Uranium City, 1978

2007-07-21T10:42:00.001+08:00

Today is my last full day in Taiwan . . . Then it is to Vancouver to hang out at Clayton's until I find my own place to stay while I do my teaching degree at Simon Fraser University.

I am excited.

And I bought a new computer--having used the school's computers for the last three years!

Excitement galore!

Spider Eats Fly -- World Watches With Bated Breath

2006-05-25T21:12:00.000+08:00

That's right, the bug parade continues...

...with pictures of a spider eating a fly.

Exactly what everone wants to see.

Well, I'm into it, at least.

Such a fascinating phenomenon deserves more pictures...

The last one.

And a stick insect thrown in for good measure. If you are curious about how big this guy is, the portion visible in this picture is about 10 cm.

Okay, the next post will feature people doing stuff, and even a picture of me! --but doing nothing.

2006-03-31T22:36:00.000+08:00

Back in Taiwan in with Alfreda.

2006-03-31T22:27:00.000+08:00

Brian, Sue and I, as seen by a 4ft photographer.

2006-03-31T22:25:00.000+08:00

Brian, making us all a some chow mein.

2006-03-31T22:24:00.000+08:00

Thomas, about to find a target.

The Third Leg: Edmonton and Camrose

2006-02-24T15:25:00.000+08:00

Seven months have passed since my trip back to Canada, and I fear I can put off the final installment pictures no longer.

Throughout the trip I’d been taking pictures of mundane things, buildings mostly, to show friends back in Taiwan. I’ve mostly kept these off the blog since they are in no way remarkable to anyone who has lived in North America. Still, for some reason I am today inclined to post a few which I took in the third leg of my journey.

On the bus from Grande Prairie to Edmonton, we stopped in a small town called Sangudo. I was, as I had been in Sexsmith, strangely drawn to the architecture of the village’s main street.

As I arrived in Edmonton--the city I call my "hometown" when pressed for an answer--I continued to take pictures of things I thought might interest my friends here, like the big boot:

And this street-sign inspired building which I don't think I ever really looked twice at when I was living in Edmonton:

I got off at the downtown bus terminal and headed over to city hall to take some more pictures since it would be a while before Kasia (my friend and host) was off work.

I was surprised to find the annual street performers festival in full swing. City Hall and Churchill Square were packed with people.

I was also surprised to see that the formerly grassy square had been paved over.

My gracious host Kasia who not only shared her home with me but also fed me fahitas, BC greens, and wine...

and took me out drinking with her bf. This is a picture of them from a wine tour they went on... in France, was it Kash?

I took a wrong turn somewhere and found my self in the monstrosity known locally as West Ed. I took some pictures of the attractions there which proved amazing to my students when I got back.

After Edmonton, it was to Camrose, where my big sis lives with my nephew Thomas.

thomas

Sue and Brian. I'll be cutting out of the end of the semester so that I can see my sis get married, with Dad in action again. (My parents are twins and my dad marries his kids... :P)

Thomas and me. Sue, if you ever want to take a break from child-rearing, I'll take him off your hands anytime. Consider the advantages!

At the end of my trip Sue and Thomas saw me off at the airport in Edmonton. Not so much later I would be in the Vancouver airport waiting for my flight and writing part of the first post. Now that I've finally put up these pictures (and failed to tell any kind of story) I'm already looking forward to July when I'll be back in Canada again to see Sue and Brian get married and do more visiting.

The Second Leg: Grande Prairie and Sexsmith

2005-11-05T17:23:00.000+08:00

My apologies for the long wait, but here are a selection of photos from the second leg of my great Canadian journey home.

My mom and dad picked me up from the bus stop in Hinton, shaving about 6 hours off my trip from Vancouver to Grande Praire (via Calgary!—quite out of the way, if you know your Western Canadian geography). Needless to say it was great to see them again after a two year absence.

Dad taking a nap in the car after having driven a few hours that day.

A common sight in the Canadian Rockies—moose on the highway. Dangerously common, in fact. A foreshadowing of things to come?

Oh, Canada. Quite a change from the Korean and Taiwanese landscapes of the past two years in my life.

Another highway landscape.

A train skirting a mountainside.

Gradually the mountains became foot hills and the foot hills became prairies and the prairies, grand prairies.

In the prairies towns are built around grain elevators. This is the latest small Albertan town that my parents have called home: Sexsmith. Where on earth did that name come from?

This is the trailer in Sexsmith where my parents are living while they wait for their house to be renovated after the fire that occurred the day after they bought it. For pictures and the rest of the story, see my dad’s blog, “Carpentering for the Carpenter”—linked on the right.

My bro and my pops, in my brother’s room in the trailer. He is attending the college in nearby Grande Prairie, so he is living with them.

Ron and I, and Ron's friend, Jeff.

Dad and his boys. Ron is showing off his bike, which would later cause us some trouble and contribute to a delayed and ultimately long trip back to his tree-planting camp.

A picture of a picture of the farm where my dad grew up.

Since there is nothing to do in Sexsmith, any going out entails going into Grande Prairie—the booming “gateway to the North”.

My mom and dad and I drinking coffee and chatting.

Dad finds some people he knows there and goes to chat with them.

My mom, working in the cosmetics department in Walmart.

My dad, having a burger on his way home after a day of building doors.

This bulletin board struck me as a culturally significant, and I snapped a few pictures to show people back in Taiwan.

My brother wanted to take me out to his tree-planting camp in the mountains so I could take a little helicopter ride with them and enjoy the scenery. He, Jeff and I played basketball at his college gym in the evening and then set out quite late on the drive to the camp. Shortly after falling asleep I was woken up by the screech of tires and a crash. I opened my eyes and saw this:

We had hit a moose.

It glanced off the front passenger side of the minivan…

…damaging it to a surprisingly limited degree.

The moose, however, wasn’t so lucky. It laid down in the ditch and huffed for a couple hours before dying. We waited on a fairly deserted road until someone came and gave Ron a lift to his camp where he could borrow a company truck and come back for us and our stuff.

After an all-too-short sleep, it was breakfast time, so we joined the line-up into the breakfast trailer.

These are the trucks that get filled with boxes of seedlings, then trudge up rough logging roads in the mountains.

But this is the transport that I was really looking forward too: the chopper. It was a lot smaller up close than I had imagined it would be in my mind.

Ron was kind enough to let me sit up front next to the pilot.

Flying a helicopter is complex. The pilot assured us that if we tried to pilot it based solely on assumptions and feeling, we would be dead within fifteen seconds.

The ride and the view was every bit as cool as I’d expected.

My brother, the foreman, watching over the transport of crew and materials.

The planters, bagging up.

Me at the cache.

Just below the cut block, there was a river, which I had seen from the helicopter, so I went down to explore.

Ron came with me and snapped a picture of me on the suspension bridge.

At the end of the day, we went back to the camp and mom and dad picked me up to take me back to Sexsmith. Of course, pictures had to be taken.

Mom and her two boys. It has been a long day for me, and I am visibly tired.

Ron, in the rain, showing my mom how the seedlings are packed in bundles, and the bundles into boxes.

After a few days in Sexmith and Grande Prairie, it was time to set out on the last leg: Edmonton to visit my friend Kasia and generally see the city that I call my "hometown" and Camrose where my sister lives with her boy, Thomas. But that story may be another while coming...

That's all for now folks!

The First Leg: Vancouver

2005-08-31T17:45:00.000+08:00

Well, here is the first batch of photos!

The first leg of my journey to the West was Vancouver, where I dropped in on my pal of pals Clayton and did my best to invade his privacy.

Clayton is not the skinny arts student I remember. He used to be at least as skinny as me but after starting to work out regulary he blossomed into a real man's body. (Proving that not all vegans must necessarily be as skinny as me. Take note!)

Clayton resides with his baby-faced beau, Tim. Or perhaps Tim is only baby-faced in comparison to Clayton's new grisly look. They claimed to be a little hung-over after recent birthday celebrations for Tim, but they were energetic enough to deal with a culture-shocked intruder for a few days, and graciously skipped their regular evening sessions in the gym.

Billy had changed too. He seemed a lot mellower than the aggressively affectionate and clumsy juggernaut that I knew, but Clayton suggested that it might actually be me who has mellowed.

Because I was there during the week and Clayton and Tim both have regular jobs, I had a lot of time to myself, and the opportunity to admire the guys' furniture.

Billy was always willing to be a model for these furniture shots.

They live near English Bay, and right against a large park (larger in fact than the downtown area) so it was a nice place for me to wander around.

As I mentioned before, I took a lot of pictures of buildings and various environs both in Vancouver and elsewhere to show people back in Taiwan. Here is one.

Here is another. A nice place to have your lunch, I think.

Somehow the sight of people just hanging out on the steps of an art gallery struck me as a sign of an advanced culture. But like I said, I was culture shocking at the time...

After spending most of my time wandering around downtown, I took Claytons advice and took a trip out to Vancouver's forested burbs.

Suspension bridge! Unfortunately I wasn't able to take any pictures of the bridge that conveyed how high it was or how nice its surroundings were.

Boring stream photo?

Well how about another?

I didn't bring my trunks, so there would be no miniature-cliff-diving for me. It looked like fun.

After a few days of enjoying Vancouver and the company of Clayton and Tim, I hopped on the bus and headed East across the rockies to the praries--to Grande Prarie, in fact. But that post will come later...

Here are some pictures from the bus ride:

Tomorrow is a Typhoon Day! No classes for me to teach. I'll be hunkered down with bottles of water, instant foods, and "Garth Marenghi's Dark Place" (a funny British TV show).

Bye for now!

Bizzee

2005-08-16T18:01:00.000+08:00

Wow! 2 weeks since my last post and that travelogue I promised is far from forth-coming...

However, summer classes end this week and I have a week off (in theory) before the school year officially begins. Hopefully, during that time I'll at least be able to fire off some pictures and captions.

Although I haven't been teaching a full schedule lately, I've been kept busy by cleaning and painting the dormitory apartment I'll be moving into this week. I'll be living on campus with a coworker, but not before we get the stink out of the apartment. It's frighteningly persistent.

Later, gators.

I'm biggity back, y'all

2005-08-02T12:39:00.000+08:00

Well, I've been back in Taiwan for a week and a half already, and I've been pretty busy getting prepared for my summer and fall classes. In fact, my plane landed at 5 am and I was in the office before noon the same day, online slightly scatterbrained.

I've finally posted a stream of thought that I wrote while waiting for my 2am flight in the Vancouver airport (below). It is slightly disturbing in that it is pretty critical of Taiwan, and I have never wanted to become one of those non-stop complaining foreigners that are so common here. Since arriving, I've become a little more equivocal in my assesment of the situation in Taiwan. For example, there are indeed a lot of trees in my area of Taipei, and Taiwan would be quite beautiful in general if you could see the hills clearly (unfortunately everything is obscured by a haze which I assume is pollution-related.)

I have indeed become more of a bitter foreigner though. Since returning I've somewhat rudely told my new boss that I don't trust the school administration and that contracts don't mean much in Taiwan, and the oxymoronic comment to my girlfriend that Canadians don't generalize about races and nationalities as much as Taiwanese do.

Anyways, I've got lots of pictures to post from my trip. I'll try to digest it over the coming weeks. But now, it's class time...

Vancouver Airport, 1:30 am

2005-07-21T16:32:00.000+08:00

As an "Alien Resident" of Taiwan, it is fitting that I was a "Visitor" citzen of Canada during my trip back, but this thought hadn't yet occured to me when the Canadian customs agent asked me upon my arrival how long I'd be staying. I was a little surpised by the question--after all, wasn't I a citizen returning home after a long time abroad? Well, I wasn't exactly returning home at all. I visited 4 different cities which all felt like home for different reasons, but there was no house for me to return to. The homes I stayed in, I stayed in for the first time. I was a visitor of 17 days snapping touristy pictures of the Canadian mundane: sprawling residential area, vast prairie landscapes and dirt-bike dealerships.

The pictures were for the benefit of my friends in Taiwan. I wanted to show them what it looked like where I'm from, but I couldn't help feeling guilty, wondering, am I really just trying to prove that Taiwan is ugly in comparison?

Canada-Taiwan comparison has been at the front of my thoughts thoughout my trip, and I suppose that is to be expected. Less expected has been all the warm and fuzzy feeling about Canada that the trip has inspired in me.

When I stepped into the Taiwan air for the first time I felt slowed by its viscosity. Upon this return to Canada after about two and a half years abroad, I was just as taken aback by the freshness and fragrance of the air, even in the cities. I kept on repeating to myself thoughout the trip--so many trees...

I took a lot of pictures of typical buildings, hearing myself say to some hypothetical Taiwanese construction industry person, "This is what you get when you use architects." I didn't take pictures of the people on the streets with their varied fashions and pursuits, though I wanted to so I could say to some hypothetical Taiwanese government minister, "This is what happens when people are given leisure time."

I kept on fearing (with good reason, apparently) that the trip was turning me into a cultural chauvinist. At the very least, for better or for worse, it has caused me to call myself, for the first time ever, patriotic.
I have it seems, fallen in love with my country.

Still I am excited to return "home" to Taiwan. Infact, I've gotten excited and nostalgic everytime I've heard Mandarin spoken during my trip here, barely able to keep from interrupting strangers' conversations to say, "I can speak Chinese too! Flatter me! Be impressed!"

--The end of my airport scribbling

The Bug Parade Continues

2005-06-28T16:25:00.000+08:00

Here are some more of pictures of insects, identified and otherwise...

Dragon Fly!

Big Moth!

But what is this? A coworker suggested centipede. Could be. Its body was about 8-10 centimeters long, but it took up a lot more room with those long legs and feelers. Can anyone identify it for me?

Grasshopper?

2005-06-21T01:03:00.000+08:00

This guy was on the Tom-the-Toad road. Unfortunately I wasn't able to get a well framed shot off in the dark before he jumped away. Is it a grasshopper? I guess so... It was about two to two and a half inches long. They make 'em big down here in the sub tropics...

Leaping Lizards!

2005-06-20T11:33:00.000+08:00

Gecko! I Saw this guy outside the school and snapped a picture for you gecko afficianados out there, before he blazed off.

More Remarks On Unremarkable Animals

2005-06-14T13:20:00.000+08:00

Another rainy night and the dumb flutter bugs came back again, but the geckos didn’t come to my rescue this time. Instead it was Marc who did the killing with an electric bug-zapping racket. I prefer the geckos because they don’t leave the carcasses lying around on the ground.

When I went into our office’s decommissioned bathroom-cum-recycling room, I saw a gecko on the wall and got my camera out and snapped a picture before it scurried up the wall to the window frame and out of sight.

The only other gecko I’ve seen in the past few weeks is a dead one that crawled into a sign and died there. The sign is beside the front gate of my school. The little lizard’s body has withered so that you can see what appears to be it’s little ribs. I took a picture of it, which looks kind of cool. Some flowers that are in front of the sign are reflected on the plastic pane forming a death wreath around the corpse. It is a little disgusting of course, so I’ve placed it below this post with a warning, so don’t look if you don’t think you’d like to see the desiccated corpse of a formerly cute lizard.

I see a lot of frogs on the road to my apartment, but unfortunately, few of them are alive and three-dimensional. Which is to say that road is pockmarked with Tom-the-Toads who didn’t make it across. Every week there is at least one fresh squashing, and because I walk up and down this road every day, I get to see the frogs devolve from positively disgusting exploded amphibians to a leathery mat to a mere grey blotch.

I will spare you the gore and just show you a happy guy sitting on the side of the road, perhaps contemplating his chances of making it to the other side.

pretom toad

WARNING: Slightly Gross Picture

2005-06-14T13:19:00.001+08:00

This poor fellow crawled into the sign in front of my school and died, at least 2 weeks ago. Now everyday as I walk onto the school grounds I'm confronted with a grim reminder of mortality...

Back to the Motherland

2005-06-04T15:56:00.000+08:00

Well, I've got my ticket! I will finally be back in Canada for a visit after nearly 2 and a half years out of the country!

I'm arriving in Vancouver on the 4th of July and will be going from there to various places in Alberta. So if you live in Western Canada and you want to receive a visit from yours truly, now is your chance!

It is a short window though... I'll be heading back to Taiwan from Vancouver on the 21st.

Star Wars!

2005-05-24T13:11:00.000+08:00

A bunch of coworkers and my friend Ivan and I all went out to see Star Wars together when it opened on Friday.

We saw it at a suitably sci-fi building--the Core Pacific City Living Mall. Rather an unwieldy name, I think. It isn't that there is a place called the Living Mall inside another place called Core Pacific City, but rather all five words are a single name for a single place. This is what it looks like:

The movie was everything I expected and not much to comment on. I was probably most interested in finding out why, when Darth Vader's head is shown at the end of Return of the Jedi, that it's all messed up. I had originally thought that he was extremely old, but infact he is just middle aged at that point. Episode three solved that for me.

My favorite scene was probably the openning shot which follows a pair of little fighter ships as they weave through a gigantic battlefield in space. It's hard for me to wrap my head around such a battle. It seems impossibly complex.

Before going to the movie, I was worried that I had forgotten everything I had seen in the other Star Wars movies and thus wouldn't appreciate all the loose-string-tying and whatnot so I found a website to help me reaquaint myself to the Star Wars universe. Check out the main page and the page on Star Wars history(which has been fleshed out alot more in "Expanded Universe" material, ie, comic books and cartoons).

Also this weekend, I went out with my girlfriend, Alfreda (pictured below) and saw a bunch of short animations made in Taiwan. They were shown as part of the Taiwan International Animation Festival in Taipei. Some of the animations were more visually interesting and surprising than Revenge of the Sith because they, much more like the first Star Wars film than the sequels, actually showed you something you had never seen before and couldn't expect.

Me and Alfreda!

Another Item of Interlingual Interest

2005-05-19T15:22:00.000+08:00

I came across an interesting anecdote on a blog I check from time to time-- http://litserial.blogchina.com/ --which I reproduce here. But first a preview: what English phrase do you think the Chinese sounds ai-ze-ren-de might sound like?

爱责仁德 = 投降?

I PICKED UP an old collection of Cordwainer Smith stories (The Best of Cordwainer Smith) the other day, and ran across the following anecdote in the forward, by J.J. Pierce:

While in Korea, Linebarger masterminded the surrender of thousands of Chinese troops who considered it shameful to give up their arms. He drafted leaflets explaining how the soldiers could surrender by shouting the Chinese words for 'love,' 'duty,' 'humanity,' and 'virtue'--words that happened, when pronounced in that order, to sound like 'I surrender' in English. He considered this act to be the single most worthwhile thing he had done in his life.

Linebarger here is Paul Linebarger, the real name of Cordwainer Smith. The Chinese words mentioned are probably 爱责仁德, pronounced "ài zé rén dé," a fair approximation of the English.

Interlingual Fun!

2005-05-19T13:27:00.000+08:00

No, not French kissing—I’m talking about the kind of the enjoyment of seeing how things translate, or fail to do so. Yes, this is something I consider fun. To wit:

Chinese uses the same word for alligator and crocodile, and another word for both hawk and eagle. I don’t mind that so much because I can’t tell these animals apart myself, but it also uses the same word for rat and mouse, which has been a barrier to my expressing myself on more than one occasion, not to mention an insult to mice.

It also uses the same word for burp and hiccup! I mean, give me a break! These are very different things, people!

In a translation class I teach I had students translate some pages from the children’s book, “Captain Underpants” and I discovered that there is no standard Chinese word for plunger, despite the fact that they do commonly exist here.

Often, students’ use of dictionaries make for odd word choices, such as in this letter to NBA star Allen Iverson:

“You can hegemonic your team to the playoffs.”

But other times it can turn a perfectly logical thought into a piece of poetry that twists the mind, as in this wonderful sentence:

“If the stream of the people are expression of surprise or doubt as to the quality of adjective, the line will be very, very long.”

A friend of mine told an anecdote about a very pragmatic interpretor who was assisting a foreign guest speak at a meeting. The foreign man told a joke, which the interpretor "translated" as, "He told a joke, laugh.” Everyone laughed, accoordingly.

The guest speaker may have marveled at how concise and effective the translation was. The interpreter made everyone look good in that scenario.

More Fauna from the Mountain!

2005-05-14T19:53:00.000+08:00

Slugs!

Snails!

Foot-long earthworms!

High School Students!

The one on the left (Tina) is all punked out with eyeliner, crosses, and suitable clothing under her school uniform because she had just performed an Avril Lavigne song on the outdoor stage.

This was part of our school's 50th anniversary celebration. The main event was a cheerleading competition between the classes. Their cheerleading was pretty good, especially considering it was totally self choreographed and without coaches. They just drew material from movies and music videos. (Unfortunately I forgot about my camera until late in the day, so no pictures...)

Malu: The Mystery Solved

2005-05-13T22:12:00.000+08:00

Malu, or in Chinese characters, 馬陸, are millipedes. I guess I've never seen one before. One time in Church (in New Norway, Alberta) a centipede dropped on my lap and freaked me out, though. Centipedes are scarier looking. They have long legs and move really fast (if the one from Church was indicative).

This quote from another website:

Millipedes differ from centipedes in that almost every segment bears 2 pairs of legs, the body is cylindrical instead of flattened, there are no venom-bearing claws, the antennae are short, and the reproductive organs open far forward on the body. Millipedes crawl slowly, whereas centipedes crawl rapidly. On the seventh segment of the male, one or both pairs of legs are modified as copulatory organs. A pair of scent glands on each segment, opening laterally, discharge a repugnant secretion. In some species, it can be discharged to a distance of nearly a meter and, in the case of some tropical species, has caused blindness in children (Hegner and Engemann, 1968).

So, I guess I should stop picking them up....

Alien Resident

2005-05-10T21:31:00.000+08:00

Alien Resident--that oxymoronic moniker now applies to me!

I have an ARC which means that I can do such Taiwanese things as pay low taxes and get health care so I can walk into a hospital and get an IV for any minor ailment.

It also means I can go back to Canada and then return to Taiwan again without going through the oft hasslesome visa application process.

I can also get a Taiwanese drivers license but the odds of a traffic cop speaking to someone who is visibily foreign is so slight that a drivers license is virtually unnecessary.

In other news, prompted by requests to see pictures of the gecko I refered to in a previous post, I've started a little catalogue of animal life in my neighborhood which you can see below. If anyone can tell me what a "malu" is, I'd appreciate it.

Malu

2005-05-10T21:30:00.000+08:00

I don't know what this is. It is a long crawly bug. This one was about 10 cm long, but they get longer. The students call them, "malu" in Chinese. They are harmless, and kind of cool, I think.