Travel

In Asia, everything is cute or compact. What’s cute is usually compact as well: miniature toys, toy poodles, girls… but what’s compact is not always cute. The room I stayed in at my distant uncle’s over the summer was a Taipei standard. Oh, an 8 x 10′ box, perhaps? The mattress was smaller than a twin and hugged the ground without a box spring. My baby pink, Hello Kitty sheets were much appreciated (since they have two sons and no daughter, but for someone who’s room is black & blue back home, I did not find them that cute). This time, I stayed at my distant aunt’s and pretty much slept in the 6 x 10′ storage room with a sleeping bag “blanket”…but I didn’t mind. Though this trip still paled in comparison with my summer adventures, the last two weeks I spent in Taipei were fantastic. view more →

My social media capabilities are incredibly limited seeing that I can’t check my Twitter, Posterous, Tumblr, Facebook or Friendfeed. (I’m not sure if this is all censorship or half a connection problem, since the wifi bars just so happen to go down whenever I check those sites.) I can, however, access all of my self-hosted blogs, upload to Flickr, and Posterous-tweet via email (pseudo-hack win!).

This isn’t exactly my first time in China, but I would hardly consider Kunming, Dali, and Lijiang (in Yunnan Province) “cities” when Shanghai has a population of 20 million. This is definitely my first time in a Chinese city without cobblestone-paved roads, horse-drawn carriages, and yaks. In fact, I see exactly what I expected to see: grey skyscrapers, construction cranes, and more skyscrapers in the making. view more →

To truly experience Taiwan, you’ve got to get out of Taipei and go down South, preferably to Tainan. And to better understand what it means to be “really Taiwanese”, I would recommend watching Cape No. 7, a film about a Southern young man who goes to Taipei for better prospects, only to be let down (you know, Grapes of Wrath/Little Miss Sunshine’s broken California dream). He comes back down to the South initially depressed, but slowly appreciates the oddballs who happen to know everyone else.

The movie pokes loving fun at various Southern stereotypes: men driving scooters without helmets while chewing beetlenut, politicians having petty arguments with each other then bonded by their love for the town, people gathering at the local church and singing praise songs in Taiwanese.

The one full day that I spent in Taipei hardly consisted of anything truly Taiwanese—I stayed at the Sheraton, ate lunch at the Agora Garden, visited my mom’s friend’s interior design firm, walked around the Mega House next to the Living 3.0 office—but then painstakingly tried lamb hotpot (heart, liver, feet and all) with a few of my ex-colleagues. (They were out of brains when we arrived—thank God.)

But the weekend that I stayed with my grandma in a small town in Tainan county was…”很台” and hilariously Taiwanese. view more →