Big Brother

Early morning bike ride

Bitan

Breakfast en plein air

There are a couple more things to relate before I finish with my blogs on Taiwan. On the third day in Taipei, Michael, Kirk, and I went on a long bike ride, about 6 miles one way. There is a continuous green trail over 100 Kilometers (or 62+ miles) along the Danshui river in Taipei.  We started out at 5:30 a.m. when the weather was still relatively cool and arrived at a place called Bitan a little over an hour later.  Along the way we passed numerous people, young and old, walking, jogging, or biking on the trail.  Unlike in the U.S. where you expect the hiking or bike trails to be in the wilderness, this trail is located right along the highway, with the river on one side and housing developments above the river bank on the other.  Though noisy at times, one never feels isolated; it is easily accessible for people living alongside the trail.  We saw school children from a nearby elementary school running on the trail with their PE teacher, old people practicing Tai-chi, and housewives doing gentle aerobic exercises in the parks by the trail.  Michael told us that Taiwan is a haven for retirees; there is a forced-retirement age at 65 and a functioning universal health care system for every citizen.  We ate breakfast (cold soybean milk and crepes with different fillings) at a quaint, little shack, or more like a makeshift shelter, on the hill above the lake at Bitan.  On the way back, Kirk's bike got a flat tire and we had to walk the bikes for about 30 minutes to a nearby town to see about having it patched.  Unfortunately, the bike shop we found did not open until after 10, and as a result, I took a taxi home with the broken bike while Michael and Kirk rode home by themselves.  Apparently I missed the fun they had of zipping through, what Kirk described as, waves of morning traffic, among cars, motorcycles, and bicycles. 

The upshot of all this is to tell you that I've got a tough brother!  He was diagnosed with bladder cancer a little over a year ago.  He went through an operation which lasted 10 hours to completely remove his bladder and had a new one reconstructed just last March. Afterwards came chemotherapy and a grueling process of learning to use his new bladder. Due to complications resulting from the scar tissues from the operation, his kidneys still are not able to function normally and he has to wear external bags along his legs. Apparently, the distance we rode that day was one of the shortest that he, his wife, and a bunch of friends have undertaken.  How he manages to build up his muscle strength in such short time and ride long-distance carrying external bags on his legs is beyond me.  He is scheduled to be back in the operating room to have the scar tissues removed in early August and we hope that it would completely free him to live as actively as he wishes.

Here's looking at you, big Brother!

LaLa Taipei & Taiwanese female entrepreneurship

Lala Taipei

I would like to give a shout-out to Lala Taipei, the place we stayed at in Taipei.  It is a cross between a hostel and a B & B, or as they call it, a "Bed and Water".  Conveniently located, about $25 a night, clean beds, clean showers, common sitting and dining room, well-stocked kitchen, laundry facility, free wi-fi and loaner bicycles, in a safe, residential area, etc., all the essential amenities a traveler needs in a foreign place.   But the most interesting aspect about Lala Taipei is the fact that it is an enterprise started in late 2009 by a group female friends (which includes my sister-in-law) who pooled money together to buy a flat, remodel and furnish it, and operate it as a guest house/hostel.  They have since duplicated their business model to include a location in Flushing, New York, as well as Los Angeles, and Ginza, Japan.  They have also expanded their operation and invested in a cafe and a bookstore.  Quite a formidable group of women!  Taiwan has made great strides since I left 30 years ago. Kirk and I were both struck by the signs of vibrancy on the faces and in the gaits of people on the streets, of self-sufficiency and confidence, and the live-and-let-live attitude toward the ad hoc enterprise of making or eking out a living.  I'm not sure if I don't harbor a sense of longing for the place I left, but there is no going back to one's childhood.

Thriving

Green wall

I noticed while walking around Taipei these curious, clever installations affixed to the fences of all kinds of construction projects going on in the city.  Instead of the "pardon our dust" signs we see in construction sites here, which is nothing but a pure formality, the construction companies in Taiwan actually install live, breathing plants on their construction fences, creating a kind of green wall all around the perimeters of ugly construction sites.  They not only beautify the cityscape but also help purify the air and reduce pollution!  As the construction of tall city buildings normally takes months, if not years, these green walls provide a great service to improve the quality of life for people living in the city.  Now seems like a good time to segway into another point of difference between most U.S.metropolises and those in Taiwan.   Here people come to town to work and leave for home in the suburbs after work.  In Taiwan, the places for home and work are not so sharply segregated.  Most buildings usually consist of store fronts on the ground floor and residential flats above. And commercial buildings frequently bump against apartments and shops.  A continuous covered walkway links all the buildings in a block together, though not in a uniform manner.  The convenience of this kind of living arrangement makes an enormous difference to the character of everyday life; instead of getting in a car every time one wants to do anything, one can just walk to places to shop or to get a bite to eat, something familiar for those who are lucky enough to be able to live in cities such as New York.   


Lastly, I want to share with you a video clip I took of my sister-in-law having her face "done" in a traditional Taiwanese manner.  It is a dying art; I remember sitting at my grand mother's feet watching her face done in the same manner.  We went in search of one of the few practitioners of this art form in a crowded night market.  I'm not sure how to describe it - something like a person using threads winding around her fingers with one end bit in her teeth to pluck the unwanted hair on a woman's face.  It is also supposed to clean the pores and soften the skin.  I expect it's rather painful.  Carolina was actually in tears but the experience was worth it, according to her. In this video, you can also get a feel for how lively the night scene is in Taipei.  

Taiwanese Puppetry

Glove Puppet Theater

Puppet Master

My brother took us to visit a Puppet Theatre Museum in Taipei, whose mission is to preserve and promote Asian puppet theatre traditions and cultures.  What a fun place it was and we got to meet some very interesting people there as well. The style of puppetry which I grew up with is Glove Puppetry - the puppets are made of carved and painted wooden heads, palms, and feet and little elaborate costumes as torsos and limbs.  Here is a video clip on YouTube of the Taiyuan Puppet Theatre Company's performance in Prague.  In addition to glove puppets, the museum has a large collection of other forms of Asian puppetry including marionettes, stick, shadow, and water puppets.  We were also taken to see the museum's highly-valuable puppet collection in a climate-controlled room, currently maintained by a young college student from Leiden University in the Netherlands. She has been in Taiwan for two years and can speak, read, and write in Chinese.  Very impressive! We also met the resident puppet carver, who told us about the guardian of the puppeteers, whose wish is always consulted as to whether he would like to travel with the companies on tours, and the Performance Coordinator, Wu Shan-Shan, who has extensive training and experience in Western theater and dance.  The Director of the Museum, Robin Ruizendaal, who is a friend of Michael's but was away on vacation, is also Dutch and holds a Ph.D in Sinology from Leiden University.  There seems to be a deep cultural connection between the Taiwanese and the Dutch people.  There is a fort, Fort Zeelandia, built by the Dutch in the 1600's in my home town, Anping;  I grew up scaling its thick walls. 

Puppet Workshop

Marionettes

Glove Puppet Costumes

Close up

Puppet Theatre Front

Back

Glove Puppets

Painted Head

    

Precious Japanese Puppet

Glove Puppet

Too cute!

Marionettes close-up

Puppet in storage

Puppet in storage

Chinese shadow Puppets

Three-dimensional shadow puppets

Leather shadow puppet

Shadow puppet

Shadow Puppet

Blessing from the guardian
of the puppeteers

Taiwan - Foodies' Paradise

Michael & Carolina

Thanks to the hospitality of my brother and his wife, our four-day stay in Taipei was structured around meal time - morning, noon, night, and anytime in between when the fancy struck us.  There seems to be an endless varieties of food available in Taipei, but to seek out and savor the very best, one needs to have a veritable cicerone to show the way.  The followings are pictures of just a few samples of the delicious food we had in Taipei; a lot more was consumed but not recorded in the heat of action.  We were told by a foodie friend of Michael's that Tainan, where my other brother lives and close to where I grew up, is the hottest place for the authentic Taiwanese cuisine.  Kirk and I now have our next vacation destination in our sights.

Sashimi & raw sea urchin

Fish cheeks

Pig intestines & lungs

Northern style food from China

Bitter tea

Michael took us wandering around older parts of Taipei the day before we left.  We practically started our eating odyssey from 7 o'clock in the morning till after dark, with a brief nap in the afternoon to recover before dinner.  He had our route planned around food stops; we walked a little, a breakfast stop at the East Gate market, walked some more, a refreshment stop, then walked a bit more, a beef noodle stop, and so on, until we arrived at a tea shop where Kirk had a cup of bitter tea, which he claimed to be the best tea he has ever tasted but which was too bitter for me.  It was made of a secret concoction of different herbs and dished out by the owner of the shop & the secret holder, who sat by himself behind an inner counter, guarding the silver urn from which it was dispensed.  There was a plaque on the back wall citing twenty benefits of drinking bitter tea, one of which is lowering the body temperature, which Kirk confirmed to be true!

Tokyo - the city of thousand skyscrapers

Tokyo skyline 

from 33rd floor hotel window

In contrast to Kyoto, Tokyo, a city mostly built-up after the Second World War, is jam-packed with not only humanity but also skyscrapers.  Unlike most major cities in the U.S., the skyscrapers in Tokyo are not concentrated or confined in the area near the city centers, they seem to grow indeterminably into the horizon without end.  Kirk was struck by the faces of commuters on the subway trains which seemed to him to be full of quiet desperation, and the pedestrians on the streets wearing the uniform of the "salarymen," white shirts and black or grey suits. 


We spent an afternoon in Tokyo looking up recent buildings by famous architects.  These are mainly flagship stores of European luxury brands, though unique and interesting, they are somewhat forbidding and unwelcoming, even with porters stationed at the doors to let you in.  Here are some pictures of the facades of some of the buildings; unfortunately, most of them do not allow photographs inside.

Maison Hermes by

Christian Dior

Renzo Piano

Prada Store by 

      

        Herzog & de Meuron

Shopping Mall by Tadao Ando

       

There are, however, two earlier modern buildings which we liked very much, one is the National Museum of Western Art by Le Corbusier, one of the giants of modern architecture, completed in 1959 and the other, the 1999 Gallery of Horyuji Treasures by Yoshio Taniguchi, who is known in the U.S. for his 2004 redesign of MOMA in New York. The former is the first and only building by Le Corbusier which I have seen in person; I was pleasantly surprised to see how well thought out it was, though the gallery space could be improved by adding a couple more feet to his modular human scale.  In contrast, Yoshio Taniquchi created a soaring entrance hall for his building, approached by a concrete walkway suspended over a shallow pool - an understated facade evoking the spirit of a Zen Temple.

National Museum of Western Art

Gallery of Horyuji Treasures

Not all of Tokyo is occupied by nondescript skyscrapers.  The Imperial family manages to carve out a large chunk of Tokyo's premium real estate and preserve it for their palace and pleasure ground surrounded by a moat and large park.  Also, Shin took us to a restaurant located in one of the oldest (100+ year old) buildings rarely seen in Tokyo.  It had formerly a commercial store front and a residence in the back.  The intervention in front of the building is rather interesting - it serves not only to reinforce the structure of the facade, it also sets it off from the buildings around it as if it were behind a museum case, made of steel slats and glass in the vernacular of traditional Japanese buildings.

Imperial Palace

Rare old building in Tokyo

Teacher and student

Facade intervention

Kyoto - the city of thousand temples

Rock Garden, Ryoanji Temple

Kyoto, the old Capital city of Japan until 1868, contains over 2000 temples and shrines, 17 of which are listed as Historical Monuments by UNESCO World Heritage Site.  These ancient temples are interwoven into the fabric of modern day Kyoto, many of which are separated simply by tall walls from their mundane neighbors of commercial buildings, apartment complexes, shops, and traffic noise.  In our brief stay at Kyoto, we only managed to visit four of them, Ginkaku-ji, Honenin Temple, Kiyomizu-dera, and Ryoan-ji.  

I had hoped to experience these temples in their peaceful, zen-like settings but to my great dismay, everywhere we went we were met with teeming crowds of school children, tourists, souvenir hawkers, and refreshment vendors.  Apparently this happened to be the annual field trip time for the graduating classes of Japanese schools, and as Tokyo was still under the cloud of the Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster, many of the them chose to come to Kyoto instead.  You should not be fooled by the disarmingly tranquil scene of my picture of the famous Rock Garden in Ryoanji Temple - it was a center of stillness amidst the din of loud chatter, laughter, and the clicking of cameras!

Costly meal in authentic setting

Food in Japan is considerably more expensive than in the States.  A tall coffee at Starbucks costs 340 Yen, about $4.25, a subway ride, $2, a bus ride, $2.75. Shin took us to a traditional Japanese restaurant on our first night in Kyoto.  We had a private room and were served by a middle-age woman in a Kimono. We had a fix-priced menu meal consisting of several small plates of local delicacies and a couple bottles of beer.  The bill came to a whopping 19,000 Yen, approximately $240 for three.  Luckily, not all restaurants in Kyoto were that expensive.  We found a hole in the wall place near our hotel called Sushi Express, which serves up single plates of sushi (two pieces each) on a conveyor belt.   All the diners sit on stools in front of the circular counter around the conveyor belt while a couple of sushi chefs stationed inside the ring continuously put new plates on the belt. There is a spigot of hot water in front of each customer to make tea and each grabs what looks good to him or her as the plates move by like model trains on a track. You eat till you're full, then a waiter counts up the number of empty plates in front of you and writes up a ticket for you to pay on your way out; each plate costs 137 Yen, about $1.75.  We got pretty stuffed after 10 plates or so, for a total about $20 for both of us.  Apparently a lot of foreign travelers like us knew about this kind of places, for there were several around the counter while we were there.  To give you a cost of living comparison between Japan and Taiwan, for similar Sushi Express places in Taipei, the cost for each plate is NT$30, about $1.10, while a subway token costs about $0.75 and the bus fare is $0.55.


Here are some pictures of the temples we visited.  Mind you, notwithstanding the crowd and noise, they are magnificent in their carefully landscaped gardens surrounded by lush vegetation.

Garden - Ginkaku-ji

Entry walk - Ginkaku-ji

Cemetery - Honenin

Built on a cliff - Kiyomizu-dera

Crowd scene - Kiyomizu-dera

Crowd scene - Kiyomizu-dera

Porch - Ryoan-ji

Lotus pond - Ryoan-ji

Garden gate - Ryoan-ji

Dipping well - Ryoan-ji