Lots to recap here, I’ve gotten a bit behind. Pictures to come later.
Shanghai
- I got ripped off by the cabbie on the way to the hotel and ended up paying about $10 US extra
- The city sprawls and traffic was horrible. It took me an hour to an hour and a half to get from the hotel the office each way.
- The local work folks couldn’t have been friendlier, showing us around on weeknights and weekends
- Leo took us to Xintendi - an upscale walk thorugh bourgeoisie mall across from the first communist party hall
- We explored the lights and architecture of the Bund and had Italian dinner on the 56th floor of the Hyatt.
- Lei took us to the underground mall, featuring hardcore haggling for counterfeit designer goods. My opening bid would be 20% of the quoted price (i.e 80% lower), and I’d make the deal for no more than 30% of the original.
- Jenny took us on the train to Hongzhou, where we looked at Temples and rode steel Chinese rental bikes around the locally famous lake.
- We bought hairy crabs and snakes and other stuff at the seafood market, then had a restaurant cook it all up for a team dinner. I ate snake gall bladder, a duck’s head (best parts: tongue and brains), and drank lots of 白九(bai jiu/rice liquor/shiver). You open the carapace of the crab up with your chopstick as if picking a lock and then eat the roe that tastes just like egg yolk (the males moreso than the females)
- Mediocre buffet breakfast at the Hilton International Shanghai was $33 US dollars each day. Instead, I bought ramen noodles for breakfast at work for 40 cents.
- We rode the Maglev train to and from the airport at 350km/h (217mph). It leaned in the turns. It was awesome
All in all, we were happy to get back Taipei. For the first time, it felt like coming “home”.
Yi Lan
Went to northeast Taiwan last weekend with a group of expats organized by The Center. Getting there required going through the 5th longest road tunnel in the world (18 miles). We stayed in a really interesting B&B and did some hiking around the local mountains. One of the trails had a rope bridge over a river and getting to the other one required riding on a small scale logging train. I saw a monkey in the forest.
The mountains are all dense subtropical forest, but the valleys around the mountains are totally desolate – so much water falls during the typhoon that it turns into a giant washout that just wipes everything out, leaving a dried up riverbed behind.
We also sampled some of the local food with a barbeque on Saturday night (pork, steaks, fishballs, shrimp and veggies). Best food of the weekend was the deep fried “onion pancake” with scallions, eggs and batter.
Thanksgiving
Today is Thanksgiving in America, but not so much in Taiwan. I worked. You can’t find turkey here, and even if you could, we have no way to cook a whole bird. Michelle suggested hacking it up and putting it in the toaster oven, but I don’t think this will have the desired effect. We could have gone to one of the international hotels and had an authentic dinner, but we had Chinese lessons tonight so really didn’t have time. Instead, Cynthia made miso soup from scratch (she made her own dashi broth from kombu seaweed and bonito fish flakes) along with some teriaki chicken and noodles. In the middle of our meal, I spotted a huge cockroach brazenly walking across the floor. We killed it, but the food just didn’t taste as good thereafter. I have no idea where it came from . . . I think we would have noticed it flying through the door, it must have come in on my bag or through the walls. We hope this is an isolated event but fear it will not be – other expats have warned us about this sort of thing.
Cynthia is going to make a “real” Thanksgiving dinner for me and some coworkers next Wednesday instead. We’ll have a crock pot chicken (no crispy skin I guess), my Grandma’s stuffing (which we should be able to faithfully replicate with local ingredients), mashers, green bean casserole, and maybe a squash based dessert. I’m looking forward to it.
This weekend we’re going hiking with a club from work on an organized trip. We think this will be a more hardcore hiking experience – hitting a couple peaks of more than 11,000 feet and rumors of some slopes requiring rope. It’s hard to really tell because the details are all in Chinese, and we’re staying in huts along the way, so we don’t need to bring most of our regular backpacking gear – it will be more like a couple of day hikes. I will of course log a trip report here. Hope you have/had a good Thanksgiving.
I figured out how to type in Chinese.
我性Cassleman 我是美國人
“I’m surnamed Cassleman. I am an American.” Yeah, you can’t type “Cassleman” in Chinese.
Also, 我喜歡吃義大利面
“I like to eat Italian noodles” (still not sure how to say “with tomato sauce”). Also note that despite this impressive writing feat, I can’t actually read it. I’m typing phonetically and a what I assume is the proper character shows up. I have no idea if it’s the right one.
In other Chinese learning news, I actually did the tiniest bit of thinking in Chinese today (when the teacher would tell me something and I wouldn’t have to translate it in my head word-for-word into English to figure out what it meant). Today the cab driver also understood my directions to drive me home on my first try - without having to resort to the special address card I’ve printed out. Still, progress is way slower than the Spanish I picked up in the Dominican Republic. Of course, there’s not as much forced immersion with my English speaking wife and coworkers, and 4 years of high school Latin doesn’t help at all with Chinese.
I’ll tell you all about our trip to Shanghai when I have some down time at the B&B we’re going to this weekend.
There’s an article on my high school in Time Magazine. U of D Jesuit had a massive influence on my formation as a person, and this article touches on some of the reasons why.
This weekend started poorly . . . Saturday we went to a travel convention at the World Trade Center that was packed with people but not with English and proved a complete waste of time and money. Sunday, my football team lost ignominiously, I went to church at the wrong time (an hour late), and then we road the subway/elevated train (it changed mid trip) to Danshui. I christened this place Chinese Grand Haven, since it shares the boardwalk, junk food, junk stores, and river meets big water geography with the Michigan resort town near my family’s cottage. I had this vision of walking out to see the Pacfiic, but the boardwalk is not really near the estuary, but was raining, and we had only one compact umbrella. You will not be surprised to hear Cynthia was quickly hungry and frustrated.
Taipei has highlighted for me that Cynthia doesn’t share my same level of comfort of just setting out and seeing where things take you. I remember first noticing this when I went with Dave to Munich years ago. We landed in Munich, drove into the city and parked at a hotel, then got on the subway and got off somewhere and walked around. Soon enough we acquired beer, sausage and sauerkraut, sat in the plaza and watched the Glockenspiel, and commented on how our wives could not appreciate this kind of spontaneity. Taiwan magnifies this for me because there is a lot more day to day frustration when you can’t communicate and are functionally illiterate – stuff isn’t where you think or you don’t know where it is, and you can’t ask. This drives Cynthia’s already low tolerance over the brink. I ignore this, get overexcited about going on some “adventure” . . . and most of the time it turns into a disappointment because of the aforementioned reasons. So, I have resolved that going forward here (i.e. Asia), it’s just not worth it to try and survive on your own – sightseeing and adventures need to guided by someone in the know who’s not me.
In any case, the day needed turning around, so we went decided to go to our favorite Indian restaurant – Saffron. It was closed, since it was 3:30. However, the restaurant next door, the Spice Shop, was open and after literally awakening the staff we were mowing on samosas and lamb kebob and chicken tikka masala and butter naan and vegetable curry and it was excellent. This is why two Indian restaurants can be next to each other and survive, I guess, though I can’t imagine when whoever came second was location shopping, looked at the spot next door to the existing Indian restaurant and said “this is the right spot for my Indian restaurant”. The only place this should happen is in India.
Satiated, we walked back the the main road and saw a movie theater with a poster for the Michael Jackson “This is It” movie. The Taiwan movie experience is a bit different – you buy tickets (which are still $9) where you buy popcorn, you can’t go into the theater until the assigned time that the show starts, and you have an assigned seat. I actually like this because you get to reserve where you want and no one is holding seats, and I’m sure the theater likes it because everyone is packed in efficiently. At the end of the movie, everyone packs up their trash and actually carries it over to the trash can. As for the movie, we both enjoyed it, they kept it from being too corny and fawning. MJ still had the whole dance/sing/compose/perform package like no one else this generation.
Today was a good day, I made up for effectively missing church Sunday by going to a noon All Souls Mass (in’n'out in 30 mins) and one of the guys I’d been interviewing accepted his job offer (for the position I thought would be hardest to fill). That’s now 3 guys down, 9 to go. Plus, our mail shipment came from the US and my property taxes dropped by $200.
This week I’m going to Shanghai for work but I’m bringing Cynthia with me to celebrate our 5th anniversary. Pics and recap to follow.
So I finally posted a video tour of our apartment. Warning: 25MB. There are more pics up in the Taiwan gallery too.
In other news, we’re getting fully settled in. Work is going well but keeping me extremely busy. I like walking to the office tower every day, even when it’s raining, it makes me feel like a grown-up for a some reason; apparently my brain didn’t think I was a grown up before. I’m really learning to appreciate the location of the apartment, everything we need seems just a short walk or ride away. I got my first Taiwanese haircut and it looks good – at a high end place down the street, only about $13 with a hair wash. Like Costa Rica, I’m starting to get annoyed if I spend more than $3-4 on lunch. My lunchtime tighfistedness had eroded in Folsom, I had worn down to paying $8 without a second thought.
We’ve started Mandarin lessons – 4 hours a week. I’m building a mental map of the city in my brain. Food is still great – I’ve found a lot of good local places near work, and were sticking pretty faithfully to a different style every time we go out (which is about half the time). You can’t count Chinese food as one genre for this to work, however. My running joke that Cynthia finds unamusing is constantly saying “Hey, why don’t we go out for Chinese food?” . Last night was mala hot pot with visiting US work friends – made with a Szechuan spicy broth. Szechuan is shaping up to be my favorite Chinese food variety overall – it has the best sauces and it’s almost always spicy. Taiwan style beef noodle soup is a very close second. We’ve been sneaking American food at Yuma (Tex-Mex) and today friends took us to The Diner. We will return to all of these places, and also break down and have pizza.
I’m not feeling homesick yet, probably because time is flying – its already almost November. Cynthia and I are spending a week in Shanghai in early November and we’ll be back in the US for Xmas and New Years. Let me know in the comments what you guys want to hear about. For now, I’m going to thaw some frozen sauce and have pasta and garlic bread for dinner.
I’ve posted up some crazy pics I took over the weekend . . .
This is a man-eating tree snail crawling on a sidewalk planter, almost as big as Cynthia’s hand
They were doing underground work in front of the apartment this week, and repaved it over the weekend. Instead of moving parked cars with a tow truck, they used a forklift. It was surprisingly efficient, though I don’t think either car nor forklift are intended for this application.
There are more pics from the week in the Taiwan gallery. I’ll continue to post there as new experiences occur.
You want to make bean dip in Taiwan? Need some canned chill? Well, the pride of Eden Prarie has made it’s way to the Wellcome (we’re thinking of you Paul and Rachel).
Oh, also I changed the blog theme. I may bring the old one back, but I can’t figure out how to manipulate the style sheet to make it look better on wide screens.
I can post from my new blackberry storm now. Adding a pic
This is a shot of my office. Cynthia is asleep and I don’t have anything else to shoot. A beta test for more interesting things to come . . . I can post life in real time now.
Pat and I knocked down a few more cuisines the last 2 days. We had delicious indian food at a little place called Tandoor. We must have been there early because we were the first people in the restaurant, and it was friday night. We ordered a selection of awesomeness including lamb dahl (lentils) and a spicy chicken tikka masala. We skipped rice and plowed through some killer butter naan. yumyumyum. I want to eat more right now.We checked out of our hotel and moved into our apartment for good on Saturday morning. Noticed that our master bath smelled of sewer gas, and pat had not even been in there yet…had to do some “who speaks english and is in town that we can call to talk to the landlords” juggling and were informed that a plumber will be around on monday, and that the other floors were experiencing similar complaints. Another couple has moved into our nearly empty apartment building, on the 4th floor.It has been grey, annoyingly drizzly (but not really raining) and windy for the last 3 days, the rain finally picked up last night with some seriousness, and I had to send Pat off to his first day of work with my nice umbrella because the 100NT ($3) one we bought on the street is so cheap and crappy (who knew?). I hope he isn’t soaking when he gets there!Last night we braved the spitting clouds to head out for dinner at a sushi joint that we read about on “The Hungry Girl’s Guide to Taipei” (a really useful site written by a taiwan native who splits her time between here and cali, she puts maps and cost info and gives you helpful tips, like whether they have english menus etc.). The tea that they served us was amazing. It wasn’t sweetened, but it was light and fruity and smelled almost like plums. We ordered a tomato salad, a small sashimi platter, a tuna and avocado roll, and grilled asparagus. Everything was delicious. The sashimi platter had about 8 pieces on it, and the fish was so fresh and creamy. We paid our bill and left feeling like we stole something. $23 bucks for sushi dinner! Then we went to have a celebratory beverage at My Other Place to cap off the weekend. As we easily navigated back home through the winding alleys, we realized that the we were already scuffing off the *new* polish and breaking in Taipei.
