's not a very good place to talk as folks are busy. There's no elevator in the building, so there's not that uncomfortable silence between floors to break. There seems to be some segregation at meal time and after work. One student volunteered that they don't like to talk to anyone they don't know. This rule of thumb only goes for foreigners, though.

Why would that be, do you think? Stress, mostly. With Americans, one guy said, the conversation goes from topic to topic faster than you can say "Attention Defecit" and the locals have a hard time keeping up. This isn't the first I've heard this from a Taiwanese student, but it's the first time I've heard it as a reason why they'd rather just not attempt to talk to foreigners. The reason they gave for not wanting to talk to the Germans is that the Germans will just stare at them after giving them a one or two word answer so the Taiwanese person slinks away back to his workstation.

I'm going to try both of these things this week. First I'll try to stay on one topic for eight hours. The next day I will answer every question with one or two word answers, die my hair blonde, and stare like a hun when Caty at the Early Bird asks me if I would like some more coffee. And if she tries to take my order in English, I may tell her--in Mandarin-- that she's not paying me to practice English. It'll be a multi-cultural irritant experiment.

More Train Pics

2007-01-12T21:40:00.000+08:00

Taiwan High Speed Rail

2007-01-11T19:42:00.000+08:00

Met a travel writer at the Early Bird at breakfast this morning who said that he was heading out on the Taiwan High Speed Rail to continue research for an article he was writing. (Here's the Wikipedia entry) He was a nice enough guy so I volunteered to give him a lift out to WuEr if he didn't mind waiting while I got my camera.

I told him there was no way in hell I was getting on that thing. (And you can quote me, honeychile...or words to that effect.) They've been working on this thing for about as long as I've been in Taiwan and when I think of the train, I think of the train arriving in Taiwan and what a grand soiree there was, only to discover that the wheels were too far apart, or too near together, to fit the track that had been laid. Fast Forward a little while, and the inspectors found that the road bed was already eroding in places because local contractors had skimped on their labor. In Taichung, thieves crept along the tracks and stole grounding wires for a section of track, presumably to sell the copper. I want no part of it. No thank you. But, I don't mind looking at the thing, even though my wife says it looks like a cheap plastic toy.
So the plan has been to wait five years. If there are no major incidents, we'll go for a ride. Yesterday, in Tainan, the train overshot the station and had to back up to let folks off. Then the doors wouldn't open. A few days before that, it got stuck in a tunnel between Banciao and Taoyuan for about six minutes.

"C'mon, Paul! Where's your sense of Adventure?" you might ask. I rode the bullet train in Japan, no problem. I've jumped out of an airplane, no problem. It's wasn't out of fear that I had hoped to boycott that fool contraption, but out of a healthy disrespect for Taiwanese engineering.

I will say, however, that it is one sexy looking train as it arrives at the station, and I might be willing to ignore my boycott under conditions which I have no yet been able to finalize.

January 1, 2007

2007-01-01T08:16:00.000+08:00

I am sad to report that on top of James Brown, Jerry Ford, and Saddam Hussein, someone else has died; I have no idea who, but they lived across the street and their funeral began warming up at eight a.m. with an atonal organ rift played by a tone deaf organist with no rhythm. Quite a start to the new year, this is.

Fortunately, it was a very sedate New Year's Eve and I was actually asleep by eleven. Otherwise, I fear, I would be pouring water on the celebrants.

**UPDATE--It's 11:30p.m. The ceremony across the street lasted for a little over 14 hours today. There were different people praying, a man and a woman singing, keyboards, stringed instruments, and finger cymbals. It's not so bad unless you're trying to sleep. But, I guess that's the point, probably similar in purpose as a "wake." I still have to wonder what happened to the poor souls who died in the days before amplified sound reinforcement.

Measuring Earthquakes

2006-12-29T00:03:00.000+08:00

This last quake was 7.2 by Japanese standards and 6.7 according to the scientists here in Taiwan. What gives? The Taipei Times continued to not answer this question this morning, and Will at the Early Bird Diner really wants to know.

I found out a few things, but nothing that resembles a complete answer to the question What's the root cause of this discrepancy?

First off, the Richter Scale was rendered obsolete in 1979 when Tom Hanks (the seismologist, I presume) and Hiroo Kanamori came up with the Moment Magnitude Scale.

Here's a short explanation from the USGS:

Q: What is moment magnitude?
A: Moment is a physical quantity proportional to the slip on the fault times the area of the fault surface that slips; it is related to the total energy released in the EQ. The moment can be estimated from seismograms (and also from geodetic measurements). The moment is then converted into a number similar to other earthquake magnitudes by a standard formula. The results is called the moment magnitude. The moment magnitude provides an estimate of earthquake size that is valid over the complete range of magnitudes, a characteristic that was lacking in other magnitude scales.

I may be missing something, but the Taiwan Weather Bureau is listing the quake as ML6.7, this is Local Magnitude, which according to Wikipedia is the same as the Richter Scale. It looks like the boys in Denver are using the moment magnitude calculations. So, "MagnitudeX" and "Y on the Richter Scale" are meant to be close, which now counts in horse-shoes, hand-grenades, nuclear war, and now, earthquakes.

The USGS also has an interesting summary of the quake.

We're All Ok

2006-12-27T16:46:00.000+08:00

The earthquakes affected the southern part of the island. There is footage on TVBS of a collapsed building in Pingtong, apparently there's a little boy trapped inside. There are gas leaks and a rather large fire. There is a graphic at the top right of the screen that says "Live," however I've just seen the same fireman throw the same piece of debris onto the same pile three times. I have less and less faith in the local media. Well, I guess the talking heads are live.

In Taichung, some three hours to the north by car, we felt three quakes. I was in an office on the second floor for the first one, and we were all spooked by the rattling of the windows up and down the hall. I called Maggie immediately after the shaking stopped. She had been feeding Gretchen on the sixth floor at the PNCC and I could hear the other mothers in the room making their "Oh goodness that makes me nervous" noises. I felt the next quake in the car at the corner of Wenshin Rd and WuChuan Rd. To feel an earthquake in a car at ground level is quite an experience. The car did not go up on two wheels, but I could feel shock waves passing underneath me.

I have a flashlight ready to go in Franklin's backpack just in case. There was a third shock about three minutes before I started this post. It was more of a gentle shake that barely had any impact on the beaded curtains.

Coming two years after the Big One that set off the Asian Tsunami, I know a lot of folks must have been mighty nervous. Leica and Frankie are sound asleep.

Gretchen weighs 3766 grams (that's 3.76 kg for those keeping score) and is the favorite of all the nurses in the nursery. I've been keeping my distance as Franklin and I have been battling colds. More pictures before her first birthday, I promise.

More quake news here, and here.

Also, anyone know why there would be such a great discrepancy between the Richter reading from Taiwan and the one from the friendly folks at the USGS? I'm sure the cynical answer that the Taiwanese computer is not set up properly would not be the most accurate, but what gives? It seems to me that the USGS reading is usually quite a bit higher. The Taiwan News this morning acknowledged the difference by saying that no explanation was given for the wide variance. How bout it?

Not Christmassy X'mas Posting.

2006-12-26T00:46:00.000+08:00

Happy X'mas, all that.

This is not your traditional holiday fare, I realize, it's just that I heard this story earlier in the week, and now five minutes before the end of the day, I finally have a few minutes to get this down. If you were looking for an uplifting sweet & sour soup for the soul sort of entry for today, look elsewhere.

My beautiful wife delivered a healthy baby girl to us two weeks before X'mas, and in keeping with Taiwanese tradition, she is --"sequestered" is as good a word as I've been able to come up with lately for it-- at a Post Natal Care Center (PNCC) for a 25 day period following her three day stay in the OB/GYN clinic. This period of time is to allow the mother to acclimate to motherhood, and to be fed copious amounts of traditional Chinese medicinal food and to drink teas that are supposed to increase milk production. Women are not supposed to be exposed to lots of visitors, wind, the public, cold water, for obvious reasons and for feng-shui purposes. Which came first?

The PNCC is a 9 story building; there is a clinic on the first floor, a maternity clinic & delivery room are on 2 and 3. It being a hospital, there is no fourth floor (the word for "4" in Chinese sounding the same as "death" they decided not to include one in hospitals & all others would be leased out to foreigners). The fifth floor has patient bedrooms for either the clinic below, or the PNCC above. On 6 is the nursery, a waiting room, classroom, and two separate feeding rooms. One for father's to hang out with the baby, and where boobs are not normally whipped out (unless you're lucky, har har har, knowwhatImean?) Then, 7-9 are all patient bedrooms. Each floor has 9 or 10 rooms and each room has a private bathroom. Ours has one bed and a sofa, TV, fridge & wardrobe. It's a college dorm room without the cigarette smoke & the empty whiskey bottles.

Because who would smoke in a place like that, right?

Last week, a mother moved out of the room next to Maggie's. If I remember correctly, she was the Taiwanese wife of a Japanese businessman who lived in Japan. The wife returned from Japan either right before or right after giving birth. Not too clear on that part of the story, but it's not important. She came back to Taiwan for the purpose of entering the Post Natal Care Center to take care of her body and that of her child. I mean, that's why I would pay for this service.

The mother was doing something right. She produced more breastmilk than she knew what do with, much more than the child was hungry for, and she must have feared that it was going to waste, so she offered it to one of the other mothers in the women only room. I've not seen the inside of this room, as I don't have a womb, but it's the place where mothers go to feed, usually from the source, but there are also two breast pumps that are, apparently, something. The woman squeezed out her two quarts of milk and surrendered them to the nurses who stored them until they were needed to feed her child, or the child of the other mother who was also using her breast milk.

Then, she left the building to go shopping. Mitsukoshi Mall is a short hop by taxi from there, as is SOGO and Tiger City. It would take a bit longer to get to Chung-Yo, but that's surely not out of the question. Shopping in FABULOUS Taichung!

When the maids came to clean out the woman's room after her time was up, they found a month's worth of cigarette butts and a dozen whiskey bottles. Maggie walked past the room, caught a whiff and was shocked. The maid, not being one not to gossip, said that the mother had just been using the place as a hotel while she was in Taiwan, that her husband had paid for everything.

I've been hoping that the mother was offered that monster's breastmilk wasn't so thick as to give it to her child.

The PNCC and the whole concept of Early Motherhood Sequestration is without a doubt the best thing about Taiwanese society. I can stand here for an hour and mock their ice cream, their driving, their insane public spectacles such as the dancing team from the chemistry department that practices in the park by my house. But I'll sing praises about the health care provided to new mothers from the top of my building.

I don't know where the US Government would ever find the money to pay for/or subsidize this sort of a program. Pity.

OMG @ OBGYN

2006-12-13T23:36:00.000+08:00

I was there having a baby. Well, I was there with someone who was having a baby, namely my wife. We're all ok. Gretchen Althea Batt was born 12/9 at 2332. She weighed 3.6kg and was 53cm long. There's an OMG for you.

ICFBI moment came a few hours earlier, though. I'd gone home to feed Leica and returned at about nine in the evening. On the sofa by the elevator was a father and his 6 year old son. When I walked onto the ward, I didn't see anyone hooked up to a monitor, so I assumed that the person they were with was having a C-section. She came out a few minutes later, knocked out on a gurney, and the father and son came in. Then son is running all over the place calling his mom and asking her how she feels and stuff, which I thought was a little odd. I asked my sister-in-law if she'd had a C-section. A stiff shake of the head was the answer, followed up with the mouthed word "Abortion."

I've got two wonderful kids and I'm not going to weigh in on this issue except to say Safe, Legal, & Rare. However, if it weren't for the fact that my wife was about to deliver our second child, I would have gone over and smacked the shit out of the father for bringing a young child to his younger siblings execution. And THEN letting him run all over the place, shouting, and crawling on the bed in the 30 minutes he allowed his wife to rest before taking her home.

On my Taiwan's Bottom Five List: INCONSIDERATE

East of Taichung

2006-11-26T23:59:00.000+08:00

From Dali City, you hop on Hwy 136 and head towards Puli. The twisty road which seems to have been built with motorcycles in mind eventually takes you south through the mountains and hooks up with Hwy 14 just East of Tsaotun smack in the middle of the Pick-Your-Own Strawberry Fields. It's a great ride and I'm glad to have rediscovered the idea of a road trip.

Before you get too far up into the mountains, you come across this Buddhist Monastery. According to my traveling companion, this is the place where people go when they've got troubles. The nuns will take you in for as long as you need to stay, and the first three days are free. If you're still there on the fourth, they give you a job to do. The weather was lovely at the beginning, but the Taiwan grey soon took over.