Speaking of fresh air, Nono and I recently moved from our place in downtown to a nice suburb called TienMu. It’s north of town, borders the mountains and a national park (Yang Ming Shan). The temperature is a bit cooler than in downtown, and the air is better. I took a bus from our new house to downtown recently and was really Shocked at how much of a difference there was in the air.
Last weekend Nono and I had signed up for a 10k run in Taipei. It was put on by Puma and took place on a Saturday night at 6:30pm. I hadn’t thought twice about it, but it ended up being a bad idea. I believe Puma chose an evening run because they wanted to have a post-run party and concert. There were some semi-famous names there for the performances after.
May is really hot and humid. There’s frequent rain and the weather isn’t ideal. So, on race day the weather was typical. 85 and humid. Saturday morning I bought the newspaper and looked at this:
I had to teach a class in the morning, it’s on the 25th floor downtown. Here’s what the air was looking like at 10am. Add a busy day of 500,000 scooters, cars and everything else, the air is only going to get worse too. We decided to skip the run and saw a movie instead
I am a regular TED.org visitor and I recently ran across this video. This is a great, brief, video that can help you improve the air quality of your home or workplace.
From: www.TED.org
Time: 4:00 minutes
Subject: A study of 3 plants that work together to increase air quality indoors.
Summary of the plants and information from the video:
One of the perks of living on a sub-tropical island is that there’s tons of fruit and vegetables, and lots of them are fairly cheap. Since we got to Taiwan, Nono and I have gotten hooked on cherry tomatoes. We eat them almost every day and they are so cheap! Here you can see them for sale, 4 jin ( 斤 ) for 100NT. 1 jin is about 600grams, so that 2.4kg (5 pounds) of cherry tomatoes for $3 US. I love it!
This picture was taken in Ying Ge, which is a pottery town a 30 min train ride from Taipei.
Last night was our weekly Wednesday Night Bowling. While we were there we ran into one of the local moviestars from Taiwan (馬念先). He had just done a main role in the 2nd most successful movie in Taiwan history, Cape No. 7 (Here is the movie trailer with english subtitles). We did bother him and get a picture (thank you!), and it reminded me that Taiwan is a small place.
I have participated in two events where I’ve gotten to hear the President of Taiwan speak, in 8 months of living here. It’s cool to be somewhere you can run into famous people from time to time. BTW, yes that is another Wisconsonite pimping the Leinenkugels shirt
I watched this video today and loved it. It’s from a recent TED conference, and the speaker offers a slightly different understanding of what happened in the American financial institutions. From there, he talks about how we as a nation are dealing with the problems today and what our politicians are doing. In America we call them Regulations and Incentives. In the East, they call it Carrots and Sticks.
Time: 21:00 minutes
Subject: The side effects of only using Regulations and Incentives. How does virtue play a role?
So this is one of the first things that you start to learn after getting into chinese - “measure words.” It’s basically a classifier that you should add onto a lot of nouns.
Image courtesy of this article on chinese medicine
Personally, one of the main things I’ve noticed in 8 months of studying is how many words there are with the same sound. Ie. There are more than 100 words with the sound “shi“ I would guess that using measure words helps to narrow it down a bit! I particularly have trouble remembering another common sound in chinese “ji”. On top of hearing the word, then you’ve got got to try and determine the tone, then hopefully you’ve got the meaning. It can be laborious at times.
Below is an image from a handout in my class, with some descriptions of how measure words work in Chinese and some examples.
Last Saturday I visited Ping Xi for their annual Lantern Festival, which comes every year right after the Chinese New Year. For 1 day, this old coal mining town in the mountains turns into a tourist trap, and everyone is lighting off lanterns with new years wishes written on them. There is also a ton of street food to be had, and if you’ve ever visited Taiwan, that goes without saying! From what I’ve seen and read this is one of the most famous happenings in Taiwan, so it was something I wanted to see while I live here.
There is a main stage at the local high school that is sectioned off for special events during the festival. This year, the President of Taiwan, Ma Ying Jeau, was there lighting off lanterns with different people. I was lucky enough to go with my chinese school, Shi Da MTC, and all of us went into the main stage and lit off lanterns with the President. It was super cool to be a part of and even with the rain it was fun.
I gotta give some props to the MTC for the field trip there. They got us in and out and took care of us the whole day, all for free. THANK YOU!!!
This is a picture from the museum in Hiroshima, dedicated to the atomic bomb that dropped in 1945. The red ball in the air is the bomb explosion, the rest is what was left after it left its mark.
A model of the destruction left by the atomic bomb
This is a screen shot of a free chinese dictionary I got for my ipod. This picture shows the chinese translation for Indiana. If you see the pinyin below the characters, you can probably read it to realize it sounds almost the same Indiana does. The 4 characters mean:
Stamp / Seal
Place
Peace
There / That
Clearly no meaning is connected. I’m starting to see more and more characters “borrowed” for their sound, it’s nice because you don’t have to learn more characters and sometimes you can sound out the meaning. After 7 months of studying Chinese characters, they are FINALLY starting to make some sense.
Two weeks ago 13 of us all went to Jiufen on a really beautiful fall weekend in Taiwan. Jiufen is an old gold mining town an hour away from Taipei. It's turned into a tourist trap, people from Taipei go there for the day and walk around and eat from all the different street food stalls.
So the 13 of us had some tea at a place called Jiufen Tea House, it's an old Japanese building / tea shop and it's beautiful. My friend with an SLR camera took some beautiful pictures. The album is here. What a beautiful place!!
This is another shot of most of our group at the table. This tea shop used coal to heat the water at each table, which is something I'd never seen in a tea shop before. Very nice.
