Warner of Suburbia

Videos: Summer 2010 Travels

2010-10-04T23:08:00.000-07:00

The Route-Summer 2010

2010-06-01T01:48:00.000-07:00

Thailand

Bangkok to Chiang Mai

Chiang Mai to Chiang Rai

Laos

Luang Prabang to Vientiane

Vientiane to Siem Reap

Cambodia

Sieam Reap and Angkor Wat

Siem Reap to Phnom Penh

Phnom Penh to Nam

Vietnam

Ho Chi Minh City to Mekong Delta

Ho Chi Minh City to Dalat

Dalat to Buon Ma Thuot

Buon Ma Thuot to Pleiku

Pleiku to Hoi An

Hoi An to Danang

Danang to Hue

Hue to DMZ

Hue to Ninh Binh (train)

Ninh Binh to Hanoi

(meet dear Lauren on June 26th)

Hanoi to Ha Long Bay

Hanoi to Hai Phong

Hanoi to Sapa

Sapa to YUNNAN, CHINA

Route in CHINA???? Vamos a ver...

Malaysia: Days 4 & 5

2010-03-14T05:22:00.000-07:00

Christmas Holiday Getaway: Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

Days 4 & 5

Patriotic Frisbee–Robed Tourists Swarm the Mosque–Lamb–Butterflies–Orchids–Saturday in Little India–The Fifth Largest Building in the World–The Red Light District of Berjaya Times Square–A Massage–Don't Put that in Your Ear–A Final Hookah–Roti Baba–Farewell Curry

Still recovering from the Christmas feast the day before, we skipped breakfast, grabbing only a quick froth tea before heading back towards the Islamic Art Museum to visit the Kuala Lumpur National Mosque. Christmas day we were denied access to the mosque on account of it being closed for prayer at the time, so we decided to remedy the setback.

On the way we stopped at Merdeka square, Kuala Lumpur’s very own independence memorial and the original site of the first Malaysian flag raising in 1957. After a quick survey of the park and the building surrounding it, we decided it best to pay our respects to the country’s independence with frisbee.

We reached the National Mosque, a fairly modernized looking edifice that is KL’s largest, and slowly walked around the building’s exterior and interior.   Being a holy place, Mosques expect a certain attire from visitors wanting to enter. The usual tourist garb of shorts and sleeveless tee-shirts doesn’t fly, especially for female guests. Therefore the National Mosque requires all visitors with excessive exposed skin to dress in what could easily pass as a purple Jedi nightgown or Jeremy Irons’ brightly colored gynecological scrubs from David Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers–all references to the loose-fitting purple robes seemed feasible at the time.

We lingered for a bit watching various Chinese tourists pose for photos with “real-life praying Muslims” but eventually headed out to check out Taman Rama-rama (which sounds like a children's song) AKA the KL butterfly park.

The butterfly sanctuary was a lot more interesting that it sounds. The outdoor, netted sanctuary houses roughly 6,000 butterflies, with over 120 species present. Butterflies are easily taken for granted, but they truly are beautiful–each with its own color scheme and no two butterflies the same.

The Perdana Lake Gardens is a truly remarkable part of Kuala Lumpur, an otherwise major chaotic city. The gardens seem to represent the natural, more serene side of Malaysia and give residents a much needed break from city life. Walking around the butterfly park, and later the orchid and hibiscus garden, was a wonderful transition from the hustle and bustle of the city center.

After the butterfly park we made are way back to the Islamic Art Museum for lunch at the much-applauded museum cafe, which we had heard served up some incredible Mediterranean/Middle Eastern cuisine. The cafe overlooks an outdoor courtyard that features one of the museum’s aforementioned five domes. The spread was indeed a treat: roast lamb, grilled eggplant, spicy barley soup, fresh roti bread, a lump-tuna salad that instantly brought to mind Iberia (taste bud déja vu perhaps), fresh tomatoes drizzled with olive oil and salt, and an impressive olive, hummus, and baba ghannoug bar to start things off.

Among other world cuisines, Taipei is lacking solid Mediterranean food. There’s a halfway decent chain of falafel joints around the city but unfortunately years of wolfing down sandwiches at Chicago’s Pita Inn and Sultan’s Market have made me a bit of a connoisseur of the chickpea and its brethren and Taipei’s Sababa just reminds me of what I’m missing at home. It was therefore a treat to have some truly decent food at the cafe.

After getting our fill at the cafe (gluttony seems to be an underlying theme of travel in Malaysia) we walked towards the park’s orchid and hibiscus garden, an impromptu decision but one that was worth it.

I don’t pretend to know anything about flowers. During my childhood my mother was always an avid weekend gardener, I’ve visited the Chicago Botanical Gardens a number of times, and I thoroughly enjoyed the Charlie Kaufman film “adaptation” of Susan Orlean’s book, The Orchid Thief, Adaptation, which philosophizes about the beauty and mystery of orchids. Still I wouldn’t consider myself the type who normally seeks out gardens while traveling.
 Like the butterfly park before, the Taman Orkid was another beautiful departure from busy KL central. The garden boasts addressing over 3,000 global species of orchids, 800 of which come directly from Malaysia. The garden is broken up into a series of small walking gardens and one orchid bazaar.
The variety of colors and shapes found makes it easy to understand why there are orchid festivals and fanatics to attend such galas. An orange sherbet flower in particular caught my eye.

Along the way I spotted a foreigner reading on a bench under a canopy of hanging flowers, in an area void of the sounds of tourists or garden hands at work. Whether she was a fellow traveler enjoying the park or an expat living in KL was irrelevant. It seemed like a blissful moment. I remember thinking, “yeah, this is pretty nice.”

After wandering around for a while we decided to catch a taxi back to Little India to check out the Saturday street market. This would be my second of three trips to Little India but was without a doubt the most memorable.

The Saturday market spans the length of a major street bisecting the district. From the narrow row of stalls vendors hawk clothes, textiles, discounted copy-products and a colorful and delectable array of snacks. Samosas and deep-fried snacks of the fritter genus, fish balls wrapped in banana leaves and grilled, the smell of curry wafting in the air, spicy tandoori style chicken, candied fruit and jellies, dates, tea and then some, and even some out of place Chinese fare to stir things up.

We were still recovering from the lamb and humus feast at lunch but couldn’t resist taunting our stomachs, yet again. We walked around before dodging an afternoon rain shower at Little India’s Capital Coffee shop, a supposed landmark establishment. With its old electric ceiling fans, tile floors, and large diner style wall menu, the place felt more like what I imagine of French colonial Vietnamese cafes look like.

We drank more froth tea, possibly the tenth cup of the trip, but who’s counting. The place served staples like coffee and tea but also had a sweaty, seasoned grill man stationed at a hibachi on the sidewalk dishing out satay. A table of four Malay woman next to us must have ordered at least 50 of these yummy meatsicles.

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At around five we caught a train to Bitang Street, a flashy upscale district in KL near Petronas towers that houses most of KL’s nightlife. We spotted a large red Borders Books neon sing outside the entrance of large building called Berjaya Times Square and decided to kill some time in the bookstore. The allure of checking out some English language magazines was reason enough to get out off the steamy streets.

A recent Wikipedia search confirmed my suspicions that this was no ordinary shopping center but rather an obnoxious mega mall. With 7.5 million square feet of built up floor area, Berjaya Times Square is the fifth largest building in the world (measured by floor area), according to Wikipedia. That this same ranking states Dubai International Airport’s Terminal 3 is the largest makes that obscenely excessive oasis in the desert all the more ridiculous.

The Borders it turns out is also the company’s largest franchise store in the world, though it seemed like just another mega bookstore to me.

In terms of grandiosity I suppose you could say that Berjaya Times Square is impressive. The shear size of the building coupled with the 1000+ different retail stores housed under its roof is overwhelming but also yet another sign of what Kuala Lumpur dreams of becoming: a major Asian metropolis on par with its neighbor to the south, Singapore, along with the usual East Asian suspects–Tokyo, Hong Kong, Shanghai.

Berjaya boasts having an indoor theme park, the largest in Asia, which features, among other attractions, a large candy-colored roller coaster. To exemplify just how big this mall is, I had no idea this place even had a theme park until I later researched the building for this entry.

Photo c/o The Internet

After skimming through Time Magazine’s “Person of the Year” end of the year issue and debating whether or not to stock up on some hard to find books, we decided to meander around the mall a bit longer, soaking up its opulence.

Malls throughout America are known for housing some strange stores. It’s safe to say the larger the mall, the weirder the array of shopping possibilities. It’s not uncommon to find an entire store devoted to Christmas ornaments or Yankee Candles, or a snack stand that takes something as straightforward as “the pretzel” and ups the stakes by adding maple syrup, frosting and/or pepperoni. This shopping center seemed like more of the same only with the number of random, brand-free stores outnumbering the familiar. For every Nike or Calvin Klein store there were ten oddly-named fronts selling knock-off clothing and accessories under a fancier roof. It’s as if they took the street market goods and pitted them against big names like Polo and Dockers.

Places with names like Magma, Tough, French Kiss, Fellini’s Boutique, Old Scull Clothing, Slipper World, Vamp, Private Shop International (underwear), and the trio of boutiques Rum, Romp and Rock and Roll, were filled with loud teenagers, and the flashy attire that they pined for. The place was what I expected Minnesota’s Mall of America must be like, only with a more global clientele in lieu of overweight Midwesterners.

Still had I known that I would have found a store in which customers pay money to dangle their feet into a pool filled with ravenous fish, I might not have been so quick to write this shopping center off as, “just another mall.”

We stumbled upon the fish spa massage parlor tucked away in what looked to be the shopping center’s very own red light district. This wing of the mall housed a number of kinky Japanese clothing stores with names like S & M Dream Shop and a tiny, neon-lit sex shop that had customers spilling out of its entrance. It could be that edible underwear are in season.   The massage parlor was one of two in the area and had an unassuming sign out front offering up foot massages (which are big in KL), full-body rub-downs, and something called ear candling. It was the large fish tank with its padded bench island in its center that managed to catch our attention.

It took me a bit longer to fully comprehend what the hell was going on. Stuart, having lived in East Asia coming on almost four years now, instantly knew what the tank was for and without much discussion coaxed me into booking a 20 minute session.

I wouldn’t uncover the details surrounding Garra Rufa, or Doctor Fish as they’re more commonly referred to as, till an Internet search long after the trip. Like the medicinal use of leaches, Doctor Fish have long been called upon for the revitalization of weathered-skin. The ancient act of “fish nibble feet” spa treatment has roots in China, Southeast Asia and the Middle East where the fish originate. This particular species of fish have a taste for human flesh and have been used for years as an effective way to remove dead skin from bathers at spas. At the time I was only focussed on the reality facing me: I was about to pay the proprietor (who I was convinced was taking the piss out of us– “come on man, this tank is just for decoration. You don’t actually expect me to go through with this” I thought.) to feed his fish with the flesh from my rank, well-travelled trotters.

While a place of this nature was just screaming, “anything goes,” I was surprised to find that the proper etiquette before the feeding frenzy is to cleanse the feet with a hose in a back room. Had I previously waltzed around barefoot in cyanide I might have understood this precaution, but I found it hard to believe that these fish had standards.

Following the instructions, I rinsed my long, bony feet, rolled up my pants to the knees, took a seat on the island and dangled my toes over the water, taunting the little buggers, and procrastinating the eventual plunge.

The tank was divided into two sections. The front section looked out to the mall’s corridors, granting strolling shoppers the chance to watch the spectacle of a couple of clueless foreigners wriggle and squawk as fish chew their feet. Its tank featured fish of the minnow variety–small and plenty of them. These younger, more ambitious fish clearly had stronger appetites and were handy for getting into the hard to reach spots like the web of skin between toes. The back tank had bigger fish, which I gathered served no other purpose other than to make me squirm like a child getting a splinter removed.

I started with the little buggers. They wasted no time in surveying the terrain of my size 13 feet jumping right in, their little mouths picking away at every corner. The scary part of the initial ride was how quickly the feeling went from just plain weird to surprisingly comfortable.

After feeding the kids for about five minutes, I moved over to the papas next door, unsure of how their bites would compare. While slower with their eating habits, and hardly as efficient as their brood, the sensation that the bigger fish issue out was enough to completely irk me out.

With their teeth clearly more developed, their mouths bigger, these diligent monsters went right for the heel and were more adventurous with their trip up leg hair alley.

After about ten minutes I was ready to stop but when the woman massaging a man’s big toe in the massage stall closest to the pool asked me why I had removed my feet so soon, I realized that throwing in the towel early would be weirder in the eyes of the locals than continuing the squirming and hissing.

When the proprietor’s timer went off my feet flew out of the water, my toes pruned, cherry-colored and a hell of a lot smoother than before.

When later asked about the meal the wee diners wrote the meal up as “adventurous,” complimenting the notes of foot funk and calling the amuse bouche of hiker’s blister on left Achilles’ tendon, as “a pleasant surprise.” Second seating enjoyed the big toe knuckle hair and were floored by the lower shin region’s smorgasbord of pre-softened skin and sock lint.

After drying off and putting our shoes back on we were set to leave but were drawn in, yet again, after reading a sign offering a discounted ear candling.

Ear candling, aka ear coning, aka, sticking a friggin’ lit candle up your ear canal, is supposedly a therapeutic method of cleansing the ear of toxins, such as wax, dirt and sinister ear goblins. Unlike the fish spa treatment’s instant tickling results, the jury is still out on whether or not this “alternative medicinal” procedure works or if it is simply another new-age body cleansing scam. After the feet-feeding-frenzy–having just done that–my immediate response to the, “ear candling? Come on!” proposition was, “eh, what the hell.”

Ear candling is quite simple really. The patient, or should I say sucker, lies on his/her side while a perfect stranger who may or may not be licensed but does in fact own some fish, sticks a conical paper candle of sorts deep into the ear canal and then lights it up like a cigarillo. As the candle slowly burns its way down, the sensation is that of, well, something long burning its way closer to the eardrum.

After about fifteen minutes the rolled earwax blunt is removed and the remnants–charred pieces of ash and wax, which may or may not come from the ear–are shown to the customer as proof of what just went down.

According to a Montreal Gazette article entitled, Don't put a candle in your ear and save $25, “as of 2008, there are at least two cases in which people have set their houses on fire while ear candling, one of which resulted in death.” It’s in the humble opinion of this author that records like the aforementioned article should be burned so as not to give future generations the ability to say, “you’re kidding me, right?”

Coupled with the fish spa, the experience cost about US$20.

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After realizing how long we had just spent in the shopping center we made our way out and checked out some more of the surrounding area before heading back to our nightly hookah spot at the Kampung Baru Night Market.

Over another fruit-themed water pipe, I ordered a couple satays and some fresh squeezed orange juice, while we chatted with the hookah stand’s owner. He talked about the Kampung Baru market being a popular hangout for young people and of how down-to-earth Malaysians are. I couldn’t agree more with him.

The next day was my last day in KL. We grabbed a coffee and a small bite to eat at a cafe outside of Little India that was written up in the New York Times as serving up a sinfully delicious treat called roti baba. This “light” breakfast monstrosity is essentially a greasy, fried dough pocket stuffed with greasy pork and grilled onions. The Malaysian calzone is then doused with Worcestershire sauce. Damn.

Afterwards we made our way into Little India so I could pick up some goodies at the local grocery store, mainly candy and treats for my students and co-workers, not to mention some Tongkat Ali ginseng coffee, another supposed Malaysian specialty. Before heading back to grab my bags we had one last feast at a hole-in-the-wall South Indian cafe, which I feared would rid my pores with pungent curry before boarding a plane but ultimately seemed like a sacrifice I was willing to make. The things we do for food.

The flight back to Taipei was relaxing with lots of fond memories of this amazing place to keep my mind occupied. Back home I immediately uploaded some photos and replayed the trip.

Malaysia gave me a taste of more travels to come in Southeast Asia. Kuala Lumpur is a lively metropolis, and his home to people from all over the planet. Its diversity and peacefulness in spite of this varied make-up was refreshing and kind of eye-opening. While I might not have gotten the true Malaysian experience (the peninsula’s interior might be a separate trip down the line), I was definitely treated to a truly global experience.

2010-03-06T01:16:00.000-08:00

Christmas Holiday Getaway: Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

Day 3

Christmas on Foreign Soil–Multiple Mosques–A Camel Gun–Christmas Buffet–Garbage Monkeys–A Bar in the Sky–Hookah: Part II–Rats Underfoot

When waking up on Christmas morning in a dank youth hostel in Kuala Lumpur, it’s easy to forget that it is in fact a much cherished Western holiday. This would be my first Christmas away from family and while this realization stung a bit more than Thanksgiving, which went by like any other day, I was buzzing from the natural high of being somewhere completely exotic.

Still, it being Christmas and all, Stuart and I had previously decided that a proper Christmas meal would be necessary.

Prior to arriving to KL we both researched various hotels and restaurants offering “traditional” Christmas brunches and settled on a pleasant enough spread to be held at the distinguished Carcosa Seri Negara hotel. We were to meet two of Stuart’s Japanese friends from Hong Kong (who were also visiting KL for the holidays) at one so we decided to start the morning off semi-early with the intention of perusing the Islamic Art Museum and National Mosque, both situated in the general area as the hotel.

The Kuala Lumpur Islamic Art Museum is a gorgeous building constructed around five ornately decorated domes. With a collection largely devoted to Islamic architecture, the building is one of the more beautiful museums I’ve visited.

Top: One of the five domes PHOTO C/O The Internet
Bottom: The Architecture Wing, PHOTO C/O The Internet

The first wing we entered was the Architecture Gallery which features an impressive collection of scaled down models of various mosques spanning the globe. Each was designed with such a precise attention to detail that viewing the models was a window into a truly remarkable side of this religion that I know so little about.

Each model was coupled with a description of its architectural style and a brief history of its construction. The room was organized by geographical region, and while the major mosques present–Masjid al-Haram at Mecca, India’s Taj Mahal and Turkey’s Blue Mosque–were impressive in their respective grandeur, the real gems of the collection were the lesser known exmamples.

I’ve written before of my interest in a number of the Central Asian countries, most notably Uzbekistan, so it wasn’t a surprise that the Central Asian section captured my attention right away. Equally exciting were examples from Southeast Asia, with the Indonesian and Malaysian styles being the most “untraditional” and an example of one from Southern China being the most downright curious, featuring the construction methods might expect in a Buddhist temple coupled with a Muslim architectural sense of space.

We took our time surveying the museum’s collection. The remaining rooms tended to blur together with a focuses on textiles, household artifacts, various styles of Quran binding, and ancient armory pieces, most notably a small cannon that was once attached to the sides of warring camels. A camel gun. Who knew!
Camel gun PHOTO C/O The Internet

We spent about two hours in the museum and eventually made our way to the hotel for what we had been preparing our grumbling stomachs for all morning.

The Carcosa Seri Negara hotel is a beautiful colonial style estate built in the hills around the Kuala Lumpur’s Lake Gardens, which is a wide jungle of a park featuring a butterfly habitat, wild bird sanctuary and an orchid and hibiscus garden. The hotel is owned and operated by the government and was once the residence of high-ranking British commissioners in then Malaya. We later found out that Christmas day was the last day of operation, as the hotel would close down indefinitely for repairs.

Carcosa Seri Negara Hotel PHOTO C/O The Internet

We arrived, accepted the glass of champagne that was offered to us by the waiter and surveyed the hotel’s long porch waiting for the girls to arrive.

Mickey and Jiggy are co-workers of Stuart’s in Hong Kong, working as Japanese teachers at his school. They were excited to be dining at such a beautiful hotel and though I was left out of some of the Japanese conversations that commenced, they were very sociable.

The Christmas spread consisted of the usual fare: roast lamb with mint jelly, an impressive salad and appetizer bar with a focus on marine life, stuffed chicken and polenta, fine cheese, and a colorful dessert selection that was alluring enough to make us rethink the fact that by the end of the main meal we were clearly stuffed.

The added expense option for free flowing wine was only debated briefly with the go-to excuse of, “what the hell, it’s Christmas,” taking over. Needless to say we left the hotel fatter and more inebriated than when we had arrived.

After the three and a half hour gorging we followed the girls back to the art museum and said our farewells and I coaxed Stuart into trudging along with me to the Kuala Lumpur Bird Park, written up everywhere as “The World’s Largest Free-flight Walk-in Aviary,” which is a mouthful of an endorsement.

Outside of the entrance I was pleasantly surprised to find a family of greedy tree monkeys scrounging through the public trash receptacles. These filthy buggers had no respect for the park’s otherwise serene beauty and took to throwing their rejected finds on the ground, with not a single flinch from the movement of the spectators (myself included) inching closer with cameras ready for something mischievous to capture.

While I secretly prayed for one monkey to go bezerk and attack a woman’s purse or lunge at some poor spectator’s ear, the monkeys just carried on with their tasks at hand. “How bout that man over there with the video camera,” I thought. “He’s just screaming to be made an example of. Or the unassuming child with the ice-cream cone, you could easily take her treat for yourself.”

The Walk-in Aviary turned out to be the kind of over-priced park one might expect at Disney World, rather than the wicked place to have birds fly around your heads place I imagined. With the red wine taking its toll and some menacing storm clouds soiling the morning’s beautiful blue skies, we made an executive decision to head back towards our hostel for a much-needed late afternoon siesta before heading out into the city in the evening.

We walked down the hill back towards the museum where we had left Mickey and Jiggy and encountered a Romanian tourist who had just left the sanctuary. She was traveling in KL solo and was also headed back to her hotel for a little rest before heading back out into the city. She told us that many Romanians travel to Southeast Asia, taking advantage of the cheap-airfare and more importantly, cheap exchange rate. She complained, however, that taxi drivers in KL had been taking advantage of the fact that she was a foreigner and looked instantly put-off when we saw her get into a cab outside of the museum.

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After a two hour siesta of sorts back at the hostel where I read up on some possible sights for the next day, we made our way towards Petronas Towers to soak up the night lights and possibly find a bar for a drink.

Even though I had seen the towers on my first night in KL, they were equally as stunning. We sat for a while in the crowded fountain park on the backside of the towers looking up at a number of the surrounding hotels and buildings, wondering what their views were like and if any of them had sky bars.

Two days before I left for KL the New York Times travel section had printed one if its, “36 Hours in___________” stories on Kuala Lumpur, naming The Trader’s Hotel SkyBar as the best place to soak in the “silver, scalloped buildings light up at night.” After a while we meandered through the towers’ exterior park towards the hotel and quickly found ourselves sipping cocktails with the towers glistening in the background.

Eventually we headed back to the hostel, opting to walk the distance, in lieu of the monorail, seeing as the towers were practically in the backyard of the previous night’s market. Our plan was to cap the evening with yet another hookah.

The night market was bustling as always and once again the large projector screen was flashing Hollywood Christmas flicks to a fairly indifferent crowd.

After taking our time with a melon flavored nargila, we made our way back to the hostel with the intention of calling our family as they celebrated Christmas morning.

In my typical controlling fashion I had taken on the role of navigating the city during this trip, and I knew the hostel’s surrounding area very well. This said, my suggestion to cut through the Chow Kit Wet Market after dark was not one of my finest moments.

“Trust me, if we cut through here it’ll take us right to the front door, saving us the trip around the block to the monorail station,” I told Stuart.

The market route did in fact take us right to the hostel entrance as I had promise but the market, which in the morning was alive with the sounds of commerce, was empty at night, save of course for the hoards of giant Malaysian rats feeding on the day’s scraps.

The market stretched a lot deeper in than I had anticipated going in and street lights quickly faded leaving us to transverse through a dark and damp series of narrow walkways with bits of fruit and meat being feasted on below our feet. That this was the first and only time during the trip I had worn sandals out made the experience that much more hair raising. Way to go.

After making it a third of the way in before truly realizing the vermin situation underfoot, we decided that it would best to just run the remainder of the stretch with the intention of scaring away whatever might be chewing away in our path. While I can’t be sure of what I was feeling around me, it’s safe to say I startled a number of rats, many of which were no doubt drunk on rotting fruit, and am sure a tail or two brushed up against the exposed flesh of my naked feet. Remember that scene in “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade” when Indy and a busty Fräulein head into the Venice sewers surrounded by rats, well this wasn’t that far off in terms of moments to make you squirm.

Back at the hostel I called home via Skype and caught my family in the middle of Christmas morning. While it felt weird and bit sad that while my family sipped mimosas and carried out our traditional Christmas morning tradition of poached eggs and a candied holiday-themed coffeecake, I had just sucked down a fruit cocktail-flavored hookah amongst a group of muslim youths, and had just fled through an alley overrun by scurrying rats, I was pleased that this one Christmas would undoubtedly be one to remember forever.

Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia: Day 2

2010-02-10T18:34:00.000-08:00

Christmas Holiday Getaway: Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

Day 2

Taxi Cab Confessions—Bus to Malacca—A Mosque—Curry Under the Finger Nails—A Disappointing Chinatown—David Byrne—Strange Fruit—Tales From Kampung Baru Night Market: First Night— Hookah and Tim Allen—The Durian Nightcap

When making plans for Kuala Lumpur, I gave myself an extra day to venture out of the city. I knew the main focus of this trip would be KL and all its glory, but what about the rest of Peninsular Malaysia? I went through my Lonely Planet, talked with a friend who traveled in Malaysia last fall, and ultimately settled on the former colonial port town of Malacca, from which the Straights of Malacca are named.

This historical port city once served as the landing point for the Dutch and Portuguese to make their claims of parts of Malaysia for trade in the East Indies. The city, which is protected under UNESCO as a World Heritage Site, was written up as having a surprisingly European feel with all the diversity of modern day Malaysia. Situated a mere two hours south of KL by bus, it seemed like the perfect day trip and a chance to be near the coast.

I woke up twenty minutes before my alarm was set to chime due in part to an older Australian lady who checked into the mixed-dorm room at dawn and made all kind of ruckus. I would later run into said woman after showering, while I was applying my contacts at the communal sink and mirror.

“Oh my, you’re a tall boy, aren’t you?” she said padding my shoulders, mid left contact lens application.

I made casual small talk, trying to be friendly though I was not quite awake and ultimately granted her the podium. I gathered from her rambling story that she was on an extended two-four month tour of Southeast Asia, solo, and had just come down from Thailand where she told me she has many friends. The woman seemed friendly enough, albeit a bit chatty for 7:00 in the morning. I’m always impressed at the older travelers you meet in hostels, which are no longer globally type-casted as Youth Hostels. Most older wanderers either fall into the category of veteran travelers who favor lively hostel settings to lonely hotel rooms or of travel newbies who seem to be touring to fulfill the “better late than never” mentality.

As I gathered my day pack and was heading out of the dark dorm room, I passed her in the long hostel corridor heading towards our slumbering room in a long white nightgown with two shopping bags full of 7-11 goods. I pitied the sleeping souls who were about to awake to plastic bag wake-up call she was surely going to issue onto the fellow travelers.

I caught a taxi to the bus station and was pleasantly surprised to find the driver spoke perfect English and was instantly curious to talk to me. The man was from KL, originally, but had spent much of his life working on a freight-shipping vessel that took him all over the world. He instantly had an opinion of Chicago, a city he had stayed in back in the 70s after living in New York City with a brother for six months.

He told me that I would like Malacca and recommended that I take advantage of the seafood offerings. I told him that wouldn’t be a problem.

He seemed excited to talk about world travel and I got the feeling that while he was happy in KL with his family and his job (he hinted to making a decent living working as a driver and owning a shop on the side) he enjoyed the freedom of his shipping days, particularly pulling into foreign ports. It was obvious that man had a number of stories he was dying to share but sadly the cab ride only lasted ten minutes.

The bus to Malacca was uneventful, though the scenery shifted from the suburban sprawl of KL to lush rolling green hills and palm trees that seemed to go on forever in every direction. The main bus terminal for Malacca was actually outside of the town’s center, which meant I had to find a local bus to take me into the town. Here’s where the trip started to get interesting.

The local bus fare rang up to about 20 US cents and my carriage to the city looked like it had seen better days. Aboard were several Muslim women in headscarves, including one woman’s daughter who navigated her way around some melted pocket chocolate for the majority of the ride. A loud Chinese gentleman made his presence known early on and continued to chat with people around him (his is the louder voice heard in the video below).

I reached the city center and instantly realized that this was a hot spot for tourism. In the city’s main square, which is situated around the Christ Church that was built by Dutch settlers circa the mid 18^th century, there were countless Chinese and Indian tourists with cameras perusing the local market and pricing the many bicycle rickshaws that run tours of the city.

The rickshaws were especially fun to watch. Most were ornately decorated with colorful flowers, umbrellas and many were outfitted with some sort of make-shift speaker system that blasted obnoxious Western and Eastern pop music, as if the drivers were competing for loudest bike. One nervous-looking older Western couple seemed unsure of their rickshaw choice as they were pedaled away to Michael Jackson’s “Heal the World” blaring from the sleigh’s florally vibrant canopy.

Malacca is a charming city that does truly have a European feel to it. It’s a bit overrun by tourists but there are still untouched sections of the village that are perfect for the more ambitious walker. Malacca’s most obvious connection to Europe comes not from the Dutch and Portuguese architecture but rather from the fact that the city is built around a series of canals and river boardwalks, all of which flow into the Straights.

I checked out the usual sights–the aforementioned Christ Church, a Portuguese fort, a shipping vessel turned museum on water, and the Stadhuy town hall. The most striking sights were the two major Mosques in Malacca, the Tranquerah and Kampung Hulu Mosque, both fully active and quite beautiful.

At the Kampung Hulu Mosque I came across a Muslim man throwing buckets of water on a car parked outside the Mosque entrance. I watched for a good ten minutes from across the street as the man would casually walk out with a plastic pale full of water, throw the contents all over the car’s hood and windshield, all while mumbling something to the driver. He would then return to the Mosque’s cleansing pool to refill. I’m not sure if the car wash was out of anger for her parking choice or if he was truly cleansing the woman’s Nissan hatchback.

Inside the Mosque I did my best to keep myself out of sight, out of mind. The aforementioned water thrower was very kind and told me to meander around even before I had a chance to ask. There were men conversing on the outside porch, a woman and her kids were in a small female prayer room off to the side and one long-haired man was praying near a large drum situated above the main entrance gate.

After wandering around Malacca’s Indian neighborhood I found a small restaurant that looked promising, that is to say there were a number of people eating at long, communal tables.

The food was served on large banana leaves and not a single person was seen using a fork. Custom calls for using your right hand to scoop the food into your mouth, usually by taking clumps of rice or bread to soak up the sauces. The technique is a lot harder than it sounds as you must rely partially on gravity to help drop the food from the hand to the mouth.

I ordered banana leaf rice, which includes rice or freshly baked nan bread and FOUR different side dishes, which are spooned onto the leaf by a man carrying a giant metal tiffin set. Later another more flesh oriented waiter comes around with various meat, vegetable and fish dishes that have already been prepared and portioned out for guests. I was given a fork without even asking for one but decided to do like the locals and dove in, my left hand sitting idle to the side.

Picking up the rice proved to be harder than I had thought, especially after a waiter poured a hefty portion of steaming lentils over the then nicely clumped rice, as if to challenge my competence. The experience felt primitive in a good way.

After I gorged myself on spicy curried lamb and fresh fish, cucumber salad, lentils, and various stewed vegetables I headed back out to explore. My stomach was full, my pores were sweating turmeric and there was a good deal of curry getting cozy under the fingernails.

After seeking out Malacca’s other notable Mosque I headed towards Jonker Street, also known as Malacca’s Chinatown. The main drag was flooded with window shoppers and was clearly the one part of the city that was truly overrun by tourists.

Tacky gift shops ran most of the street. Every restaurant advertised chicken rice ball, the unofficial delicacy of Malacca’s Chinatown. One thing I’ve noticed having lived in East Asia for the past seven months is how locals here are drawn towards anything that is advertised as being a specialty. Long lines immediately constitute a place as being, “a must-visit” and hype goes a long way.

Taiwan’s many regions and cities are all famous for one or more items that one must either buy or see when visiting. If you visit say, for example, the port city of Keelung north of Taipei it is expected that you seek out the Keelung sandwich, a greasy donut like submarine roll that is slathered with mayonnaise, sprinkled with diced cucumber, green tomatoes, and given a helping serving of hard-boiled eggs and Chinese sausage. It doesn’t matter if said sight or delicacy is good or not, it’s expected that as a tourists you must make the pilgrimage to seek it out. The same applied to Jonker Street, particularly with the Chicken Rice Ball. At one particularly restaurant it looked as if an entire tour bus of Chinese tourists had been dropped off in front of the building and were waiting to taste what this place (most likely written up in a guide of some sorts) had to offer.

I wandered around for another hour or so snapping pictures and popping in various shops. There were a number of cool antique stalls selling relics of the old Malaysia, particularly cool hard currency from yesteryears. Still, all goodies were being sold for antique prices.

Eventually, I made my way back to the Christ Church where the city bus had dropped me off. At around 4PM there were already a number of travelers waiting to get back to the central bus station for a return to either KL or possibly down south to Singapore. It should be noted that the city bus ride TO Malacca’s center took roughly 20 minutes or so. The trip back to the bus station during Malacca’s “rush hour” would’ve taken up to an hour, maybe longer, according to the ticket seller and another passenger who spoke perfect English. Understandable considering Malacca’s tight European streets aren’t made for giant busses and hundreds motorbikes to share.

Knowing that I had to be back for the 5PM bus back to KL that I had already bought a ticket for, I jumped off the bus and walked to a cab stand of sorts to flag a taxi to the station.

The first driver who saw me instantly flagged me over and started his engine. He gave me a good price up front to get me to the station and assured me that I would definitely make my bus.

“No problem. We fly there. You’ll see,” he said.

The driver was friendly in a casual sort of way, jumping right into the basic precursors to small talk. I told him where I was from in the States, what I was doing in Taiwan, and why I had come to his country. While he hadn’t traveled to Chicago, the city’s reputation preceded him. He even referenced John Dillinger, which may or may not be a result of the recent Johnny Depp Dillinger film, considering the biggest gangster reference linked to Chicago is always Al Capone.

We chatted about Malacca and K.L. His name, I would learn, was Pak Frankee and besides driving the taxi (which he said was merely a part-time gig for supplementing his income) he ran boat trips over the Malacca Strait into Indonesia, ran a hostel in Malacca and also conducted jungle tours of the Cameroon Highlands in inner-Southwest Malaysia. Like the driver before him who had taken me to the bus station in KL, it was clear this man had his share of stories to share. One in particular caught my attention instantly.

“Do you know David Byrne? Musician. From America,” the driver said, as my ears perked up with intrigue.

“Well, it just so happens...” I said, carrying on about my lifelong admiration for Byrne and Talking Heads.

Turns out Pak Frankee once gave David Byrne a ride from Kuala Lumpur into the Cameroon Highlands for a jungle trek to record orangutan sounds. While he couldn’t recall the exact year he said he thought it was in the early-80s, right around the time Byrne was wrapping up Talking Heads’ masterpiece, Remain in LIght, as well as 1981s My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, his “recorded-sound collaboration with Brian Eno that prominently features found sounds recorded around the world and paired with synthesizer symphonies.

Frankee told me that Byrne (who was also accompanied by his girlfriend at the time) was “down to earth,” his words, and that he was very interested in learning about Frankee’s life and the history of the region.

The story was too bizarre to be made up (and Byrne is too abstract an artist for Frankee to just make the story up, had he said say, Michael Jackson or Jon Bon Jovi, I might have called his bluff). The ride to the bus station was enjoyable and when I was let off a part of me wanted to find out more. He gave me his card and told me that if I were ever back in Malaysia that I should call him out for a tour. I will take him up on this offer should I ever return.

...

After a long and rainy bus ride back to KL through rush hour traffic, I met Stuart at the hostel and we set out for a late dinner at the nearby Kampung Baru night market that the proprietor of the hostel told me was a must-eat destination.

Night markets in Asia just might be the single greatest culinary offering to the world. They are bustling havens where eating is not merely a refueling for the body but rather an exploration for the taste buds. While I am spoiled here in Taiwan with the plentiful night markets at my disposal, the Kampung Baru market ended up being the highlight of my trip to Malaysia and would be the one constant throughout the rest of my time in KL.

The market, which runs the length of three fairly unassuming streets in Chow Kit is an amalgamation of different cuisines, often all sharing the same roof. A fruit and meat market lies at its entrance offering a multitude of bizarre fruit choices, including one that both Stuart and I were virgins to.

Photo c/o Stuart Wallace

The small, hard fruit called salak looks like a medium garlic clove that has been covered with reptile skin, creating something that is truly unique to Southeast Asia, possibly only in Malaysia. The taste was bitter sweet, with a hint of banana, which is why, I suppose, one online blogger referred to the fruit as “a banana wrapped in a snakeskin”. I ate what I could but was ultimately more excited about the prospects of trying a new fruit than the actual flavors the salak had to offer.

For our proper dinner we settled on the first open-air seating establishment we could find that smelled good and more importantly had people eating. Our first stop was commenced with a toast of teh tarik frothy tea and two steamy bowls of peasant soup–one with the always good base of oxtail, the other a sour seafood stew.

Moving on with bellies not quite content, we stopped at a place across the street that sold grilled whole fish of the mysterious family. Served with a bit of spicy soy on the side, the fish was fresh with a nice hint of smokiness. By this time it was about 9:45 and the places around us were packed with locals socializing and eating.

Afterwards, we moved to a larger open-air food bazaar that had a large projection screen TV playing local KL channels. It makes sense that the satay man and his makeshift habachi grill was set up at the market’s entrance, and it makes even more sense that without thinking we ordered up fifteen pieces of the mixed variety. At pocket change prices, these glorious skewered offerings were more like meat lollipops.

We ordered some regular hot tea (which we found out would be sweet nevertheless) and sat near a hookah stall in the corner while Tim Allen’s 1994 “everyday man becomes Santa Claus” family comedy, The Santa Claus was projected onto the large screen for the mostly Muslim audience to enjoy.

We shared a fruit-flavored nargila, which used a piece of fresh pineapple as the base for the tobacco and coals to burn, over conversation and the reality that yeah, we’re sitting in Kuala Lumpur, smoking, eating skewered meat and looking at the Petronas Towers lighting the distant sky to comfort us. The scene was perfect and we knew that we would return again, and as it turns out, again until we both left the city.

After a couple of hours we decided to head back, first insisting on stopping at an equally bustling stall across the way that sold freshly baked, sweet rodi bread with a standard yellow curry for dipping. On the walk home we tested our stomach’s durability one last time with a night cap of “The King of Fruits” and a staple of Malaysia: the durian.

Photo c/o The Internet

The durian is the kind of fruit that makes you wonder, “who ever thought to eat it this bizarre alien fruit?” For starters, the fruit’s spiky exterior shell places it nicely in the “treacherous-poke-your-eye-out” genus of weird Asian super fruit. The fleshy interior, which has the feel of three-day-old pudding skin, emits an odor that can be best described as ass meets rot. Still, the taste is something truly unique and dare I say, besides the mess involved with eating this fruit, it’s pretty good. I had had durian in Taiwan but Malaysia is where it reigns king and the quality and freshness was unprecedented.

Content and exuding funkiness from our pores, we returned to the hostel, checked email and eventually crashed for some much needed rest before another adventure in KL the following, Christmas Day!

To be continued...

Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia: Day 1

2010-01-19T06:38:00.000-08:00

Christmas Holiday Getaway: Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

Day 1

A Melting Pot—The Uzbek Connection—Little India—Curry to Evade Torrential Rain—Tea that Foams—A Survey of Chinatown—Satay and the Art of Grilled Skewered Meat—Burmese Shoe Salesman Tells His Tale—The Twin Towers—Photo-Op With Malay-Chinese Family

December 23, 2009 Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia--

I sit in bulkhead aisle seat of EVA Airlines flight 227 trying desperately to look over my neighbor’s window at the lush green that has just come into view. It’s Malaysia. A Taiwanese flight attendant sitting in the temporary fold-down seat in front of my ridiculously long legs seems to be staring at me with interest. My fervent anticipation is understood to those around me.

“What brings you to Kuala Lumpur?” the Malay gentleman sitting in the window seat asks me.

My decision to holiday in Kuala Lumpur over Christmas ultimately came down to the epiphany of, well, why the hell not!

My friend Stuart of Hong Kong, by way of Texas, sent me an email back in November about a trip to Malaysia’s intriguing capital. Ticket fares seemed high late in the game and it was going to be a bit of a challenge convincing my boss to grant me three of my contractual vacation days (the Taiwanese work ethic is daunting at times). There were a couple days of hesitation before I realized that there’s absolutely nothing holding me back from what will undoubtedly be a memorable Christmas in an exotic destination. After all, “when in Asia.”

In terms of Southeast Asian travel, K.L. was the last place I figured I would end up first. My ever-growing list of future passport stamps include at the forefront: Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, and Laos. Still, the allure of Malaysia, a place I knew little about, was too much to turn down.

I first became privy to Malaysia when I first arrived in Taiwan back in May. My modus operandi for my move to the far East was with Air Malaysia, a surprisingly comfortable experience that gave me my first glimpse into the notion that Malaysia had a lot to offer. Being in a predominately Muslim countries like Turkey and Bosnia was an incredible experience and the idea of standing in the midst of Mosque and hearing the minaret’s sound their daily prayers, was reason enough to check out what Malaysia had to offer.

In Taipei there are many Malaysian tourism advertisements on TV, particular the local Travel Channel that my housemates and I used to enjoy before our free cable was remedied. “Malaysia, Truly Asia” is the slogan and after traveling to this country, I understand why.

Malaysia is a melting pot of the Asian continent, not merely the Southeast region where it resides. The Chinese have been on the peninsula for hundreds of years, as have the Indians, Pakistani, Thai, Indonesians, Nepalese, Vietnamese, Burmese, Filipinos, to name a few of its closer neighbors. The Dutch, Portuguese and British colonialists each had stakes in the region at one time in history. In recent years there has been an influx of people from the Middle East–signs of influences from United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Iran, Oman, and Saudi Arabia were everywhere–and on two separate occasions I noticed advertisements for Central Asia’s Uzbekistan Airways, which as you can see from the route map, has more reach than I would’ve guessed.

The country of Malaysia itself is young, gaining its independence in the 1950s and only recently finding its way to the world stage through its oil reserves and Kuala Lumpur’s rapid growth.

The Petronas Towers (more on these marvels later) were for a while the world’s tallest buildings until Taipei’s Taipei 101 overtook this bragging right (Dubai’s Burj Khalifa recently grabbed this title away from the Taiwanese and I’m guessing it’s only a matter of time before China gets on the bandwagon and decides to join in the fun). From photos I had seen, the two towers were just begging to be visited.

So after about two days of questioning and hesitation (I am horrible about booking tickets, often waiting for days in the hope of finding cheaper fares until I ultimately cave and pay more than I had originally projected) I booked the flight, found a hostel and waited till I was set to sail.

I arrived in KL at around two in the afternoon on a Wednesday after a four and half hour flight that included a read through of the New York Times Global Edition (formerly the great International Herald Tribune), a scan through my Lonely Planet Southeast Asia guide, a decent breakfast, and an episode of House M.D. which features the smartass helping a shut-in heal some wounds. The Malay gentleman who sat next to me was extremely friendly and welcoming, telling me instantly that, “while this is will be your first trip to my country, this will not be your last.”

Kuala Lumpur is a sprawling metropolis that is still rooted in tradition and has not yet reached the status of say its sister city to the south, Singapore, or say the heights of Tokyo and Hong Kong. It is said to be the cheapest place on the planet to stay at five-star hotels and eat at Michelin-rated restaurants.

It’s a city currently in a state of limbo between its aspirations to be a thriving international commerce hub and its traditional market-based customs. It is diverse beyond belief in the many languages spoken, religions practiced and with its food. And oh, what a city it is to eat your way around. It was the perfect introduction to Southeast Asia and easily one of the greatest cities I’ve ever visited.

…

It took roughly 45 minutes to go through customs at Kuala Lumpur’s International Airport, which was a buzz kill, as I was increasingly anxious to get into the city and start my first day, lay-of-the-land wandering. I chatted for a while with a tall, well-put together woman in front of me who I noticed instantly from my flight as the one who was accompanying a group of Malaysian teenage athletes dressed in matching club sweat suits. Said team was actually a local gymnastics ensemble returning from an Olympic training competition in Japan. I guessed the woman (the team’s coach) to be from Eastern Europe, perhaps Russia, and was pleasantly surprised when she told me she came from Uzbekistan.

“I’m from a country in Central Asia, Uzbekistan, you probably haven’t heard of it,” she said, challenging my geographical prowess.

I got a smile out of her when I then told her of my fascination with the ancient city of Samarqand, an intriguing UNESCO World Heritage Sight that was a major stop on the Silk Road. When I asked here if she was from Bukhara or Tashkent, she was also pleasantly surprised. God I love when my random knowledge of geography, the result of hours of time spent staring at GoogleEarth and the CIA World Factbook, can be put to use.

She told me she had lived in Kuala Lumpur for the past seven years and that, while she thought it was an amazing city to visit, it didn’t offer much for a foreigner looking for work. Looking back on the my time in K.L. it’s evident to me that unless one holds a job through an international company posted in the capital, the job market for ex-pats, particularly in regards to English teaching, is pretty weak.

From the airport, which actually lies an hour outside of the KL proper, I caught the express train to Central Station, transferred to the KL Monorail (enter obligatory Simpsons’ reference: “a genuine, bona fide, electrified, six-car monorail!”) which took me to the Chow Kit district in Northern KL where the Hostel Cosmopolitan sat waiting for me.

I stood in the cramped rail car, sandwiched between Indians, Chinese, local Malays, I would gather at least one Indonesian in the fold, and a handful of foreigners alike. There were people dressed in Muslim burqas and other customary headscarves. The monorail itself is one of five modes of transport in the city and seems to be the dilapidated line of mass transit system. Rather than speeding around the city like the Taipei MRT, it runs at a slow pace, stopping almost every minute at stops that can be walked between in a matter of ten minutes or so.

Chow Kit is located away from the chaotic city center and seems to be a much more local-friendly neighborhood, with a large Indian and Indonesian population as I would later learn from the hostel proprietor. The Hostel Cosmopolitan was located at the mouth of a vast, partially enclosed wet market that offered up an expansive array of exotic fruit, spices and prepared treats, from fried delicacies, steamy curry dishes, and plenty of freshly baked bread. I checked into the room, changed out of my Taipei-winter-friendly clothes and made my way out to explore.

I like nothing more than to explore a city on foot, especially on the first day. Nothing pleases me more than to find a route on the map and just walk until I’m lost. It opens up areas that one can often easily miss speeding around on mass transportation, and allows me to truly soak in everything around me. Judging from my map, I knew K.L. was the perfect walking city for my tall-ass to navigate around.

I snaked through the Chow Kit Market, which is famous enough to warrant its own Wikipedia entry, grabbing a wax apple along the way. This delectable fruit has become a passion back in Taipei, a year-round fruit that was completely foreign to me before coming to Asia.

Chow Kit Market PHOTOS: Warner Sills

My first stop was K.L’s famed “Little India,” a neighborhood south of Chow Kit that is one of the major tourist draws in the city. I can’t begin to tell you how much I miss truly great Indian food, among other “ethnic cuisines” that I can’t find in Taipei. Taiwan has an amazing local food scene, one that I am still exploring on a daily basis, however, the city fails to deliver when it comes to certain major world cuisines, such as Indian, Mediterranean and towering above the rest, Mexican. Even now, as I’m writing this in a nice local coffee shop in my neighborhood, the thought of three greasy al pastor tacos from Arturo’s on Western and Armitage back home is giving my tummy rumbling melancholy. This said, it was safe to say that Little India was high on my list of places to see in K.L.

I navigated around the area for about 45 minutes hoping that the dark clouds and sporadic flurries of drizzle were temporary setbacks. Colorful sari shops aligned most streets offering fabrics ranging from expensive silk to cheaply factory-dyed synthetics. A number of storefronts were blaring Hindi dance music from large sidewalk amplifiers. One shop was offering a “back to school sale,” which made me instantly feel like I wasn’t in Kansas anymore, but also served as one of those miniscule, shared cultural similarities that I love discovering when I visit foreign places. While back to school meant a trip to Old Navy and maybe a new Trapper Keeper binder, a new sari might be enough to make a local Malay-Indian child excited to start school again.

PHOTO: Warner Sills

When the tease of rain to come morphed into an onslaught of torrential tropical rain, I sought refuge in an enclosed food stall market that was calling my name with its steamy trays of colorful Indian fare. I found a vendor that looked promising, ordered a steaming plate of chicken curry and a ration of freshly baked thin roti bread. K.L. is a largely Muslim city which means alcohol is hard to find on a regular basis. Instead, tea reigns supreme. Malaysian Teh Tarik, or pulled frothy tea, is a staple in this region and is yet another incarnation of the overtly sweet tea and coffee that is found in Southeast Asia, often mixed with sweetened condensed milk.

Teh Tarik differs with its natural airy froth that comes from a series of high pours. I would drink the tea every day during my stay in Malaysian, sometimes two or three times a day. Once you’re in the Malaysia, any notion of healthy eating goes right out the door when your eyes behold what the city has to offer.

VIDEO: Warner Sills

Chicken curry, roti bread, and pulled tea PHOTO: Warner Sills

Markets like the one I ate in our common in the city and are akin to the some of the night markets here in Taipei, with the exception of a focus on Malay and Indian cuisine. The seating was unassuming, mainly bench like tables, each adorned with a tissue dispenser and plastic teakettle for cleansing the hands. Malaysian’s Indian and Southeast Asia roots mean that most food is eaten using the right hand, with forks making you look weak and inept to cultural challenges.

PHOTO: Warner Sills

Curries range from spicy, gut churning red lamb curries called rendang to South Indian curried vegetable dishes. It was nice being back in lentil territory, where legume offerings like Dhal Makhani are taken seriously.

After the rain calmed I ventured out again and made my way through a night market selling copy-watches, knock-off shoes, clothing articles and pretty much most other types of market crap you can find in this part of the world. The differences here were in the stall vendors who seemed to come from all over. North Africans, Indians, Cantonese, Malay, Indonesians, etc all had a stake in the cutthroat industry of replicas and pirated goods.

Eventually I found my way further south in the city to K.L’s Chinatown. Coming from Taiwan it’s now hard to be impressed by foreign city Chinatowns, especially since Taipei’s night market scene is unlike anything I’ve encountered. Still, I felt obligated to explore what K.L.’s largely Cantonese Chinatown had to offer.

As far as food goes this district offered staple Cantonese fair, with a focus on dim sum skewer snacks. I did, however, make it a point to eat from as many satay stands that my stomach could muster. Satay, which is basically just skewered assorted meat served with sweet peanut sauce, is to Malaysia what stinky tofu is to Taiwan, a staple snack treat that is portable and fast and readily available wherever you find yourself. The mutton versions tended to be too tough, while the chicken and beef were fresh and perfectly satisfying when paired with a serving of diced, partially pickled cucumbers. The stands were everywhere and it didn’t take long before I was full.

I stopped in a couple of pirated DVD shops after countless hecklers approached me offering copies of films theater favorites like “2012,” “Avatar” and “Twilight: New Moon.” When I finally caved to one persistent gentleman who had a tattoo of his own name on his arm, a detail I would later discover served as a permanent business card of sorts. I had a list of obscure titles for him to check, including the latest Coen Brothers film, “A Serious Man,” the film adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road,” and Spike Jonze’s “Where the Wild Things Are.” “Wild Things” was the only familiar title on the list and he instantly jumped to a pile of a hundred or so titles, knowing exactly wear to pull the disc out. At eight Malaysian ringgits (about $2) I couldn’t say no. What was striking is that while I was scoping out this film adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s endearing children’s book, the young, ambitious vendor kept on offering me porn.

“You like porn, I got good movies. Blu-Ray, too. Good price. Very hot. Very sexy. Japanese girls. You like, I give you good deal. 4 get 1 free,” he said.

My response: “Do you by any chance have “The Fantastic Mr. Fox?”

This inquiry completely went in one ear and out the other since the man basically repeated the same pitch five minutes later as I was getting ready to pay. Perhaps he simply couldn't fathom why someone would prefer talking foxes and badgers to hi-definition sexapades.

I found out the man was from Bangladesh originally, had lived in K.L. for three years, spoke perfect English, Cantonese, and local Malay and was working on his Mandarin, which seems to be less common in Malaysia. One thing that never ceases to amaze me is how adept vendors like this man are to picking up languages when they are forced to learn it for their trade. Back in Hong Kong at the Chungking Mansions I was equally impressed by a food stand vendor’s mastery of six languages, all for the sake of competing with those around him.

Moments later as I scoped out a copy-designer shoe stall, I struck up a conversation with a young Burmese man about my age who had been in Malaysia coming on two years now. I told him of my interest in traveling in Burma (also known as Myanmar) and he shared his opinions of the corruption with the government, but also about how beautiful the country is. He too spoke a handful of languages comfortably and was working in K.L. to save up money to return to his home and girlfriend. I ended up buying a pair of mock Diesel sneakers when I found out they actually had my size! To humor myself, I asked if the shoes were in fact real and he replied that yes, in fact they were the real deal.

“They come from Korea factory. Best quality. Here look!” he said as he took fire to the shoe’s sole and fabric outer shell. Not sure how showing a shoes resilience to a Bic ligher proves its authenticity but it is comforting to know that if I am ever confronted with a fire storm or a freak encounter with magma, my Diesels will hold tough.

After I had had enough of the endless barrage of vendors offering their goods, I left Chinatown and headed further south towards the towering Petronas Towers, which I had been working my way towards all day, saving the towering beauties for night when the spotlights would make them glow.

These beacons in the sky are a spectacle to the eyes. Forget the ridiculous “biggest dick” global competition for tallest skyscraper, and focus on the beauty of these architectural wonders. At night the twin towers are magical. They at times bring to mind the minarets that are littered around Kuala Lumpur’s many mosques. There’s a bit of Angkor Wat thrown into the fold, and the Antoni Gaudí enthusiast in me can’t help but see similarities to La Sagrada Familia. They’re simply breathtaking.

La Sagrada Familia, Barcelona Spain PHOTO: Internet stock

Petronas' sexy curves PHOTO: Warner Sills

Petronas Towers at night PHOTO: Warner Sills

Angkor Wat, Cambodia. Photos by yours truly coming soon, hopefully...

I spent a good hour photographing the towers’ nooks and crannies up close, later finding a cozy stone pillar near a fountain park to sit for a while, staring up in complete awe. At one point a Malay family from Penang approached me wanting me to pose for a photo with their teenage daughter. In a city as diverse as K.L. this request was a little puzzling, but I agreed nonetheless.

I was downright bewildered when the one photo with the nervous 15 year turned into a series of shots with each child, followed by a group shot with the whole family at their request. I tried to speak to them in Mandarin, detecting some similarities in the Malay they were speaking but they preferred to use their broken English. I was happy when I told them I was from Chicago and instead of the usual, “oh, Al Capone” or “oh yeah, Michael Jordan” name checking, they spoke of Obama.

The girl sulking on the right did not participate in the photo shoot with the tall foreigner. PHOTO: Warner Sills

After my neck started to strain from looking up at the towers I started to make the long trek back to the hostel. It being only 10 I decided to walk the distance back, taking a different route.

Chow Kit at night is definitely a lot sketchier than during the day, but I never felt unsafe. I tucked in at my ten-bed mixed dorm room and chatted with two Polish girls I had met earlier when I had checked in. The two had come from London where they work and told me that it was cheaper to fly to Malaysia for Christmas than to fly to Warsaw! I shared some stories about my short stint in Poland and we talked about Żubrówka Bison Grass vodka.

After my long first day it didn’t take long to fall asleep and I surprisingly slept comfortably through the night, despite the usual coming and goings of people entering a hostel dorm room. For the next day, my plan was to wake up early, head to the bus terminal and catch a ride to the port city of Malacca for a quick day trip, cramming as much as I could in before meeting up with Stuart later in the evening.

To be continued…

Tales from the Classroom

2010-01-13T18:22:00.000-08:00

A Warner of Suburbia EXCLUSIVE

I have a new student. His name is Cobra. He is 12. He tells me that his father gave him the name. Little else is known, but I will be getting to the bottom of this.

Photo, student profile, and wicked sounding origin story coming soon.

Stray Observations

2010-01-01T18:55:00.000-08:00

Stray Observations From An Amused Foreigner #3

ON THE LOCAL ZOO

--A while back I took a trip to the Taipei Zoo with the intention of seeing Taipei’s pair of Pandas. It’s hard to deny the cuteness factor of a Panda Bear and I’m pretty sure I had never seen one in person before this trip. The two bears, Yuan Yuan and Tuan Tuan (which according to Wikipedia means ‘Reunion’) have their own indoor and outdoor habitat and even on a rainy day draw lines of onlookers. The queue that can form to see the two bears is on par with the lines waiting to see Pope John Paul’s body at the Vatican a couple years back, which is to say you are shuffled in an out and are lucky if you catch the Pandas doing something interesting like scratching themselves or taking a dump.

--The Giant Panda also warrants its own gift shop, which proves that you can in fact churn out a panda into every kind of chotchkie imaginable. Panda plush toys. Check. Panda notebook. Check. Vile of concentrated Panda breath for good luck charm necklace. Could happen.

--Rocky the Raccoon, Chinese. It makes sense that an East Asian zoo would have a Raccoon habitat. These arguably cute but rather annoying creatures are common in the nocturnal suburban scavenger subspecies of North American vermin but over here they are only alluded to in children’s storybooks and the 1995 Disney film, “Pocahantas,” which featured Meeko the playful pet raccoon. It was quite a surprise to see that their display at the Taipei Zoo was not only bigger than, say, a lesser animal’s exhibit (some monkeys seemed to be living in squalor though it’s hard to say if a monkey would comprehend squalor, what with the penchant for dung-tossing and all). It turns out that when Raccoons are allowed to just lounge around and don’t actually have to clumsily scrounge through your trash can at all hours of the night, they can be quite playful and charming to watch, as seen in this Taipei Zoo Raccoon enthusiast’s amateur Youtube video.

--Anything advertised as, “The Luxury and Trendy Finger Food” has to be anything but. Even this hungry zoo patron seemed puzzled by the prospects of pizza served in a cone. NOTE: the bonus sprigs of fresh basil featured in the display photos (a nice touch). Brova!!

--I still argue that the Ocelot is truly underrated cat–beautiful and mysterious, while still sporting baadassss claws that could mangle a jugular.

ON MY NEIGHBORHOOD

-- I share a flat on a fairly unassuming street. Our place is close to a grocery store, seven convenience stores, a riverside park, and numerous warring clans of stray dogs mark their territory outside my window.

-- There are many noises in my neighborhood. For a while we would all wake up to the sounds of ripsaws and a pneumatic nail guns at the construction site one building over. At night we can hear the dogs howling and barking at said construction site, usually trying to put the scare into a stationary piece of heavy machinery.

-- Every once and a while I can hear the sound of what must be a howling man of sorts across the way from my window. While at first I figured it to be a dog, the howls have become more nuanced in their tones and range. After recording a sample on my camera’s video feature I spent some time pondering what the sounds might be. The following is a shortlist of perfectly feasible explanations:

a) said noise is from a dog, albeit a rather unhappy, dare I say depressed pooch.

b) said noise is from an old man, possibly someone bed-ridden.

c) said noise is from a waking gimp, possibly being exuded from its cage or cabinet dwelling.

d) said noise is the result of some bizarre Tai-Chi ritual that I am not yet privy to.

e) said noise is from a zombie going through a self-identity crisis.

-- Open letter to the neighborhood lady on her bike who feeds the local stray dogs and cats scraps of meat: Thank you for being such a kind soul. You go above and beyond my feeble attempts at feeding the animals store-bought treats.

-- Open letter to the hungry/scared/impatient/impish kitten who cried all night long last Monday. If you had just waited till morning the bike lady would’ve have taken care of you. Also, if you want something and feel the need to whine at least make your presence known visibly. My housemate Antoni and I spent a good thirty minutes out searching for you, tracking your sounds to various possible hiding spots. NOTE TO READERS: The following night said cat was neither seen nor heard. While it could’ve gone elsewhere are been cared for by its owner I suspect the aforementioned gimp had something to do with the cat’s sudden disappearance.

ON CHRISTMAS

(NOTE: The following are merely observations regarding a recent Christmas fair hosted at my English school. For those curious, I was in charge of a Christmas dart game with a Robin Hood theme. Also included at the festivities: face painting (which morphed into hand painting when the quality of the paint brought to light suspicions that pain might leave certain kids with nasty face rashes), Christmas stocking-making, a fishing pond (don’t worry, more on that to come), indoor soccer, pinball, and for those not interested in games there were two back-to-back screenings of the 2009 classic Christmas film, “Terminator: Salvation.” The opinions displayed are of the curious and sarcastic nature and by no means show my dissent for my employer’s choices and practices in the arena of teaching English to Taiwanese children. Another column would suffice for that.)

--Look, I understand Christmas is not widely celebrated everywhere in the world. Even the Westernized commercial aspects of Christmas are only hinted at here. Taipei has a couple trees up in public spaces, some of the department stores are slinging holiday-themed items, generally presented with tinsel and ornaments. At a recent concert I attended the Midori Liquor girls were pushing the green libation from a tree of under lit green bottles. Still, if you’re going to claim to hold a Christmas party for a school full of curious minds, you must refrain from doing the following:

1) Grilled sausages and deep-fried onion/chicken circles are no doubt tasty but are about as Christmas as Bob Dylan singing “Here Comes Santa Claus.”

2) If you give a wild child a bag of live fish, there will be blood. Teacher Elle, one of my Chinese co-workers hosted a fishing pond game where students paid actual money for paper fishing nets and were given the chance to scoop up as many terrified little fish as they could. While cute in a carnival kind of way, a number of children were clearly not ready for the responsibility of caring for living things, even if said creatures were of the minnow variety. I had to rescue three different sets of fish that were spread across the floor of classroom 304 when my students carelessly dropped the bags. Student Jerry, who is truly a menace to society, was caught poking and squeezing a number of his fish. When I confronted him about his cruelty he belted out a sugar drink induced screech, the likes of which might give an Apache war party a run for their money. Give a student a life and their true colors come out.

3) Fact: A 6 oz plastic Hello Kitty juice tumbler can temporarily hold approximately 12-15 fish comfortably depending on size and girth.

4) Fact: Cold water from the school water cooler may stop fish hearts.

5) Nothing says Christmas like a giant inflatable giraffe head and neck, which I suppose could be used as a riding toy like the classic wooden pony head and stick. Still clearly the better choice is to hit tall Teacher Warner with said apparatus of mischief.

6) When Christmas trees, ornaments, Santa Claus’ and other red and green colored drawings are simply not enough to please naughty students for simple face/hand painting, one can always resort to safer themes like snakes, rats, spiders, and sharks.

7) Though probably an overlooked mistake, the paper vampire bat decoration (a leftover from Halloween, another misunderstood holiday here in Taiwan) on the windows of the teacher’s lounge/staff bathroom/kitchen was a fitting extra touch.

8) Nothing says ho-ho-ho like giant cyborgs battling it out in the future for survival of man after Judgment Day. Teacher Steffi was in charge of renting a movie for the screening classroom to keep the older kids occupied during the festivities. While I could think of at least a hundred charming Christmas films (hell, if you’re going the guns, explosion and cursing route why not settle on Die Hard, which actually was set during the holidays) Terminator: Salvation was ultimately chosen.

Jerry, our school's resident problem child, watches cyborgs shoot humans

during the Xmas "Terminator: Salvation" film screening, the sugary contents of that

red bottle circulating through his system.

9) The total number of pleads to universal problem child Eason to put down the darts and to stop: 11

10) Eason: 11, Teacher Warner: 0

ON TAIWANESE MTV

-- On a date of sorts a couple weeks ago I was introduced to Taiwan’s version of MTV, which has nothing to do with the American Music Television cable network. MTV is essentially akin to East Asian KTV, which, if you recall, are venues where you and your friends can rent a room equipped for Karaoke. MTVs take the same concept of renting a room (a seedy sounding diversion if you ask me) and incorporate film to the equation. You and your friends can show up, pick from a selection of DVDs, and get a room with a surround sound system and a digital projector. Pretty cool concept and one that I always envisioned in the States but I knew would never be profitable. Why watch a movie on your dinky home TV when you can rent a large high-definition screen with surround sound for less than the cost of going to an actual film house?

-- In Taiwan MTVs were largely successful for many years, catering to young teenagers wanting to watch movies and make out. It takes the concept of the drive-in movie and brings it indoors. I learned that due to internet movie downloading these establishments are a dying breed.

-- I was invited to an MTV by a girl I met who told me that if I liked movies (which I do) then I would love MTV. Of course when it came time to make the film selection I knew instantly that my usual insistence on snooty art films wouldn’t fly. For starters the film library was limited to big Hollywood action and romantic comedies, many of which starred ponytail wearing white ninja Steven Segal (who apparently is quite respected over here). Setting aside my film pretensions, I allowed my friend to choose the film. She, without hesitation I might add, went for the teen vampire soap opera, Twilight, which is all the rage here.

Having not read any of the books of which the Twilight Saga is based on, I can’t accurately comment on its importance in the lexicon of American literature and film but it does seem to follow a fairly basic formula: Take one pasty white skinned, semi EMO teenage girl (Kristen Stewart, who was quite good in Sean Penn’s Into the Wild), send her to the Pacific Northwest, introduce the Romeo to her Juliet (who is part of a mysterious family of pasty-faced vampires), insert some hipster indie rock music, have a scene where said vampire love interest rescues her from a car accident and possible attack/rape from Oregon gang members, and finally, add a pinch of voice-over narration about the complexities of loving a vampire, all of which is said to be a metaphor for keeping one’s virginity sacred–give in to your lust for sex (with a vampire) and you might end up with two holes in your neck. Watch out girls!

-- The whole experience was odd, to say the least.

-- MTV summed up: A place to relive middle school.

ON MUSIC IN THE CLASSROOM

-- The songs written by Hess, my school’s parent company, are offered to teachers as a tool for helping to teach key grammar points and increase vocabulary comprehension. The majority of them lack any sort of catchiness and often drive the students (and the teacher) insane. My American Curriculum Program class (ACP) meets four days a week and is one of the few that actually enjoy singing the songs offered. While I’m gradually trying to supplement the material with classic English songs of my childhood–The Beatles “Octopus’s Garden” and Bowie’s Labyrinth film era “Magic Dance” are two that I’ve attempted (other song suggestions are welcomed!)–my class still seems to enjoy the text book offerings. Take for example, “Rock and Roll Days,” a wall of sound Hess production referencing the days of the week and featuring female backup singers, which the girls in the class love.

--The students also can’t get enough of “We Wish You a Merry Christmas” even after Christmas has come and gone.

-- I’m toying with the idea of introducing the students to Prince’s “Starfish & Coffee.” Thoughts? Concerns of introducing his Purpleness to these innocent minds?

Those who doubt me just take a look at the lyrics:

It was 7:45, we were all in line 2 greet the teacher Miss Kathleen (Practice telling time)

First was Kevin, then came Lucy, third in line was me (Time adverbs)

All of us were ordinary compared 2 Cynthia Rose (Cynthia’s a fun name to say)

She always stood at the back of the line, a smile beneath her nose (Incorporates smiling)

Favorite number was 20, every single day (Favorite + (nouns) are big in our class)

If U asked her what she had 4 breakfast, this is what she'd say

Come on....

Starfish and coffee, maple syrup and jam (Food vocabulary)

Butterscotch clouds, a tangerine, and a side order of ham (Food Vocabulary)

If U set your mind free, baby, maybe U'd understand

Starfish and coffee, maple syrup and jam. (Starfish are funny.)

Jesus, Santa, Krishna, Buddha, and Allah walk into a bar.

2009-11-24T17:08:00.000-08:00

Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

December 23-27, 2009

It's going to be a laksa Christmas miracle!

Hong Kong Part II

2009-11-20T06:42:00.000-08:00

Weekend Getaway:

Hong Kong, Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China

Part II

On the Trail of Anthony Bourdain–The Chungking Mansions-A Return to Spanish–Warner Sits Like Buddha–An Outlet Mall–Where the People Buy Gold Fish–Night Ferry Across Causeway Bay-A View From the Top

Monday

Monday was my day to explore solo, which I was keen to do considering I had yet to truly venture away from the Westernized side of Hong Kong. First on my list was a little field trip on the footsteps of one Anthony Bourdain and the enchanting bamboo noodle-maker he encountered during his stint in Hong Kong.

The scene I’m referring is one of the more mesmerizing moments on his culinary travelogue series, “No Reservations.” A simple man makes simple noodles by hand. Everyday he mixes the most basic ingredients to make one of Asia’s staple foods in his cramped apartment. The difference between his technique and that of a utility noodle factory is his use of a large bamboo rolling pin of sorts to fold the flour, egg, water, and salt mixture together. The dough isn’t mixed but rather kneaded together and, well, you can take a look for yourself.

The act is drenched in, “last of its kind” family tradition and I felt obligated to make the pilgrimage.

A quick survey of some foodie websites and message boards gave me an address in Tai-Po, a university district in the northern part of the New Territories, an area I had been intending to check out anyway. This seemed like an ideal place to grab a late breakfast and uncover the less-traveled side of Hong Kong.

It’s amazing how the city transforms when you leave HK central with its many Western reminders. The New Territories truly have the China feel I was looking for.

The aforementioned gentleman is the proprietor of Ping Kee Noodles, which is your average, run-of-the-mill noodle stand. To be honest it was also a bit of a challenge to find.

Hong Kong has a number of giant indoor markets, which were built to rid the already crowded streets of food vendors (sadly Hong Kong doesn’t have the street food scene that makes Taiwan such a treasure of a place to live in). On the outside these buildings look like giant park lot structures. They’re void of windows and have very few signs indicating what they house. The first floor is butcher and fishmonger territory, which is always a fun place to take a stroll. Seafood in this part of the world never fails to impress. The variety can be overwhelming and just furthers the notion that our planet’s seas are still quite mysterious.

The locals seemed a bit puzzled by this tall foreigner leaning over their stock with a camera and a face plastered with curiosity. Surely they must have been thinking, “Boy, he must be lost…they’re just fish, you know…Why is he wearing such large hiking boots? Why does his hair stand up by itself?”

It doesn’t matter where you are in the world, markets are a great place to be. It’s prime turf for people watching as you are granted that rare peek into the day-to-day lives of everyday folk. At 10:30A.M. on a Monday, the Tai-Po market was alive with the sound of commerce.

People were yelling orders at shirtless vendors slinging an array of flesh from land and sea, the floor was wet with run-off ice melt, and there was a curious mix of odors–some pleasant, others foreign. This is the setting.

Fruit vendors, miscellaneous dry goods sellers and knock-off purse pushers occupied the second floor, which only required a quick walkthrough. The third floor is where the magic was though.

The open warehouse space was flooded with flimsy plastic tables and chairs and the walls were lined with various food stalls selling damn near anything you could possibly want to eat. Cheap dim sum snacks, ducks dripping off hooks, steaming woks at every corner, the bustle of the Cantonese eating and socializing and of course, noodles.

Despite its notoriety around Hong Kong and by way of Bourdain’s trustworthy global recommendations, Ping Kee Noodles is a fairly unassuming place. I ordered a simple bowl of thin bamboo noodles served in broth with small fish wontons. As far as noodles go, these were very good. Mind blowing, not quite, then again noodles are one of those essentials that ranges from bad, so-so and good. The notion that this man’s simple trade was passed down from generation to generation gives the noodles more of a romantic feel than an overpowering sensation to the taste buds.

I spoke briefly with the man himself (his English was minimal and Mandarin doesn’t fly in this part of the China), who upon seeing me instantly pointed to a framed news-clipping of he and Bourdain standing next to his noodle work station, which looks more like an archaic painter’s drafting table, an appropriate comparison I think.

***

After a couple hours spent surveying the rest of Tai Po’s outdoor markets, I boarded the MTR and headed back towards Hong Kong Central by way of the Kowloon district. Kowloon is directly across from Central and seems to be the bridge between the surreal Westernized business district of Central and China proper. If Central is Manhattan, the large Kowloon is an outer borough, possibly its Queens.

My first stop was the world famous Chungking Mansions, which the notable setting of Hong Kong filmmaker Wong Kar Wai’s masterful film, “Chungking Express.”

The mansion, which is more a run down apartment complex situated in an otherwise fancy drag, is literally a giant melting pot. Its hotels, hostels and guesthouses (all three of which seem to be equals in terms of quality/safety) remain Hong Kong’s most affordable lodging for travelers. Its short and long term residents, not to mention the vendors and shop keepers that inhabit the bottom floors, span the globe in their diversity.

North and West Africans, Indians and Pakistanis, Turks, Persians, Mainlanders, Southeast Asianers, you name it, are all under one roof. It serves as a cheap place to lay one’s head during the transition period for immigrants and is also supposedly one of the cheaper indoor markets in Hong Kong City.

The bottom floors are flooded with vendors of countless tongues pushing used cell phones, replicas of coveted Prada and Gucci handbags, DVDs, computers, and pretty much all other odds and ends you could imagine. There are also a number of food stands serving up simple, but tasty native dishes from Indian/Pakistani curry pilaf and Turkish kebab stands to Ethiopian fast food.

I spent a good hour in and outside of this massive complex, which, it’s safe to say, somehow manages to avoid being shut down by the Hong Kong Fire Department annually (a peek inside some of the upper level hostel floors, by way of an antiquated elevator, furthered this observation). I got a steaming plate of Dhal Makhani at a South Indian food stand situated next to a guy selling rebuilt fuzz-busters and handheld GPS units. The food vendor, I learned, has lived in Hong Kong for 23 years, speaks fluent English, French, Cantonese and is even capable in Mandarin. When I told him that in Taiwan we don’t have anything even remotely similar to the Chunking Mansions he said, “you would have a hard time finding a place like this anywhere else in the world.”

Clearly I had found the other side of Hong Kong, the underbelly to all the glamour that makes up most of the island. I instantly realized how unique a city Hong Kong really is. Its varied history of foreign occupations has left the city a multi-cultural oasis in the middle of the Far East. Its ports, economic ties with Mainland China and pretty much the rest of the modern world, gives the city quite a unique look and feel with a lot more to see under its surface.

Eventually I left the Chungking Mansions (though I could have stayed longer) and made my way down Nathan Road, the major drag in this area, to the waterside of Kowloon where the Hong Kong Museum Campus is.

I took a quick run through The Hong Kong Museum of Fine Art, checking out a current exhibit titled, “The Prosperous Cities: A Selection of Paintings from the Liaoning Provincial Museum.” A nice dose of history was a perfect cap to the afternoon. The paintings, many of which were nothing more than faded, yet detailed glimpses into day-to-day life of the Chinese during the Ming and Qing dynasties, were fascinating. The merchant scenes depicted were a nice supplement to what I had just experienced in Tai Po and at Chungking, the latter being the results of globalization on merchant life in China.

I took the ferry back to Central to meet up with Stuart. The choppy boat ride offered stunning views of both Kowloon and Hong Kong Island and I believe was actually cheaper than the MTR. Nothing like a good ferry ride. Memories of a similar ride crossing the Bosphorus came to mind.

Monday night I accompanied Stuart to a weekly Spanish class he attends. Spanish speakers are hard to find in Taipei and ever since starting my fairly intensive Chinese courses (six months of classes, five days a week, three hours a day) the linguistically savvy part of my brain seems to want to merge Spanish and Mandarin together into one incomprehensible mash up. Sunday night Stuart and I exchanged words in Spanish and while my listening and speaking skills were still sharp, I found myself adding Mandarin words into the mix. Without even thinking about it I might, for example substitute the first person singular pronoun, “I” in Spanish (yo) with the “I” in Mandarin (wo) or replying to interesting conversation with “zhende ma?” (really? in Mandarin).

Stuart’s night class was a mix of British businessmen brushing up on their foreign languages, a handful of local Cantonese, two Americans and Stuart, who was the youngest in the class. The teacher, a cordial woman from Colombia welcomed me to the class and an elderly British man, a retired barrister who has lived in Hong Kong for 30+ years brought a celebratory spread of Spanish munchies as a, “welcome to our class” treat.

As we munched on Iberian Manchego cheese (which I hadn’t tasted since the States but was a regular staple in my refrigerator in Chicago) and chorizo sausage, and drank Rioja we read through a couple Spanish reading passages on Cristóbal Colón and did a short exercise reviewing the vocabulary of weird body parts. The three words for different parts of the cheek and upper face were new.

Attending a Spanish class in the middle of downtown Hong Kong would be the last thing most tourists would do but I have to say it was a memorable experience.

TUESDAY

Tuesday I rose early and headed by MTR to Lantau Island, one of the outlying islands that is adjacent to the airport and is home to not only Hong Kong Disneyland but also the giant 34-meter-tall bronze Tian Tan Buddha, perched high in the hills overlooking the Po Lin Monastery.

For all the glory of the awesome spectacle of this oversized Buddha, Lantau Island seems to be nothing more than an extension of Central’s shopping district, only outletified!

I exit the train station and immediately am thrust into a surprisingly large outlet mall that is literally connected to the train station. Nike, New Balance, Timberland, The Body Shop, you name it. I felt comfortable knowing that after I paid my respects to the holy Buddha I could successfully purchase a new pair of trainers, on discount no less. There was even a Mrs. Fields Cookie depot, which, along with East Asia’s fascination with KFC, essentially equates to the globalization of the protruding gut. With Disneyland a mere bus ride away one could easily be persuaded (by the Lantau urban planners I might add) to skip the Buddha all together, purchase a sun visor at the North Face store, and head towards Disneyland’s Main Street U.S.A. for the complete mock-American experience.

The giant Buddha is something to marvel at. It’s just one of many large Buddhas scattered across the globe and a quick Wikipedia search clued me in to some of the other even more eye popping examples, take, for example, the Leshan Giant Buddha in Leshan, China, which was first built in 713 and took 90 years to complete.

I spent a good hour or so at the top of the peak where the Buddha resides. The views of the valley below were stunning as were the adjacent smaller statuettes that praise and make offerings to the big boy Buddha.

I struck up a conversation with an Argentine who asked me to take a photo of him with his iPhone. He had been traveling primarily in Japan and S. Korea and was working his way down and eventually towards Sweden where he had what sounded like a cushy engineering job lined up. I didn’t ask but he informed me that he had been studying Swedish by way of an audio lesson program he discovered which he claims to be the best way to learn a new language. The more travelers I meet, the more I am impressed by certain foreigners’ aptitude for picking up new languages.

Europeans have the advantage of small countries and open borders, which means if you are born in say the landlocked country of Switzerland, it is not uncommon for you to graduate from university with perfect fluency in German, French, Italian and English. That this Argentine spoke clear English and was picking up Swedish by way of essentially in-flight language lessons, made the linguistically challenged American in me jealous.

On my way out I talked with a father and son duo from Belfast who were doing a two-week East Asia tour that included Shanghai and Tokyo. Their masterful grasp of English with a wicked sounding accent made me feel more at ease.

***

After I had gotten my Buddha fix for the day I headed back towards the northern parts of Kowloon to a famous outdoor street market where I heard one could find just about anything they wanted, with that beautiful fine-line between legal and illegal. As I exited the MTR station and was immediately offered a supposed new pair of Bose headphones and later some coke, I couldn’t help but remember John Goodman’s Walter character in the Coen’s “The Big Lebowski” infamous line, “You want a toe, I can get you a toe by three o’clock, with nail polish. Believe me, there are ways.”

Hong Kong’s notoriety as a shopping enthusiast’s Mecca is understandable. Kowloon is flooded with electronics pushers of all sorts. There were old cell phones and used cell phone accessories. VHS players with serial numbers that had been scratched off years ago sat next to other relics of the home entertainment golden age–Laserdisc players and even a Betamax. There were kitchen appliances and cookware sets, neon lights, and heavily discounted fleece jackets, which I would later learn were often the spawn of mad fusions of various companies’ products, say, for example, a North Face jacket with sleeves sewn on from a Colombia Gortex product and Mountain Hardware zippers.

A used camera vendor caught my eye with his collection of vintage to modern lenses and bodies. I fondled an old manual Leica and was instantly given a pitch from the Cantonese gentleman who told me, “no scratches…good photos…good photos. 1000HKD,” which is a little over $100US.

Sprinkled throughout the glut of used electronics were various hole-in-the-wall food stands. I picked up two steamed buns (which in this part of the world never cease to tickle my taste buds), one meat (meat as in I don’t know what it was), the other filled with sweet red beans, and continued down the massive street back towards the MTR.

Later after another couple hours of walking I met up with Stuart and we made our way to the Temple Street market for dinner. Our first stop, however, was a curious sounding goldfish market, which proved to be exactly what it sounds like.

One thing that I’ve noticed living in East Asia is that certain markets or streets will be famous for one thing and one thing only. In Taipei there is one heavily concentrated computer related market, and similarly one that only caters to cameras and camera accessorizes. These markets essentially bring in all the competition into one small area, making it a one-stop shopping bazaar for exactly what you are looking for. This might not seem like a viable business model but it works. The Goldfish Market is no exception.

The Goldfish Market in Mongkot is essentially a four-city-block strip of goldfish sellers. It’s a sea of overcrowded aquariums, anxious onlookers looking for the perfect specimen and with a subtle smell of flakey fish food and brine shrimp lingering in the air. Goldfish in East Asia are considered prized possessions, especially when allowed to maturate to ridiculous mutant sizes. The Longshan Temple in Taipei has an impressive waterfall and goldfish pond outside of its main gates. At said pond I always manage to locate a great black spotted one that has the distinguished body girth of a fish that seems to have spent a lifetime devouring its foe and offspring.

After a surreal stroll along goldfish mile, we headed towards Temple Street, which is probably the most touristy night market in Hong Kong and seemed like a perfect capper to the day/trip. We ate at an unassuming three-wok, open door restaurant with sidewalk seating and big bottles of beer for the offering.

Later after doing the market rounds we made are way back towards Central by way of the night ferry across Causeway Bay and stopped for a surprise outdoor glass elevator ride to the top of Hong Kong’s Hopewell Center building. This is one of those rare experiences that only a local would know about. The building is quite tall and offers a great view of the city lights at night by way of an unnerving outside glass elevator that hugs the building’s exterior wall. While one could exit the elevator and have a drink at the overpriced top floor bar, we opted to just go up for the ride and quick view.

My flight back to Taipei the following morning was easy and when I got home I had originally given myself a tight window of time to leave the airport and rush to work for my two o’clock class. Luckily while on the airport express bus back to Taipei my boss sent me a text message informing me that my first class would be canceled for the week on account of two of my students–Eileen and Angel–contracting oink-oink flu. With a couple hours of free time I went to my apartment, showered, unpacked, uploaded some photos and let the trip soak in some more.

My first foray outside of Taiwan made me anxious to see more, and then some.

This is a terribly exciting and lively part of the world. The clashing of modern the world with traditional sensibilities is everywhere you go, especially in China. Visiting Hong Kong’s Western suburbs gave me a glimpse into what Mainland China might be like (Shenzen continues to fascinate me) and I am already planning an elaborate overland travel route through the monolithic country that is hovering over Taiwan as I write this prose.

I hope to visit Hong Kong again, but if this were my last trip to the massive metropolis by the sea, I feel I did the it justice.

Hong Kong Part 1

2009-10-26T23:47:00.000-07:00

Weekend Getaway:

Hong Kong, Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China

Part 1

A Brief History–Seven Million Can’t Be Wrong–A Walk in the Hills–The Ongoing Book of Pork: Part 2–A Swim at Dusk–Makumba Africa Bar–Dim Sum, and then Some–Sunday in the Park with the Filipinos–A Hookah in a Whorehouse–Salsa: The Revenge

It was only a matter of time before I made the trip across the Taiwan Strait to Hong Kong. Since coming over I’ve have a constantly evolving checklist of places to see while I’m living in this part of the world and Hong Kong had always been the first on the list–a sort of training wheels for other adventures in the region.

For foreigners working illegally in Taiwan the city serves as a convenient destination for the daunting visa runs, weekend or single day getaways taken every thirty days solely for the purpose of leaving Taiwan and renewing the tourist visa. It’s a bizarre loop in Taiwan’s immigration system that seems to have been implemented for managing the amount of foreign laborers coming to the island to work. For teachers who aren’t fortunate enough to land visa through their individual schools, it’s a bit of a hassle, albeit one that allows for travel.

I travel to Hong Kong strictly out of leisure.

For the Taiwanese trips to Hong Kong are easy and the national frame of mind is that the city is less a tourist destination and more a convenient hub for shopping. This “shop to you drop” notoriety was originally a bit of a turn off but then I did my homework.

It’s safe to say Hong Kong is unlike any other place on the planet. It’s a huge, densely populated city packed into a series of small islands that, like Taiwan, is “China Lite.”

With the city center's population at roughly seven million (15 million if you include outlying suburbs and the city of Shenzhen, China) not to mention a flood of Westerners (primarily Brits) the city at times feels like a New York City of the Far East. Having not ventured to other East Asia metropolis’–Tokyo, Shanghai, Beijing, Seoul, and Osaka–this is merely my initial reaction. That Hong Kong’s Causeway Bay, a decadent part of the city that is one of the most expensive places to live in the world, is on par with say New York City’s Fifth Ave, only furthers this comparison.

The city is extremely diverse (something I’ve come to realize Taipei is not) with not only its European and American pockets but also large clusters of immigrants from India and Pakistan, the middle East, West and North Africa, and of course most corners of Asia proper.

Coming from Taipei where English is seldom heard other than amongst foreigners (or in my case at work) Hong Kong was also quite a shock when I discovered how easy it was to speak my native tongue.

As part of China’s Guangdong Province, Cantonese is the preferred language but the British rule has the left most of the city a linguistically pleasurable city. With the comforts of the English language at every corner and all the luxuries of Western culture at your disposal it’s easy to get lost in the city’s glamour and even easier to forget you are in China.

My gracious host in Hong Kong is one Stuart Wallace, my ex-housemate during my Salamanca, Spain stint, a fellow traveler and to readers of this travelogue, my first and only out-of-town guest in Taipei.

The best way to describe Stuart in Hong Kong is comfortable. He openly admits to being spoiled by the city he has resided in for over a year and a half now. His job is the kind of teaching gig most serious foreign teachers strive for–a well-established Japanese International School, tucked away in one of Hong Kong's wealthier districts that pays a generous salary, grants extended PAID vacations, and allows for all the perks of living in Central Hong Kong. His demeanor throughout my stay in Hong Kong was that of a jovial king surveying all that was at his disposal.

He shares a flat with his old college buddy who previously worked for the International Herald Tribune (sigh…) and now has a cushy publishing job. Hong Kong can be an expensive place to stay so I was fortunate to be welcomed into Stuart’s world for my four day sojourn.

Hong Kong is made up of a series of small islands, with Hong Kong Island serving as the central hub for all commerce, in many ways a miniature Manhattan. To the North is the Kowloon peninsula, which is a much more realistic look at Hong Kong’s Chinese influences with only subtle Western influences, primarily in regards to shopping. The northern regions bordering Shenzhen and Mainland China are referred to simply as the New Territories but are hardly as menacing as they sound. The New Territories are the result of what happens when you can no longer build UP in a densely populated urban center–it’s a sprawling suburb district of dotted high-rise utility housing complexes.

Shenzhen lies directly over the border with Mainland China proper and is also, in many ways, a suburb of Hong Kong, although its notoriety as the fastest growing city in China and one of the fastest growing cities in the world seems to proclaim that the young city is catching up with Hong Kong as a major East Asia port.

Shenzhen’s close proximity to Hong Kong (it’s on an extension of the city’s MTR metro train line) makes it entirely possible to live and work in Shenzhen and commute to H.K. for play. Shenzhen is also predominantly a Mandarin speaking city, despite its location in the Cantonese-speaking Guangdong Province, due in part to an influx of immigrants from other parts of Mainland China coming to the region for work. If I head back to Hong Kong (and after this trip I’m almost certain I will at least once more) Shenzhen will be toured.

Let’s get back to the trip.

The October 10^th weekend in Taiwan is a celebration of the island’s independence from China. For foreign teachers, it’s a free Saturday, which meant early on that some sort of trip was in place.

I left Taipei late on Friday after my classes, catching the Airport Express Bus, which is, I might add, anything but. At the bus stop I met a nice Dutch woman who was heading back to the Netherlands for three weeks to see family. She’s lived in Taiwan as a missionary for the past 20 years and what she had to tell me about her experiences was fascinating, filling the entire duration of the bus trip, and spilling over into the time spent walking to our individual departure gates.

She came to the island through a missionary training program that paid for intensive language lessons in return for volunteer work with the homeless, female prostitutes, drug addicts and other parts of Taipei’s underbelly, many of whom are kept well-hidden from the general public's knowledge.

I've noticed that there are certain parts of the city that have homeless problems and the old ladies who collect my trash and recycling on Saturday nights (a self-made form of social welfare–a couple kuai dollars for each bottle of Taiwan Beer, etc) seem to have been left behind in Taipei’s economic boom of the last couple decades. Still what I heard from this woman was shocking.

Taipei’s homeless men are exploited by the local crime syndicates through identify theft. They don’t have many options it seems but the ones they do come across only bring eventual doom. People will pay or offer drugs to these poor souls in exchange for their identity, which is then used to obtain marriage certificates for women from the mainland looking to cross the strait for a better life (one, mind you, that is often in the seedy human sex trafficking industry). Once on Taiwanese soil, the women split, leaving the men with the bulk of the blame if officials get involved.

Drug addicts I learn are rarely granted opportunities for kicking the habit and instead are locked away in over-crowded prisons with the keys seemingly thrown away.

The conversation was of course not all bleak in theme. We compared teaching stories, discussed Taiwanese food, which I’m starting to think is a terribly underrated world cuisine, just waiting to be discovered, and, like all fellow travelers, discussed our past and future adventures.

***

Before boarding the plane I picked up a thank you gift bottle of Green Label from the duty free shop. Scotch is surprisingly cheap over here, which I must say is a net positive for all parties involved.

The flight across the Taiwan Strait is just shy of 90-minutes, though you wouldn’t have guessed it on the luxurious China Airline 767 that flew me over. A meal was served as soon as the Seat Belt Sign went dormant, I had a wide selection of movies to view on my personal LCD television (though I was buried in a secondhand copy of Lonely Planet’s Hong Kong guide for most of the flight), and the plane’s leg room was just begging for me to stretch my shit out.

At 11 PM Hong Kong airport was bustling with business travelers from all over the world. An American suit spotted my passport and approached me in the immigration line. He told me of his past two weeks of business trips from Boston to Hong Kong by way of Zurich, Tokyo, Osaka, and now H.K. He noted that he did, however, fly Business Class the entire way, which he cited as reasonable at just under $7,000. I’m not sure if he saw the serious businessman in me hidden beneath my giant-ass hiking boots and traveler’s backpack but my indifference to his travel tale caught him off guard.

Hong Kong is best summed up as a city of commerce. Everywhere I went it seemed like some deal was being made and I seldom strolled down a street where I wasn’t offered heavily discounted designer suits, “copy watches,” and cocaine, which may or may not aid the fast-paced nature of this city. After all before Redbull energy tonic, there was blow to keep the markets rolling.

The airport express train, a futuristic modus operandi, which looked like the inside of the plane cabin I had just left behind, was packed with business travelers of all types with their neatly packed carry-on suitcases tucked away in a the train’s luggage compartment like perfectly erect black rolling monoliths.

Arriving late Friday night didn’t allow for more than a bit of catch-up conversation. We were both tired and Stuart had to put in a half-day shift at work the following morning.

Saturday

I rose early and left with Stuart towards one of many hiking trails that wrap around Hong Kong’s outlying hills. I’ve been a bit spoiled in Taiwan with its abundance of hiking opportunities but Hong Kong still managed to deliver.

The Wilson Trail is an impressive 78K trail that goes from Hong Kong Island and continues on into the New Territories. I started at around eight in the morning and had until 12:30 to explore. A co-worker of Stuart’s told me that Stage Two of the massive undertaking offered the best views of the city and the smaller islands. This particular day the trail was a bit congested with locals participating in a massive 78K thru hike sponsored by the Hong Kong chapter of Raleigh International, a British adventure travel and outreach organization.

There was an unfortunate haze settled over the city but the views were still superb. The city’s sea of tall edifices look almost artificial from the hills, like a city planner’s twisted dioramic vision of a perfectly efficient city by the sea.

Along the way I encountered some pleasant surprises–a dam lake, a quarry of sorts, and most notably a shrine of various porcelain effigies that sit by a clearing just waiting to be stumbled upon.

This particular leg of the trail descends down into a densely packed urban residential jungle, a more realistic look at the vast array of towering buildings I peered down at before.

The high-rise apartment complexes are truly remarkable in a looming and hideous fashion. They bring to mind the Soviet era concrete slab housing projects that are scattered all over Eastern Europe.

These homogeneous utility dwellings dare onlookers to conduct mental calculations of the number of windows to people ratio. The speckles of garments hanging on lines outside each window do however rescue these sights from being completely bleak by adding a human element to their otherwise sterile nature.

At the bottom of the trail I rehydrate in a small park while watching the local elders play Go. The rules and strategy of this game continue to elude me but the Chinese (and Taiwanese) can't seem to get enough of it.

At around 12:45 I rendezvous with Stuart at a landmark near his house and we head off for lunch, which, after the long walk, "must be," as I explained, "an orgy of meat."

Hong Kong is a foodies’ utopia with a steady diversity of cuisines, not just Chinese, and it seemed appropriate that the first proper meal be pork or duck related.

Siu mei restaurants are essentially hole in the wall establishments that specialize in glowing bbq meat products hanged window side from glorious hooks and skewers to beckon streetwalkers. Char Siu pork was described to me in an earlier email from Stuart as, “BBQ pork that will make your pants wet.” This is a prime example of Stuart’s twisted way of embracing food that instantly brought back memories of our culinary adventures in Spain, particularly with the drip off the bone goodness of Serrano ham.

No comment.

Stuart ordered for us his usual, two heaping servings of char siu bbq pork (the soy and color red glazed slabs hanging bottom left) and siu mei, which is a fatty cut of cured roasted pork that looks like bacon (pictured bottom right). The meat is served over unassuming white rice, drowned in a sweet soy sauce blend with a handful of delicious sauteed Chinese greens for roughage and color variety. A rather odd complimentary soup is served but only a fool would waste stomach space on such an undertaking when the challenge of way-too-much-meat lays before you.

A wise nuclear family man once said, "You don't make friends with salad."

Zen and the art of pork

We stuffed ourselves and were content upon leaving to the point that both of us could’ve used a good old-fashioned siesta. Still we decided to go back to apartment to change and then head back out to explore the Stanley district and its Repulse Bay.

Repulse Bay

Stanley is a charming albeit Westernized boardwalk getaway that is a simple double-decker tram ride away from Central Hong Kong island. There are tourist shops, over-priced lemonade stands and plenty of English style pubs with outdoor seating overlooking the picturesque bay.

We walked the area and ended up finding a place for a beer before hitting the beach for some casual Frisbee and a sunset swim.

The leisurely swim out to a stationary floating raft (which instantly brought to memory Northern Michigan lakes) with the city lights of the hills around us and a series of small islands lit from the descending sun brought on that daily feeling of pure bliss when I need to blink to realize that I’m really here in this part of the world.

Later that night we grabbed a quick sandwich at a Doner Kebab joint near Stuart’s house (despite the fact that neither of us were hungry it was agreed that it was necessary to prepare our stomachs for the tortuous libations that we were undoubtedly going to indulge in later on in the evening).

Our first stop on the booze train was Hong Kong’s legendary Lan Kwai Fong street, which is an overwhelming and fairly obnoxious Central nightlife drag that is unlike anything you would find in the States. The street, which is built surprisingly on a rather steep hill, is a cluster of open-door bars that issue loud club music and even louder inebriated foreigners. The closest thing I can compare it to is a similar drag in Lisbon in which nobody actual drinks in the bars but rather congregate in the street forming one massive amalgamation of belligerence.

We walked the area twice soaking it all in. Later we popped in a tourist trap Russian restaurant for a taste of vodka in its refrigerated ice bar. The bar is decorated with, well ice and its female patrons are greeted with the option of wearing lavish fur coats, you know, just like the Siberians. I hear the desert oasis city of Dubai has an ice bar, which is equally if not more ridiculous, and is truly a piss in the face to environmentalists all over the world.

A ten-minute walk away from the lights and noise of Lan Kwai Fong brought us to Makumba Africa Bar where we met up with a number of Stuart’s Japanese co-workers. The girls were sipping exotic cocktails and a live afro-funk group was just warming up. This was my kind of place and something I probably wouldn’t be able to find in Taipei.

The night was capped on a ritzy rooftop club overlooking the impressive night skyline and the towering IFC Building, which was where that latest Batman film staged a remarkable paragliding stunt. While the club itself was hopping none of else felt any urge to leave the amazing view before us.

Sunday

Completely spent from Saturday’s FULL day we took it easy on Sunday. We had a nice dim sum brunch with the Japanese friends from the night before and walked around the Causeway Bay area.

Too tired/hung over to notice, Stuart and I somehow managed to wear similar shirts to Dim Sum at H.K City Hall

There is a large population of Filipinos working in Hong Kong, primarily as housekeepers and nannies for the city’s middle and upper class. Sunday in Hong Kong is Filipino day.

Diasporas have always interested me in my travels. Certain places seem to attract particular ethnic and cultural groups and when you find their tightly knit communities it's always intriguing. Moroccans have flooded parts of the Netherlands in recent years, Portugal has a surprisingly large Eastern European population, primarily from Ukraine, and sweet home Chicago at one point was rumored to have had more Poles than the city of Warsaw.

In most cities you find these groups congregated in their own neighborhoods but in Hong Kong most of the Filipino women are live-in helpers for families, therefore the city’s public corridors become their meeting areas, and every Sunday they gather, like clockwork.

Sunday is their citywide day-off and the majority of them spend the entire day picnicking with friends on blankets or makeshift hoboesque camps outside of MTR stations, covered underground walkways, and around Hong Kong City Hall and various other building vicinities. From morning to night they socialize, often over the sounds of small radios. They play cards, share food, both homemade and bought, and seem to ignore the rest of the world around them. It’s their day and they know exactly how they want to spend their free time.

Filipino Sundays

It’s a fascinating sight to see and I actually felt like an intruder with my camera out, hence this sole snapshot. We have a fairly large Filipino population here in Taipei, many working as kitchen line-cooks in restaurants. I have yet to find their common ground, if it even exists. In Hong Kong its damn near impossible not to stumble across these charming gatherings. At one point I asked Stuart why they chose these mundane concrete settings–underground walkways seemed to be the most populous of all the ones we encountered–over say, a nice city park. His responded with the intriguing, “oh the parks, those are the Indonesian’s turf.”

***

Sunday afternoon we somehow made are way to a hookah bar that Stuart had been to once prior to this excursion. Unlike most casual hookah/tea cafes that you find in most cities this particular setting was a seedy night club of sorts that seemed to be just cleaning up from the previous night's escapades at four in the afternoon.

Over an apple flavored shisha we reminisced about the nargile café we frequented in Salamanca, switching between English and Spanish the entire time to let the nostalgia truly sit in. It didn’t take us long to figure out that the bar itself had another agenda especially after an eager Indonesian girl in a skimpy outfit approached Stuart while I was in the bathroom. The Turkish men who may or may not have owned the place seemed to have a number of these wide-eyed girls hanging around. Later after an hour or so we realized we were the only ones left lingering in the establishment and the upstairs office room overlooking the bar had a heavily fogged window.

That night we dined on Malaysian curry and made are way to a Salsa bar, where Stuart and one of the girls from work take lessons every Sunday night. While I wish I could put “Salsa dancing skills” on my resume, I simply can’t. I’ve tried at various stages in my life and it’s safe to say these hips DO lie. Normally I blame my awkward dancing skills on the fact that I tower over most dancing partners but a 6’4” gentleman who must have been well into his twilight years terminated this plausible excuse after he repeatedly humbled everyone in the bar with his masterful moves on the dance floor. Later, after I had spent a good 20 minutes trying to get a simple twirl step down, he had the audacity to ask me if I was having fun, while we occupied partnered urinals. The bastard.

Up next, tales form Monday and Tuesday.

A Trip to the New Territories, Spanish lessons, Indian food at the Chungking Mansion, Warner sits like Buddha, and an examination of Hong Kong's market scene.

A glimpse at the amazing Tai-Po indoor market

An amendment to a previous post on sexism in the workplace

2009-09-27T06:21:00.000-07:00

A follow up to a small post regarding minor forms of sexism in the workplace, RE: the referencing of demographics such as "Dumb Blondes" in early age English language text books.

Though not as scathing as said blonde bombshell, The Step Ahead Unit Five book is fairly unforgiving towards the waist-belt challenged baseball players featured above. The texts used at my school, many of which were written by Canadians, offer curious (and often outdated) outlooks of America, not to mention the country and people of Mexico, which my students are taught is a wild place that most recently introduced the world to H1N1. One of my other storybooks features a character study of a young American named Chris Jacobson who comes from Connecticut, has recently received a brand new SUV, goes home after school to play rather than study and lives in a house that rivals the presidential estate here in Taipei. Now I’m not saying that America doesn’t have its indulgences but that this particular book chooses to show America from the view of the tiny state of Connecticut, which many refer to as a large suburb of New York City, is a bit misleading to these gullible young souls who already think that American food revolves around three ingredients: meat, ketchup, and bun.

It could be the writers of our material are simply having fun with their power over these young minds. Still I am constantly encountering examples of America getting a bad name. There will be more to come I’m sure.

A Day in the Life

2009-09-25T21:30:00.000-07:00

A Day in the Life of a Foreigner in Taipei

The High Fiber Cockroach Diet – Horoscopic Hounds - The Boss – Speaking Chinese – “Can You Fly A Kite? / Yes, I can. Yes, I can. Yes, I Can” – Pho – Life’s Big Question

Ever since truly settling in, my life has suddenly become a lot more of a routine than I had originally anticipated. My days aren’t monotonous but they do tend to blur together with weeks and months flying by. Part of this sudden change was due to my decision to sign up for an intensive Beginner’s Mandarin course Monday-Friday, from 9:30 in the morning to noon.

Working the standard six-day teaching week doesn’t help and I’ve found it more difficult to get away on weekend adventures. Still I’ve been able to soak in all that Taipei has to offer and more these last couple months, and there is more than enough to see in the island’s Northern corners.

I attended various screenings at the 11^th annual Taipei International Film Festival, have attended two separate music festivals, and I recently discovered I enjoy traversing up climbing walls like a 6’5” spider-man thanks to a trip to a local indoor sports center.

The Carsick Cars, a punk group from Beijing that is a happy blend of the

Velvet Underground, The Strokes, and the guitar range of Sonic Youth.

When I’m not exploring the city or making a fool of myself in front of a room of Taiwanese Karaoke enthusiasts, my life is very much a daily grind, with the occasional surprise adventure. The following is a day in the life of Teacher Warner, written in the key of Sgt. Pepper.

7:15am-Woke up, got out of bed, dragged a comb across my head. Found my way into the kitchen to get a glass of juice. Surprise the morning cockroaches as they enjoy their high-fiber feast of my housemate's bottom-of-the-sink oatmeal remains, then head for the shower.

7:25A.M. - Showering is a bit of a challenge when the showerhead sits (or rather, hangs) just above the nipple. It’s hot in Taipei so cold showers generally do the trick. If I’m feeling up to it I’ll sing a little jingle while I crouch around the low-pressure showerhead. The Lovin’s Spoonful’s “Summer in the City” is fun, and timely. (SIDE NOTE: Since I started writing this piece we remedied the Hobbit shower nozzle, now enabling the cold water to flow down from the heavens, rather than at crouching height.)

9:00A.M. -After goofing around on the computer, checking nytimes.com, looking over my Chinese workbook, and going through some listening pronunciation exercises, I head towards class, which is about an ten minute walk from my apartment.

9:02A.M. -You can often tell how your day is going to be depending on the mood of the dogs that hang around outside my apartment door. If they move out of fear (or respect, I suppose) when my building’s metal door opens, confidence will be high for the rest of the day. If the dogs growl and stare me down like a tall and lanky Milk Bone, then who knows where the day will take me.

From left to right: Vincent, his brother Jules, and Horace

9:10 A.M. If I’m feeling hungry I may stop along the way at one of the 30 or so different breakfast sandwich shops that I encounter on my route to school. These tasty little egg/meat/cucumber sandwiches are extremely cheap and are more than ample to hold you over till lunch. They seem to be the breakfast staple in Taiwan and are on every corner. Many of the proprietors seem to only tap into the breakfast market, which makes you wonder if there’s good money in fried-egg sandwiches or if these people have other jobs on the side.

Along the way I generally listen to my iPod since I have long discovered that the most mundane parts of life, i.e. walking to class, can become amusing when set to the right soundtrack. For my ‘songs in the key of Taipei’ I often mix it up. Frantic or tired mornings often call for something more drastic. Lately, in mourning of a canceled Nine Inch Nails concert that was supposed to make my day last month, I will start my fast-paced mornings off with something like, NIN’s “Mr. Self Destruct” or Pantera’s “Domination” (yes, Paul, I still dig “Domination”).

More relaxed mornings will call for something lighter. Amadou & Mariam’s new album has been a favorite, as has St. Vincent’s “Actor” and Animal Collective’s “Merriweather Post Pavilion,” which is still hands down the best album of 2009 thus far.

Sometimes shuffle mode is needed, which often brings on pleasant sonic surprises. One recent sunny morning I got to sashay down the street to the 0ne-two punch of Bruce Springsteen doing the wild and innocent “E-Street Shuffle,” and The Traveling Wilburys “Margarita.” Both are curious diegetic samples that shed an interesting light on watching the Taiwanese begin their daily routines. Case in point, the Boss line, “Well the kids down there are either dancing or hooked up in a scuffle / Dressed in snakeskin suits packed with Detroit muscle,” paired with the image of an old laoban (shop owner) crouched in gutter washing a soup pot with a makeshift hose while her husband slaves over a scorching hot wok that issues a heavenly aroma.

9:30A.M. The first hour of my Chinese class at the Taipei Language Institute is generally spent going through new material, primarily vocabulary building. Lai Laoshi (laoshi meaning teacher) is very nice and helpful but she will not let you slide on your pronunciation, especially when it comes to mastering the tones.

My class started with seven and has now dropped down to three. There was my pregnant Japanese classmate Yuki, who must have delivered by now though nobody really knows. Riette is from South Africa, Michael is from San Francisco and for the first two months we had an extremely young albeit ambitious high school kid, Drew, from Oklahoma who was in Taipei for a couple months learning Chinese and exploring. He is pictured below with a hat that he so generously gifted me when I told him of my admiration for its message and my desire to pay him for it. I own one baseball cap that I’ve had since Junior year in High School. It has a kangaroo on it. It’s blue. I can now wear this hat with pride.

Calf to Carcass. Brilliant.

10:30A.M. We’re on our second teacher for hour-two. The first one disappeared randomly without telling anyone. The school gave us the excuse that she moved on to a different job, but I believe witchcraft was at play.

Our new teacher tries to only speak to us in Chinese, which is challenging but ultimately very effective in terms of soaking up all the sentence patterns. I like having fun with the teachers and am always trying to conjure up new ridiculous sentence that make use of whatever vocab words or new grammatical structures we’re learning.

Case in point, my recent smartass Chinese sentence offering: “During the morning I ride to school by horse.” It should be noted that my third teacher Li-Li Laoshi’s (listed below) response to this silly sentence was, “Impossible! It is too expensive,” ignoring the obvious fact that riding a horse in the middle of Taipei is fairly ridiculous. The Chinese language is like this. “Impossible” isn’t as simple a word as you might think.

11:30A.M. Li-Li Laoshi is my favorite of the three. She’s older but wise in her age. She’s been teaching forever and seems to have the respect of all the students and teachers at T.L.I. She’s tough but fun, thorough in her lessons, but easy going at the same time. Eventually I hope to take some one-on-one classes at the school to either supplement or replace my current group class. If I do, Li-Li Laoshi will be high on my list.

12:20P.M. Lunch has also become a fairly routine part of the day since I’ve found a number of different haunts in my neighborhood that can feed me quickly and on the cheap.

My noodle lady knows by now that I’m the “hen la,” or very spicy, foreigner. I have a lunch box place that serves an incredible Japanese eggplant dish, paired nicely with grilled tofu and a fried egg. Paigufan, or pork cutlet over rice, seems to be the national lunch dish and is everywhere. Tasty but like most things you can only eat so much of it. If I’m not too hungry there is the steamed bun lady that makes a mean steamed pork bun (zhurou bao). She knows me as the tall one who smiles and always practices new Chinese phrases with her while dishing out the hot sauce.

1:00-3:00P.M. There was a time when I had a solid two-hours of break time between Mandarin classes and work. Those days are over ever since my boss added a new four-day a week class to my roster. Before I could use the time to add to this blog, study some of what I just learned, explore some of the city or venture out on a hunt for future lunch destinations. Now I generally race home with a quick bite, check my email, change into my teaching garments (basically blue jeans and a tee shirt/polo) and head to my school for a 2P.M. class.

This is my schedule Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. Those days tend to fuse together into a giant amalgamation of Chinese vocab words and sentence patterns and various English language songs, like “Yes, I Can,” the elusive “What Kind of Meat Do You Want?” and little memory joggers like, “He/She/It—SSSS.”

Tuesday is my “easy” day. Mandarin classes are the same as always but I only have one English class to teach (my young girls who you might remember from the aforementioned Goodbye Song video). This gives me two and half hours of down time between class and work, the perfect amount of time for a nice lunch and possibly a haircut, which is an experience worth blogging another time.

On Tuesday’s I finish at around 6:15, which allows for me the luxury of a night free to explore more of Taipei’s various eating neighborhoods and night markets. The hunt for fresh sashimi is my current priority for Tuesdays and sure enough there are a number of places that deliver, often for a fraction of what you would pay in the states.

2:00-8:30P.M. For the other four days of the workweek (not counting Saturday, which is also part of MY work week) I am at work. With the addition of my new class I am now up to 30 teaching hours a week, which is a lot, if you take into account that each of the two hour classes require at least 30 minutes of prep time and transportation time to boot. Still, I am really enjoying the job. My students are all, for the most part, very respectful and willing to learn, even if they need the occasional incentive or dose of humor to get them to wake from their zombie state.

This is pretty self-explanatory

8:30P.M. -1A.M. If I don’t eat at work (delivery dinner boxes are often the cheapest and most convenient way to go) I grab some late night eats on my way home. The Shilin night market, which was the setting for my first escapades into Taiwanese cuisine, is now just another night market, albeit one that is always far too crowded for its own good.

My most treasured discovery is a decent Vietnamese Pho restaurant that dishes out a cheap and plentiful steaming bowl of goodness, often the perfect cap for a long day.

Ahh pho. Comfort in a bowl. I lived off this and chicken curry during my Le Colonial days

My time spent in the evening is entirely based on my demeanor. If I’m feeling motivated I’ll get some Chinese work done. If I’m lazy I’ll put on an episode of Mad Men or get some reading time in. Weeknight bars are always a possibility and there are some decent joints to get a beer or whiskey. Roxy Rocker is the love child of many of my inner music dork fantasies, a music junkie's cantina with a proper beer selection, lounge setting, great rock music and a separate, soundproof record room with a private DJ and a wall filled with LPs ranging from Abba to Zappa. On one night the DJs played a string of 90s alternative classics followed by The Pixies “Mr. Grieves,” Zeppelin’s “In the Light” and The Clash’s “Career Opportunities.”

The Blue Note is the best jazz bar I’ve discovered here in Taipei, an unassuming and fairly low-key lounge with live music almost every night and a library of music DVDs and jazz staple LPs to fill in the gaps. On my first night there I knew I was somewhere special when the bar’s owner put on a live concert DVD of Paul Simon performing Graceland in Lesotho after the all-female piano trio wrapped. Sipping my drink and watching the mouths of all around me singing along to “Boy in the Bubble,” “Crazy Love, Vol. II” and “I Know What I Know” gave the inner music junkie in me a fix of pure.

At least once a day, be it while I’m riding the MRT, walking to work/class, eating in a hole in the wall food stand–wok up front, condiments tableside, and friendly owners–or merely laying in my bed with the headphones waiting to sleep, I’ll have the ubiquitous, “damn, I can’t believe I’m here” moment. My decision to come here still seems random to most people I know (even to me at times) but it’s this spontaneity that makes this experience thus far so rewarding. Even in the daily grind of life as a teacher there are still those memorable moments of adventure and surprise.

These aforementioned “What am I doing here?” moments are quickly erased when I think of all I’ve seen and done so far. When I look back at all that has happened and then imagine the possibilities ahead of me, these nourishing reality checks are followed by a large grin.

Random Experiences

2009-08-30T02:25:00.000-07:00

Random Experiences:

The Marriage of Music and Meat or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Swine

It’s amazing how the most random experiences in life are often the most memorable. For a 25-year-old American I like to think that I am fairly well traveled. I’ve seen the Roman Coliseum, stood in the shadow of Picasso’s looming “Guernica” in Madrid, smelled the air that flows through the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, and sat on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in D.C., to name a few “must witness” essentials. Still for every monument visited, cathedral climbed, painting seen there are countless captured moments of everyday life.

For as long as I live I’ll never forget driving in a cramped Euro hatchback with four other tall Americans as we headed from Northern Spain to its Southern tip. We survived numerous close-call lane-changes, saw the back roads of Iberia and learned a thing or two about driving in Europe. I still remember approaching Cadiz, driving on fumes and listening to Muse’s appropriately chose song, “Time is Running Out” as we desperately tried to find a filling station.

There was the final night in Warsaw where my friend Paul and I sat outside our youth hostel with the three Polish hostel workers, a guy from Bangladesh, a Frenchman, a brash Texan, and an Aussie card shark, sharing travel stories, drinking Żubrówka and apple juice and eventually singing favorite songs from our individual countries of origin (in their native tongues), eventually culminating in a multi-lingual rendition of “Hakuna Matata” from The Lion King.

I remember being taken off the tourist grid of Rome by the proprietor of the dirty hostel I was staying at to a “mob run” neighborhood and ultimately drinking Peroni with a bunch of hash smokers in the streets, fearless of any police interference due to the confidence of the mob’s rule over the turf.

There was the hostel from hell in Dublin and the Indian family searching for their “lost” son at 4AM in our cramped 16-bed dorm room. “Wheeerrre is my soooon?!??!!”

I can distinctly remember The Proclaimer’s “Sunshine on Leith” being played not once, but twice at a pub after a local football match in Edinburgh and how I remember seeing everyone around me, old and young, singing every lyric and raising their pints into the air, pride for their Scottish heritage and their hometown band’s unofficial city anthem. I also remember the chills that ran down my spine after the occasion had finally soaked in.

Life in Taiwan is full of similar moments impossible to find in a guidebook, real life experiences that are instantly burned into the eternal psyche. Two weekends ago was no exception.

In a previous entry I mentioned a bar called Maybe that I discovered. Summed up for those who know me: this is my kind of place. While not as good as Definitely, Maybe is ten times the bar that Certainly is and for my money it serves a meaner gin and tonic than Perhaps, its rival to the South (I’ve clearly been teaching too much English). The drinks all have promising names like the aforementioned, Baby Sleeps for Three Days, and the proprietor and head DJ, Bruce, is the kind of music fanatic that I could happily spend hours talking to, the kind of fanatic who single handedly spent hours loading the lyrics to every song in his massive iTunes library, thus creating Taipei’s most refined karaoke jukebox. Bruce and I hit it off right away and I now have the luxury of skipping the queue of songs waiting to be played. If I have the sudden urge to belt out Bowie’s “Diamond Dogs” or Petty’s “Straight Into Darkness,” Bruce is there to deliver.

Two weekends ago my buddy and Mandarin school classmate, Michael, invited me to a birthday party at Maybe for his girlfriend’s friend. The invitation basically read: stop by for a BBQ on the roof and some good music. Sure.

BBQ could technically mean anything in this part of the world and to be fair I didn’t plan on eating. When my eyes fixated on what the gang was up to on the roof all bets were off.

Anthony Bourdain, that oh so fortunate foodie and traveler, has often commented that the pig is a magical animal. Even if you look at its contribution of bacon to the world, a global net positive ingredient that might just be the only portion of flesh food that would make vegetarians exclaim, “just when I thought I was out, it pulled me back in.”

Pork, as you might assume, is very big in Taiwan and Mainland China. Like most things eaten regularly or out of habit, pork here can get a bit tired. When a 100LB sacred being is skewered and slowly roasted over an open fire to the delight of a handful of drooling Taiwanese and foreigners, pork (or zhurou) takes on an entirely new face.

I’ll set the stage for you. I enter Maybe, pay my respects to Bruce in the DJ booth and notice a heaping pile of shredded white meat sitting next to his computer control console. Hmm, bit curious but then again it is his bar.

I grab a bottle of Taiwan Beer, find my friends and am eventually led upstairs. A whiff of heavenly smoke has filled the upstairs private party area and it’s the kind of aroma that could make heads spin. I step out onto the porch and see what is at one second grotesque and then suddenly beautiful.

(I’m doubting that any of my vegetarian friends have continued this far but in case you have I am not responsible for any toilet hugging the following prose might instigate. Animal cooked over fire is a primitive thing of beauty and is, if you believe what Michael Pollan, the author of “Omnivore’s Dilemma” has to say, the spark (literally) that started the rise of civilization and the birth of the food culture as we know it.)

Back home I probably wouldn’t know how to go about acquiring a whole pig (though my Bucktown apartment was down the street from a sketchy live chicken shop/coop, which may or may not have doubled as a crack den) but here I’m pretty sure I could get a pig by cocktail hour.

My friends had brought some local Taiwanese (of aboriginal descent) from down South to serve as roast masters. With them they brought a monster of a porker, at least 100lb, maybe more. As I approach the pit master, a burly, sweat soaked man who clearly knows his way around a rotating hog, I tell him (in Chinglish) that this is a without a doubt a thing of beauty. While others are ooing or saying icky, I’m quickly establishing camaraderie with the folks behind the spinning impaled Babe with hopes of some future under the table samples of the best parts. Some skin crackle, a colossal rib, or a piece of loin perhaps. It’s amazing how quickly one can morph from a sophisticated young man who minutes before was discussing the relevance of the modern day David Byrne with a DJ to a full-blown drooling wild dog, focused solely on the possibility of a handout.

The handouts were heavenly. The tender bits were moist without being overly fatty. The pieces cut closer to skin were crispy with just the perfect level of melt-in-your-mouth fat. Then there was the rib, a generous offering that I was privileged enough to receive–you see most others were busy coaxing poor Bruce to spin another Bon Jovi tune.

Ribs back home come in many intriguing incarnations, BBQ being the true “cultural” food of America. I often try to explain to the locals that Americans don’t just eat hot dogs and hamburgers, that, in fact, there is a national culinary movement that we call our own, one that incorporates whole hogs, beef brisket, and countless variations of the same sauce. The rib that was snapped off this particular hog was a taste experience in itself. For starters it hadn’t been rubbed down with any “mama’s special blend” or slathered with a sticky sweet sauce. It was meat, plain and simple, and it was to die for.

The rib was easily as long as a mid-sized-ferret and was covered with perfectly cooked meat–fall off the bone tender with just the perfect amount bite and pull required, the best of both worlds.

By now I assume you, the readers, are either sitting at work with a grumbling stomach and a preamble to the meat sweats or rethinking your relationship with the writer of this carnivorous homage.

H1N1 (formerly swine or oink-oink flu) is no joke over here. There is a national furor going on in this part of the world towards this rapidly spreading illness, however, the swine part of this flu has been completely overlooked (and to be fair, pigs and the country of Mexico got a particularly bad rep during the flu’s initial rise). Pork is a staple part of the Taiwanese diet. Even something as simple as rice or stir fried greens may just have a surprise piece of pork fat thrown in for a trip to flavor country. This is a pleasant part of eating in Taiwan but one aspect that must make being a vegetarian in this country about as easy as asking for a glass of Grüner Veltliner at Milwaukee Brewers game.

In conclusion, the pig roast and the late night festivities that followed will undoubtedly go down as one of my fondest memories of life in Taiwan. Even if this experience were replicated somewhere down the line–and the meat + bonfire possibilities are endless, especially when one of your housemates is from New Zealand–it won’t have the same lasting impact that this evening had on me.

Seeing the flames tickling the burnt red carcass and tasting the results gave me a newfound appreciation for the consumption of animal. There is something very personal about witnessing the time and labor that goes into such an event and observing just how many souls can walk away from the experience content and with full bellies. The experience has also made me rethink the various times over the years I used to poke fun at my Greek friend, Ellen’s many family lamb roasts, which always sounded brutal and unnecessary, but now seem to be the best way to do things. Ellen, if you’re reading, I take back all my smartass gyros spit comments and sacrificial backyard lamb jokes. You can count me in your next Greek lamb orgy!

Until the next psyche-burned experience, this is your faithful rotating meat enthusiast who never quite makes the cut when it comes to candid photography, signing off.

R.I.P. John Hughes

2009-08-06T23:45:00.000-07:00

Sad news from Stateside. John Hughes, the once legendary filmmaker of 1980s teenage angst comedies, is dead. Damn. Just look at this lineup up of classics that he either wrote, directed or both: National Lampoon's Vacation; Ferris Bueller's Day Off; The Breakfast Club; Uncle Buck; Home Alone; Sixteen Candles; Pretty in Pink; and the great, great Holiday Travel comedy Planes, Trains and Automobiles. If you come from the Northshore suburbs of Chicago he is also a bit of a local legend, having filmed many of his greats in our backyard. This youtube fan montage pretty much sums it up.

Stray Observations #2

2009-08-06T20:21:00.000-07:00

Stray Observations From An Amused Foreigner #2

Coming to a foreign place ensures a certain level of culture shock. While I embrace the hundreds of new sights and sounds I come across on a daily basis here in Taipei, I feel it my duty to share some of the more out-there cultural differences.
On the Weather

--As I'm writing this entry my housemates and I are anxiously awaiting the arrival of Morakot, as in Typhoon Morakot. I've always been curious how countries go about naming hurricanes or typhoons. Hurricane Andrew? Katrina? Why not Bob or Steve?

--For the record the summer months constitute as “Typhoon Season” here in Taiwan. Rainy days are plentiful and rather spontaneous. There will be days where I will walk to Chinese class under clear skies and scorching sun. By my third hour of classes menacing clouds and torrential downpour change what was once a pleasant morning into an unpleasant navigation home by way of awning hopping.

--Typhoon days are like snow days, only with the advance notice of a day-off from work, which allows for the planning and execution of various Typhoon Parties–gatherings where foreigners and Taiwanese alike summon the Tropical Storm gods through pints, tequila shots, karaoke renditions of the Beastie Boys and, as I experienced last night, hodge-podge libations with names like Baby Sleeps for Three Days, an unforgiving concoction calling upon nine different hard liquors and Ecto-Cooler-Green beverage dye. It resulted in the inevitable: me and a British bloak singing David Bowie’s “Heroes” to a bar full of unimpressed Taiwanese.

--If you let go of an umbrella during rain and strong winds it will in fact fly far away leaving you satisfied with the success of your little experiment, but ultimately unpleasantly moist and bitter.

--Rain can hit at any moment, sometimes lasting for the remainder of the day, sometimes for ten minutes or so. This will be my first proper Typhoon experience and I’m hoping that unlike the fairly significant earthquake (a six on the Richter scale supposedly) that hit a month ago I will not sleep straight through its fury.

-When it rains, it really does pour.

--Text message received from my boss last night while at a “Typhoon Party” at a local bar: “Hi it’s me Vicky, don’t go outside, there is a typhoon coming, be careful!” ROUGH TRANSLATION: “By all means let your curiosity take you for a stroll down by the river.”

--Mudslides: The messy and truly tragic killer.

--Umbrellas are a lot more complex than you might think.

--Umbrellas may prevent cancer. The Taiwanese do not like the sun. I’ve been told that at the beaches the Taiwanese rarely take off their shirts (or long pants!) when swimming or sun bathing (or sun dodging, really) and umbrellas are utilized for blocking the poisonous rays throughout the day.

--U-U uh uh uh, an U-M-B-R-E-L-L-A, when repeated ten times, will teach Taiwanese students one of many sounds that comes from the twenty-first letter in the English alphabet.

On Racism

--While sometimes easy to pardon due to good old fashion ignorance, there is a level of harmless racism in parts of everyday life here in Taiwan. Be it a casual comment from a co-worker or a bigoted reference made in an English teaching textbook.

--Probably the most fascinating examples of this widely overlooked phenomenon here in this otherwise fairly accepting culture are two everyday consumer products: racist toothpaste and a line of stereotypical iced-coffee beverages.

--Darlie Toothpaste (which in some places is actually printed as Darkie Toothpaste) is Taiwan and Mainland China’s most trusted name in plaque fighting. The toothpaste tastes like your run of the mill paste or gel, with just a smidgen of racism hidden beneath its explosion of peppermint and fluoride. The company’s mascot could be mistaken for Al Jolson, circa The Jazz Singer. The minstrel caricature totes a top hat, bowtie and shit-eating grin.

--Mr. Coffee has a nice little hold on the sweetened-iced-coffee market with its line of mini-cans and bottles. Mr. Coffee himself (or Kafei xiansheng as I call him in Chinese) is a blatant stereotype of an Italian Mafioso gentleman. His perfectly tailored white suit, matching white fedora and oddly shaped upper facial structure are dead giveaways. There are actually only a few degrees of separation between this jovial Signor and the ill-fated Don Fannuci in The Godfather Part II. It should be noted that Mr. Coffee beverages are surprisingly tasty and their tiny snack size cans make them an inexpensive shot of caffeine while on the road. If you can look past the blatant cultural generalizations, sampling the various flavors offered is always a fun part of grocery shopping. SIDE NOTE: Mr. Coffee was involved in a bit of legal debacle back in 2008 after some of its products were tainted with melamine (the wonders of Wikipedia) during the Chinese milk scandal. Two Mr. Coffee executives were subsequently whacked, chopped and buried out in the sticks of Taipei County, which doesn’t help to shed the company’s troublesome stereotypical image.

Man, Youtube comes in handy.

On Sexism

--According to a rather sexist example sited in lesson three of The Step-Ahead Level Five workbook, "dumb blondes" are an actual demographic. (PHOTO OF THIS JAWDROPPING CASE OF UNFORTUNATE BRAINWASHING COMING SOON…)

On Karaoke: A Dissection of KTV

--KTV’s are literally giant hotel like buildings that house private rooms for groups of friends to get together and sing in front of a giant plasma TV. It’s Karaoke, but with style! I’ve been to the Party World KTV twice since coming to Taiwan and both experiences were memorable for the following reasons:

1) KTV’s music selection needs a reboot. Sure for Japanese or Taiwanese Pop, you have all your bases covered. When it comes to Western pop, the masterminds behind KTV’s song selection must be stuck in 1996. On both occasions I took part in the 1984 spooky anthem, “Ghostbusters,” I’ve contributed to a gripping rendition of Prince’s “Kiss” and “When Dove’s Cry” (sadly there wasn’t enough room for my tall ass to do the floor hump dance routine that made Prince squeal, “Baby, I’m a Star”), and lent my pipes TLC’s “Waterfalls,” with an added shout out to the departed, Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes that fell flat with the heartless bastards in my company. We miss you girl!

2) Most Karaoke music videos in this part of the world are makeshift films that generally have nothing to do with the songs that they accompany. Generally the videos are shot in parts of Western and Eastern Europe, cheap locales like Ukraine or Romania’s Carpathian Mountains. While a modern hip-hop video will sport the predictable amount of bling, babes and shiny cars, and many feature state of art special effects, a Karaoke video for say, something like Michael Jackson’s “Black Or White” (which I sang days before he departed to his Neverland space ranch on to the moon, I mean, after all, like Elvis, the King of Pop is still alive, right?) will feature a beautiful blonde Moldovan frolicking in the hills or enjoying a the sunshine in a European plaza. A pity since the original “Black or White” video made history back in the day.

3) The makers of KTV songs seem to enjoy the editing (or shall we just say, destruction) of perfectly good songs. Whole verses will be cut out or in some cases altered all together.

4) I discovered that when it comes to KTV it’s best for me to accept my limited Eeyore pipes and aim for more comical song choices such as the aforementioned Ray Parker Jr. ballad, “Ghostbusters Theme,” or say Toto’s mighty anthem, “Rosanna,” which I just happened to video for your enjoyment!

5) Local pop song music videos seem to share a bizarre fascination for food and the forlorn. On one evening three videos were either set in restaurants (one, featured below, set the stage in a fast food restaurant) or involved female singers eating their worries away while singing.

6) While supposedly hush, hush, you can bring your own booze to KTV, thus avoiding the inflated price of their otherwise dirt cheap Taiwan Beer. The caveat when partying with the Taiwanese is you must drink your local brew over ice and with a dried plum dropped into the cup to give the stale beer some sweetness. The Taiwanese truly are the sugar-eating people.

7) When shared, a bottle of cheap Taiwanese whiskey will go fast.

8) The Taiwanese fail to understand the David Lynch reference to the now eerie song “In Dreams” by Roy Orbison.

9) The KTV experience is best described as Lynchian.

On Taiwanese Television

--I don’t get very many opportunities to watch the boob tube here in Taipei, mainly because I’m too busy. On the rare occasion that I do sit down with the housemates there are only a few English language channels to choose from. National Geographic, Discovery, Travel, CNN are all favorite channel surfing stops. As are the four movie channels offered, including an East Asian version of HBO and Cinemax and two random movie channels, Hollywood and one simple called C Movie.

--Open letter to whoever chooses the films screened on the aforementioned Hollywood and Movie channels; I want your job. These two channels broadcast the most random selection of C-Grade films, mainly residing in the horror, action, sci-fi and the “man merged with beast” genres. Case in point is the low-budget 2005 film, Hammerhead (AKA Sharkman), which my housemates and I enjoyed one evening with jaws wide open to the film’s shear stupidity. The plot is a bit complex, you know with the character development and all, but it goes something like this: overly acted mad scientist creates a half-man/half-shark mutant, which then escapes and goes around eating low-paid actors, including females willing to strip and get eaten by a CGI sharkman, possibly as a means to pay off art school loans. Sharkman eventually confronts his maker, has an emotional “Do I eat my master?” moment. Then Sharkman eats his master before biting it in a lame lab explosion. Most of the gory kills that you look for with anticipation when watching films of this caliber are edited out or the channel’s programming bastards deliberately air the commercial break right before said scientist eats it by way of fatal sharkman bite.

--Taiwan: Where bad movies go to die.

--One could spend an entire hour just soaking up Taiwanese commercials.

--You could also spend an hour just soaking up what the Hakka Channel, made for a large group of aboriginal Taiwanese.

--There is a game show here in Taiwan, which, as far as I can tell, consists of young female celebrities eating weird food in front of live giggling studio audience members and a flamboyant host. I’ve found that it’s more fun when you don’t know what the hell they are saying.

--The Japanese have apparently made a lot of Samurai films. Few come even remotely close to anything Kurosawa contributed to the world.

--The Malaysia tourism board’s commercial for traveling in Malaysia, which features the tagline, “Malaysia, Truly Asia” makes me want to travel to Malaysia.

--According to the Internet Movie Database (IMDB.com) Hammerhead's tagline is: When he began fusing human and shark DNA, his colleagues laughed at him. Now his creation is taking his revenge, and they aren't laughing anymore.

Now this is how it's done! The 80s was a magical decade.

Day Trip to Jiofen & Jinguashi

2009-07-22T22:28:00.000-07:00

Day Trip to Jiufen & Jinguashi, Taiwan's Northeast Coast

The daily grind of life here in Taipei has definitely caught up to me. I picked up some extra hours at work, which has helped to fill my empty account at the Hua-Nan Bank of Taipei but has ultimately taken away from my precious free time. I am currently finishing up my second month of Chinese classes at the Taipei Language Institute. These lessons fill my mornings Monday through Friday from 9:30 to 12:30 and have greatly improved my abilities to blend in here. Fewer hand and body gestures are now needed for me to order a glass of juice or a bowl of soup and I feel more confident talking to random locals I meet on the street.

My busy schedule has also made it difficult to get some traveling in, which is one of the main draws for living here in Taiwan for the year. I work every Saturday from 9 in the morning to about 3 PM, which destroys the day and makes weekend getaways fairly difficult. These past couple weekends I was also primarily staying in Taipei to attend the recent Taipei International Film Festival. With most of the screenings on Saturday and Sunday, this too made getting away from life in the big city difficult.

This past Sunday I escaped to the North East part of the Island to the small village, Jioufen, and its sister city Jinguashi. Jiufen is one of those quaint little towns that draw lots of tourists for shopping, scenery, and local eats. The town itself was an old mining base back in the day and Jinguashi, a gold mining village further up in the mountains, also has a great deal of Japanese influence seen in its architecture.

Click the map for a bigger jpg (I hope). Jiufen & Jinguashi are at the top of the Island, Northeast of Taipei.

I left Taipei Main Station by local train to the town of Rueifang, which serves as a hub to both Jiufen and Jinguashi by bus. All three of these towns are technically part of Taipei County, which means public transportation is on the same card system as Taipei City’s MRT, a pleasant surprise that enable me to squander my coin kuai on various street snacks and tea.

It’s easy to forget that a mere twenty minutes outside of Taipei’s busy downtown there are lush green hills, mountain views and picturesque streams and rivers bisecting various suburbs. Further North and East you head towards the Pacific, and then things start to get truly breathtaking.

Sundays are understandably busy tourism days and Jiufen, which lies roughly an hour outside of Taipei, is a popular hotspot for locals and foreigners to escape to for the day. The train was crowded, though not as uncomfortable as my Dragon Boat Fest weekend, which, if you’ll recall, had yours truly crammed into a hot train car like livestock on the way to the slaughter.

Chicago had its cows, Jinguashi has its own version. Bulls on Parade!

My friend and I early on decided to save Jiufen for later in the afternoon to hopefully steer clear of the other hordes of tourists hitting the town for lunch and shopping excursions. We decided to ride the local bus from Rueifang past Jiufen to the far less popular but ultimately more rewarding Jinguashi, which, like Jiufen, was also an old gold mining town in the early 20^th century.

Jinguashi is probably best known for its access to the Gold Ecological Park, one of Taiwan’s many national parks. The Gold Ecological Park is noteworthy for its abandoned mine (fully accessible for tourists but a bit too juvenile for this intrepid traveler), and its sought after Golden Waterfall, which I learned was only accessible to by car, scooter, or three hour hike into the mountains.

35 ft tall war God perched high above a temple in Jinguashi

The town itself is nice but it’s the stunning coastal view of the Pacific that is worth the trip and the 45-minute hike down a mountainous path.

In 2002 the town of Jinguashi and its neighboring park was a possible candidate for inclusion to the oh so sacred UNESCO World Heritage Site master list, a trekker’s Holy Grail catalog that has been teasing travelers with the vast exploration opportunities around the globe since its inception.

The main tourists attractions–the old mine, the various colonial Japanese estates that are now museums and the Temple of Gold–are nice for a peek but the true wonders lay off the beaten path towards the sea. A long trail winds around the mountain side, goes through a beautiful old temple and 35ft-high War God shrine, and eventually ends at a scenic overlook at the Pacific and a small fishing port below.

After surveying all there was to see by foot in Jinguashi we headed back to Jiufen to eat and soak in the town. Between Jiufen and Jinguashi there are thousands of small traditional Chinese burial plots in the hills. These ornately decorated ceramic and stone shrines are the resting places for only the richest and most fortunate of deceased because of their quality and the feng shui of facing both the mountains and the sea. If you are somebody of great worth or fame you may very well be fortunate enough to spend the afterlife in these peaceful green hills.

Jiufen is a pleasant enough village built on a steep hill overlooking a misty bay of hills and one pyramid island. The town is famous for its tight, semi-indoor market that is a maze of vendors slinging salted dried meats and seafood, fish ball soup, dense and sugary pineapple cakes, gooey dumplings, various treats on a stick, all the chotchkies one could want. The town’s other major draws are the many teahouses that have sprung up over the years as the crowds started flocking in.

For those who know me well you will remember that I am a bit of a tea enthusiast back in the states. My dear friend with a knack for dry humor and sarcasm, Jake, once said I have nothing more than a love of “dirty water.” In Taipei I have discovered a number of low-key coffee/tea cafes around the local university that serve up delectable pots of various East Asian aromatic teas. Other than that, I have really only scratched the surface on what is available in this part of the world. My trip to Jiufen proved that artisan tea is way beyond my enthusiasm for green and oolong chá.

But before diving into my memorable experience at The City of the Sky Tea House let’s get through the obligatory offering of food porn.

Fish ball soup is exactly what it sounds like, unappetizing white balls of dough and protein that floats in a rich broth with vegetables and the occasional surprise mystery meatball thrown in for kicks. Since Jiufen is fairly famous this dish I felt obligated to try it out. For all the hype fish balls are about as boring as they sound. Perhaps I chose the wrong vendor but a general rule of thumb is go to where the locals are, and this particular hole in the wall was hopping.

Rice with savory minced meat is a common side dish in all of Taiwan. Best not to ask what's in the grind.

After eating sparingly at the fish ball soup stand, we made are way to another Taiwanese delicacy, Ba-Wan, translated to ‘Meat Circle,’ which are large, gelatinous meat filled dumplings served either in a thick sauce or accompanied with soup.
There were at least seven shops selling these curious culinary wonders, which look very much like the treacherous jellyfish that wash up on beaches around the world. Are particular stand looked decent enough from the outside so we gave it a shot. Later on as we were navigating through the gooey mess of bamboo shoots, mushroom and odd pieces of meat, we noticed that two Buddhist nuns sat down next to us and were also enjoying what we thought were pork filled dumplings but were in reality all vegetarian. Turns out of all the shops in Jiufen serving up Ba-Wan we ended up at the vegan stop. The pieces of red protein were either tofu or some oddly formed piece of gluten.

The red balls of protein do not come from any animal I am familiar with.

Our first hint that we were dining vegetarian.

The dish was actually very tasty and is something that I would like to try in different incarnations some time down the road.

My Lonely Planet guide lists a number of “famous” teahouses in Jiufen, all of which served pretty much similar forms of brew but differed in their interior atmospheres and their views of the sea. Walking down a narrow side street we stumbled upon The City of the Sky Tea House, a charming little three-story café fully furnished with folk art pieces, antique furnishings and a stunning view of the port. Like most of Jiufen the café was perched high on a cliff overlooking the Pacific and in the distance Jinguashi. After settling in on the balcony of the third floor we ordered a rather expensive bag of locally grown and aged Oolong tea.

One thing about Asia that I’ve learned is that even the simplest of things, like tea or as I’ve mentioned chicken, are ultimately a lot more complex than you might think.

This was hardly my first experience with artisan tea however, I was clearly unprepared for the proper (and traditional) preparation and serving of tea of this quality. Whereas most of the world casually throw some tea bags or loose leaves into a pot of boiling water or even the unromantic mug of H2O, the Chinese are very particular about the order and purity of the tea tasting experience.

The shop’s proprietor did not speak English so I had to rely on my limited vocabulary and my friend to interpret the woman’s directions.

First off, the tea set that our tea was served in was a piece of art in itself. We learned that the sets were custom made for the teahouse and were modern interpretations of traditional sets. Basically with tea of this caliber your water is boiled over coals on the floor in a large ceramic teapot. The tea itself will never go near this pot, which is nothing more than a utility vehicle for water at a constant boil.

Instead, the boiling water is slowly poured into one of the two larger white ceramic bowls seen below where it is left to cool to a perfect 85 degrees Celsius, the optimal temperature for steeping tea leaves.

After the water has rested a bit it is poured over the loose tea leaves that are resting on the top of the small teapot, the only piece on the table set that has a top. It is given a couple minutes to steep then is poured off into the second large white boil. From there it is poured into the two smaller drinking cups, which offer only two or three small sips per serving. It seems like a lot of work for nothing more than the aforementioned soiled water, however, there is something quite romantic and beautiful about this system. It’s nice to know that people have been drinking their tea in this manner for thousands of years and that the procedure is still practiced today.

Homemade Oolong tea cheesecake.

Every piece in the set had a purpose. The pot for the tea leaves was specially made to strain the loose tea leaves, the small cylinder on the left side of the tray was made to rest the teapot’s top, the small curved piece in the back (shown in photo above) was for scooping the dried tea leaves from the bag into the pot, and the small aromatic twig hiding in the back was for tidying up any wet tea leaf that stuck to the top of the pot. The large dark ceramic bowl was for the wasted water or cold tea. Only the purest form of the brew is supposed to be taken to the lips. If you let it get too cool or leave it steeping too long, it's best to just dump it and start over.

Our tea choice was very good. The local specialty was naturally sweet, with a hint of bitterness. It tasted different served in a small sipping cup, rather than a larger Western mug and overall the experience was very refreshing even on a hot day summer afternoon.

The tea that was served ended up lasting at least three hours and we ended up waiting for the sun to set before heading off into the maze of Jiufen again. Please break for a series of scenic photographs that really don’t do justice to just how stunning our view was during the precious twilight hours.

It started to rain right as we boarded the train back to Taipei City. Damn I’m good. Our train ride back was standing room only, which was a bit of a drag but we opted for the faster rail line so the time passed with ease.

I’m hoping to head down South to a famous waterfall in the town of Wulai during my next weekend excursion. I won’t be able to do any serious travel in the far Southern regions of the Island till I have an entire weekend to devote but there is plenty to do up in Northern and Central Taiwan till then.

Till next time, your devoted lover of filthy water and gooey meat circle enthusiast.

What would a day of photography be without the obligatory moment when I ruin a perfectly nice photo.

Jesus. Michael Jackson.

2009-07-16T22:47:00.000-07:00

I stumbled upon a Church of Nazarene on my way to work the other day. The dancing, the pink shirts, the electric drum set, it was almost too much to take in. The voice you hear is a recruiter trying to woo to an evening concert. Further down the street was an Episcopal Church.

Michael Jackson's passing disproved any theories that his popularity had diminished since his goblin transformation and various courtroom battles. I stumbled upon this tiny music vendor in the middle of a nigh market who has been playing this Jackson concert DVD in a loop since his death. I had some time to kill so I watched a version of "Black Or White" (clip from the nostalgic music video starring a young Macaulay Culkin precedes the actual performance), stayed on for the following performance of "Will You Be There" and eventually left during an over the top version of "Beat It" filmed in Bucharest, Romania of all places circa 1991-92.

I was not the only onlooker. Jackson's passing has been a much needed reminder to how big he was on a global scale.

Scenes from a Taiwanese Classroom Cont.

2009-07-06T23:46:00.000-07:00

More Scenes From A Taiwanese English Class

During break time we witness young Alex's high-pitched shriek, something we as a class experience on a daily basis. Also, the birth of the classroom cockroach scare (to be fair, cockroaches are all over Taipei). Keywords learned during this particular class: COCKROACH, TO HUG and verbs in the Present and Past Continuous Tense using "to be" and "have/has + been." Normally I wouldn't condone hitting Teacher Warner but I suppose I deserved this onslaught of fists, feet and a head-butt to the hip from Jimmy (yes, he's that short, or I'm just that tall). Notice again how the girls are busy doing homework. Amazing work ethic.

My Jumpstart class sits at the other end of my teaching spectrum. The class is made up of six girls ranging from age four to five. In all honesty they're too young to misbehave. The class requires a lot of memorization on their part, mainly consisting of key vocab words and sentence patterns, delivered via kid-friendly songs that tend to grind into your psyche long after class. At the end of each class period the students are required to line-up at the door and sing the terribly adorable "Goodbye Song." The players from left to right: Hana, Nina, Mina, Liane, Momo, and the energetic Jessica. Also featured is Teacher Angela, the Chinese Teacher for the class who is around to make sure all is well and to occasionally explain things in Chinese. If this little jingle doesn't bring a smile to you face, you might need to seek some help.

Scenes from a Taiwanese Classroom

2009-07-05T23:07:00.000-07:00

Anatomy of An Elementary Age English Class

Three days a week I teach my "Treehouse" level class, an intense and higher-priced class offered at my school. I will have these eight students for as long as I am teaching at the school or for however long the student's parents keep forking out the dough. It's amazing how much better the Treehouse program is compared to some of my other classes. All eight of these kids are learning English at an extremely fast rate and a handful of them will truly benefit from these lessons should they continue their English studies down the road.

I have a lot of fun with this class. I get to spend the most amount of time with them, which in the long run makes a difference in terms of my teaching plans. The class is smaller in size, which allows me to focus on individual student's strengths and weaknesses. To top it off we're allowed to have a good time via games and amusing activities since the students have a decent grasp at conversational English. The class can be difficult at times and certain students do enjoy making a ruckus during my lessons. Still, when it's all said and done, they're all a good group of kids, some more amusing than others.

But enough rambling, let's meet the players!

Bottom Row, Left to Right:

Jimmy: Let's see, what can I say about Jimmy. The kid is the only student who actually needs the most extra help in class, particularly with pronunciation and simple sentence patterns. Much of these issues can be blamed on his attention span, which is on par with that of a new puppy getting his first bath. Some days Jimmy is a delight in class. He'll participate in class exercises and reading, and if we're lucky he'll sit quietly and listen. On other days he's a tornado of loud Chinese rants, unnecessary games of hide and seek and the occasional high kick to the Teacher Warner's "tree" legs. Last week during the reading of the storybook, "A Bully on Baker Street" Jimmy, possibly in an act of inspiration from the story's antagonist, decided to tear his book to shreds and lunge at Alex who was sitting next to him. What's most striking about Jimmy is that when you are one on one with him he's a very calm, and rather delightful kid. The other day he came to the school earlier and offered me a piece of candy, while a Chinese teacher helped him with his homework. He would later throw a small rubber basketball at my head during a game of spelling Basketball after I corrected him on the spelling of "V A C U U M."

The Jimmy, The Alex, The Iris & The Joyce

Vicki: Don't let the pink shorts and occasional pigtail hairdo fool you. Vicki, a promising student with the hindrance of selfishness, can be trouble. For the most part she is a decent, middle of the road student. She loves participating in class and often volunteers to read aloud, but much of this is fueled by a level of greed. Hess Schools print their own hard currency, the Hess Cent, tiny little colorful squares with phrases like "Way to Go!" "You're #1" and "Superstar," which when stockpiled can be used to buy goodies like Hello Kitty paraphernalia or pencil erasers (and let me tell you, the Taiwanese love their pencil erasers). You see, Vicki has a brick of cents that she appears to have been hoarding away in her pencil case since she started at Hess three years ago. During one lesson when we were learning about the word "S T E A L" I made the mistake of using the sentence example, "Teacher Warner steals Vicki's cents," a risk taken for the sake of teaching. She was not amused and spent the remaining class time sulking in her corner. SIDE NOTE: By "her corner" I literally mean her corner. These kids are territorial little buggers. Any change in seating causes more political strife than is needed and for the most parts it's best to separate the boys from the girls since it turns out coodies is a global epidemic.

Freshly minted Hess Cents!

Melody: Melody is a delight to have in class. Not the strongest student in terms of reading and spelling but she always wears a big smile on her face during class and never ceases to participate during class exercises. When I recently mispronounced my Chinese name she was, however, the first student to point out that I had mistakenly introduced myself as Xi (Dead) Hua Na, a minor hiccup in the pronunciation of one tone, but one that cost me the respect of my class for the rest of the period.

Top Row: Left to Right

Alex: Arguably the most ambitious in the class, Alex, with his high-pitched voice and constant thirst for attention, if the official go-to guy for all sentence or word examples. Case in point: last week during a break Alex let loose an ear-piercing shriek after I jokingly said he was sitting near the (keyword of last unit) COCKROACHES. From then on certain students in class used this incident to spark all kinds of creative sentence examples. During our movie unit Melody created the movie title “Cockroaches Eat Alex” for a (keyword) HORROR movie. Later when we learned the word SCARED Joyce decided to say, “Alex is scared and he scream like girl.” After correcting her grammar I told her that wasn’t very nice. Later on this web of name calling eventually culminated with Lucas (more on him in a second) conjuring up the sentence, “Alex is a girl.” These students are amused by the most primitive of sentences. I only recently was able to weed them off the giggle inducing word, “poop,” as in Teacher Poop (previous unofficial nickname for yours truly). Despite some juvenile name-calling, Alex has a very good sense of humor and laughs along with everyone else. He is a very promising student whose only major flaw is a desire to be the first to finish all his work, resulting in sloppy mistakes on tests and reading exercises. I’m working on this with him. Less dancing and screaming in class, more attention paid to the fine details of English grammar.

Joyce: Joyce is another of the top students in the class, however, she has a bit of an issue with authority. She loathes the storybook reading exercises in class and very rarely volunteers to read aloud (I of course make her anyway). The tragedy of this is she’s extremely bright and her conversational skills are some of the best in the class. On the last major test she had a 100% on every section, even the admittedly difficult question and answer part, but bombed the storybook questions. I learned during the movie unit that her favorite movie is “Mr. and Mrs. Smith,” a curious departure from her peer’s collective agreement that “Wall-E” was the best film. Side note: Joyce will try to sneak drinks and food into class, a big no-no at Hess. Best to catch her in the act early before she, eh hum, spills a bottle of chocolate milk on Alex and his belongings sitting in front of her. I’ve also come to realize that she will not be wooed into participating in class with the usual incentive of Hess Cents. She does, however, have a vice for Mister Donut donuts.

Apple: Let’s forget the obvious fact that her name is Apple even though she could pass as a Rebecca. Apple is a well-behaved student who struggles in certain areas, mainly spelling and pronunciation, but has a high level of motivation to succeed in the class. During breaks she and Melody will often work on homework or future exercises together while the majority of the class act a fool in the hallway or think of clever ways to sabotage Teacher Warner. Apple does, however, have a bizarre and rather disgusting little tendency to cough on me anytime I am helping her. It’s Almost like she has an allergic tick for Teacher Warner. For example, ME: “Apple, THE STUDENTS “A R E” STUDYING FOR THE TEST, not THE STUDENTS “I S” STUDYING” Apple’s response as she stares up at me with her innocent eyes: “(enter the sound of a kitten working hard a coughing up a hairball)” One day my Chinese teaching aid, Eva, made Apple wear a surgical face mask during class after a fit of chirpy coughs disgusted poor Eva.

While some of the other students run amuck in the halls during break time,

Apple and Vicki work on their homework. I am always around to answer

questions but only the girls in the class ask.

Iris: Iris is not only the best student in class but also the most unassuming. She is terribly bright but never let’s on to her advantages over the rest of the lot. She is always willing to ask for help when its needed and likes to participate, often raising her hand before others even get a chance to compute the question just presented to them. I recently helped to edit her application essay for an English Language Immersion program in Canada for next summer. For her sake, I hope she finds the means to go and pursue the language.

Lucas: (red and orange shirt) Lucas is the classroom’s resident terrorist. Even in the photo above he seems to be disconnected from his peers, and is clearly plotting some elaborate scheme to thwart my lesson plan for the day. He’s intelligent and knows it. He enjoys undermining authority and has a troublesome influence over the classroom’s wild animal, Jimmy, The Joker to Lucas’ Gotham City crime syndicate. Lucas is as bright as Iris and is a wiz when it comes to spelling. I once jokingly pitted the entire class against Lucas in a speed spelling writing game and he surprisingly exceeded my expectations. For the most part we have an understanding in the classroom setting: he behaves himself and doesn’t distract the others during my lessons, and I ignore the fact that for much of the time (especially during reading) he is secretly drawing ninjas and gangsters in his book or adding to a maniacal list of phrases ranging from “TEACHER MARK SO UNFAIR” “TERRIBLE TEACHER TOM” and now, “TEACHER WATER IS MEAN,” scribbled with the same vigor and craziness that made The Shining’s “all work and no play” rant so terrifying. Lucas got a 99% on the last test and I congratulated him and told him that he was doing very well in the class but that he should behave himself. He seemed to agree but as he walked away I noticed a smirk on his face that only someone clearly biding his time would make. SIDE NOTE: In one of the videos below the students were required to come up with fake movie titles, one for each of the eight movie genres we were learning. Lucas’ creativity can be amusing but often interrupts his reasoning when it comes to proper grammar, case in point, the poorly titled ROMANCE film, “WARNER KISS PIG!”

During Unit 9 we learned about the different kinds of movies.

For one classroom exercise I had the students write about their favorite movies and

also make up some creative titles for fake movies. Lucas (red and orange shirt) uses this exercise as yet another chance to give the students another reason to laugh at their faithful teacher. Notice also his puckish grin as he walks over to let me check over his work.

Random Experiences: Welcome to the Jungle: A Tale of Battle

2009-07-01T23:36:00.000-07:00

Random Experiences: War Games in the Jungle

Note: Exaggerations might be sprinkled throughout the following prose to add a bit more tension, excitement, humor and baadassness! Unnecessary adjectives and an overall heightened reality should be embraced.

Last weekend my buddy Stuart came to visit for a couple days. What do you do when a guest comes to town? Why take them to get shot at of course!

Some of you might remember my friend Stuart from such Warner Life Chapters as Spain 2005 and NYC Part 1. Stuart is from the Dallas region of Texas and was my housemate in Salamanca at Casa del Oscar y Leticia. Oscar and Leticia were our young host parents who we quickly figured out were only in it solely for the money. Summed up: If you weren't sure what "poor man's paella" is, I'll tell ya, it's pretty much just hot dogs, rice and ketchup. They had nothing but contempt for Stuart by the end of our time there (long story) and as a result questioned my friendship with him. Spain aside, Stuart is a great friend and a fellow traveler soaking up all there is to experience here in Asia.

Stuart has been in the Far East since he graduated from college. He lived on a small island in southern Japan then moved to Mainland China for six months and is now living in Hong Kong, teaching English at a Japanese school.

Oink-Oink Flu recently broke out in HK and as a result the majority of the city schools were closed indefinitely. Stuart and I had been planning on meeting up at some point (I figured I would visit him in HK once a free weekend came around) so when he found himself with nothing to do for an extended weekend he jumped a cheap flight and stopped by Taipei.

I know if I were visiting a friend in a foreign city the opportunity to shoot perfect strangers with skin-bruising paint pellets would be right up my alley. I was able to get Stuart on the list and Sunday morning we headed out of Taipei with my housemate Ant and our friend Jenn.

Paintball is a messy affair and it doesn’t help that our battle was to be set in a steamy mountain forest arena, after two days of continuous rain. We were told to bring old, ratty clothes and shoes, both of which I don’t have seeing as I’m still fairly new to Taiwan. I found an old pair of sneakers left by the guy who used to rent my room (a small size 11), cut holes in the front to let my finger-toes breathe, and grabbed a white tee-shirt, which I hoped would accentuate some of the fluorescent colored flesh wounds that I, the bulls-eye-tall novice, was sure to endure.

There were around thirty of us to start but by the end only a handful of brave souls remained.

Mobilizing a large group such as ours is hard work. We rendezvoused at the closest MRT station at 11:40, shared a series of cabs to the actual park. Arrived at 12:30, went through a brief orientation (primarily in Chinese mind you, however, it was easy to understand certain no-no’s like never take your face mask off and yes, shooting someone at point blank range could do some serious damage) and by 13:30hrs we were dressed in our army fatigues and ready for battle.

We split into two teams. Ant, Jenn and Stuart were on one, and I found myself on the opposing side. “I’ll see you in hell” I would later tell them. Choosing teams was a bit like the playground politics of softball in elementary school with the “sure thing” players getting picked first and the questionables hugging the bench till the end. I wasn’t the last person picked but I definitely wasn’t in the first round pick either. I suppose being tall doesn’t bode well for war.

I'm to the far right. My housemate Ant, far left, chose the "Beyond Thunderdome" attire.

14:00 hrs: We make the trek up a steep hill to the first terrain, a timed warm-up course that pits the two teams against each other in a free-for-all, last man standing scenario.

The course has a number of obstacles, hiding bunkers, and plenty of trees to use for cover. I decide to go all out for the first game and take a front position behind a giant tractor tire.

I run down the slick hill and take a crouching position behind the yellow and red stained mass facing enemy fire. Little yellow pellets start whizzing by my head. To the right of me one of my teammates takes a fatal shot to the chest, his blue shirt sodden yellow.

Pellets explode upon impact as they rain down upon my surprisingly feeble cover. My thick and rolling hair (I’m in need of a haircut by this point as the photo above can attest) catches a fair amount of side spray and eventually I catch a direct hit to my facemask, blinding my peripheral vision yellow.

During orientation we are told that if you receive a “kill shot,” the proper etiquette is to slowly rise with your weapon pointed towards the sky in a surrendering, “I’m dead” position. Once you’re in the shit, however, rules don’t seem to apply.

I consider trying to wipe the war scars from my facemask to elude those around me but decide to play by the rules. I rise and am immediately struck in the back by one of many faceless soldiers–friend or foe, I may never know who was responsible for my sole body wound of the day.

Our team ends up taking the first game, despite my unfortunate demise (a loss for the team you see) three-minutes into play. We switch sides and the Taiwanese coaches inform us of a some game changes, the most intriguing of which involves lighting a decently-sized bottle rocket at a mutual, no man’s land halfway point.

The goal is still kill as many of the opposition as possible with the additional five points rewarded to the brave soul crazy enough to light a flimsy but powerful proper rocket during the mayhem of yellow. The coaches warn both teams that the rocket must remain standing upright so as not to pull a sporadic flight into someone’s exposed neck flesh.

I take point behind two trees lined with green mesh material indicating a safety zone. I have a direct view of the rocket and set my aim to kill. The first to make it to the rocket, Brian, who was one of the hosts of the day’s festivities and was also enjoying a birthday, is from the opposing team and as he starts to reach for the lighter I unleash a fury of yellow his way. Birthday or not, I don’t give him the satisfaction of mercy.

It’s hard to say what happened next. I definitely hit him in the arm (merely a flesh wound!) and me thinks I take out his shoulder as well, however, he manages to light the rocket, which of course falls to its side and zips to the right, directly into a tree, a tree which very well could’ve have been an unfortunate Taiwanese girl dragged into the mess of war by her boyfriend. Or worse, yours truly, a tall-ass bloke who’s only experience on the battlefield consists of “Full Metal Jacket,” “The Thin Red Line,” and countless Schwarzenegger vehicles, including the appropriately set jungle guerilla warfare of “Predator.”

15:45 hr: We re-hydrate, wipe the combat juice, a putrid mélange of sweat and yellow chemical paint, from our masks, and make our way to the second course of the day.

If the first two games were merely warm-ups for the real deal, a la paintball basic training, the “trench” obstacle course that followed was the no-holds-barred game that the hardcore players amongst us were dreaming of.

The course was built on a long and steep hill that was made even more treacherous thanks to the week’s subtropical rainfall. Each end of the course had a flag–one red, one that was at one time or another some sort of blue. The game changes yet again.

Kill shots go from torso and above to strictly the head shot, duration time goes from six minutes to fourteen, and the goal of the game is simple enough: capture the opposition’s flag without catching a yellow stray to the face.

Our team strategize for a good ten minutes setting up a fierce defense line and sending our smallest and fastest out for the slaughter with hopes of at least one reaching the flag. I take a defensive position behind a fallen tree and some shrubs, which I later discover also, house a colony of Taiwanese ants. Ingenious little fuckers who manage to infiltrate my body suit via the sleeves. We are confident and seemingly prepared for anything that comes are way. The firecracker game starter is lit and we rush into position. It’s not two minutes into the game when my housemate Ant and three other fearless bastards rush our defensive line without a hitch and storm the flag. Damn. One instant I’m keeping my eye out for a curious enemy trying to test my sniper skills and the next, my housemate is literally leaping over my position to the prize.

We lose the first round mainly due to the fact that head shots are harder than they sound, especially when you’re running at top speed.

The next game we lose five players, one from our team, four from the other, each saying they need to get back to Taipei for work (on a Sunday). For those of us drenched in sweat, mud and yellow, we know these cowards simply don’t have the cajones for war.

The teams are uneven and our team needs volunteers to change sides. I feel no particular attachment to my clan, considering by the second game we were hardly a band of brothers. I end up volunteering with the plan to play alongside Stuart and Ant, maybe even getting a chance to shoot Stuart on friendly turf. What happened next can only be described as one of those, “for real?” moments in the life of Warner.

While my first team was pretty intense in its preparation (the team captain hinted at a military past during one of his game plan powwows) the other side was more relaxed and it basically seemed like “an every man for themselves” plan.

I initially stayed in the back on defense but quickly grew tired of the lack of action and decided to make a go for it.

In an act of pure pyrotechnical wickedness one of the Taiwanese coaches set off a couple smoke bombs filling the dugout trenches with a protective purple haze (“Apocalypse Now” anyone?). I moved quickly into the colored fog, staying low and keeping my air-powered weapon at kill height.

My vision had become blurred from perspiration and countless wipes from the communal paint towel. Yellow pellets continued to rain down around me but there were also stretches of eerie silence. At one point I look down at my hand shaking to the sound of paintball fire. I’m in the shit.

At one point I didn’t really know where I was in relation to the opposition’s flag but I found myself locked in a heated firefight (or should I say yellow ball fight) with an enemy combatant perched behind some shrubbery on top of a small hill.

I carefully crawl closer to my foe’s position and begin to unleash all hell. Up until this point I had been using my paintball ammo sparingly but with this duel I go ballistic.

After a while the unfortunate soul in my sight gets up and retreats back up the hill, which of course prompts me to shoot him in the back. Who knew I could be so ruthless?

I then realize that I am fairly close to the flag, a mere 300 yards down a trench and over a small hill. My vision is obscured and I can’t really tell who’s around me but I decide to make a run for it.

I sprint down the carved mud trench tripping, or should I say, strategically falling, all along the way. Surprisingly nobody is standing guard so I rush over the hill and touch the flag in a fit of glory. Remember that scene at the end of “The Rock” where Nicolas Cage falls to his knees with a white flag in hand behind a wave of fire. That’s me. The Taiwanese female coach, a beast of a woman who clearly considers paintball more of a lifestyle rather merely an amusing Sunday afternoon gala, blows her whistle and the game the remaining live souls on both teams rendezvous at the neutral zone.

It’s always refreshing to know that the most unassuming of us all can sometimes doing incredible things. My first team seemed stunned and I must say a bit disappointed that I didn’t bring the thunder while I was on their side. My team members were just happy to have won. One Taiwanese girl didn’t even know I was on her team. War, I learn, is all about keeping a low profile then shocking the hell out of those around you. To be fair I probably just got lucky.

17:30 hr: Stuart, Ant and I catch a cab and head back to Taipei. We are soaked with sweat and my hair is a possum’s nest of waves and yellow.

Stuart and I are beat (especially since the paintball excursion followed a night of drinking) but I decide that there might not be a better way to finish off the day than with a dinner at the acclaimed Taipei eatery, Din Tai Fung.

When it’s all said and done, Din Tai Fung is really just an over-hyped dumpling house. Don’t get me wrong it’s a damn fine one but it was hardly the most memorable meal I’ve had in Taipei thus far.

Din Tai Fung specializes in Xiaolongbao or soup dumplings. These tender morsels of steamed dough and meat (usually pork or crab and shrimp) are literally flavor explosions for the mouth as each dumpling is a vessel for a spoonful of hot Au Jous. There is a proper way to eat a Xiaolongbao so as not to burn the roof of your mouth with piping hot broth.

First you lightly dip your dumpling in a soy sauce and rive vinegar sauce. Then carefully place the dumpling on your soupspoon. Once the dumpling is settled it’s a race against the dumplings temperature clock. Carefully puncture a hole in its side with your chopstick spilling its liquid guts into your spoon’s basin. Then slurp up some of the soup and gobble down the dumpling.

Stuart and I go through an order of pork and crab soup dumplings, a bowl of “niurou mian,” a sinfully decadent beef and noodle soup with a dark brown broth and tender chunks of brisket that could easily pass as Vietnamese Pho’s gluttonous wealthy uncle, a side of buttery sautéed pea shoots, and a spicy wonton dish that we learn was just added to the menu. The wontons, with their slightly spicy, slightly sweet flavor ended up being the hit of the meal. We shared a couple bottles of Taiwan beer and reminisced about our time in Spain, Stuart’s many adventures here in Asia and plans for the future.

All in all, it was another memorable day in Taipei, one that will no doubt go down as one of the best. For Stuarts remaining time in Taipei we found a hookah bar near the university, ate a wonderful seafood meal at a local restaurant that one of his Taiwanese friend’s took us to, and explored the Shilin night market. I have an open invitation to Hong Kong, one that I hope to use as soon as I can.

Stray Observations #1

2009-06-18T07:48:00.000-07:00

The Mister Donut--Photo c/o the internet

Stray Observations From An Amused Foreigner #1

ON SCOOTERS

-- Never mind the fact that the thousands of scooters flooding the streets of Taipei only add to the city’s growing smog presence. The real hazards of these motorized zoom-zooms come at the pedestrian level. Walking in Taipei requires the same amount of focus and attention to the surroundings as someone traversing through a minefield. Scooters ignore most logical street signs, and will hit you if you happen to be in their path. Not too long ago while sauntering my way through a local night market I was struck by an anxious scooter’s side view mirror as the rider weaved his way through a mob of shoppers. Instead of apologizing for smacking my elbow the elderly rider scolded me in Taiwanese and may or may not have responded with a fist of dissidence in the air.

-- Riding a scooter (or in my case, hanging off the back of scooters wearing helmets made for children) is on par with the thrills of walking. Taxi cabs and buses would just assume cut you off if it meant catching a fare, red lights are merely suggestions for some Taiwanese commuters who see the lights as an excuse to speed up, and helmets protect the skull but do nothing for the flesh (check any MRT train car and you’re guaranteed to find one wicked flesh wound from a recently scarred ex-scooterist).

--Riding during a torrential rainstorm, aka the month of June, is about as smart as taking your Mazda Miata out for a spin on the Dan Ryan during an icy Chicago winter. Finally, a note to all the Taiwanese, just because you wear a body-sized “scooter poncho” during aforementioned road conditions, you are hardly the wiser commuter; you’re, however, a hell of a lot more colorful. This all said and done, I still desperately want a scooter of my own. Is this wrong?

ON FOOD

-- I don’t care that you’ve flash-fried the specimen to a “delicious” black char, you WILL NOT trick me into munching on a whole duck/goose head–neck, skull, beak et al–even if you somehow manage to impale it on a convenient stick like some ruthless Hun.

-- Chicken as an animal and food group is a lot more complex than you may think. Summed up: If you think you’ve had chicken, you really haven’t.

-- If you put custard pudding in ice tea, they will come.

-- Duck blood by any other name is still duck blood.

-- If you pretend that the surprise pieces of pig intestine at the bottom of the delicious steaming bowl of Mian Xian (oyster noodles) are really morsels of calamari, you can in fact fool the mouth.

-- Unforgiving Taiwanese rice liquor could and should be used to remove paint. East Asian whiskey, however, should not be overlooked on the world stage.

-- Dumplings are understood.

-- Becoming a regular at a street vendor cart is easy. Show up once, spew out some complimenting Mandarin phrases, and reap the benefits the follow. A neighborhood dumpling shop owner (one of the few places around my apartment open late) is happy to slip in an extra dumpling or two to my order since we are on a first name basis and she is still amazed at my height. A steady use of the word “haochi” or delicious also helps.

-- A long line may not ensure quality but will most definitely beckon the flock. The Taiwanese seem to attribute long lines at food vendors and shops as being a sign of quality. Case in point, the popular JiPai, or over-sized fried chicken breast stands. In the Shi-Lin night market there are two prominent stands that sit right next to each other on a busy drag. The vendor on the right side will at times have a queue thirty people deep, while his neighbor on the left will be empty. When I ask one university-age girl why she chose the vendor on the right, she replied, “Because the line was longer.” It should be noted that the final products at both stands are identical and the two supposed rival vendors might in fact be brothers.

-- The Taiwanese truly believe that American food consists of hot dogs and hamburgers. One afternoon at my school the staff ordered delivery McDonalds from down the road. When I declined the chance to order a value meal and said, “I actually don’t really like McDonalds” my boss, Vicky, was downright shocked. “Don’t you miss your hamburgers?” she inquired. From peeking at a carryout menu Taiwanese McDonalds appear to be the same as say a Nebraska McDonalds.

-- No matter how much area you conquer, you will never win, Starbucks.

-- Mister Donut, a Japanese donut chain sprouting up all over Taipei, serves your typical donut. That they offer chopsticks for their sugary treats does however up the establishment’s weirdness.

-- The consumption of properly prepared Chinese cabbage is an ethereal experience.

-- I have long argued that adding a fried egg to just about everything ups the ante. Eating in Taipei only confirms this position. Lunch boxes are not complete without the essential fried egg topper for the rice. The sandwiches at my housemate’s restaurant, Kiwi Gourmet Burger, served with a fried egg (not to mention pineapple and pickled beets) are to die for.

-- Keep the chili peppers coming. It turns out the Taiwanese are not as brave as their Sichuan brothers on the mainland when it comes to spicy food. “Hen la” or very spicy has become a favorite phrase when surveying the culinary canvas here in Taipei, however, I have yet to come across something that numbs my mouth and rips my insides apart. I need to find a true hotpot!

-- Noodles shaved by hand from a mothership of homemade dough into a giant vat of boiling water are worth the extra time and money.

-- Sprouts, yes please!

-- In a country where half of the food you see is still a mystery I’ve realized it’s best to just jump right in and hope for the best. Over the years my stomach has definitely become a lot more adventurous through travel and interest in foreign cuisine. East Asia is like one giant test for the inside. So far I have yet to take ill from anything thing eaten on the streets or inside more established restaurants. I haven’t turned down anything that has been offered to me (save of course for the aforementioned duck/goose noggin, because, and let’s be honest here, one must have limits) and have already found a number of must-go hotspots.

ON PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION

-- I'm tall and yes, I just hit my head on the hanging support handles. Get over it.

-- The Taiwanese are a polite and organized people. Sometimes. The MRT trains are a perfect example of a society that respects their elders and knows how to make a system work. The commuter trains here can fill up fast but no matter how busy or full a car might be, people will always offer up their seats to small children, the elderly and women. The Taiwanese also know how to line-up, whether it be to board the train (lining up on in a marked and designated area) or to wait for an escalator. For as busy a place as Taipei is the people never seem to be in a hurry (though it could be said that due to long work weeks many commuters are anything but anxious to get to work). I wish I could say the same for the street traffic scene here, which is a cluster-fuck, free for all of fleeting scooters, ambitious taxis and fearless buses.

-- You are forbidden to eat or drink on all MRT trains inside each station creating a sterile but delightful area. Ever felt disgusted by the homeless guy eating a bucket of hot wings on the Howard Red Line ‘L’ train in Chicago? Well, behavior like that is non-existent here in Taipei.

ON DOGS

-- For the most part the Taiwanese are a dog friendly people. It is very popular to own dogs, particularly four specific breeds–a long haired brown lap dog of sorts, run of the mill golden retrievers, some curious lab/terrier mutt, and some no-name cross breed that I can’t recall seeing in the States. The dogs are sold at night markets, which is even worse than it sounds. The ones that don’t sell are unleashed to the streets. The city is full of strays. The lucky ones find a nice old lady who feeds them regularly and they mark their territory. Others create instinctual gangs and roam around parks and by the river. Outside of my apartment there are at a given time at least four, sometimes six dogs. They are covered in fleas, attract flies, and in the case of one doomed pooch are riddled with stomach worms. Depressing. I make it a habit to buy dog biscuits at the grocery store as often as I can but the problem is clearly too big for the occasional treat. I hear that it is 50 times worse in Mainland China where strays are even more abundant and certain breeds, i.e. the unfortunate raccoon dog, are bred for their pelts, faciliating a hush-hush illegal tender of fake furs that might just end up on the racks of JC Penny.

-- Then there’s the amusing side to the Taiwanese’s love of dogs. Not only are dogs accessorized much like the downtown Manhattan purse pooches that you might run into at a Dean and Deluca but they are also given fashion cues. It is not uncommon to see a beautiful golden retriever shaved completely bald, save for the hair around the neck, head and tail. I kid you not. A friend’s Taiwanese girlfriend has at least two-dozen photos on her cell phone of her dog dressed up in various inappropriate costumes. From a watermelon to what looked like an airplane pilot’s garments, the dog’s masculinity is non-existent and would probably last a good six hours out in the wild. Dogs ride scooters with their owners and sometimes even manage to fit on normal bicycles. Finally, certain Taiwanese, specifically at said dog haven night markets, carry their miniature canines on their chests in makeshift doggie backpacks.

-- Stray cats are present in the city but I have yet to figure out if felines are welcomed pets here or merely a type of training-pet for future dog owners.

-- Bringing your pet rabbit to a busy park with dogs and hundreds of people may not be the wisest move, even if you walk the bunny on a leash.

ON TEACHING

-- If you give a mouse a cookie, he just might kill Teacher Warner. It’s hard to say how it happened but ever since I started teaching my three day-a-week “Treehouse Class” seem to have this fascination with creating English sentence patterns that place yours truly in harms way. Teacher Warner has been eaten by a shark, a lion, and spider, not to mention a monkey who is a mascot in the book series. I was once hanged using the keyword ROPE. Last Thursday Lucas, the classroom’s resident terrorist, decided to use the new word SAW (part of a construction/cleaning unit) to cut my head off–verbatim sentence spoken out loud: “I will use a saw to cut Teacher Warner on head.” And I can’t even begin to tell you how violent things got during the Natural Disaster debacle of Unit 8 when I met my demise in lethal hurricanes, typhoons, volcanic eruptions, tornados, drought and somehow by a mudslide. Still, if it teaches the children English then I guess I don’t mind being their personal voodoo doll.

-- Apple will never be a real name. For that matter, neither will Rock.

-- The Taiwanese love ‘em some office supplies. I have never seen such adoration for pens, pencils, notebooks, pen cases and erasers than inside the Taiwanese school system. Pencil lead flows like water. Erasers are traded like currency. Hi-lighters come in more colors than you might think. And don’t even think about using the pencil’s built in eraser to correct your mistake. For the task of homework editing you must utilize the heavy-duty pencil/pen eraser that’s shaped like a Hello Kitty.

-- White board markers are bitch to clean off clothing.

-- If your teacher ever seems dazed and confused he/she has probably been inhaling too much white board marker ink. Weekly ink re-fillings of these tools of the trade could very easily be killing my precious brain cells.

-- The game of Hangman, it turns out, never ends. No matter how many letters the students go through before reaching the correct word there are certainly more body parts and accessorizes to add to the hanged stick figure. Top hat? Why not! Backpack? I can’t draw that, but sure.

-- Trying to practice my rudimentary Chinese with the students only leads to trouble and requires at least one class period of reclaiming my authority.

-- Finally, in response to my Step Ahead Class Level 5 workbook’s written suggestion that I reward the winning student of a word puzzle activity with “a big sloppy kiss,” the answer is, No. No, I will not.

ON THE TAIWANESE

-- Never before have I felt so welcomed in a foreign place than here in Taipei. Not unusual but worth mentioning.

A W of Suburbia Fan in Turkey!

2009-06-11T08:10:00.000-07:00

So when I originally set up this blog, going back to my Eastern Europe romp in the summer of 07, I figured it would be a place to share my experiences with family and friends, maybe test my hands at light Travel Writing. I have always enjoyed writing the entries and find that the logs as a whole create quite the narrative. I also tend to write a lot more on a computer than in my actual print journal I keep.

The other day I was friended on Facebook by a Yesim Budak, of Istanbul. Turns out she had stumbled upon my blog (through Google she later told me) and had taken a similar trip through Croatia. Anyway, if you believe what Thomas Friedman says, you will agree that this is truly a flat world. A Turk stumbled upon my humble little blog and enjoyed it enough to seek out its author (her friend request said, "Warner Sills, of Warner of Suburbia???"). So Yesim, if you're reading, thanks for the read and keep on traveling. Your photos from Lokrum and Dubrovnik bring back fond memories of a truly beautiful part of the world.