I’ve got the pictures in this album on Picasa, here are a couple of highlights.

This was taken from the mid-elevation point on the farm.  We were at about 1800m elevation.  Supposedly, tea can be considered high mountain if is produced about 1200m elevation.  The air was so clean and fresh up there!

This picture shows the farm and the processing buildings.  The larger looking building on the right is used only for drying.  It’s a big open room with a big blower inside.  The building on the left is where the tea is processed and where people sleep.

Here the freshly picked leaves are drying.  After a couple of hours, they’ll be put inside to dry further.  They will dry between a half day and an entire day based upon the temperature, humidity, etc.

Here is a process where heat is applied to the leaves.  They roll around in this big dryer.  After a minute or two of this, they’ll be put into a bag and crunched / rolled for a few minutes.  These two processes are reaped many many times (about 40 ) until the tea is done.  The drying process opens the tea leaves and drys them out, while the rolling compacts and closes them.

Tea tasting is constantly happening during the processing.  Grab a handful of tea, put it in a bowl and pour boiling hot water on it.  They also put a spoon in there which is used to smell the tea.  I was surprised at how much emphasis is put on the smell of the tea.

It was great to see another side of Taiwan; Getting off the beaten path.  Going up into the mountains, breathing the fresh air, being around all the tea…It was awesome.  I believe the best Oolong teas in the world are from Taiwan – and there’s lots of them around here!

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

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!!!

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.

Thought that was pretty cool.  Being a migrant worker has its perks. 

MERRY CHRISTMAS EVERYONE!!

Photo Credit: http://www.srichinmoycentre.org

A few weeks ago, I went to Sun Moon Lake in central Taiwan (I also got engaged while there!).  It is one of the most famous places in Taiwan for tourism, it is very beautiful lake in the mountains.  While I was there the strangest things happened and I just had to share it.

While in an aboriginal town next to Sun Moon Lake, we heard a lot of people inside a particular business and went to look inside.  When we got in there we were shocked to see a chinese lady sitting at the counter with a wad of US $100 bills in her hand.  Just a few feet to the right, was a fresh deer antler (see picture) and they were grinding it up for her.

Lots of small slices of the antler were taken and put into a grinder.  After some time, what came out was a powder which was put into pill jar sized containers.  At my best guess, 3 of these jars were at least $500 USD.  She told me that they preferred to use US $ to Taiwan $ for some reason, and she was able to get a better price because of it.  Supposedly, eating this will improve your skin and especially the skin on your face.  After looking for an article about it, apparently this is big business in Asia, and does a lot more than just improve your skin.  See Here.  How about some Deer Antler Drops?

The other method they said you could use to utilize the deer was to put a fresh slice of the antler into hard alcohol for a month and then drink it.  They did tell us that the deer this was taken from was not killed and that it was fine.  The interesting thing is that we were there in November, it’s a little late for an antler to be growing in the US, so perhaps Taiwan climate has something to do with the timing.  Could also have been flown in from NZ, where it’s springtime and when this kind of thing should be growing.

This makes me think about fireworks in the US.  The only places you can buy the good ones are on Indian Reservations, maybe this is a similar deal in Taiwan.  I have no idea if it’s legal or not, but it does seem to be a legitimate industry done all around the world (including the US).  Does anyone know that Wisconsin (the finest state in the entire US) is world famous for its Ginseng?  See this: the Ginseng Board of Wisconsin

My friend Toto Vo is visiting me in Taiwan right now.  Toto is a semi-professional photographer and has 2 nice cameras at his disposal.  We took some great pictures this week in Taroko Gorge, and when we got back Toto was showing me how to tweak them so they look great.

While checking out the new photos Toto showed me the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button Picasa has for optimizing photos (which is on older versions of Picasa too).  Here are a couple of examples of how well it works, and 1 example where it doesn’t work so well.  BTW, you can also have Picasa apply this to an entire folder of pictures at one time, so you don’t have to do it over and over (see how).

Landscape Photo:

Close up with bright colors:

Flourescent Lighting / Yellow Tint:

All in all this is a great tool, and it was actually hard for me to find a case where it was bad for the shot.  Here’s one that looks worse though:

Night Time w/ Flash:

I know that a professional person could improve photos like this pretty quickly (and perhaps even make
them better), but I love that anyone can do this and it doesn’t take
any knowledge of digital images, etc.  I also like the Picasa makes it really easy to post your pictures online.

Taiwan in the last year opened a country-wide high speed rail, with help from a partnership from Japanese companies who created the Shinkansen (the fastest train in service in the world). Now you can now get from the top of the island, Taipei, to the bottom of the island, Kaochung, in only two hours.

More impressive is the subway system in Taipei, known as the MRT.  It’s got one of the highest approval rating of any subway system in the world, and is easy to get around for us foreigners.  Wired magazine did a nice summary of the Taiwan Subway System recently.

• “It carries 1.1 million people a day yet last year it experienced just 36 delays of more than five minutes”
• “With customer satisfaction topping 94 percent,…San Francisco Municipal Railway considers 65 percent customer satisfaction a good mark”

Image compliments of Taiwan HSR Website

This is old news in Japan, and 2d barcodes have been introduced in the USA too.  Remember those stamps you could print out from home?  Probably not, but they are still trying to sell those online.  What I found exemplary was how these barcodes are being used in Japan now.  I picked up a newspaper the other morning, and found this on the upper left corner:  a 2d barcode taking you to another news site.

The barcode in the lower right corner of the BBC World News Ad can be used by your cell phone.  So, you just put your cell phone in camera mode, take a picture and your camera browser will automatically take you to the special webpage.

Cell phones in japan have the ability to take a picture of this barcode and take you to a unique URL.  It’s great because it’s like a landing page, but you don’t have to create a special URL for someone to remember.  Using Landing Pages with a unique URL (Ie. www.moretosee.com for the Sharp Aquos television) is hard to measure, usually expensive to create, can complicate brand messaging, and is generally problematic.  The 2d barcode is nice because it allows you to shortcut the naming (and then memorization) and focus on brand and content more.