My brother Jamie comes to Taiwan; Penghu pt.2: Magong City

The flight from Tainan airport to Penghu was a short one, less than 30 minutes. It was fascinating seeing familiar areas of the mainland from the air. We touched down at Magong airport and then wandered into the terminal to try to get some kind of transportation. Unfortunately neither Jamie nor I possess an international or Taiwanese driver's license so the woman at the car-hire desk wouldn't let us hire a scooter. After a messy bit of negotiation and explanation in broken English and Chinese we got a taxi into town to a scooter rental shop. The first question from the woman at the shop was some form of "Do you have an international license?". My negative reply was met with a negative look. And then she let us rent a scooter anyway. And then we were free on two wheels in the main city of Penghu, Magong.

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(from Wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Makung_City)

Makung (Chinese: 馬宮) is the county seat of Penghu, in Taiwan Province, Taiwan (Republic of China). Makung is on the western part of the main Pescadores island.

The earliest temple in the country to the goddess Matsu is found on Makung. Makung is therefore also known as "Magong Ao" (馬宮澳 or originally, 媽宮澳), or "Matsu Palace Seaport". The first character of the name was changed from "mother" (媽, mā) to "horse" (馬, mǎ) in 1920 under the Japanese Occupation. There had been proposal from the Executive Yuan to revert the character, but there was little support.

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Our first two priorities were food and accommodation. Just down the road from where we rented the scooter we found a buffet restaurant with an array of trays scantily clad in an assortment of mediocre-looking comestibles [I used the word "comestibles" here in honour of my friend Richard].

Jamie looks happy with his buffet meal but would later regret it perhaps. It put him off buffet meals.

With our bellies full of food, some familiar and some not so, we took a short tour of the city by way of finding a hotel for the night. We noticed this lovely little park where children may slide down the slide, swing on the swing, and imagine they are fending off waves of attacking Japanese or Dutch soldiers intent on sweeping over the island and subduing any resistance. You have to understand that Penghu, like the rest of Taiwan, has had several masters including pirates, the Dutch, Koxinga (son of a Chinese merchant father and Japanese woman born in Japan and loyal to the waning Ming Dynasty), Chinese Qing (Manchu) dynasty, the French, and the Japanese, apart from the Taiwanese themselves. With a history of being conquered it is not surprising that references to island defense are not hard to find in the landscape or the cultural imagination.


We found this beautiful house constructed of various kinds of bricks, coral rocks, stones, tiles and ceramics. Indeed, coral rock proved to be a very useful building material on the island.


Down by the water side we found several of these boats, unusual for their arrays of huge, incandescent light bulbs. They are squid-fishing boats and the lights draw the squid up from below.

After enquiring at several hotels near the downtown area of Magong, we settled on the rather unassuming Hsinyi Hotel. Being a Thursday, they were not terribly busy and offered us one of the better rooms at a great rate. This photo describes the view from the window of our hotel room. Note the clouds in the sky, reminders of the recent typhoon and how close we came to not being able to travel to Penghu at all.

My brother Jamie comes to Taiwan; Penghu pt.1: Tainan Airport

I haven't written for two weeks because I have been busy. Yesterday was my first day back at school after my two-week vacation. The vacation falls between the end of one academic year and the start of the next. The academic year in Taiwan and Korea starts in August or September whereas in Australia and New Zealand it starts in January or February. The difference seems to be a product of the seasonal difference between the northern and southern hemisphere.

Anyhow, many months ago my brother Jamie booked his time-off from his job so that his vacation time would coincide with mine and he came to stay with us here at the wonderful Music for Haydn complex. Of course we didn't just hang around Jyunping Road eating at the buffet restaurants and buying icecreams from 7-11; we took up the map and ventured forth into strange new worlds to discover what we knew not.

One of the places we went was Penghu island.

This map shows Penghu labelled as the Pescadores with the capital Ma-kung (or Magong, Makong, Magung). I chose this map because it includes part of the coast of Mainland China. You can also see Tainan, where we live.

(Image copied from http://www.geocities.com/apapadimos/Taiwan_Pages.htm)

From Wikipedia: The Pescadores are an archipelago off the western coast of Taiwan in the Taiwan Strait consisting of 90 small islands covering an area of 141 square kilometers. They are administered as Penghu County, Taiwan Province, Republic of China.

To get to Penghu you can take a ferry or a plane. There had just been a close call with a typhoon and the ferry had been cancelled but the plane was still going to fly so we decided to fly there on Thursday and get the ferry back on Friday. This necessitated a trip to Tainan airport.

Tainan airport is a clean, modern facility with an air of homely intimacy about it, by which I mean that it is quite small for an airport. As a result of being small and not serving international flights, it fails to live up to the promise of larger airports. You can't expect the same luxuries and signs of decadence that you might find at Taipei international (okay, still small relative to other international airports but as big as it gets in Taiwan).

Yes, at Tainan airport there is a convenience store and a restaurant (kind of). Here is Jamie having a quick browse through the dried seafood section.

If you are hungry and want to eat before boarding the plane then you can either buy from the convenience store or sample one of the delights offered by the Frog Family Mexican Restaurant. We had time to spare and space in our stomachs and so we decided to try the "nachos". I don't know exactly what constitutes nachos but what we got was corn chips poured onto a plate, cheese of some kind sprinkled on top and then a quick zap in the microwave and *pow!* - nachos! The worst nachos I have ever had. Damn, if that is nachos then even I can cook great Mexican food. I liked the way that when we asked if we could get nachos, the girl on duty produced an open bag of Doritos from somewhere behind the counter and gave us a uncertain look. By the way, the beer paraphernalia scattered around the "restaurant" (counter with stools at which food was available) led my brother to thinking that he would be able to order a beer. However, the lake of yeasty, malty goodness proved to be a dry one; they don't have any beer.

Jamie browses through the Tainan Airport library corner. I think it would be fair to say that their collection is a bit thin: there are about five books on the shelf. It does look as though they envisaged something greater when they set up this area.

Upon exiting the main airport public space through the main glass doors towards the departure gate, the first thing you are met with is this beautiful garden. Every instance of flora here could be classed as an everlasting: they're all plastic.

My three-three birthday

And thus it came to pass that in a country of ornate temples, maniacal drivers, and 7-11s, far from the place which he loved, Adrian Brown came to pass the mark of 33 for his age, and thenceforth called himself a thirty-three-year-old. And in the making of 33 there had been much ado about nothing much and everything. What meaning could be contrived in it and what bodings of the future did it entail? Know only that 33 is not much different from 32. But yea, he took it as an umbrage to his good face, a sore point thrust among the embers of his entrails, and thus came to wield his flashing sword among the unwary and faithless. And lo, a great battle ensued with the fell and wretched cretins of that place falling here and there by his blade, so keen his eyes were and so trained was his blade. It was a great day of reckoning, the deeds of which were sung in songs in long years after and with every flash of his sword the world became a changed place until we lived in a different world than that in which we had begun. Thus spake the seers of Ghanding who descry all that passes oer the minds of men and women.

Something like that. I have been reading Tolkien again.

The day is a fair one and the sweet breezes of this morning bring with them the promise of adventure, for we shall set out ere the day is old and travel to that most bountiful city on this isle, the place called Taipei. There we will enjoy our time without labour until the morn of Monday when we should venture out to the Korean embassy and apply for police checks as part of the application process to get spouse visas for our respective countries. Later on that day we will go to the airport where my brother will arrive and stay with us here in Taiwan for 10 days. Yay! I am now excited and am looking forward very much to seeing my brother.

O, I forgot to say that yesterday was the last day of the teaching semester at my school, quite an uncanny coincidence, allowing the day of my birthday to fall on the first day of my vacation.

Gotta go and make some calls.

Taiwanese English - Part 1

In Taiwan, as in many other Asian countries, there is a real drive to learn to speak English. I should qualify that by saying that Taiwanese children are driven by their parents to learn to speak English. The acquisition of English as a second language is seen as an investment in the child's future and parents are keen to make this investment in what is a competitive job market and will probably still be a competitive job market in the future when their children are old enough to be looking for jobs. There are English schools everywhere just as there is English everywhere. But it doesn't take long to realise that while the ability to communicate in the English language is a thing most desired, the English that is plastered on t-shirts, sign-boards, packaging, vehicles, etc. often leaves much to be desired. This then is a small collection of some examples of English employed with more exertion than expertise.


O the irony.

I know what they meant but it doesn't sound good.
Love Baby Preschool Pudding Burger American School? Really?

I'm not sure how this one came about. I suspect that whoever devised this business name has some idea of the meaning of the word but little idea of how offensive it could be to the ears of a native speaker. It's funny how Chinese swear-words don't seem to hit you in the 'guts' of your brain in the same way that English swear-words do. The relationship between swearing, the evocation of taboo concepts, and particular areas of the brain is a well-established one. There is even a medical term for uncontrollable and impulsive swearing, 'coprolalia' that is often a symptom of Tourette Syndrome and can be associated with certain kinds of brain injury. I don't think the individual responsible for naming this business was suffering any severe brain injury.


Motorcycle slogans deserve their own, dedicated category. Manufacturers do their best to come up with a slogan in English that conjures up images of the paradise on two wheels promised by the scooter to the prospective buyer. Going 50 - Move your creative heart!

Cabin - with fashionable feeling!

Party 50 - Flying Angel of Elegant, Nimble and Beautiful. At least they punctuated correctly.

Mid-week mediocrity and Mongol invasions

It's Wednesday evening and I'm half-way through the week. During my lunchbreak (does that last word need to be hyphenated or can it stand as a compound noun?) I managed to watch a documentary about the mysterious disappearance of Kublai Khan's fleet off the Japanese coast during the attempted Mongol invasion of Japan. I had heard of this historical episode before and remembered something about a divine wind "Kami-kaze" destroying the Mongol fleet or blowing it away and out to sea. A quick precis of the explanation provided by the documentary Kublai Khan's Lost Fleet: The Mongol's did attempt to land on the coast of the Japanese island of Takeshima but were repelled by Samurai. The general in charge of the invasion was caught between a rock and a hard place, being unable to return to Japan in defeat but fearful of being slaughtered by the Japanese samurai, and so vacillated off shore somewhere until a couple of weeks later a typhoon came along and smashed most of the fleet. The Mongols/Chinese were the master ship-builders of the age and properly built ocean-going Chinese vessels would have withstood the typhoon. However, Kublai Khan had been hasty in his move to invasion and used many river-boats to build his invasion fleet. These river boats would have capsized in the rough seas. Also, the invasion armada was constructed in large part by conscripted (slave) labourers whose country had recently been hijacked by the Mongol invaders and so were none too keen to perform at their best by constructing good, solid warships with which the khan could further his ambitions of world conquest. They built shoddy ships of which many perished in the typhoon. The documentary followed the trail of evidence recruited by the principal investigator in support of the explanation for the fleet's disappearance. The explanation evolved over many, many years of research and marine archaeology.

Back in the real world, I am getting my class into shape for the graduation show on Sunday morning. Ho hum.

Life goes on

Andrea has been away in Canada for the last two-and-a-half weeks and she returned to Taiwan safe and sound on Saturday. I took a special shuttle bus to Kaohsiung airport to meet when she walked through those doors in the arrival section. Those doors are magical doors. They are the real barrier that separate the departed from the departee. The moment that the traveller walks through those doors is the moment that they rejoin the people in the country in which they have arrived. They are also the barrier beyond which freedom lies; freedom to do what you want in the country to which you have come.

I kept myself very busy while Andrea was away. I managed to get through the second book of the Lord of the Rings Trilogy. I managed to take care of a lot of little chores I had had on the back burner for a while.

Going back to work today was not easy. It felt as though I had also been away and was about to have my first day back at work after a long break. I was exceptionally tired on the weekend and managed to exhaust myself in the last three weeks at work and out of work.

I was going to ramble here about the (thus far) hypothetical relationship between the french word for goat, "chevre", and the English words "chevron" and Chevrolet. Apparently it has something to do with the shape of goats' hind-legs. The name of the motor company Chevrolet derives from its founder, Louis Chevrolet. The family name Chevrolet is supposedly either a corruption of the French "goats' milk" or roughly translates as "little mountain goat".

I found a website last night that made me happy. On this site you can watch over 600 documentaries. Strangely there are no or few ads and you don't have to register or install a special player or anything. It is almost too good to be true. And the site contains links to some very good documentaries. I saw "The Fog of War" listed there somewhere and I remember watching that one in the Luna Cinema in Perth many moons ago. Anyway, before bed I managed to squeeze in a filmed lecture about evolution and butterfly wing patterning with implications drawn to human evolution. I'm very happy to have so many documentaries to watch.

Work again tomorrow. *Sigh*

Baolai, in the mountains

On Saturday the fifth of July, a small band of intrepid adventurers set out on three motor scooters intending to travel from Tainan, the old capital of Taiwan, to Baolai in the lap of the mountains. Armed only with money, changes of clothes, some food provisions, maps, pre-booked tickets for the white-water rafting, pre-arranged accommodation, experience of having made the trip before, and a devil-may-care attitude towards the very real possibility of long-distance-travel-induced-sore-bottom-syndrome, these comrades in helmets mounted their 250cc steeds and headed out from their home base in search of that mythical land the Lonely Planet calls....

PAOLAI

(photo shown above may not resemble Paolai)

Our posse, ready to rock outside Erin and Dave's apartment in Tainan. I was so pumped that immediately after this shot was taken I bit the head off a chicken. Note the tent attached to the back of the scooter that I shared with Andrea; it would not be used due to weather-related factors that I will discuss later.

Tea is the drink of choice in Taiwan and there are hundreds of variations, but probably fewer available from any one vendor. There's red (black) tea, green tea, barley tea, Oolong tea, other things I don't know the name of, and all of these are available with sugar or without, with milk or without, with tapioca balls or without, with gelatin chunks or without, with lemon juice or without, with grapefruit juice or without, and in combinations of all these and many more ingredients. Taiwan is truly home to a culture of tea and it grows on you. These days, a bit of travel soon induces in me an appentence for a large, cold, green tea of some sort. This photo looks too good to be natural but it was. It has only just occurred to me that we are wearing the four foundation colours blue, red, yellow, and green.

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Baolai (sometimes Paolai). Population: 600. Location: southern central Taiwan. Claims to fame: western "gateway" to the south cross-island highway; hot springs; whitewater rafting.




We did go whitewater rafting but I couldn't take any photos as I had to leave my camera behind. I borrowed the photo above from Kaohsiung County website. We couldn't take our personal belongings on the rafts because you do get very wet and occasionally a raft will capsize. There were between twenty and thirty rafts each carrying between 6-10 people; that's a lot of rafters. After we were given the initial go-ahead, everyone took off in their raft and went crazy, splashing each other and racing down the river. However, it soon became apparent to me that there was real potential for danger in this activity. One of our crew-members fell overboard and was almost dragged under the raft. We saw others fall into the river. There were many stops along the way which became quite discomforting after a while. Being intermittently wet and dry and exposed to the wind caused a loss of body heat and after an hour or so I wasn't the only one feeling a bit cold and trying not to shiver. There were several other rafts fitted with outboard engines, each of these rafts being manned by two guys working for the rafting-tour company. These guys would basically do whatever they had to to prevent any serious injuries to their customers or to their rafts. This usually involved them ramming their raft into yours to knock you to where you should be and away from the more dangerous parts of the river. Nevertheless there were injuries and we saw the occasion customer being helped out of the river or being guided away from the river by rafting-tour employees. Overall the white-water rafting was an interesting and certainly exciting experience although I think the single best change that could be made to enhance the experience would be to remove all the other rafts and people and let us have the river to ourselves.

By the time we reached the end of the river-rafting ramble some of us were quite cold and hungry. The sky was quite overcast and the wind had picked up. We had 5 minutes to go to the bathroom before we needed to clamber on to buses which took us back to the rafting HQ in town. From there most of us headed down the road to the 7-11 where we got some hot, instant noodles and hot chocolate. By this time the heavens had opened and the sky was manumitting the lakes in the sky, most of which opted to fall straight to earth.


That night a barbecue ensued from which only a scant few vegetable kebabs, barbecued chicken wings, or barbecued bamboo (surprisingly good) escaped uneaten. From left: Jannie, Willy, John, me, and two of the people renting the room next door, returning to their den with bowls of instant noodles.

Scene 1: dogs belonging to friends at barbecue sleep in bed in room we rented.

Scene 2: I sleep in bed in room we rented. I have to admit that I was the first to go to bed and to sleep. Driving an unfamiliar scooter for hours on unfamiliar roads definitely contributed to my impuissance.


On Sunday we arose and found ourselves, not surprisingly, where we had been the night before. We proceeded to avail ourselves of one of the natural wonders of the Baolai area - the natural hot springs. Besides a couple of pools of different temperatures the "spa" is fitted out with some shower heads which deliver high-pressure jets of water. It's really good to be able to move your back (or head or other body part if you wish) around under the jet and use it to massage yourself. However, if you were to direct the high-powered jet of water to the wrong place you could possibly do some damage, for example, blowing your eardrum out. Not that anyone would be silly enough to do that. Surely.


After the invigorating hot spa DIY massage we went for a short walk into town. On the way we discovered where dragon fruit come from. We saw this plant and others like it bearing the odd fruit. I was surprised. The plant itself looks like a kind of cactus. Perhaps it is.


And then it rained some more. And more. And when the time to leave came, it was still raining. However, while rain-jackets were on our side, time was not and so we prepared ourselves as best we could and mounted our wet, motorised steeds and began the long journey home. This photo was taken as we stood in the rain-shadow of the arch in front of the main entrance of the resort and as we stood there we sought to master our collective resolve to start what was going to be a very wet and uncomfortable ride home.

Not only did it continue to rain: it stormed and thundered. In places along the road down from the mountain, small streams of water ran across the road. At one point the storm raged close by and the rain became torrential, forcing us to stop for a while at the local market in a small town on the highway. The amount of water pooling everywhere was impressive and John and I caved in the audience demand for some kind of rain dance, the rather unimpressive result of which you can see in this movie.

I was hugely relieved when we finally managed to get off the mountain and onto some more even countryside. And as the kilometres passed us by and the sun slowly ran its course across the grey and unhappy sky we drew slowly closer to Tainan where we would return to our always temporary lives and jobs, to our comfortably familiar, familiarly mundane day-to-day normality.

Energy everywhere

I've been thinking a lot lately about energy. In a way, everyone has been thinking about it lately and it's hard not to think about it given the price and cost of the stuff our that powers almost all of our transport (that's gas if you're from the Americas and petrol if you're from Britain or it's children). By price I mean the amount of money that it costs us to buy the stuff. By cost I am hinting at the environmental damage caused as a result of oil extraction, processing, and burning.

The climate crisis (or any other name for the warming of the global climate) and the rising price and cost of oil have inspired an awful lot of talk and thought about energy. What I have been realising lately is that our current, intense concern about energy has influenced the way that we think about the world and the way that we see the world and how it works. I have heard a lot of things being talked about in terms of energy lately, many of which I had not considered in that light before.

A lot of the energy on the Earth comes from the sun and it takes many diverse forms as it transfers from plants to animals to people or from radiation to electricity to movement or from radiation to heat to climate to destruction. I could have made up a million different chains of energy movement then. All of the interesting stuff on the earth plays a part in the energy story.
Plants are a form of stored energy. They are like batteries soaking up and storing the sun's energy. Animals run on these batteries and they power all of their behaviours, just like a robot animal would require some kind of artificial battery (unless it were solar powered). In the process they become batteries themselves. We humans derive our energy from these other batteries, the plants and animals which have already concentrated the sun's energy for us.

Plants are a form of stored energy and so are animals. That should be obvious as the equation becomes a lot simpler once you look at coal and oil. Coal and oil are fossil fuels and are a concentrated form of plants and animals and of their energy. In Australia most of our electricity comes from the combustion of coal and the electricity produced supports our society and all of the behaviors that it consists of. It is too far-fetched to look at human society as another form of energy? Human society is a battery itself isn't it? Energy is often defined as the ability to do work and human society does a lot of work. For example, human society has a lot of complicated behaviour to act out, people interacting and moving all over the planet, within their own communities, cities, countries, and without. And human society is also reshaping the planet and building a lot of stuff and those things require energy.

Energy is recycled all the time on the planet in the food chain. If you leave humans out of the food chain for a second, not a lot of energy is directed into dead ends where it is not recycled. Animals exist to survive, prosper, and reproduce and if they are successful then they will multiply as their environment (including sources of energy) allows. Adding humans back into the equation, I can't see how the energy put into constructing an apartment block is recycled. It seems like a dead end for energy. But that's okay because the energy on the Earth is not finite or limited: Energy is continually being transferred from the sun to the Earth in the form of solar radiation. All the life on the planet is part of a complicated, dynamic battery in which this energy is stored. You can extend the battery metaphor beyond the life on the planet to the environment of the planet: A lot of energy is absorbed by the physical environment of the planet and the environment moves in response. For example, 71% of the Earth's surface is ocean and this huge surface area is always absorbing energy in the form of solar radiation. The sun heats the ocean and then this watery battery affects the rest of the planet, especially obviously in the form of climate.

Just as plants are as batteries on land, algae are the batteries of the sea. Algae and plants are both primary producers (or autotrophs) in that they produce organic compounds from inorganic inputs, making them the basis of the food chain. The main way that primary producers do this is, of course, photosynthesis which is how solar energy enters the food chain. Algae also produce roughly 80% of the world's atmospheric oxygen. The ocean is a bit like a huge solar panel.

I think I have said just about as much as I am apt. So much of the world around us can be thought of in terms of energy: the transfer of energy from one place to another; the conversion of energy from one form into another; and something else which I cannot remember now because I spent so much time checking the proper usage of the colons and semi-colons that I have used in this sentence. Lest we forget the semi-colon.

Kenting

Okay, Kenting is a bit of a cliche for any foreigners living in this part of Taiwan. Everybody knows about it and everybody has been there.

For those of you who do not live in this part of the world, let alone this part of Taiwan, Kenting is a huge national park that occupies the coasts around the southern tip of the island. It was the first national park to be created in Taiwan (1984) and is famous for its beaches (I admit that they they are good beaches when held relative to other beaches in Taiwan), surfing and coral reefs. It also contains the only "armed" lighthouse in the world, complete with a deep trench around the outside and high walls with "loopholes" in them (loopholes are small holes in a fortification that allow defenders to fire out or observe enemy movements). Here's a map of the park, straight from the Kenting National Park website:

As you can see, most of the park is yellow and the remainder is green apart from a few red specks. The park is also replete with a range of large geoglyphs including one depicting a couple separated by a wall and another depicting a person in a wheelchair. Ha. So funny.

We actually made this trip a few months ago, in March perhaps. As with our trip to Rueli, we were lucky enough to be escorted down by our friends Craig and Helena and their baby daughter Susannah. They had made the trip before and knew of a hotel that was reasonably priced yet centrally located on the beach-side of the main highway through the actual township of Kenting.


Villa Kenting: Our Hotel, decked out in balmy yellow and orange. Makes me think of small seaside resorts, which is what this place is, so that's fine right? Andrea poses with a gesture communicating something along the lines of, "So I guess this is it. I like the balmy yellow and orange. It feels like the seaside."

I can't remember why I was so tired by the time we got to Kenting but all I wanted to do was lie down and sleep. After checking in to Villa Kenting we headed off to the beach to soak up some rays. Actually I didn't soak up too many rays. I fell asleep under the umbrella and had a nap. I do remember I managed to soak up a bit of sand: It seemed to find its way into my hair and down my pants. When I finally came to a great time was had by all. Rather, all had had a great time already yet there was still time for some swimming and some more swimming and some reading and some more swimming. Craig and Helena were joined unexpectedly by a large group of friends that they knew from Chiayi and there was much swimming and snacking and talking and walking. After being in Tainan for a few months with only our rather lame local beach to go to, the beaches of Kenting were like unto those of the Hawaiian islands although I have no idea what the beaches of the Hawaiian islands are like except what I have seen on TV. I guess I would have to say that they were similar.

Nothing special about this shot. Just thought it looked nice. You can see the big mountain range off in the distance. Real mountains with sheer inclines; The Taiwanese geoscape is a lot younger than Australia's.

Our secret love pudding baby! She looks like our baby but actually you'd be eminently mis-leadable if you believed that. This small, female creature is Susannah, the daughter of Craig and Helena. Craig and Helena come from Canada and South Africa respectively so they're in the process of applying for spouse visas. Andrea and I need to do the same thing. We've been in the process for a while but we haven't gotten our application together yet.


I really like this shot: Father and daughter synchronise. Something along the lines of "Out there across that water is that other country that you do not know, yet you will come to know it intimately and it will be your homeland. You will grow up with cousins and grandparents whom you have not yet met but will come to know and love. This land, this island Taiwan, you will come to know through our stories and our pictures but you cannot grow up here. We will be leaving to start our other life soon. It's just over there...on the other side..."

Taiwan and Korea: Comparing the experience of living there(s)

This seems a bit like cheating but I am going to paste in here a big paragraph I wrote to somebody a month or two ago:

Being here in Taiwan has helped to shape my understanding and impression of Korea. In Korea there is a strong drinking culture but here you see people going out for tea or dinner instead. Last night was the first time that we saw an obviously drunk person and he was being helped from a car to his apartment in a very low-key way. I think that people here are a bit more genuine which feels nice. People in Korea are almost always nice to you but it doesn't feel as genuine as it does here. Koreans seem to be living their own kind of 'pop' lives, caught up in some kind of lifestyle drive, but here people are a little bit more down-to-earth. Taiwan yearns for recognition from the rest of the world and its relationship with greater China is ever a tangible point of ongoing un-resolution. It seems that everyday you can read in the Taipei Times some story or stories which betray a facet of the national identity that is about the quest for real and recognised independence and the failure of that quest. It is a little sad perhaps but I think this is part of the reason for Taiwanese people's good-humour and realism, not to mention their friendliness. I have occasionally heard someone here talk about the experience of being made to feel the foreigner: reverse discrimination or undue attention paid because of the obvious difference in appearance, but the people making these complaints have probably not been to Korea. We feel almost like normal people here compared with the pseudo-celebrity cum annoying invasion of privacy we experienced in Korea (although this may be in part a function of city size; we are living in a city three times the size of Jinju). The cost of living is a bit cheaper than in Korea however you can't expect electronics to be much cheaper than they would be back home. There are plenty of cars and scooters around. We have a scooter ourselves now. In terms of earning money, you earn less here than you would in Korea, but not a whole lot less. The big trade off you have to look at when coming from Korea to Taiwan is lifestyle and money. Taiwan is a nicer place to live where you cannot save as much money.

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I still think the same now after a couple of months have passed. Of course, the longer we are away from Korea the better it gets. While there is a force of selective memory at work, I am convinced that 3000 Won for an authentic Korean bibimbap with side dishes is one of the best meals ever (apart from Tim Tams (which are available in Taiwan if you look hard but they never taste the same and are not made in Australia)).