lai’er

My journey is over. We’re back in Cincinnati, almost completely giving in to jet lag. That is, we’ve been indulging in excessive napping. This will be my last post. (sniff)

With 1,190 page views over the course of last month, I’d say this blogging operation was a success. Over 30% of readers came from my Facebook profile, which is surprising. I guess that just shows how important the Facebook is. My videos, photos, and blog posts from the trip show up in 7 of the top 10 in the Google search results page when queried with “Ryan Child Taiwan”. This is the 33rd post, and people (not including myself) have left 21 comments, which I think is just great.

I’ll continue to post to my Twitter stream as I did before my trip. If you subscribed to my Yahoo Pipes feed (aggregation of photos, videos, posts and twitters) you’ll probably just get the Twitter updates from now on, along with the occasional video. This feed will probably be discontinued sometime in the future, so if you like getting my Twitter updates it would be best to unsubscribe to my Taiwan feed and go right to my Twitter page. If you want to continue to see photos I post of whatever, my Flickr is http://flickr.com/photos/ryanchild. Videos, http://ryanchild.blip.tv.

So what will happen to this blog? I’ll make a backup for my personal records and probably move it to a subdirectory here at ryanchild.com. I’m not quite sure what will happen to ryanchild.com at this point, but I’ll try to think of something soon. Apart from this blog, my focus has been mostly on Legendary Web Solutions, where I plan to be promoting my web design and hosting business.

Well, on with life. Thanks for reading, everybody.

Last night we went to the same temple where I participated in that ceremony for the Buddha of one thousand hands. This time we were praying for a safe trip and I guess for Yi-Ching to do well in school and for me to not go broke etc. There are now nine gods enshrined at this temple, so we each got nine incense sticks and walked around, praying (拜 bai4) and leaving incense sticks in front of the different statues.

Before we left I made them stay behind and teach me how to do this thing called 求籤 (qiu2 qian1). 求 means “ball” and 籤 can either mean “note” or “stick”. Both of these things were part of the whole process so I can’t say which it was in this case. Then again, one can’t always take apart words like this. Sometimes the characters in a word must be chosen for other reasons. Proper nouns of course are phoenetic, and “ham” (火腿) is “fire leg” if you break it down (as I did in an earlier post).

Yi-Ching shot a video with my cameraphone and I threw in some text to clarify the whole process. Enjoy:

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I’m eating a 便當 (bian4 dang1, lunch box) from 7-11 right now and getting ready to pack and clean up this place, because we’re leaving soon, at approx 10:30PM our time (9:30AM Tuesday, Central, 10:30AM Eastern). I’ll write one final post from Cincinnati.

I took this picture a day or two after that huge billboard was put up in front of the Presidential Building, publicizing Taiwan’s recently announced referendum on UN membership. Yi-Ching just sent me an article from yahoo.com.tw about White House National Security Council senior director for Asian affairs, Dennis Wilder, denouncing Taiwan for expressing its desire to rejoin the UN. Apparently they wouldn’t be able to join now anyway and they’re just making China mad. There’s an article in English from AFP here.

In case you didn’t know, Taiwan is very divided right now politically, much like America. Northern Taiwanese tend to support the pan-blue KMT while the southerners are generally pan-green. The current president, Chen Shui-bian, is DPP, so hopefully the citizens of Taipei will blame their government rather than hating me for Wilder’s comment.

I just got back from dinner with Yi-Ching and her parents. I think tonight was the first time I’ve ripped the head off of a cocktail shrimp, and I did this to many shrimp. You can’t see it too well in the video, but stuff squired like 3 inches into the air when I popped this guy’s head off. Yuck. I’m sure they serve shrimp like this in some US restaurants, but I don’t think I’ve been to any of them. Oh, and the guys at the table next to us were putting ice in their beer. I’ve been tagging all my food-related photos on Flickr, so you can see them here, although I’ve run into the limits of free Flickr accounts, namely only being able to display up to 200 photographs at a time, so some of the pictures from the early stages of my trip probably aren’t viewable any longer. One of my favorites so far (to blog about, not to eat) has been the pineapple and deep-fried shrimp covered in mayo and sprinkles. We had that tonight too.

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Sun Yat-Sen (中山) was the first president of the Republic of China and is considered the founding father (國父) of modern China and Taiwan. He was a revolutionary who helped overthrow the Qing dynasty and spoke about non-imperialist nationalism, abolishing unfair trade contracts forced upon China by Western powers, and incorporating and adapting Western knowledge into Asia without destroying Eastern culture. This building was built in memory of him over a period of eight years from 1964 to 1972 and houses a 2,500 seat performance hall — the largest in Taiwan. There was a rehearsal going on in the auditorium for a dance. I took some pictures in addition to the one above, which you can see in the photostream.

In the main hall with the statue of Sun Yat-Sen I witnessed a changing of the guards ceremony, and I caught most of it on film with my cameraphone:

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Everything was so beautifully timed, I was curious to see what it would sound like if I sped up the audio x8:

I suspect this would be more interesting if I had used something other than my cameraphone and audacity. Even with this recording, though, there’s definitely a discernible tempo. Can you hear it?

Here’s another video, of the dance rehearsal:

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We went to a KTV (Karaoke) with three of Yi-Ching’s friends on Tuesday. It was my first time singing Karaoke anywhere, believe it or not. You pay a flat fee for a room, service, and all the snacks and drinks you can eat, and then there’s another fee for the songs you sing. I kind of tried to sing a few songs. They had the numa numa song, with the Chinese version of the flash video playing in the background. Americans of course know about this song because of that guy who made a video recording of himself lipsyncing and doing a funny dance, but it originally became popular because some Japanese guy heard it and made a creative flash video based on the lyrics and posted it online. People started talking and creating their own videos and now this Moldovan band’s song is known and loved across the globe.

Sorry, I just think that’s awesome. I love the internet. Anyway here’s a video of Yi-Ching and a couple of her friends singing some Taiwanese song.

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Yi-Ching had to go buy some stuff with her mom today, so I took the opportunity to wander around by myself. My first stop was Longshan Temple. This is a building built by Chinese settlers in 1738. The wooden ceiling above an incense-burning place was blackened by all the smoke. I had a good look around and enjoyed the really magnificent architecture. Pictures here. After that I took the MRT to another temple, which turned out to be a newer building, so I lost interest. I found a map nearby the station and saw found the place with the best coolness/distance ratio which turned out to be the Taiwan Beer brewery. I had some Taiwan Beer (台灣啤酒) in Pingxi with Yi-Ching and her friends but it was definitely better on tap there at the brewery. I saw a really big beer bottle and took a crack at a little thing the kids these days are calling “vlogging“. Here you go:

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I then walked a long, long ways to Taipei 101 because I knew I wouldn’t get lost if I just kept looking for that. It’s currently the world’s tallest building, but someone’s working on showing them up right now. Seriously though, it’s huge. There’s a shopping mall under it that has Prada and Swarovski and all those guys. I got some nice pictures.

You may have noticed that the video player in this post is different. I’ve been having troubles uploading videos to Google Video and YouTube so I finally switched to blip.tv (I don’t know why it took me so long) and now there’s an RSS stream for my videos too (at least from now on) at http://ryanchild.blip.tv/rss. I updated the Yahoo Pipes mashup too so now you get my photos, blog posts, twiters, and videos all in one place!

Today is July 15th according to the lunar calendar, which means that there is a full moon, and the gate to hell is wide open for the ghosts of people’s ancestors to come and eat and drink. It’s a special day during the ghost month — the lunar month of July — when people pray for (or to?) their ancestors, burn “hell money” (bank notes that dead ancestors can use in hell for luxurious items or pay to Satan as bail bonds), and place food and drink outside on tables along with incense, as an offering. Most store owners participate too, so there was a lot of incense and smoke in the air today while we were walking around. Here’s a video of some hell money burning and food offering I took while we were walking by:

This kind of stuff happens throughout the month, but today is significant as the gate is the widest, and the moon is full. I think it’s Ghost Day, or Chinese Halloween, but Wikipedia doesn’t agree. You can read more about Ghost Month there: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_Festival

I took a video at an intersection Friday night while I was waiting for Yi-Ching and her mom. This is just a few blocks from where I live. There are scooters everywhere..yes, a couple of them did drive right by me on the sidewalk, missing me by a foot or two. By the way, I’ve only seen maybe one police car so far, and I haven’t seen anybody getting pulled over. Lanes don’t really seem to matter much. Scooters just kinda go wherever, including sidewalks sometimes.

So we’re back from South Taiwan. I survived, and the mountains were pretty. We saw some old forts too. Catch up on the flickr photostream and twitters if you haven’t already here. I could talk about the places we visited, but a picture is worth a thousand words. Most of my photos on flickr are tagged with a location so you know where they were taken. It seems more appropriate to talk about what didn’t happen, because that’s really what this trip was about. I didn’t want to write about personal stuff here because I know most people don’t want to read it, but I don’t know what else to write about. Here’s a top 10 list of the things Yi-Ching and I can’t do when her parents are around:

10. Share a bar of ice cream
9. Go to a hotel exercise room together
8. Hold hands
7. Sleep in her bed when she’s not there
6. Share a beverage
5. Hug
4. Sleep in the same room, in separate beds, without being separated by at least 10 feet and her dad
3. Exist as a couple without her being lectured by her parents EVERY NIGHT
2. Engage in physical contact

And, finally, #1 was undesirable and would have been ruled out tonight if her brother hadn’t stepped in…
1. Ride on a public bus together

You might think this is a “cultural thing” but there’s no way other parents here can be this crazy. Other Taiwanese I’ve talked to have been surprised. These people are really generous and hospitable up front, but they really seem determined to separate Yi-Ching and I at every opportunity, which not only puts us both in a bad mood but keeps us from going out and doing things on a regular basis, which is kind of why I’m here. Her dad took a couple days off from work to drive us down to Tainan and we stopped and saw some places, ate lots of food, and stayed in two hotels, but it would be better for everybody if they had just let us go by ourselves. I mean, how are they planning to deal with their daughter getting on an airplane to America with me? I don’t understand these people at all.

I know, I should be going out and looking around on my own. If I had known it was going to be like this I definitely would have done more planning.