Hualien City: A day off, a night out and a bike trip...

This weekend saw us wearing two hats...one as participants in yet another sports day event at Guan-Yin Elementary, as another as freelance adventureres in Hualien City. This trip was more about the nightlife, and we got to have a "city night" that we were in need of. So long in the boondocks leave you craving a hot coffee made for you and a bit of selection when shopping. The small things, but kind of important.

Here are some pics of our Hualien City night, and a day trip biking along the coast and playing in the surf. Freaking nice place, that Hualien:

"If these guys are not careful, they might find themselves in a slump... "

A hat tip to the geologists in the crowd.

Signage along the way....the left an environmental awareness sign about cleaning up your garbage and clean ecosystems, the right a warning that perhaps people with lead sim trunks may need to heed. ... Ok, I get why deep water is a concern, but the way it is worded caught my eye.

Markets. Left, farmers selling their fare along the roadway (the standard way to get our food) and on the right, a larger market area that would house fresh fish, etc, veggies, meats, and of course random products that you would never assume would need to be in a food market. For example - high heel shoes, bandanas and bookmarks.

Fishing as a pastime, and as a living, is the common sight along the entire East coast. Many people will fish solo, just them and a cooler, and some families make a day (or, daily) trip out of it and these catches usually end up at the market or in a truck selling the days catch along the sidestreets....or two days later where we live (we are inland a spell).

Trevor biking away: to the left circumnavigating a loader as it fixes the retaining wall for the bike path extension, to the right navigating through a side street trying to find the access path to the coast ("I think it was this one....").

On the left is a snapshot of three stray dogs trying to stay out of trouble in the afternoon sun, the right a still of Crystal pausing and looking out towards the ocean along the bike path. These bikes are borrowed...no meaning is to be found in the basket at the rear of her bike!

Rock. Taiwan is made of, mostly, schist and marble. The schist makes hiking on the steep slopes absolutley treturous, landslides epic in their size and the sunlit mountainsides spectacular. The marble makes money. The blocks on the left are all mined marble - Taiwan, in the 1990's, was second in the world for exports of marble, behind only Italy. The industry was booming, still is of sorts, but not like it was. To the left is the industrial section of Taiwan that was built to process the marble. I especially like the colours (make them bigger by clicking on the pics, and you can see the colourful, creative buildings). This section of town was a workhorse of the Taiwanese economy back in the day, but still accounts for a large portion.

There are significant environmental concerns with the industry, both in terms of how it is done, and how much it is done, but the segment of the population that is aware of this seems to be limited. As such, the industry continues and digs away. I bet that if you have marble in your house, appartment or have seen a carved statue...there is a good chance it came from Taiwan. Made in Taiwan. Perhaps not made, but it would be an expat of Taiwan. Of sorts.

The election continues......they are all trying hard. I know. But most of these posters are just so.....fake. Like the dude who's poster screams "I play baseball, I stand in front of scenic picture of a place I have never visited....vote for me". There are some candidates who have donned running outfits and their posters are of them running....but one look at them can give you enough evidence that they have never taken the stairs when an escalator is an option, let alone actually jogged somewhere. But their poster screams "I am healthy, I want a healthy Hualien County" with a pinch of "I bought this outfit yesterday, does it fit ok?". Then, on the right up there, is the poster genre of folks who beg for votes. The hand clasp is a Taiwanese way of showing that you are trustworty and caring. To me it looks like it says "I pray with a hot-dog in my hand" or "somebody photo-shopped out my microphone while I was singing karaoke".

Overall, my subjective analysis of Taiwanese elections is that they are in your face, impressively fake applications to your sense of security. More on their electioneering style later....its fraking weird.

Crystal on the beach, and by a fountain drinking pearl tea. Although we only had one day to play about on our bikes, on the beach and in various alleys and villages that we came upon, we tried to make the most of it. And we did. The best parts, as usual, were the unplanned and chilled out times...like the beach pics here. We stopped, hopped over some erosion barriers (big bulky cement monsters) and poked around the beach for a while, watching the surf, getting soaked in the surf, washing up and generally drinking in the oceanic splendour.

Beach fun, fishing boat.

Trevor, full, and lubricating the remaining bites of bbq'd okra with Taiwans finest. To the right our empty plates telling a tale of a meal well eaten.

The Hualien Bay surf to the left, and our bikes taking a break along the bike path on the right. We wanted to keep going, but our bikes insisted that we stop for a breather....so we complied. This is the section of the trail that is still being constructed to link, via urban bike path, the entire coastline with the city centre (which is itself on the coast, but it is a more populated, built up part of the coast, by East coast Taiwan standards).

Us piddling away the evening at the All Star Pub in Hualien with some new found comrades. Live music accompanied us as we chatted the evening away.

Where I video a few moments of a bus ride to Fong-Lin...

On the way to practice for an aboriginal dance competition (see post below for the highlight of that day...) I decided to snag a few moments of the bus trip as we drove down our road, Highway 193, towards the town of Fong-Lin.

Song-Pu Elementary is taking part in a regional competition of their ancestral stories told through dance. It is a very....very....impressive performance, not jus tby the kids that we know but by the whole group of schools. It is done mostly in languages that are not chinese - as the long history of Taiwan was anything but Chinese - so the conversation and songs are lost on me. But the dance tells a story clearly, and the kids do it quite well. Each school will have its story to tell, based on the tribe that most of its students are from. There are 13 recognized tribes in Taiwan, and then the three waves of Chinese immigrants. So, diversity is high, cultures are intensely different, but it all seems (now) to work as one central unit of "Taiwan". Mostly.

Taiwan T-Shirts

Yup, you gotta see the varieties of T's available in the night markets for the kids to believe them. . This one is on the back of a grade 6 girl, at a school aboriginal dance rehersal.

Hmmmm....when did winter get here?

Scrambled Memories: Luna, New Garden, Song-Pu Village

Here we have a random assortment of pic's from the last week or so. Some awsome celestial views around this time of the month, and the weather is totally on our side.

We also got a new garden!

As always, click on any photo to see a much bigger version. I totally suggest you do it for the moonrise one....seriously.

Me teaching a morning session, and the morning view from our living room (out our front door).

The view we have pretty much every morning - well, the bricks, mortar and trees are always there, but the clouds and colours are 'pretty much' always there! - from our third floor window. Song-Pu wakes up for another scorcher. This is also when we hear the rooster, the village chief on loud speaker and the pig ushering in the new day together.

Morning events. People in the background waiting for the bus, neighbours dog walking along the road and a couple of farmers getting loaded up with betel nuts and snacks for another epic day in the fields. The rice harvest is now starting, so the views are chaning from emerald green and vivid contrast between sky and field to brown and dusty in parts. This is not a distraction from the beauty, not in the least, just a change of scenery. It is really interesting to see the vibe of the village change with the approaching harvest - new vehicles in the fields, people busy once again, assorted bags of rice and husks... .

More people getting ready for a day in the fields. The house directly beside us is a restaurant and a multi-purpose shop of sorts, and it is a common way-station for people in the morning and at lunch. A very friendly lady runs it who, earlier in our year, would help us call a cab. The other pic is a sultry morning view of the fields across from our house.

Then....at night.....the game begins! The moon rising above the Coast Mountains, alomost directly behind our house.

The moon, Luna of the evening sky.

Another morning view of Song-Pu village. The tallest bulding is ours, the third floor window you can see is where most of our morning rice field shots are taken from. The roof beside us is a haven for birdies, as is the hydro lines, so we get the epic geological splendor of the Central Mountains, the rice fields and the birdies to gaze at as we awaken. Not too bad at all.

But, there is always the rooster. If only I had a muzzle.......

Trevor's new sticker (thanks Skeptical Inquirer!!) on the coolest helmet this side Kansas, and Crystal at the site of our new garden! Our neighbour has the garden, and when she found out that we were interested in trying to grow some Taiwanese varieties and that we were somewhat used to having our own veggies to grow back in Canada, she cleared a small plot for us. We have basil, cilanto, bok choy, chinese cabbage, okra, chinese eggplant and a lot more to come (we hope!).

Rice harvest. Cut the stalk, burn the rest. Hmm.........this reminds me of a few other bad ideas that agriculture has given us.

Earthquake!!

Sitting at home, just back from town and attempting to digest my delicious dinner, I felt the urge to check the Central Weather Bureau - the science agency that monitors earthquakes, tracks typhoons, does meteorology work, forcasts, the like - to see what was happening around Taiwan. The typhoon season has passed us it seems, but there are always the other things - earthquakes! So, I checked. I clicked and saw that, since I last checked (multiple times daily) there had been a pretty massive earthquake - Taiwan CWB giving it a R-6, USGS a R-5.7:

Then, literally, as I clicked away to check in on Glenn Beck's blog (ok, ok, I know nobody would knowlingly do that....)...I clicked away to find a TED talk or something, and WHAMO, or should I say SHAKE-O!!! The house started rattling, the desks, chairs, glasses, computer started doing the jiggity - then the ever present earthquake reality of the 'wave'. The house - the world it seems - just does this epic and eerie wave, sort of like all the molecules in the materials that constitue a house all decide to go in different directions for a few minutes. A wobble...

...then nothing. This is when the scariest time is, because your thinking to yourself....what next? Waiting, waiting, waiting....then you relax. All is safe. So I immediately checked back with the science folks at CWB and got the almost instant update:

And then this morning, more aftershocks (and what appears to be a brand new 'quake - Hualien is a distance from Nantou, so to assume that they were directly related is a little questionable):

The ground is alive, the plates are active....

Roosters, Pigs and Public Service Announcements

Today took the cake.



Our neighbour, apparently, just purchased - or decided to slaughter in their back yard at 10pm - a vociferous pig. Our other neighbour recently did the same, purchased that is, an equally vociferous rooster. Rooster in the morning, 5:30 sharp, rooster in the evening, anytime, pig sqreeching randomly. This is the music of our lives, our morning wake up and our evening serenade.

Add to the cacophonous joy of the pig/rooster choral brigade a group of out of work karaoke singers ("to sing" infers melodic charm, but let us not fool you into thinking that these 'singers' have any melody, nuance, tone or timing that would ersult in anyone determining it as mucis if it were not for the background song implying that they are intending to make music..but failing). This is the music of our daily lives, but today was the best the loudest and the most diverse of all.

Then we had the village announcemet. The village chief gets on his loudspeaker, loud enough so that the whole village can here (the speaker is directly across from our house!) and speaks - yells - updates to the villagers about weather, the harvest, when the water will be shut off, where to put garbage, random thoughts that he has...things that they need to know, perhaps, and all need to know at the same time. Im sure that if we could understand him - it is in Taiwanese, not Chinese - it would be informative. But to us it is a random assortment of consonants.

The music of village life!

Biking to(wards) Guangfu

...the view from here...

We took a ride this weekend, a day trip, to the north. Towards the town of GuangFu, where Japanese occupation turned fields of rice and forests of bamboo and camphor into fields of sugarcane. Then turned almost the entire rift valley of rice, forests of bamboo and camphor and cloud trees and myriad other species into....sugarcane. Thats a story for another trip.

We stayed on the back roads, Highway 193, which offered more of a palcid rice-paddy environment than the main road, Highway 9. We started by actually biking through the maze of roads that permeates the rice fields themselves near our house, then latched back onto 193 and rode along the backwoods of Taiwan, passing by farms, fields, forests and birds, birds and more birds!! Above Crystal is perturbing an Egret, either on its way to Japan, or on its way back from Japan. Ill ask it next time.

Here Trevor pedals away amongst the fields of rice; to the right is a view of rice (foreground), pineapples (mid) and betel nut palms (background). These crops are common, rice obviously, around these parts. Along with these arepomelo trees, orange trees, all veggies and tubers and melons and nuts you can name.

An election signs. Common as election signs themselves, and also as props for scarecrows once the election is over. The rice fields are replete with election banners from years gone by, apparently enough to scare off offending birds (see field video below!)

Us taking a break alongside a bridge before the actual backroad section of 193 began snacking on carrots and almonds. And an add for massive pomelos to be eaten be equally massive people. This area is prime pomelo territory, so the trees, the signs and the common sight of pomelos on the road, in roadside stalls, at the market, in barbershops, dropped from trees in various fields and forests...everywhere.

Left, Crystal pausing as a scooter whips by; Right, construction on the riverbanks of the FuYuan River. I think that they are turning this into both a wall to hold back floods and a recreational area worthy of an afternoon tea and stroll. Time will tell, but they are hard at work along the banks and inside the stream bed istelf.

We wondered what all those strings were for...until she did this....