After 12 years, I managed to make another trip out to Taiwan.
It's been over a decade since I've seen my grandma (dad's side), it seemed like a good idea. She's still healthy, although I think one of her kidneys has a small problem, so she's not as mobile as the other grandma, who files out here to the US often to see us.
Spending a little short of 2 weeks in Taiwan was fun! And the food.... so good!
I didn't have much net connection, so I just wrote down notes and stuff of what I did on some of the days onto my laptop or iPhone. (not completely imported yet)
On the way back from Taiwan, I also stopped by Japan for a couple days (Tokyo, Sendai, Kami-Machi) to visit Andy who moved out there last August to teach English.
After a long flight, where I watched a Discovery Channel documentary about iPods, Rush Hour 3, and half a season of Air Gear, I arrived in Taiwan. Boy, does it smell weird. But familar. On the other hand, the airport's been cleaned up significantly and remodeled to look much nicer than I remembered.
Day 1: Went to the Nova tech shopping area with dad. Saw a bunch of laptops, memory cards, misc hardware. Considered buying stuff but I didn't feel the need for it. Couldn't find the penguin driver usb drive. There seems to be a lot of fake iPods too. Didn't find anything novel enough for gifts either. Oh, and the streets periodically still smell like sewage.
Yang le duo is so much bigger at 7-11 here. Awesome :)
Day 2: *** need to extract from iPhone ***
Day 3:
Went to Puli / Nantou to go see the Sun Moon Lake. I think it might have been two smaller lakes that was then modified to join into one lake. There's a variety of shops and temples and hotels on the side. You could also take a boat trip through the middle too. Oh, and there's a place there where they raise peacocks.
On the return, we went to the Chung Tai Bhuddist temple. It's huge! We walked around and looked at the various statues. Made some donations too. There's like a hundred variety of statues in one room. There's a variety of trees in the garden area on the side. Also, in the poster board which documents the Chung Tai center in Sunnyvale, mom is in one of the pictures which has a group of people in a meeting.
Story from grandma 1:
Back when she was a teacher, she led a group of students on a camping trip in Taichung. One of the girls was trying to catch up to the group, so she thought to run through a grassy area. Trouble is, she didn't have very good vision, and what she thought was a large patch of grass was actually a bunch of moss and foilage covering a pool of water. After her running start, she ended up waist deep in water. Grandma had to have one of the other teachers watch everybody as she got the girl wrapped up in a towel and then went to town to buy a change of clothes.
Story from grandma 2:
A lot of the male students would always find some way to get into trouble. One guy used to bring in some new sports equipment, like basketballs, and volunteer to share it with the class. Knowing the kid didn't have much money, grandma eventually got suspicious about it and inquired some of the girls, who tattle easily. Apparently, way back, store lotteries, using the little scratch off tickets, were a lot more popular. And to make them, some of the factories would set them out to dry in the middle of the day. Some of the boys would go there during lunch, look for a few winning tickets and run off with them to redeem later.
Since it'd look pretty bad if people found out the lotteries were kinda unfair, grandma told the student's father to tell the factory owners to dry them at a different time so that the kids would be in class, and don't punish him too much since he was at least nice about sharing and stuff. The father beat him down anyways. :P
Another group of guys would sometimes arrive tardy. Before video games, internet, and all that other stuff we do now, kids entertained themselves differently. Like, going to the lumber processing plant and run on the logs in the water. So when one of the girls told her where they were going, she asked all of them to raise their pant legs, to see the dirty water residue marks to see who was doing this. Rolling logs was fun and all, but she had to stop them and it wasn't hard to say why. Out there, in body of water (probably a lake) covered in huge logs, if you fell through, you'll drown and die. And the only sign you were there would be weeks later when the stench of your rotting body permeates the air. Yup, pretty convincing reason.
Story from grandma 3:
When my mom was in 4th grade, she helped grandma take care of a pretty profitable bird business. They'd raise birds and they'd sell for about a month's wages. But it was tiring, as late into the night she'd be washing leaves and stuff and feeding the birds. There were around a hundred of them. An entire wall. This is also before they moved to Taichung, I think.
Anyways, a friend wanted to offer 40,000 taiwan dollars (a lot back then) for the whole lot. Grandma thought it was a good idea, as she wanted to then turn the money around to buy a large plot of land in Taichung. Since they're really just for looks, as they're too small even to eat, they're kinda useless. A plot of land is better. But, grandpa thought it was too profitable a business to give up.
Shortly after, a typhoon blew through, and the bird market crashed. Eventually, they couldn't sell any of them so they had to just let them go. And even then, releasing them from their cages, many of them flew back. Sounds a lot like the stock market these days.
Feb 15th
a-ma's apt, National Palace Museum, Taipei 101
Feb 16th
Walked around HsinChu today. Started the day by eating pian pi ya from a local store. Lots of meat. They used cooked the rest of the duck in some sort of spice mixture and tossed it in a plastic bag. The duck tasted pretty good. From there on, we walked to the bus stop to get a ride into the middle of the city. Walked around for a while in the shopping area. At the bottom of Sogo there was a supermarket and some little food vendors, so I got a giant strawberry cream puff and bought a bunch of random stuff at the market. It seems asian drinks are cheaper here than in Japan and US.
Finally got a chance to stop by a KFC for a snack. I ordered a original chicken thigh, a maji dan ta, and a pu ci dan ta. The chicken really does taste better than from the US. It's less greasy and the oil seems lighter. The flavor is the same, it's mainly in the texture. Slightly less crispy on the outside, so it's not dried out. It's probably a sign that it's more fresh this way too. The chicken meat seems more moist rather than oil-soaked.
The pu ci dan ta tastes pretty much like from the bakery in Saratoga. Slightly more oily crust and crispy/flaky on the outside than what I normally get. It's pretty good.
The maji dan ta is like the pu ci dan ta except that there's a layer between the custard and the bottom crust, filled with some sort of mochi stuff. Because it's all melted, it was easy to take a bit out of, and it tastes really good. I think I like that one the best out of the three things I got.
Afterwards, we went to the city god temple which is like this hole-in-the-wall temple right next to a food court with tons of food. I got a fish ball soup and a hakka bbq pork "ba wan". Those were pretty good, but now I'm totally full :)
Feb 21:
Story from grandma 1:
When she was small, she learned all the old ways of day to day life. Such as indoor heating (it's done in expensive homes by having a clay/concrete floor over a sort of oven chamber where they burn horse dung, which doesn't smell very bad because they were vegitarian back then), and making salt from sea water.
Sea water is made by taking a dirt area and covering it with wet horse dung. It's slathered around and then dried so that it forms a hard uniform layer. Saltwater is poured on and dried in the sun. The dung layer allows the salt to dry without grit being mixed in, as it would if it were just dirt.
Story from grandma 2:
More like Taiwanese history. Hakka people came from Guangdong and used to live on the coast. They were pushed inland by the Minyue people from Fujian. Eventually they returned to the coast when the Japanese invaded, and found them favorable. It seems during the occupation, the Japanese built up the industrial sector, the public sanitation systen, and the public school system. Genrerally, an overall standard of living raise across the board. It also seems probable why there are people in Taiwan who are very anti-Japanese and very pro-Japanese.