Okay, One, Two, Three

I just made some killer Nagasaki Champon while listening to Afrirampo's delicious 45 minute-long Suuto Breakor.































Yes, I used the packaged noodles and sauce powder, but the vegetable choice and frying was all of my own device.

On the way back from elementary school, the teacher giving me a ride and I were talking about the recent changes in staff while the radio played in the background in the front of the car. I had been noticing the types of music playing: what sounded like screamy metal at first, then revealed itself through further listening to be soft, whiny rock, the kind that might come out on kroq; then an electronica-type pop song with a female singer and recognizable synthesizer melodies before and after each verse; then Brother Sport. Wait, what? Doolooloolool doolooloolool doolooloolool doolooloolool went the beginning high-pitched twinkley sound followed by those instantly recognizable voices of Panda Bear and Avey Tare singing those lines I can never understand but sound like, "Open up your, open up your, open up your, open up your." I got really excited, perhaps not so much from the joy of hearing Animal Collective on the radio, but from the pure paradigm shift that placed me in a place where I could hear their music on the radio right after music that's completely normal and easily digestable. I tried to explain to the teacher what was happening in the radio waves around us, "Oh yeah, this is FM. Oh, oh, I see." Haha, oh well, I was happy and smiling, excited by something that had never even passed through the realm of the possible in my head happening right in my area of being and experiencing.

So, here are some pictures of Taiwan, as promised. Most important things first...
















They actually had a beagle going around with a security officer sniffing peoples' luggage. It was soo cute! I tried to get a picture of the actual, living dog, but didn't succeed.

Oh yeah, I should also mention that I got pinned for another "random" security check right upon entering Kansai International Airport during which I had to show my passport to an officer in plain clothes and talk about my travel plans. And imagine my luck, I also was stopped to show my papers to officers upon leaving the airport in Taipei while everybody else walked through unchecked. I guess I just have that lovable, terrorist-resembling face. Man, I bet a white guy would have some an easy time sabotaging an airport.

Anyways, back to the wonders of traveling and away from the realities of racism running our societies. No, no, leave that all behind, come with me to a magical land where that doesn't exist, you're floating up now, up, up, up *twinkle twinkle twinkle*...
















...where "Che" is an internationally consumed symbol of...something! No, no, no, wait, gotta get out of social analysis mode. Okay, we're going to try one more time to make this work. No analyzing, just experiencing, maybe we can separate the two here we goooo....tooo.....















Rilakkuma! He/She/This androgynous, emotionless, complacent being is all the rage in Japan right now and one of the many emissaries of Japanese "cuteness" and pop culture that seem to be flooding Taiwan. Apparently, most people in Taiwan, especially youth, put think of Japan in a pretty positive light. People seem to hold up Japanese fashion as the top in the region, and students in college overwhelmingly choose to study Japanese as a foreign language (I actually spoke to a young woman working at a store in Japanese when my friend told her I couldn't speak Chinese but could speak Japanese). Before going there, I thought people would almost all think of Japan negatively considering, oh I don't know, the major, violent campaigns to wipe out Taiwanese culture (Southern Chinese and Indigenous) during the time the island was under Japanese rule. Apparently I was wrong. Undoubtedly, there are people like that, mostly of the older generation, but the sentiment does not seem to be nearly as widespread as in China and Korea. When I asked my friend who lives in Taipei and his friends and later the Japanese professor at work, the gist of the response I received was that, yeah, the Japanese did terrible things to the people in Taiwan, but they did even more horrible things in China and Korea, where they took a more physically brutal approach to colonization. Also, the people who took over Taiwan after Japan was forced to abandon it after World War II were, guess who...another military army! This time of the nationalist variety from mainland China. So, from what I've been told, the people who took over after the Japanese may have been Chinese, but in the end were just another group of invaders enforcing their will through violent repression. I'd like to learn more.

So minusing the historical-social analysis didn't work out so well, but now I think I've got it all out of my system. If you've made it with me this far, here is your reward. Unless you just skipped ahead to this part, then that's okay, too, these just won't be as rewarding.

Night market at Shillin














My friend, who is studying and working in Taipei, and his friends took me here the first night I got it in. It started pouring as soon as we got there. For the most part, it is an open air market.















We walked through that awesome market for probably around 3 hours and didn't even see it all before we left for the apartment at around midnight.

Three of us played video games until like 3 in the morning. Not my usual choice of activity for vacation, or any downtime really, but this was Castle something or others so it was different.

The next day, the weather was just as awesome as the day before. I'm not being sarcastic, almost the whole time I was there, the sky was a beautiful, deep mix of different colors of grey and almost half of every day bore all of us a light rain the likes of which I hadn't felt in a long time.

Danshui riverside walk































This was beautiful. A good walk. We must have walked I don't know how many miles, but we went from the station at the beginning of the walk, through all the store-lined sidewalks, into an empty but florid streetside, and eventually came out into this scene...
















As we approached...































Apparently this bridge's English name is Valentine Bridge or something like that and it's appeared in virtually all Taiwanese dramas. Go figure.

After a bus and train ride back...
















we were ready for a nice dinner in the city-er part of Taipei.
















Pretty cool. One of the things I really liked about Taipei was how it was a big city with all the people and movement and energy that cities offer, but at the same time, it was not so massively built up and standardized that it lost its human personality. Somehow, it still felt like a small town. There was some kind of community, some kind of genuine human interaction.

The next day, I was on my own, since my friend and his friends were working and studying. So I took a trip to the National Palace Museum. Here, my Japanese actually came in handy as the bus signs had no English on them whatsoever. So I just memorized the characters for the National Palace Museum, which I had actually already learned in Japanese (score!), and followed those.

Not much to show here, since I couldn't take pictures of the hundreds of years old artifacts, but here's a picture of one of the museum buildings from the exit of the exhibition I saw.















Made my way back, stopping off at Shillin again for more pictures and enjoying the energy, then had another amazing dinner at one of the noodle shops across the street from my friend's apartment at 12 in the morning. My friend and the people in his apartment know pretty much all the street vendors in that area and introduced me to one like he was an uncle.

Here's a really cute dog I sort of bonded with that night before making it back for that late dinner. I did a lot of thinking with him. He had a bit of a limp.
















Then, the train I rode back that night.
















My friend's friend told me Taipei's public transportation's nothing special, but I really liked it.

From the station.















Delicious bread I got from a bakery by the station before I headed back that night (sorry things got a little out of order). Can anyone say "pan dulce?!"
















No, but it really did taste different. It was delicious in its own way!

Back at the pad.















Enjoying the bread.

The next morning, I got a tour of National Taiwan University, the top one in the country, from my friend who's studying Chinese there, and then I was off to the airport to catch my flight which would land me back in good old Osaka, Japan in less than two and a half hours later.

Needless to say, an awesome trip. My friend and his friends were amazing hosts and took me all over the place, ordering all the most delicious food for me (oh yeah, I didn't even talk about stinky tofu, prawns skewered and grilled alive (aw..), and delicious guava with prune powder (ahhh)!), and just overall being great people.

Taipei is a definitely a place I like, a lot. I'd consider going back there with friends again. I really got to like the sound of Chinese, too, which has gotten more and more interesting to me lately. I also realized that if I plan on traveling around and learning more about that region, it's kind of ridiculous that I only speak one, mostly insular, language, Japanese. In any case, these are all ideas in their infantile stage.

Wow, it's been a while since I wrote such a long post. It feels good to let you all know more about what I've been doing and show you some of it with pictures. But it probably won't feel that good waking up tomorrow at 6:40am and taking the bus to spend the day at work. So with that, I will bid thee all (is that even proper English?) a good night and pleasant dreams. With love, as always.