Friday, October 27, 2006

Temporary relief

Finally some downpour. The rains these last couple of days have certainly helped to dissipate the haze.

Singlish

This will tickle your funny bone for those of you who understand singlish. Check out this skit by two young american teens from the International Community School.

http://www.mrbrown.com/blog/2006/10/the_mr_light_br.html

Thursday, October 12, 2006

On foot

Around Dan Shui on foot.



Dan Shui

Dan Shui is the last stop on one of Taipei MRT lines. Dan Shui was a fishing village in the past, and still retains a laid-back atmosphere with little shops selling tidbits and folk crafts.


The Dan Shui MRT station

Wednesday, October 11, 2006

Soak in the atmosphere

Exciting night life

I love the night markets here, they are full of surprises and they are, in my opinion, the best I have seen so far in Asia (beating Hong Kong and Bangkok).



This is the Hwa Si night market which is a street of shops that look more commercialised than the stalls outside of this street. A major attraction here is the numerous restaurants selling snake meat soup, with some stalls competing for customers through demonstrations of how the snake is "expired" and hawking on the medicinal properties of snake meat. Understandably, no photos are allowed.



A stall selling crabs.










This is common hawker stall selling pork rib stew in claypots.

Throw a Ball

This is like the hottest game around Taipei. These stalls seem to be everywhere, in the night markets, in the subway malls, shopping centers and there is always someone playing. Highly popular with both men and women.

See Saw Singing

Decided to check out other night markets and followed the map which pointed out several such markets around the Longshan temple MRT. As I wandered in the area just outside the MRT, I keep hearing some ghostly singing. It is high-pitch with no decipherable words and actually sounds eerie. I thought my ears must be playing tricks on me. Thankfully, the mystery is solved when my curiosity drew me to check out a crowd of people whose attention are commanded by this performer. It is one interesting yet strange street performance. The things people do to make a living.


I saw a saw singing like no saw can sing,
making me think of what more will spring.
A poor king with no links,
wringing his thing to bring a zing,
Ooh.. tis enough to drive me to drink.

Tuesday, October 10, 2006

Catching your own supper

This is the first time I have seen a stall like this. Rows of people squatting on a small stool and bending over oblong containers, trying to hook a small fish or a shrimp with a stick and string. For a fee of NT10, you can buy a stick with a string and fish any number of catch till the string breaks. The string breaks very easily but many people seem addicted to it and keep paying to get a new stick to re-try their luck. Like this angmoh here.
At the corner of the same stall is a charcoal stove with wire rack over it. People can barbecue their catch immediately. Here some people are cooking their own shrimp satay for supper.

Ear Candling

Hmm.. Taiwanese is a pragmatic lot. No spa experience, no daintly beautician girls fawning over your face. This stall is run by a couple of gruff guys who look like they clean your ears by nite and could be working as fishmongers by day. You need to have some courage to have a burning candle stuck inside your ear while in a contorted sitting position and looked upon by a crowd of curious on-lookers. Well, if something goes wrong, you have dozens of eye witnesses.

A couple of americans were adventurous enough to try out the treatment and looked quite pleased at the end, when the stall man cut open the remaining candle and showed them the powdery clumps of wax in the tube. Quite disgusting. As you can tell, I was quite kaypoh and had sneaked a look at their results.

Shi Lin Night Market


After hearing the name Shi Lin mentioned so many times, I made myself go visit this night market rather reluctantly, expecting them to be selling teeny bopper clothes. It turned out to be more of a food place.



I don't know why the tourist books tout this as the biggest night market in Taipei, it is your average hawker center size and half of it was closed. Feel a bit kena conned. I might have missed out parts of the real thing but anyway, I am not impressed with what I saw. Thankfully, some bizarre stuff there made up for the disappointment (see subsequent posts)

Rally

Not sure if I picked the right time or the wrong time to visit Taipei, over their National Day. There's been a month-long rally to depose C.S.Bian, peaking on Oct 10. Hordes of people wearing red take to the streets around the Taipei main station. There are people selling red shirts, red head bands, red handfans, stickers, etc. Despite the crowd, people come with the mentality to carry out peaceful demonstrations so the affair is surprisingly peaceful with loads of people just seating around, shouting slogans "Chen Shui Bian step down!" as led by their leaders.
The atmosphere is almost carnival like with people taking their dogs out, turning up with friends and family of three generations. The streets are floaded with a sea of red. Even at traffic junctions, the people continue to cry their slogans and give the thumbs down as they cross the roads. Their cries echoing down the corridors of the streets. Very drama.
Quite an eye opener for me at how well organised this is overall. It is very impressive and I am almost ready to spent the whole day in their company, figuring my chance of getting arrested for meddling in Taiwan politics is probably slimmer than for voicing partisan views in sgp...Then suddenly a thought interrupted that I still have that Eslite shopping center to conquer which is more challenging and so lah lah lah, I flitted away...

Monday, October 09, 2006

Taipei food

It is easy to get adjusted to the street food here than to those in Hong Kong. The range is broader than wanton noodles and congee. Surprisingly, I found Taiwan food not expensive, which tells me food in sgp is over-priced. Here is what I paid for S$5 (NT100) at a food court:

set: soupy mee sua, kang kong greens, oyster omelette,

Sunday, October 08, 2006

First stop

The main motivation was to come visit the "ku kung" 古宫 (Taiwan National Palace museum) which houses an astounding 650,000 artefacts removed from palaces in China when the kuo ming tang fled to Taiwan. It is said to have one of the most magnificent museum collections in the world.

One of the most popular pieces is the cabbage jade which the craftsman had ingeniously carved to have the white part of the jade to form the stem of the cabbage while the green part of jade becomes the leaves. The other amazing piece is a jasper rock that resembles a small tender slab of moist and layered pork belly. *slurp*

My favourite section is the curios which make up many of the Imperial toys. In Taiwan, many of the items are kept in its original set such as the Emperor's puzzle boxes fitted with miniatures, I am told those kept in China museums have had theirs taken apart and dispatched to different specialised departments, as a result some of the exhibits there have lost some context.


The really exquite ones are the miniature carvings such as this olive nut (actual size) that made into a small boat holding eight people with animated mannerisms. The bottom of the boat is also carved with 300 characters.

However, above all these items, the one I love most is this set of ivory boxes which have lattice patterns cut into them to form grid-like lace openwork on all its sides. The biggest of this box is perhaps only one inch by half inch, yet it fits 7 other smaller similar boxes (like russian dolls), plus long tiny delicate chains of ivory that ties each cover to its box. Exquisite beyond belief. Most people gasp the first time they lay their eyes on this. Unfortunately, photography is prohibited and I am unable to take away a snap for keepsake and no other pictures of this are in their guidebooks.


You have to be here to see for yourself that these are actually made-made, for it is impossible not to marvel that they are not made by the heavens.

Saturday, October 07, 2006

Interesting clouds formations

I wander freely as a cloud...

Thursday, October 05, 2006

Safari

Our package came with a free entry each to any one of the theme park. The Safari was picked because it charged the most expensive tickets. We went from show to show and got more than we anticipated.

The first video is on the bit in the elephant show where the baby elephant gives a female volunteer a back massage. The second video shows the baby elephant giving the male volunteer a massage. Unfortunately it was not a back massage for him. Not sure if this could be
the incident which defined the end of his bloodline.



Melaka

I launched my break with a trip to Melaka AFamosa resort with a group of friends. We had booked a villa for 8 with a private pool. It all sounded very glam and exciting but it didn't turn out to be Banyan Tree. It looked like the kind of spare house an uncle had let us go over to stay for the weekend and sunken in backyard was a pool. It was clean enough with three rooms, one of which had an attached bathroom. There was a shower room, a kitchen with a fridge, a kettle but opps, no cutlery. We pinched some cutlery at the breakfast table to snack on our supper of cup noodles. Towels and toiletries were provided.

The resort is huge with some 534 hectares of condomiums, houses, theme parks, eateries etc. Open shuttle buses speed around to pick up and drop people off within the compound and they rattle a lot. There is no hair dryer in the villa but you can take a ride in their shuttle services; the trip will do a nice job of whipping your hair about your head and giving it a good blow-dry. Of course, you don't get a choice of hairstyle but a quick comb through with your reliable brycream should pad down all your hair securely enough to survive your return ride.

Not all villas are built equal. The more newly built ones which has more beds are actually not as well maintained, not as thoughtfully designed and also less equipped than the older units which are closer to the reception center. So when you plan a trip here, I recommend you keep the group to 6 so that you can request for the older villas numbered between 200-300, which can only accommodate 6 people.

On our first nite we visited the Cowboy Town theme park which operates from 6pm - midnight. It was not crowded. Almost a ghost town with perhaps 100 visitors. We attended several shows, some were quite literally hot. We were impressed that fireworks are let off every night at 9.45pm. And boy, the works are as good as what you get on national day.


So long and thanks for all the fish

It is already into October! I have not been able to settle down to blog. The past few weeks have been a whirlwind of handover training, interviews, meetings, housekeeping, shredding, lunches, dinners. My colleagues have been fabulous. I will miss them.

I have hardly touched on work on my blog although I have wanted to mention some of the big guns and what an inspiration they have been but as it turned out, it has been kind of hard to find anything interesting to say about men with small pricks.