Category Archives: Taiwan

Taiwan, how will I miss thee? Let me count the ways.

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Tomorrow evening, Steve and I will board a flight out of Taipei to Chiang Mai, Thailand. Our last day in Taipei will be filled with frantic errands, like mailing a package off to the United States, hanging out one last time with friends we’ve barely gotten to know, and ordering our favorite dishes for dinner one last time.

For several weeks now, I’ve been saying goodbye to Taiwan. Every time I walk by a market stall and catch a glimpse of a snack I once tried, I silently mourn the fact that I won’t be able to try it again. Each time I buy a tea drink, I think about the many desolate tea-less countries ahead, and that I won’t just be able to buy us tea to go with our lunch. In small ways and big, I am feeling nostalgia about our time here already.

“One green jasmine tea, half sugar, half ice, please.”

I am going to miss Taiwan. There is just no way around that simple fact. I think Steve and I have made it pretty clear that we think Taiwan is the bee’s knees when it comes to so many things, but on this, our next-to-last evening in Taiwan, it’s really hitting hard that not only will we have to say goodbye to a number of amazing, beautiful things, but that we will also need to take on a different frame of mind for travel in other countries, particularly in Southeast Asia. It is a mixed blessing, but right now, I can only grasp how sad we are to be leaving Taiwan. Reader, if we have not convinced you yet that Taiwan should be a destination for you too someday, here is our last ditch attempt.

Continue reading Taiwan, how will I miss thee? Let me count the ways. →

Chilly Taipei: unexpected heights, sights, and hikes.

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On Tuesday, we boarded the HSR (high-speed rail) outside of Tainan and speeded into Taipei barely an hour and a half later. This is the way to travel! It felt just like the bullet trains we’d taken in Japan, and made for an ultra smooth ride. We trekked our way with heavy bags through the unreasonable cold to Da’an District, where we had reserved five nights in a hostel. That evening, I made Steve stay up with me to debate how to travel about in Thailand and reserved a few hostels and flights before we fell asleep.

Yesterday morning, bright and early, we left our hostel for the Taipei 101 Tower, just a 20-minute walk away. Once you get onto Xinyi Road, which cuts east-west, it is hard to miss the Tower because it looms over everything else for dozens of blocks. For comparison purposes, the Sears (never the Willis) Tower in Chicago is 442 meters tall, and Taipei 101 Tower is significantly taller at 509 meters. (Though both are small potatoes compared to the Burj Khalifa in Dubai at a lofty 828 meters.) We took the fastest elevator in the world (deceptively labeled “a life-changing experience” according to a quote from CNN in the lobby) and emerged onto the 89th floor, a 360 degree viewing observatory. It was a beautiful day to see Taipei — slightly cloudy, but not oppressively so. Taipei lies in a basin on the very northern tip of Taiwan, and we could see mountains in several directions as well as a city (Taoyuan, maybe?) to the southwest on an elevated plateau, surrounding the sprawling metropolitan area.

Continue reading Chilly Taipei: unexpected heights, sights, and hikes. →

Moving out, on, and up!

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On Tuesday, we sold and donated the last of our belongings (a six-cup coffee maker, a bamboo mattress pad, an IKEA duvtet ) to some grateful expats in Kaohsiung and moved out of our small studio apartment on Lane 123, Linsen First Road. It was beautiful in that place, even if it had no kitchen — the sliding glass doors to the small balcony faced south, and from dawn to dusk, it needed no more illumination than the sun. And in Kaohsiung, it was always sunny! We stayed for two nights in the same hostel we found when we first came here, and said goodbye to the group of friends we had met through Couchsurfing with a few pitchers of San Miguel. And on a bright, sunny afternoon, boarded the train for Tainan.

It was barely a trip — even taking the local train which stopped every 10 minutes at small, out-of-the-way stations, it was only an hour before we arrived in Tainan, the old southern capital of Taiwan. Tainan’s a whole different universe, and sometime soon, when I have all my photos uploaded and categorized on Flickr, I’ll post some here. But it feels a little like Boston and a little like Japan — ungridded, somewhat disorganized, bereft of real sidewalks; large trees abound everywhere, old temples better preserved than any I’ve seen in China, and overall, just a cozier atmosphere than Kaohsiung. After touring several temples, all within easy walking distance of each other, Steve and I had a late lunch at a local place, him enjoying vegetable noodles with soybean paste (炸酱面) and me chicken curry over rice. We sipped tea from next door and watched trains stop the local traffic.

We’re spending a lot of time with Kate, our friend from Chicago. She was born and grew up in Kaohsiung, and her missionary parents currently work at the Tainan Theological College and Seminary, where we are staying. Being able to learn a little about temples and sights from them is really awesome and humbling. They also make their own bread, scorning Taiwanese standards for toast, and that made for a very satisfying breakfast. Kate and Gene, her husband, and Gene’s parents are visiting, which has been nice — it is good to see friendly, familiar faces from Chicago.

Here’s to several more lazy days around this quaint capital of the south before we head north. Between Steve’s admiring comments about the food and the scenery and my own longings for the tea drinks here, I am starting to suspect that we will miss Taiwan very, very much.

Connie

4 is the loneliest number.

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When we first investigated the possibility of living in Taiwan, I heard from my mother and several others about the virtues of Taiwan. One of them was that Taiwan had preserved Chinese tradition and culture better than China itself. I have seen a lot more signs of religious and traditional beliefs here, from both individuals as much as institutions. For example, every Monday, many businesses bring out onto the sidewalk a metal container where they burn yellow paper, which symbolizes money in the afterlife. The metal container is accompanied by a small table of offerings to the ancestors, which invariably contains oranges and some products that would be considered good presents in Taiwan, like Coke and Lays potato chips. Small shrines and temples to Buddhist and other deities are everywhere — smaller ones can be found inside people’s living rooms and kitchens, and bigger ones sandwiched between clothing shops, and occupying prime spaces on large street corners. It’s very much a part of modern day Taiwan.

One sign of a strong culture could be a strict adherence to traditional taboos, in which my mother has indoctrinated me thoroughly. For example, don’t send old people clocks as a present — the Chinese character for clocks, 钟 (zhong1), sounds the same as another character, 终, meaning final or end, so it sounds like you’re cursing them to die. Also, don’t stick your chopsticks vertically in your rice bowl; that’s how they prepare a bowl of food for the dead (maybe because it looks like incense sticks that way?), so it’s a bad omen. Do you see a trend here? And definitely don’t give a couple an umbrella as a present, because the umbrella (伞, san3) is pronounced very similarly to 散, the character which can mean to split up.

Continue reading 4 is the loneliest number. →

Travel optimization and other lessons from Taiwan.

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In the past few days, Steve and I have been looking back at our three and a half month stay in Taiwan, figuring out what has worked out well, and what mistakes we’ve made that we definitely want to avoid on the rest of this trip. Hindsight can be twenty-twenty, but you have to be willing to look in the rearview mirror, assess your decisions dispassionately, and be candid about where you made the wrong calls. Here’s our attempt at doing that!

Know Your Priorities
People travel for different reasons, and one thing we haven’t done a great job of is really prioritizing our reasons. What Steve and I like best about travel is being able to soak up a particular culture, its idiosyncrasies, and hallmarks. We like to grab a meal on the street and talk endlessly about how you order a meal in China and the endlessly amusing subway jingles in Tokyo. Equally fun is people-watching, like comparing the different school uniforms and bags of Taiwanese high school students. We also want to have plenty of time to read books and plan our own projects (for Steve, websites and games, and for Connie, grad school and social enterprises).

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Merry Christmas!!

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Merry Christmas from Connie and Steve!

To those near and (most likely) far,

We miss you all! Some of you we miss incredibly — and you know who you are, you furry puppy — and some of you we miss simply because you have made our lives wonderful. To  friends, family, and those whom we think about often, we hope you enjoy a very warm and merry holiday. We wish we could be close to you too, but it was simply not in the cards this year.

Instead, to celebrate the occasion, Steve and I are off tomorrow to five days in Hong Kong, where I will continue to recuperate at a nice hotel in Mong Kok, and we will eat Indian food at our favorite Indian restaurant ever and do a bit of light hiking on Victoria Peak. Then we’ll return to Kaohsiung for another two weeks before jetting off to Tainan, and then lands unknown.

Have a great holiday!

Best,
Connie

An unexpected setback: getting sick in Taiwan.

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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).

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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!

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Sunsets and the seaside of Kaohsiung.

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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!

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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!