All posts by Connie

About Connie

World traveler!

An unexpected setback: getting sick in Taiwan.

On Monday, a nurse asked me where I was from and what I was doing in Taiwan. I told her we came from the U.S., and we were here for travel.

“How did you end up here, then?”

“I don’t know,” I replied. “The hospital was not on the sight-seeing agenda.”

There , in a nutshell, is the story of the past three weeks. To drag the telling out is kind of monotonous, and I’ve already had to live through it once. So the short version is that I fell sick with a high fever, and we spent a whole week hoping it would go away, taking lots of Tylenol, drinking water, and visiting a local clinic and getting what Steve called “Dr. Feelgood’s Pills,” because they were just a packet of unmarked fever pills. Finally, we went to the nearby public hospital, and they took my temperature (40 degrees Celsius, or a balmy 104 degrees Fahrenheit) and promptly admitted me.

Continue reading An unexpected setback: getting sick in Taiwan.

Earning an honest living (under the table).

A long time ago, when Steve and I first conceived of our world trip (okay about 8-9 months ago for real) we brainstormed all sorts of ways to earn our keep. Most of them revolved around me getting a job in Asia that would utilize my language abilities, but in the end, we decided against most of them for a) not being in my career plan and b) not being conducive to a life of flexible travel, which was what we were most interested in. What we settled on was that Steve would try to do some contract work, like making mobile apps or websites, and I would try to tutor English. I even made some spiffy business cards and picked them up before I left Chicago. While we hoped to earn some cash, we would operate at a net loss overall, and sure, spend a large amount of our savings, but the trade-off, we theorized, was being able to do exactly what we wanted.

Fast forward to the beginning of our third month abroad, and since we arrived in Taiwan, we’ve been buried under personal projects, a crushing inability to get out of bed before 10 am, trying to make our social lives work in a country 14 hours ahead of most of our friends, and a lot of graduate school applications (okay, that’s just me). So far in Kaohsiung, I have succeeded in passing out a sum total of two business cards. So it came as a surprise that our first opportunity for honest income was today!

Continue reading Earning an honest living (under the table).

Sunsets and the seaside of Kaohsiung.

Living in Taiwan, it can be oddly easy to forget that we are on an island, albeit one that is very large. In each city we have spent a bit of time in, we have never been far from the ocean. A map of Taiwan reveals about a ring of a dozen big cities which hugs the coastline. The middle of Taiwan is mountainous and features just two roads which cross from the east to the west coast. That being said, sometimes it’s easy to forget because we barely budge from our apartment in the middle of Kaohsiung, hemmed in by low-rise apartments and large boulevards and streets.

From Cijin Lighthouse, looking toward Shoushan and Xizihwan.

That all changed when we finally visited Cijin Island. Long one of the attractions of Kaohsiung, it will horrify most residents when they hear how long it took us to finally make our way to Cijin (about three weeks, all right?). Right off one end of the MRT’s Orange Line, at Xizihwan Station, one can take a five minute stroll to Gushan Ferry, and board the shortest ferry ride in the whole world (approximately 4 minutes sailing) and disembark 15NT the poorer on Cijin Island, a long spit immediately off the coast of the city. It actually used to be a peninsula, but was severed at the southern end to create a second port of entry for Kaohsiung, which is Taiwan’s second largest city and 9th largest port, as Steve has become fond of noting.

Continue reading Sunsets and the seaside of Kaohsiung.

Movies and pictures, oh my!

Dear world, we have a lot to report on. The second half of November has been very busy, as you may be able to tell from our updated photos. Friends visiting, Taiwanese baseball, and a trip to Taichung! But first, just to share a short video with you guys.

Steve’s father is celebrating his birthday today in South Carolina, and because we forgot to send him a card two weeks ago (to be on the safe side), we just made a video and sent it instead!

I’m really excited about my directorial debut, not to mention my acting debut, producer debut, etc. etc. For anyone who’s about to downvote this on Rotten Tomatoes, this happens to be the product of about an hour’s worth of fooling around work on iMovie, so enjoy!

Yours,
Connie

P.S. Yes, there is a heavy ’80s influence on my work.

P.P.S. Stella Creations is the default name for any creative efforts Steve and I put together. She’s the inspiration for it all!

On travel.

Long term travel is like a marathon. Now I haven’t actually run any sort of race in my life (not even a 5K) so you know, take it at face value. But from what I’ve learned about exercise and how to push yourself, my take on it is that it is a mental challenge as much as it is a physical one.

I am reflecting on what it means to be traveling for a whole year (when it already feels like it’s been half a year) thanks to a video I first watched several years ago. Christophe Rehage, a German, documented a year of walking through China from Beijing to Urumqi on his camera, and stitched the scenes together with two lovely songs (“L’Aventurier” and “橄榄树/ The Olive Tree”) in French and Chinese.

As crazy as a year around the world sounds, I feel like our plan is a lot more tame than Christophe’s, because we’re not actually sleeping under the stars or trekking 30 km a day on foot. But the mental journey is similar. On his blog, he wrote about what pushed him to do this journey and why he stopped. He originally planned to trek from Beijing all the way to Bad Nenndorf, where he grew up in Germany, but he called it off a year in for personal reasons. He talked about how he looks so free and unfettered on the road, in the desert and under the sky, but how he was also just living by a set of rules that he had constructed about his trip. Occasionally, he felt like even taking a short bike ride and not walking every single step was cheating. Sometimes living under a different set of rules is freeing, and sometimes, you just have to put yourself into a really different environment or frame of mind to discover that there are elements of yourself or elements of life that you can’t escape.

Continue reading On travel.

A day in the life!

It has officially been more than a month since we moved into our Kaohsiung apartment. Has time really passed so quickly? Is this the fifth time on this blog that I’ve bemoaned the passage of time? I’ll move on then. It’s natural that we’ve also settled into a kind of rhythm with certain themes that come up again and again. Enjoy a picture-heavy post about a day in the life of Steve and Connie in Kaohsiung!

Our street in the morning.

8:00 AM The first battle of the day is to get up. I think everyone is familiar with this battle, but not the long-term kind like we’re waging. We have projects, errands, and things that we’d like to do… but practically nothing that we HAVE to do, unless we have a Skype appointment with our friends or family. On the days when we’ve successfully roused ourselves out of bed before 9 am, we try to take a turn around Central Park.

Central Park, complete with dogs.

Continue reading A day in the life!

Let’s import Asian toilets, stop lights, and subway systems.

While living in Asia means that we have to do without some Western amenities (like an oven), Steve and I have gotten quite used to a few innovative things here. We’ve also learned that necessity is truly the mother of invention. Asian cities are some of the world’s most densely packed places, and constrained natural resources and space made these innovations not only helpful but necessary.

One of the first things that we saw in Japan (literally) was a toilet with a small faucet and sink on top. We were at our host Ken’s house, and I swore up and down I’d get a photo, and of course, I forgot, but luckily, plenty of other people online have documented these toilets. Much like some European houses, Japanese toilets tend to be in a different room from your sink and shower business, so to make it easy for you, when you flush, the water comes out of the faucet. You can wash your hands, and the dirty water will flow directly into filling the tank. Pretty brilliant. My family uses a number of water-saving techniques in the bathroom, but it’d just be simpler if versatile water usage were the norm that we strived towards!

sink
Some Japanese toilets have their own faucets and sinks. Brilliant! (Source: Essential Japan Guide)

Continue reading Let’s import Asian toilets, stop lights, and subway systems.

Five Things We’ve Been Up To

Since we’ve been up to a hodgepodge of things, which is too hard to pigeonhole into categories, just enjoy a run-down of five things we’ve been doing recently!

1. Still photography. One of the things that I really want to do is get better at photography; I like taking a lot of pictures of different things I find beautiful, but my technique is really just point-and-shoot. The rest is the gorgeous DSLR camera my mother gave me for my birthday two years ago. Some of it has turned out nicely. Some of it looks silly enough that I don’t even want to put it up on Flickr yet. Here, have one of the more mundane samples that I like somehow!

Our makeshift utensil jar.

Continue reading Five Things We’ve Been Up To

Rubber Duck Fever.

After a week in Kaohsiung, Steve and I concluded that it was impossible to go into any store or down any street without catching glimpses of these rubber yellow ducks that were for sale seemingly everywhere. What was it all about? Was that a Taiwanese passion that no one told us about? A little rooting around online helped clarify things: it turns out that the little duck was really a HUGE duck. This 40 foot tall inflatable rubber duck is the work of Dutch artist Florentijn Hofman, and had already been the focus of intense attention in Hong Kong for two months this spring. A version of it has entertained the world since 2007. And now it was in Kaohsiung.

Ecce Anas! (N.B. That’s Latin for duck.)

The amount of media attention on the rubber duck has been a little incredible. Everyone from CNN and the China Post to finance blogs and the Denver Post (not to mention every single outlet in Taiwan) have all weighed in on Kaohsiung’s newest visitor, and duck fever effectively gripped the nation. You could buy duck t-shirts, stuffed animals, backpacks, flip-flops, hats, iPhone covers, earbuds, you name it. So, naturally, we had to go see too; Steve and I caught the duck on Sunday, the last day of its scheduled appearance in Glory Harbor. We walked to the nearby Central Park MRT stop, where free shuttle buses departing every five minutes shepherded visitors to the nearby harbor.

Continue reading Rubber Duck Fever.

Terrible Apartment Photos: Taiwan Edition

In the course of apartment hunting in Taipei and now Kaohsiung, Steve and I have frequented Tealit.org, Kaohsiung Connect, and the all-powerful 591.com, which has listings in Chinese. The apartment quality has decidedly been of a mixed variety, since some are very old and shabby looking, but the location and cost go a long way to making up for it. However, aside from seeing some horrible apartments, we’ve also encountered some atrocious crimes against photography.

Great photos in an online listing can help you gloss over an apartment’s flaws or highlight its strengths. Bad photos, however, can put off prospective tenants, or worse, waste their time by making them laboriously puzzle out what the photo is actually of and where that furniture or wall is situated in relation to the other photos. It’s also exasperating because the number of faux pas seem innumerable and so easily avoidable: if you want to make your apartment look nice, photograph it during the day for maximum daylight. Stand still while taking a photo instead of dancing around. Don’t use flash directly in front of a window. Why is it so difficult to take a nice, wide-angled shot of a room? Even more landlords are preoccupied with giving you detailed photos of the bathroom sink from five different angles, what the hot water heater or laundry machine look like, and how many independent electric meters there are on the wall. All we want is to understand what an apartment looks like or would feel like to live in, and these photos have been so ridiculously unhelpful to that end that we felt the need to compile an album of the worst offenders.

Continue reading Terrible Apartment Photos: Taiwan Edition