Tim's Vacation to Taiwan

Morgan's job was to add the pics, lucky me. It only takes about an hour to add 10 pics with our internet connection. I was experimenting with the layouts (bad idea) and now I am too tired to try to fix it, so bear with me on this poorly laid out post. My goal for the week is to try to figure out how to add a slideshow.....probably easier than I think. I realized that if we post many pictures, it is a must have. The problem lies with my ability to view the blog, most of the time I have to use a proxy site and so the host site for the slideshow won't appear. Enough, here is Taiwan!

Doesn't Tim look sext on the scooter next to the banana tree!

Ready, set, go!

Dogs can ride on scooters too! (Binx doesn't have my permission to hop on one though....)

Traditional Chinese grave, this holds two people. In mainland China, they bury your body for 3 or 4 years and then creamate you after that.

Scooter man!

Here comes the typhoon!

Tapei 101

Now that we’re already on a trip to Qingdao, I’d better write a bit about my Taiwan trip while it’s still relatively fresh in my mind. Fresh is actually a good word as Taiwan was very refreshing – it was a great time. We travelled all over the island/country/disputed 23rd province of China and found the people throughout the country to be friendly, orderly, and in general, happy. It definitely isn’t as crowded in Taiwan as it is in Shanghai. Taiwan and Shanghai both have 23 million people, but Shanghai puts those people into 2,239 square miles where as Taiwan has 13,892 square miles.

We (Morgan, the kids, Josie and I) got home at 10:00 pm after watching the Women’s World Cup championship game and then it was time to pack. My flight was the next day and I had to leave at 7:00 am. So I grabbed some clothes for a small carry-on suitcase and some books for my backpack and went to bed.
I went to Taiwan with fellow Olmsted Scholar “Steve.” Steve is also in the Air Force, but this is his second year of living in China. He came up with the idea of going to Taiwan during China’s week-long National Day celebration (oxymoron, week-long… day?) since everybody in China has the time off to travel, and travel they do. So to beat the crowds, we left the country and let our spouses/families deal with the crowds in China!
Flying to/from Taiwan from/to China is a confusing process. The flight to Taiwan would be a nice short flight, but due to the diplomatic difficulties between China and Taiwan there are no direct flights between them. The options are flying to Hong Kong, Macau, Korea, or even Japan, then to Taiwan. I understand flying to Korea or Japan, but it confuses me as to why flights are allowed between Macao/Hong Kong and Taiwan since those cities were returned to China ten years ago. At any rate, we flew to Macau, then we flew to Taiwan.
We spent the first couple of days in the capital, Taibei. I should probably talk about the “romantinization” systems used in the Chinese language to help non-Chinese speakers read Chinese words. The current most-widely used system is “pinyin” which was adopted by the Chinese government as the standard. Pinyin is what we use when typing text messages or on the computer. You type the pinyin, then get to see a list of characters that have that spelling, then you select which character you want. This is a tedious process, but fortunately computers present the more commonly used characters first so you don’t have to scroll through as many characters and then it predicts based on the previously used characters in the sentence which character you probably want to use. Without a romanticized language, I have no idea how the Chinese would be able to easily send electronic messages.
A system previous to pinyin used less letters, but had some weird rules that you had to remember and that led to romanticized spellings of, for example, 香港 as Hong Kong，北京 as Peiking, and 台北 as Taipei, instead of Xiang Gang, Beijing, and Taibei. Some of you old people may remember the name of China’s capital as Peiking – no, the city didn’t change its name, it just changed its spelling due to a different romantization system, but the pronounciation stays the same – and it is pronounced Beijing. That’s all to say that we spent the first couple of days in the Taiwanese capital of Taibei (prounounced with a “b”), even so Taiwan still uses the old system and spells the city Taipei. Ok, now we can move on…
Taibei was great. Since my friend and I are both university students right now in the Olmsted program, we qualified to stay at the YMCA, so we did! It was a great room, right in downtown Taibei, and very cheap… so what the heck?!
The first thing I noticed was how friendly people were. Instead of stares, I was greeted with “hello” or “ni hao” from people on the street. After checking into our hotel we went out to find some dinner. We just went to an area with lots of vendors selling food, which leads us to…
The second thing we noticed - the food was great! Unlike food in Shanghai that is bland and oily, this food was just good. We bought small portions from several shops and were pleasantly surprised to find that everything we ordered tasted great. And back to the first thing, the folks working at these food stands were friendly and patient. And they SMILED!! It was so pleasant to be there. They made jokes and were very helpful. In Shanghai they all in so much of a hurry to get the order and get away from you that there isn’t any interaction.
The third big thing we noticed was a sense of order. On the subway, passengers waited in lines to get on the train, and waited for passengers to get off the train before getting on themselves. This is a huge contrast to China – when you come to Shanghai, you’ll see how insane the subway is, with people pushing to get on the subway before people even get off. Above ground, cars stopped at red lights and pedestrian crossings – again, something they don’t do here in Shanghai. It was so nice to be in a more orderly culture. The Japanese possessed Taiwan from 1895 to 1945, and it is said that the Taiwanese learned their order and discipline from the Japanese.
Taibei - we flew into Taibei and spent two days here. The weather was perfect, comfortably warm and beautiful skies. The highlight was visiting Taibei 101, currently the world’s tallest skyscraper at 101 stories. Unlike Shanghai that has multiple skyscrapers in the world’s top 100 tallest and 2 in the top 10, there are no other very tall buildings in Taibei, so we could really see the entire city from the observatory on the 101st floor. It was an impressive sight.
Hualian – we took the train down to Hualian, a city located on the east coast of Taiwan and spent two days there. The highlight was renting scooters and driving through Taroko Gorge National Park. It was stunningly gorgeous, mountains, trees, rivers, waterfalls, tunnels and winding roads - the weather was perfect and so our ride on our little scooters was just perfect. FYI – these scooters are pretty quick and get up to 50 mph, they were a blast! The second highlight was hanging out outside of the Air Base in Hualian at the end of the runway where we watched their F-16s and C-130 taking off and landing – something about American-built warplanes that makes me happy!
Taidong – this was our next destination with plans of taking the ferry to Green Island, a resort island off the coast of Taiwan, but unfortunately a Taifeng was coming right for us. Taifeng is the word where English gets “typhoon” from. A typhoon was approaching Taiwan. While we were at a beach in Hualian, we watched pretty large wave come crashing in. Based on the weather forecasts and seeing how bad the water was getting, ferries were cancelled out to Green Island, so we got back on the train to our final destination…
Gaoxiong (spelled “Kaohsiong” in Taiwan) is Taiwan’s second largest city – we originally just planned a day here, but ended up staying three days here. Gaoxiong is on the south-side of the Taiwan and the eye of the Typhoon was hitting the north-side of the island. So it was really windy in Gaoxiong, but very little rain so we were able to walk around town and see the city. We stayed with fellow Olmsted Scholar “Mimi” who was very gracious in showing us around her city, despite the challenging weather! Gaoxiong is the city where all of your “Made in Taiwan” products get shipped from. The latest statistics show that Taiwan makes 49% of the world’s laptops – wow!
We flew back to Shanghai from Gaoxiong through Macao again. Just like that our 8 day “business trip” was over. What a great trip…