The Teletubbies invade Taipei

I was at Taipei Main Station the other day, and happened to come across these guys. Wierd

Beach house in Wai Ao

I have been toying with the idea of renting a beach house for the last few months. Although rent is cheap outside of Taipei, finding what I was looking for turned out to be more difficult than I thought. All the rental websites are in Chinese and the Taiwanese people I asked usually gave me the deer in the headlights look. A few of them were cognizant enough to tell me that Taiwanese people generally don't own or rent vacation properties, at least not in Taiwan. I had almost given up hope, when I received word from my friend Cera that she knew someone who wanted out of her lease...at her beach house. Luckily, she was moving back home, and not trying to escape a horrible situation.

So I checked out the house today...and it was amazing. The house itself is big, about the same size as my house in Taipei. The rent is only $NT3,000 per month (a little less than $100). The guys who currently live in the house are all surfers, which will make my goal of learning to surf that much more attainable. The house is about 50 meters from the beach, and about 100 meters to the ocean. The house, and the whole town and highway, straddle the mountains, with hiking trails aplenty.


The house itself is in the city of Wai Ao, just north of Tou Cheng (頭城) and south of Fu Long (福隆). Parking is available, so once I buy a car, I will have ample parking. I'm pretty excited.

Ma and Obama ; Simplified characters and Spanish

A recent controversy has erupted in Taiwan over President Ma Ying Jeou's suggestion that Taiwanese should learn to write simplified characters. For those of you who are unfamiliar with Chinese characters, there are essential two kinds; Traditional and Simplified. Traditional characters are the ones that Westerners would be most familiar with. Simplified characters were invented by the Chinese Communists as an attempt to improve literacy. While the characters are still complex, they are much more "simple" than the traditional characters. A good example would be the character for "horse".

Traditional: 馬 Simplified: 马

As you can see, the traditional character is much more complex.

Getting back to the matter at hand, Taiwan's President has suggested that it would be a good thing for cross strait relations and exchanges if Taiwanese were to learn to read and write using simplified characters. He also is on the record saying it would help if Chinese were to learn traditional characters as well.

The reaction by the Taiwanese independence camp has been predictable. They are up in arms over the President's "trashing the nation's cultural integrity", to quote a DPP spokesman.

I can't help but see the parallels between President Ma's suggestion, and Barack Obama's suggestion during his campaign that it would be a good idea for Americans to learn Spanish.

Reactionary elements are everywhere, in every society. We should all try to look objectively at issues like this, before jumping up and down and calling names.

Reggae Fest 6/8/09

The Reggae Fest at Qian Shui Beach this weekend was a blast. Lot's of great music, food, and drink. I was a little unhappy at the lack of any tequila however. The huge, open pit grill on the patio cooked some of the best pork I've eaten in a long time. The late night pizza was especially delicious. My friend Tony, a Ghanaian, took me to the fifth floor of the building overlooking the music. IT was an amazing view from the top. Most of the performers were typical reggae acts. One band stood out, however. Skaraoke, a ska-ish band was pretty damn good. I'll be looking forward to seeing some more of them.

Also I saw a new map of the soon to be completed Neihu line. Once completed, it should cut about 15 minutes from my commute. If you look at the upper right corner of the map, my school is located at Nei Hu station. I will be getting on the MRT at Nanjing Station. I plan to attend the inagural opening, so expect a blog about it.

Taichung Part 2 - Saturday night & Sunday day

After a long afternoon of walking, eating and picture taking, as well as a hard earned nap, it was time to go out for the night. We headed for a bar district in Taichung with a big entertainment complex called Tiger. Tiger has bowling alleys, batting cages, pool tables and video games. We played a few video games, including on of those strength games with the hammer, which I won, and also hit the batting cages. Inside, playing video games, it was nice because they had AC, but the batting cages were outside, and it was a hot night. By the time we were finished, we were both drenched in sweat.













After Tiger we headed down to a bar/club called The Pig Pen. We had a fun time, but unfortunately not of my pictures came out. I did get some video of an entertaining dance/singing crew they had. It was pretty funny, and me and Tyler were laughing the whole time. They would sing and dance to top 40 songs. I took this video with my camera phone and considering it can't even take pictures at the bar, I think the video came out pretty well.

!Warning! When you watch the video, turn the volume down on your computer.


We were out pretty late Sunday night and by the time we got back to the hotel we were pretty hungry. Where else is there to go for breakfast in Taiwan but good ol' McDonalds. After a feast of hot cakes and mc muffins, we meandered around a bit before heading back to the hotel. On the way back, we came across a bird in the river that we were enthralled with for a good ten minutes. He was just standing there waiting for food to come by. Nothing came.


We woke up relatively early, considering what time we went to bed, and went to get some coffee. We brought along the Lonely Planet, to find some cool things to do. Lonely Planet is pretty sparse for Taiwan but we did find a paragraph about a nature area outside of the city called Da Keng so we decided we would go check that out.
We boarded the busand paid our fare but unfortunately, we weren't sure where to get off, and we missed our stop. Now this wouldn't normally be such a big deal, but, as we found out a bit later, Da Keng is at the base of the mountains...like, the last stop before the bus goes up a big mountain. Needless to say, we didn't realize we missed our stop until after we had reached the top of the mountain. Now, we weren't on a mountain peak but more of a a broad plateau of farm country.
When we tried to get off the bus, the bus driver tried to get us to pay more money. This really angered me. I told the bus driver he knew where we were supposed to be going and didn't even bother telling us. We're foreigners and don't know the area, and that we weren't going to pay any more money. He mumbled something about not knowing where we were going, and I shot back "then how do you know we didn't pay the right fare" and walked off the bus.
We were 1 kilometer oustide of some small town. The town itself was perched on the edge of the mountain, giving us spectacular views of the mountain valley. We walked around a bit, being our first time in a truly small Taiwanese farming town. As you can guess, we weren't entertained long. We then went to the bus stop to wait for the bus...which never came. We waited for more than 30 minutes before we decided to pay the NT$300 (about $8) for a taxi down the mountain.

Once we got to the bottom of the mountain, we walked found the hiking area and walked around a bit. It was scenic but the views were much better on the top of the mountain. What was interesting was a little oasis in the middle of this dirty suburb called "Bee Museum No. 2". Intrigued by this strange English in the midst of Chinese, we decided to take a chance and went in. What we found was not a museum, but a themed cafe/gift shop...place. Lot's of green and bee cutouts, with a small restaurant. You would assume the gift shop would sell bee related items, but no, they sold 3D architecture puzzles...strange indeed.


So that was the trip. I had a blast. I really enjoy going to Taichung, maybe some day I'll move down there. I took a lot of really interesting pictures, so go to my Picassa page and just look for the Taichung folder.