My marvellous miscellany

There will always be a few stubborn photographs left over that refuse to lend themselves to inclusion in some kind of photo-narrative. This problem may be overcome with resort to bundling them together under the thematic umbrella of being random or miscellaneous leftovers. Now that an unnecessary and long-winded introduction has been constructed we can move on to a commentary on the images themselves. Wonderful.

Journey to Monkey Mountain
Taiwan is home to a single indigenous species of monkey, the Formosan Rock Macaque. There are about 250,000 of them on the island and they typically live at elevations between 500 and 1500 metres although they have been found living as high as 3,000 metres in the central mountain range. Some months ago we took a trip on our scooter towards the central mountain range. We just kept going until the incline got more dramatic and then we decided to pull over for a break. Just before we were about to stop we saw a monkey on the road and it hardly flinched as we putted past. We had found our way to what we think was the "Monkey Mountain" that we have heard others talk about. The monkeys seemed to be concentrated around a large, long shed containing a few makeshift shops and a crowd of tourists. It became clear that the tourists were here to see the monkeys which must have lost some of their fear of people as they would come and sit on the ground or the roof of the shed, or anywhere they liked, having learned that people would throw food at them. Once we got over the novelty of having wild monkeys wandering around semi-oblivious to us, it got pretty old quickly and we were soon ready to be on our way.


This here be scooter country
We can't afford to buy a car to get us around the province but who needs the four, impact-absorbing walls of a car when you can accelerate yourself along the street at high speeds on a motor scooter. For the majority of the population and certainly the majority of foreigners in Taiwan, the motor-scooter is the way to get around; From one city to another or from your apartment building to the 7-11 half-a-block down the street. Yes, it is common enough to see somebody mount their Jockey 125 and accelerate for all of five seconds before decelerating to a stop and dismounting having reached their destination. The motor scooter is such an integral part of Taiwanese traffic that there are often lanes reserved for scooters (as in the image above).


Golden Beach
Beach - yes; Golden - no. For a boy who grew up close to the unpopulated, clean, white, sandy beaches of the south-west coast of Australia, Tainan's premiere beach comes as something of a disappointment. I am sorry to say that the local authorities do help things by failing to organise some kind of beach-cleanup. The beach is littered with countless bamboo poles, the remnants of a gazillion bamboo pearl-bed rafts that are used in pearl farming of the freshwater mussel that produces the pearls. As a side note, until relatively recently these freshwater mussels were considered pests by fish farmers because they could invade a farm pond and compete with the fish for oxygen and nutrients. Golden Beach is also littered with all kinds of fishing-related garbage from large blocks of foam to fishing tackle. Then there are the take-away tea cups and other food packaging. Lastly (as if I just created definitive categories of Golden Beach garbage) there are the miscellaneous odds and sods that somehow find their way into the sea and are then washed onto the beach (toys, random bits of wood, tyres, etc) , or the others that never left the land but still ended up at the sea-side (more toys, more random bits of wood, and more tyres, for example). Besides the garbage, the beach is a medium-grey colour that just reminds me of... sorry... dirty beaches.


Cyclist calm in face of certain disaster
I'm sure that if this were me, having ridden my bike over the edge and about to plunge into the river, I would have let go of the handle bars and been flailing wildly in a vain attempt to put as much space between the bicycle and myself as possible. Thus I respect the mettle displayed by the silhouetted man on the cycle in the image. He must have been one tough hombre.


One size fits all average-sized people
This disposable, plastic raincoat cost me NT$30 (about AU$1) and gave me the appearance of a man for whom fashion remained an enigma rolled up tightly inside a mystery. I had been riding my bicycle to work for months with barely a raindrop falling on me and was long-overdue for a severe drenching. I was finally forced to purchase some kind of plastic to protect me from the rain.


Style versus Content
While the smaller canals in Tainan may not be the kind of waterways that inspire reminiscences of Venice or Amsterdam, their utility inspires the movement of fishermen to, from and along the canals and the culturing of pearls. I have a feeling that the bamboo racks in this picture might not be active. There is a sense in Taiwan of an increasing awareness of the state of the environment. I saw an article recently that said that 24-hour convenience stores in Taipei would no longer be able to give away disposable, wooden chopsticks with food as of this week. On the other hand I read another article that summarised the result of a survey of indicators of environmentally-sustainable behaviours with the observation that in the past two years Taiwan had moved AWAY from environmental sustainability. That's a shame because this is, on the whole, an interesting and beautiful island.

Annual Dragon Boat Festival

Last weekend we went with our friends, Tim and Lei, to the local Dragon Boat Festival. This festival is celebrated all over south-east Asia and to a lesser extent all over the world. To us it seemed to be all about eating great snacks and watching the dragon boat races. But in an article published recently in the China Post (an English-language newspaper) some knowledgeable person explained that this festival had originally been created as a vehicle for public health education about certain health issues arising at the beginning of the warmer seasons. I personally think it's really interesting to learn about the functional meaning behind cultural practices like this that are otherwise remain veiled behind a mysterious wall of alien-culture-ness. What I mean is that for somebody witnessing the rituals or traditional practices of another culture that we don't understand, the functional meaning of the activity grounds the practice in a reality that we do understand and this has the effect of making the whole thing appear so much less superstitious and more sensible.

Anyway, here's the link for that article:
China Post article - meaning of Dragon Boat Festival


I have to apologise here to the author of the Alimu blog on Blogger. I copied an image from their blog because all the photos I took of the Dragon Boats were worthless swirls and blurs of colour on black backgrounds. I still can't take a good night shot with my camera.


Alright! The best part of the Dragon Boat Festival? Ice-creams, Chinese sausages, shaved ice with almond milk and red beans, fruit shakes, sweet-spicy fried sweet-potato wedges, so many things on sticks. A plethora of snacks and drinks, a cornucopia of gustatory delights, thy cup runneth over with good things to eat and drink. Drink and be merry my friends for tomorrow we may wake up with severe gastrointestinal trouble.


Now, I can proudly say that THIS shot WAS taken with my camera. Well, I didn't take the photo but it was taken by the person closest to me so that must count for something. You can see Lei's head, half of Tim's head, the top bit of Andrea, and the top bit of me. You can also see in the canal one of the boats used in managing the other boats in the canal during the festival. I wonder if they got a bucket of almond milk shaved ice?

Just another day

Friday. I am so glad that Friday has arrived. The day to day work in my classroom is not too bad but the ongoing process of making preparations for the graduation show in August is like a nightmare, albeit a barely scary nightmare that lasts all night. A single footfall upon a flagstone will make no perceptible difference but, of course, the footfalls of generations of pedestrians will wear that same stone to a shale wafer. By the same token the ongoing, undeflected stress of the graduation show wears on me and slowly abrades my peace and calm. I do not think that I like graduation shows. In the graduation show, my students will have to perform on stage for about ten minutes. This performance will include two songs. Props must be made. My script must be made to fit between the other class scripts to create an ongoing narrative with a linch-pin theme. I don't mean that the show is about linch-pins. I mean that the theme is a linch-pin. Who would have thought that teaching kindergarten would require such a performance?

More people eating kangaroo meat

Based on a survey of 1600 people around Australia kangaroo, researchers at the University of New South Wales found that kangaroo comsumption has increased from 51% to 58.5% in the last 10 years. But you will have to check out the article on the UNSW web-page for the finer details of that research. Of course, I say yay! It makes so much sense in so many ways.

http://www.science.unsw.edu.au/news/more-aussies-dining-on-skippy/

A Trail in the Bush Somewhere

Another long, hot, dry summer
Twigs crack perfectly under a hiking boot
Eucalyptus leaves likewise
Snakes are out, silent and invisible

Sit under a tree
The leaves stop the sun but not the heat
Dry creek beds of sweat through the dust and grime
My country for better or worse

Into the mountains

Verily 'twas a great day spent exploring the Taiwanese countryside riding thither and hither, fro and to, forth and back. Our plan for this Sunday had been to ride to the mountains to the South East of Tainan and take the number 40 road that very scenically crossed a high section of the range. It was great to be able to take our time and stop to see whatever took our fancy. I have to say that our scooter is very economical to run. We were out all day and used less than a tank of petrol (from the Latin petra [rock] and oleum [oil]) which costs us just over US$3. That's a long, cheap ride.

Driving along, we saw a sign for the muddy volcano. We are aware that there are a lot of hot springs in Taiwan. According to the Lonely Planet guidebook, Taiwan's hot springs attract a lot of Japanese tourists who know the value of a good hot spring. So what did we find when we finally reached the site? You'll have to watch the video to find out although I can tell you that it was a pleasant surprise to discover that there was no fee to see the volcano and no businesses very close to it.

Riding along on a scooter honey... I was going to quote the lyrics from an old Mungo Jerry song here but upon checking the lyrics I decided that I didn't like that particular song very much so I'll quote the lyrics from the title track to Transformers the Movie instead:

Something evil's watching over you
Comin' from the sky above
And there's nothing you can do

Prepare to strike
There'll be no place to run
When your caught within the grip
Of the evil Unicron

Transformers
More than meets the eye
Transformers
Robots in Disguise


And you thought that I was holding up that dragon bridge didn't you! A very cunning photographic illusion I'm afraid. My dragon-bridge lifting days are behind me and I'm sworn to a life of abstinence (from lifting dragon bridges).


An inactive cone close to the very active muddy volcano. Note that my pose here was intentional and I attempted to look wacky, to little avail methinks.


Oh they're so cute together, the Australian country boy and the Canadian hapkido black belt. Note my collared short with the subtle floral pattern. I may not look tough but I can wield an axe like she can wield a pair of nunchaku. Incidentally, according to Wikipedia the name nunchaku derives from the terms nun (a pair) and chaku (from shaku, a unit of measurement). The weapon may have developed as a response to the moratorium on edged weaponry instituted by the Satsuma daimyo, or so says the great Wiki.

Music for Haydn

Several people have commented on how our apartment block is officially called "Music for Haydn". While this may seem a strange name for an apartment block it is not as strange as some of the other English names we see on a tour through our fair city. I especially like the local English schools "Grimm Kindergarten" and "Love Baby Wonderland: Pudding Burger". However, deficient as I am in evidence that those places really exist, allow me to take you, my gentle reader, on a very short tour of Music for Haydn.

Franz Joseph Haydn was born in the village of Rohrau, Austria in 1732 and died in Vienna (I think), Austria, in 1809. He composed a lot of music and knew Mozart and Beethoven and ate a lot of Austrian beef made into cute little meatballs with a smiley face on one side and a sad face on the other. In the late 20th century he was immortalised in becoming the eponymous inspiration for the Music for Haydn apartment complex on Jyunping Road in the historic district of An-ping in Tainan, the old capital of Taiwan. May he reign supreme among famous people who have given their names to communal residences. This is a photo of the hanging outside our front door which spells out our address. Haydn was obviously the Phil Collins of his day and must surely have been able to charm his way into the silky beds of the rich and famous women of 18th century Austria.


Immortality is your face on a gold plaque outside the elevator of our tower within the apartment complex.


The large building on the left is the north side of the Music for Haydn complex. The ground floor spaces are all utilised by businesses from scooter mechanics to drycleaners to restaurants. Note the Tomato vegetarian restaurant on the far left; This is one of our favourite dinner destinations.


Inside the complex itself, one finds oneself immersed in a lush, green paradise of tropical gardens inhabited by Taiwanese monkeys who have learned how to pry snacks and valuables from unwary passers-by. Okay, there are no monkeys. But there are fish.


Being a musical sort of place the pool is suitably decorated with a keyboard mosaic that prompts one to spontaneously burst into song upon breaching the calm surface of the cool, clear water. The song usually sounds a little like "Oo, oo, oo, ah, oo, oh"; That water can be pretty cold.


What better way to relax on a hot summer day than with a dip in the Music for Haydn pool. Mmm, life could hardly be better.

Haydn's Symphony No. 101, the Clock Symphony, 2nd movement (Chamber Arrangement)

Breakwater breakfast

Okay it wasn't breakfast, it was dinner. And I'm not sure it was a breakwater, a " A barrier that protects a harbor or shore from the full impact of waves" so much as the arms of stone, earth and concrete that created the harbour in the first place. But it was very nice there anyway.

What am I talking about? Twice in the last month we made a picnic dinner on Sunday evening and took it out to An-ping harbour to eat it. Although I can see part of one arm of the harbour from where I sit now, it takes a while to actually get there as you cannot travel directly. You basically have to drive down the river that runs out to the harbour and then drive back up the other side of the river.


It's a long walk from the car-park to our picnic spot all the way out at the end of the southern arm of An-ping harbour. This photo is taken where the arm bends at an angle and heads towards the end of the other arm to create the mouth of the harbour like a giant pair of robot pincers. Unfortunately there is no control mechanism and the arms of the harbour do not open and close so there can never be a scenario where terrorists hijack the harbour and use the pincers to grab a ship as it passes through the mouth and then squeeze it until its cargo is forced out. That was a strange distraction. My original point was that behind the camera in this photo is the rest of the arm which must be traversed to get to the end and our picnic spot.


This photo shows Andrea standing on the very end of the harbour arm while the sun begins to set in the sky. You can see the end of the other arm in the background. You can also see the end of Andrea's patience with me taking pictures when she really wants to tuck into those corn-chips we packed.


How Andrea managed to get this shot I don't know. It's beautiful and reminds me of Top Gun (which I have never actually seen) as one of the pilots walks down the deck of the aircraft carrier towards his jet and towards probable glorious martyrdom in a shower of flack and flare. The truth is that I also wanted to get stuck into that bag of corn chips.

Goodbye Taiwan

Taiwan was literally disappearing before our very eyes.

I don't know if it was just particularly bad weather or some symptom of global-warming-induced rising sea levels but there was no beach here. The sea came right up to where the trees were and had been eroding the sand away from under the trees so that there were skeletal trees all along the coast here. Just to the other side of the area in the photo here was an area where there was a collapsing cliff of sand created where the waves were in the process of eating away the sand, on top of which trees and other plants were still attached and growing. We could stand there and watch the waves undermine the small sand-cliff (a foot and a half high) until it would collapse and the sand would be washed away. To be fair the area seemed to be prone to flooding from the sea as evidenced by the large trenches that seemed to have been dug to allow water to drain away to the coast. It was a strange area but a little disconcerting to see. Oh, and of course there was garbage everywhere. Yuck!

Journey to Salt Mountain

What better way to enjoy your well-earned weekend than with a pilgrimage to Taiwan's biggest repository of salt-related paraphernalia and knowledge! (note that that introductory string was not phrased as a question but as a statement - there is no better way to enjoy a weekend). Yes, the Taiwan Salt Museum comprises four floors (4!) of salt... stuff. There are life-size mock-ups of salt-related places and industry, explications of the nature of salt both historical and chemical, salt-related tools, clothing, maps, and of course, samples of the stuff from around the world. Yes indeed, despite not being able to read the Chinese signage on the exhibits we felt upon departure that we need never again yearn for any kind of salt-related object or fact. Verily, the visit to the museum had been a case of a-salt (pun willingly scripted) upon all of our senses.

Oh, what a beautiful mornin', oh, what a beautiful day. I got a beautiful feelin' somethin' salty's comin' my way. (apologies to everyone)


Wow! Life-size mock-ups of salt-fields and salt-farmers! And the backdrops are beautiful too.


Wow! A reconstruction of a salt mine. Are those salt crystals on the wall of the cave real? Hmm, am I missing something? I feel like my appreciation of salt is not quite as grandiose as this museum. I thought it was just something that went with fish and chips.