My first $200

That's a $200 bill (worth about $6 US). I got it in change today and it's the first one I've ever seen (the common denominations of paper money in Taiwan are $100, $500 and $1,000). That's Chiang Kai-shek on the front; the Presidential building in Taipei is on the reverse side.

I wonder why it is that governments mint or print certain denominations in such small quantities that most people seldom encounter them. Living in the United States, I hardly ever saw $2 bills, but the Mint must be printing enough every year to keep the (small) supply up. I wonder why the government doesn't either just discontinue it. or print enough so that they're circulated as much as the $1 and $5.

The Maokong Gondola

We went to Maokong this weekend. Maokong's a mountainous area just outside of the city, full of little tea shops, amazing views and a temperature that's a few degrees cooler than downtown Taipei. In the past we had to wait for a rather inconvenient bus or pay for a taxi ride, but this month the Taipei MRT opened the Maokong Gondola - actually a cable car - with four stops, running from Taipei Zoo MRT Station up to Maokong in the mountains.

The cable cars are quiet, run very smoothly, and were less crowded than I expected - I'd heard of 40-minute waits the previous weekend. This may be because we went up in the late afternoon and came back in the evening. It may also be because, the previous day, a mechanical failure stranded several hundred people high up in the air for several hours. (We don't read the local news quite as much as we should, and we didn't hear about this until after we got back. In retrospect, it explains a lot, including why gondola staff members seemed so nice to everybody, profusely thanking everybody for their patronage.)
This is a very blurry picture of the Taipei Zoo gondola station, but...

...here is a somewhat clearer picture, showing where people are boarding the cars.

This is one of the service stations between actual gondola stops. The cable cars don't stop here, but these stations are manned by MRT employees.

The view, looking down.

Taipei in the late afternoon.

Here's a view of the Maokong scenery from the cable car.

One more view of Taipei.

Penghu

It's time to post some pictures from my Penghu trip. These are a bit late, but I was distracted by a bad case of sunburn I got (my feet were so badly burned they required professional medical attention; they're healing well now) and by my own procrastination habit.

Maokong is the biggest city in Penghu - not that it's really such a large city. I got the feeling it would be a lot smaller if not for the tourist trade. It has at least one Starbucks.

We took a boat like this to Chipei on Monday. Chipei is where I had my first snorkeling experience.

The main town on Chipei. Chipei's a tiny island which is settled by people living off tourists - I imagine it becomes something of a ghost town in winter.

We saw dragon boat races on Tuesday morning. These pictures were taken at the harbor in Maokong. Three boats competed, and there was a fairly decent-sized crowd.

The beach on the main island in Penghu where we went snorkeling on Tuesday. The area over by the rocks in the distance is where Jenna and I found squid, cuttlefish, puffer fish, and other assorted creatures. Just a stone's throw from dry land.

The Matsu Temple in Penghu. It's said to be the oldest temple in all of Taiwan by some guidebooks (the English-language signs outside only claim it's the oldest Matsu temple in Taiwan). I'm sure much of the original structure has been replaced since it was built in the 1600s, but you can see some old woodwork and art inside.

A gnarled tree outside the Matsu temple.

Penghu Snorkeling

I went snorkeling for the first (and second) time this past weekend with Jenna, in Penghu. There was a bit of a learning curve to overcome (as it turns out, seawater doesn't taste all that good, but that didn't stop me from accidentally swallowing/inhaling bits of it) but if you're swimming in the right place, you can see some truly awesome things.

Monday afternoon we went snorkeling off the island of Chipei. At first I enjoyed exploring, via snorkel, the areas of the beach where boring sandy stretches alternated with rocky bits. I soon figured out that I was much more likely to see some cool animal life in the rocky parts, and I saw huge swarms of little fish, and a few slightly larger fish (which were about as big as the biggest aquarium fish). I saw one truly large fish the size of my torso swimming a bit further out - he wasn't menacing at all, but looked like a giant version of a silver and yellow tropical fish with a somewhat comical-looking face. Swimming further out, I also saw dark shapes on the seafloor which I initially thought were resting fish, but when one of them opened up its head, I realized they were giant sea cucumbers.

The following day we went snorkeling in a beach on the main island of Penghu. We did not have high expectations because the beach is not well known for snorkeling, but once we began swimming around a rocky section, we saw some impressive stuff. Huge schools of glittering silver fish which moved in precise formation. Black sea urchins lodged into crevices in the rocks. Pufferfish swimming around nonchalantly - they didn't puff up, but I recognized them as pufferfish because I'd seen them on so many restaurant signs in Korea and Taiwan. A group of about seven or eight ominous-looking black squid, each about a foot long, just hanging there suspended - maybe they were waiting for food to swim by. If I'd disturbed them perhaps I would have been squirted with ink - I didn't test out this theory though. We found two cuttlefish, looking like chubby, globular squid, wandering slowly through the rocky underwater terrain. This was all close to shore - we didn't go wandering dangerously far out. And we never would have seen any of it if we had stayed on dry land.

Come to Taiwan: We're Not China (fortunately)

This is actual language from a Taiwan tourist brochure I found at the tourist kiosk at Taipei Station. I guess I don't disagree with any of it, but Jenna and I were both amazed it would be so blunt:

Interested in Chinese culture? Come to Taiwan. That's because
Taiwan is more "Chinese" than the mainland. No 50 years of communism, "Red
Guards," or "Cultural Revolution" here set on tearing down the old; just a
long-standing tradition of cherishing and preserving its rich cultural
heritage.

A bit later, the same brochure introduces the National Palace Museum by saying "China may be a dragon, but the dragon's treasures are in Taiwan."

漢字

Before I came to Taiwan, I studied Korean-style Chinese characters for a couple of months. It helped me with my grasp of more advanced Korean vocabulary, and was a good way fo rme to get acclimated to Chinese characters before coming here.

Chinese and Korean aren't related the way English and German are, and the basic grammar and vocabulary are quite dissimilar. But thousands of Chinese words have entered the Korean language in much the same way that English has adopted thousands of Latin words over the centuries.

I'm intrigued by the fact that you can usually see the phonetic similary, but not always. 生 is sheng in Mandarin and seng in Korean; 好 is hao in Mandarin and ho in Korean; 人 is ren in Mandarin and in in Korean; 光 is gwang in both Mandarin and Korean; 漢 is han in both Mandarin and Korean. But 學 is xue in Mandarin and hak in Korean, for some reason. Interesting.

Elementary Mandarin

So I've been in Taipei for 3 months, and although I'm not learning Chinese as quickly as I'd like (I still lack the confidence to verbally tell a taxi driver my destination or order in a restaurant by myself, 2 things I did all the time in Korea) I feel like I've passed the first steep part of the learning curve and I'm learning more quickly now. Owning an mp3 player is a big help.

One slightly annoying thing is that practically all of the Mandarin-for-foreigners learning material out there teaches us to speak Mandarin with a strong Beijing accent. Which would be fine if I were in Beijing, but I'm several thousand miles to the south and I've been assured by both Jenna and the locals that people don't talk like Beijingers here in Taipei. There are no huge linguistic differences, but a lot of words that end with arr when pronounced by Beijingers don't sound the same down here. That includes one of the few bits of Mandarin I knew three months ago: ...zai nar? ("Where is...?") Instead of nar I should say nali, and instead of war (to play) I should say wan, and instead of idyar (a little) I should say idien. For some reason my main textbook, Practical Audio-Visual Chinese I (which seems to be the most popular Mandarin for Foreigners book around, judging by the fact that I've seen several people carrying it around the city in the past few months), teaches me to talk like a Beijinger but write like a Taiwanese (or a Hong Konger; they use the same traditional writing system).

Another little criticism of Audio-Visual Chinese I is that it teaches grammar a bit oddly. I still hadn't learned to say "If ______, then ________" or "I have to ________" when the book went into these subtle variations on expressing past time in Chinese that even Jenna was totally unfamilliar with. Jenna may not talk like a native but she speaks perfectly decent conversational Mandarin; if she doesn't know a particular grammatical construction then presumably I don't need to worry about it yet. So I've decided I'm going to plow ahead through A/V Chinese, only glancing at the grammatical explanations but using it to practice listening (I bought the 5 CDs sold as accessories, and I'm glad I did) and to learn vocabulary and characters.

Zhonghe

I wandered around my neighborhood of Zhonghe today. A couple of pictures that will show what a busy and crowded suburb of Taipei this is:

Motorcycles parked outside Nanshijiao subway station.

A Korean restaurant.

Nanshijiao Station.

Some interesting graffiti.

This is in the local night market - I took this picture in the late afternoon, but they do most of their business between sundown and early morning.

The entrance to my apartment building - I live on the 6th floor.

Hiking near Hualien

On Monday we went hiking near a lakeside town.

The lakeside was full of the sound of frogs. You could also rent paddle boats and motorboats.

It was humid and there was a cool breeze once we climbed to a high altitude.

The view from the top.

Taroko Gorge

Jenna had no early Monday class, and I had nothing scheduled on Monday, so we went down to Hualien for the weekend. We decided to stay all day Monday too when Jenna found out she had no class that evening.

Hualien itself is not a very exciting city, but there is great natural beauty nearby. Taroko Gorge represents Taiwan's single biggest natural tourist attraction.

The gorge was carved out of marble cliffs.
Exposed marble.

There is a Buddhist temple in the gorge, open to tourists.