Chopsticks and Teahouse

I was well trained as a child - I can eat with chopsticks if I have to. But I haven't ever HAD to. Now I do. At each meal, I'm given a pair of chopsticks and a wide, flat spoon. That's it. And with those implements, I've tackled:

• soup
• slippery noodles
• spare ribs
• cabbage salad
• steamed buns
• greens

Mostly it works out OK, but when it comes to dividing a sticky bun, I really miss the knife. The chunks of rib were pretty tough too - Barbara suggested I put the rib on the spoon and use the chopsticks to hold it steady while biting off pieces. I only got a little on my shirt.

The implements also vary by venue. This morning we had cheap wooden chopsticks and flimsy plastic spoons. The other end of the spectrum are the beautiful black laqured chopsticks and stone colored ceramic spoons we had for dinner tonight.

Dinner was at a lovely tea house near Barbara's house. There must be places like this (sort of) in the states, but not many. It was very peaceful. Some people got tea for a whole tea service. We had dinner instead, choosing between tofu, chicken, pork, beef and fish. We each got a full tray of soup, pickled salad, cooked vegetables, entree, and desert, which was sweet potato mashed with bits of apple. For desert, they gave us dried star fruit.

After dinner, we visited the ajacent art gallery. How elegant!

I know I've told a lot about the food, but it's been interesting, different, and yet tasty.

Infection Control

Flu is still a big deal here in Taipei. Some of you may be interested in these details - the rest of you may want to skip this post.

On arrival at the airport, all passengers walked through a temperature scanner. It was fun to look at the monitor and see if we had passed the test (we did).
On the metro today, I ran into this ad. I also heard announcements about flu over the loudspeaker telling people to wear a mask if they had symptoms of flu.

 

Once in the city, we were struck by how many people wear masks when in public. Most use the disposable procedure masks, but others have whimsical re-usable ones. Scooter/motorcycle riders are even more likely to wear them, probably to combat the fumes on the road. Taking pictures of people wearing masks strikes me as intrusive, so I've been practicing the art of deception - pointing a camera toward something obvious while in fact catching a person nearby. Here are some I got:

Unexpected Firsts

Here's something probably none of you know about me. Meg didn't. I've never drunk a glass of soy milk. Yes, we always have soy milk in the fridge, and yes, I've eaten plenty of things cooked with soy milk, but truth be told, I was always scared to just drink it. I thought it would taste wierd.

So this morning Barbara took us out for a fairly traditional Taiwanese breakfast. It was a little hole-in-the-wall place with piles of foods to choose from, and vats of warm soymilk. They had chilled soymilk too, in paper cups labeled "coffee" in English. I was thirsty, so warm, sweetened soy milk it was. The picture shows a bucket of steaming soymilk - probably 3 gallons. They served the milk to us in a wide bowl. We were given flimsy plastic wide spoons to drink it with. And after all that worry, it was fine. Maybe not my favorite drink in the world, but not scary at all! Meg said this soy milk had a much stronger soy taste than the stuff we get at home.

For the rest of breakfast, we had fried turnip cakes (OK), a frybread with green onions (yummy), steamed buns with vegis and skinny noodles (pretty good), and sesame buns with filling (yummy).

After breakfast, we ventured forth to explore an older, downtown neighborhood. We visited a Buddist temple, wandered along narrow alleys with all sorts of things for sale, watched a lovely fountain for awhile, and stopped in a night market for a fruit smoothy.

My second "first" was seeing live birds for sale in the night market. I know, it's possible to buy live birds right there back in Minneapolis, but I've never seen them or done it. So I was startled to see cages below a display of fresh chicken parts. I looked down to see beautiful chickens of all sorts of colors. It's not really out of character - we saw live seafood of all sorts for sale, and some live snakes as well. But the chickens were more dramatic to me.

Our feet started to hurt, so we headed back on the metro, stopping to see the 822 Peace Park and the Chang Kai Shek monument on the way.

Big City

We visited the National Museum today. If you're interested, take a peek at their website: http://www.npm.gov.tw/en/home.htm . You might enjoy it than I did. The museum was mobbed with throngs of tour groups, and after dutifully following Meg around the museum, I was more than ready to head outside to the garden of perfected benevolence to wander the trails and feed the fish. Vending machines sold packets of fish food pellets for 10NT, about 30 cents. The carp, shown at right, massed to get the food. It was very odd to see fish poking up into the air.

The other highlight of the museum was a visit to the tea house on the roof. It was an oasis of peace and quiet. We shared a pot of kumquat tea plus several orders of dim sum: steamed buns with beef, seafood dumplings, sticky rice with mushrooms and lotus seeds, and whole wheat with nut buns. It was all really yummy, but it's a different way to eat. Bites. The tea cups held about a tablespoon at a time, and the dim sum was small when split four ways. And yet it was enough.

Later we walked over to the flower market, which is like a farmer's market for plants and flowers. On the way, we had to cross several large streets. I love watching the cars, taxis, bicycles and scooters pile up at the stop light then surge forward. We saw this guy from an overpass.

I took several amusing videos today, but I can't figure out how to post them. Anyone want to email me instructions?

First Day in Taipei

Our first full day in Taipei is drawing to a close as all of you wake up.

I can see why Barbara and John like it here. Taipei is a large city, but it's nice. Between the metro, buses, boats, trains, cabs, etc, they don't even own a car. It's also very eclectic. We tried all sorts of things today, including fried squid, lurid ice milk cones, and fish paste soup. Barbara just gave me a slice of some fruit that doesn't have an English name. It was red outside, and tasted like a cross between an apple and watermelon, with overtones of celery and lettuce. It was good!

We headed off to the hospital this morning with Barbara. She doesn't know exactly how the healthcare system works here, but she does know that after they were here for 3 months they got a health card for the national healthcare system. With it, they just have small co-pays. At her first clinic, there were long waits, but at this place she was only gone about 1/2 hour.

The picture shows the juice available at the vending machine at the hospital.

Afterward we took the metro farther on, to where the Tanshui Keng dumps into the ocean. There's a little tourist town that amused us. We found a ferry boat to take us all the way to the delta.

Now it may only be 8:30 pm, but I'm about falling over exhausted. I haven't had much jet lag (knock on wood) so I figure another good night of sleep may just set us right.

30,000 Feet

So we're on our way. Finally, after much angst and not enough planning, we're on a plane, 30,000 feet over Saga, Japan.

For such a long journey, it's been surprisingly easy. On our first flight, from Minneapolis to Los Angeles, Meg and I looked at each other and said "finally - time to talk!" But all we wanted to do was zone out, so that's what we did, aside from some very interesting conversations with our seat mate, a representative from Nabster, who was in Minneapolis meeting with their new parent company, Best Buy.

Los Angeles was lovely. We got a sunny, clear day with snow covering the nearby mountains, and enough recent rain to green things up. Mom's friend Sylvia picked us up at the airport and took us to a trendy restaurant in Santa Monica for lunch. We felt very far away from world traveling there - just locals out for lunch. Then we headed down to the Santa Monica pier for  short walk by the beach. Hanging out in the old haunts was such a treat, as was escaping the concrete and fumes of LAX for a few hours. I even got to see some filming down at the pier! No idea what, but we saw the fleet of trucks, cast, crew, lights, etc.

Our EVA 777 is  one of the most comfortable planes I've ever been on. The first class looked positively scrumptious with only 6 seats across. Our section packs us in at 9 across, but even that isn't bad. And the plane isn't full, so we've got 4 1/2 seats for the three of us. Personal video at each seat feels very civilized, where we navigate through menus to pick the movie, tv, games, or maps that each of us wants. I watched New Moon for awhile, but mostly I've been watching our flight path, able to zoom way in or out. And for the first time, I've actually slept. I hope I can still sleep when we arrive.

Our flight path surprised us all. We didn't just cross the Pacific. We've actually hugged the land all the way up the west coast, past Alaska, then down over Japan. Mom's interest in the window actually exceeds my own, so she scored that spot most of the time, but I got a turn to see the ice flows and snow covered islands of Alaska. It was very cool.


Here's a math problem for you. We left LA at 5pm. It was very light out. We headed northwest, taking 14 1/2 hours to cross 8 time zones. We arrive at 10:30 at night, which will be dark. How much of our trip was in the light? With the time changes, and the international date line, we sat here stumped for awhile, but it turns out that about 5 hours was in the light, the rest in the dark. Mom is over there watching lights as I write.

Roteang Orphanage

Why Cambodia? Well, my mother (Karin) and her partner (Echo) have been sponsoring high school students in Roteang Village, Cambodia, so we're going to go there and meet my mother's high school student. It's a neat program: http://sharingfoundation.org/programs/education-programs/high-school-students.html .

The high school, Jayavarman VII, is eight kilometers up the road from Roteang village, and runs two separate sessions per day.  Anyone who has finished 8th grade in the area can go there, but the regular school classes are immense, 75 kids in a class being not unusual. Textbooks are rare or non-existent, discussion or questions are discouraged, and the very poorly paid government teachers often do not show up for class. Available at the same school are "private classes"—this means the teachers, for a fee of about $5.00 per person per month, actually teach. The students have textbooks and discussions and the class size may be 20 students. The quality is obviously very different, but the students learn.


Sponsorship of a TSF high-schooler is $300 per year. The money covers textbooks, teacher fees, paper and writing tools, school uniforms, food at school, and transportation from Roteang village and back each day on the moto-trailer. The other important ingredient is that each child has a specific sponsor, to whom he or she writes four times a year. Sponsors in turn must write back to their students with letters of encouragement and family news. The positive effect of the letter connection is inestimable. To  have one's own foreign sponsor, who believes in you and encourages you, is vital—all previous experience led one to believe one was going to be a subsistence farmer or fisherman.