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Perhaps with increasing restlessness to find increased variety in my diet or perhaps by hanging out with Aaron more, I’ve been eating some great food recently. Here’s a documentation of some great food in Taiwan (Yilan and Taipei) and where to find it:

Best Curry Udon ever (Yilan)

I’ve been craving some good udon noodles, called 烏龍麵 (wūlóngmiàn) in Taiwan which originally confused me as those are the characters for Oolong tea.[^3] I haven’t found great soup udon in Yilan but I did find some fabulous fried curry udon.

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Purchased yesterday in Taipei at NET, the wannabe GAP of Taiwan.

A couple weeks ago I went to Chiayi (嘉義, pinyin: Jiāyì) to present a paper at the Linguistic Society of Taiwan’s National Conference on Linguistics.[^1] I got a chance to meet some wonderful and kind Taiwanese linguists, make friends with some linguistics students, as well as explore the city of Chiayi.

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Introduction

It’s that time of the year again—Mother’s Day weekend—and that means Scav Hunt! Every year at the University of Chicago we have a huge Scavenger Hunt (a.k.a. “Scav,” or “The Hunt”). On Wednesday night at midnight, a list of roughly 300 items is released in some obfuscated fashion. The items are to be presented three days later, on Judgement Day (Sunday). While some items are simply rare and must be found, most are some sort of construction, production, or art project. There are also some other scav staples: some of the items make up the Scav Olympics, the Party on the Quads, Scav All Stars, and the Road Trip.

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Sports day

Three Mondays ago, Nanao had their annual sports day.[^1] The sports day reminded me of the years of Japanese school sports days I used to go to, complete with the representative student’s pledge of sportsmanship, a three legged race, and concluding relay, though it was only half a day.[^2] It also was billed as the Nan’ao town and school joint sports day (村校聯合運動大會) and indeed many parents, families, and other miscellaneous townspeople were there to join in the festivities.

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Here’s my (and Aaron’s) latest favorite night market food… 抓抓餅 (zhūazhūabǐng). Here’s an iMovie video which explains the process.¹

Bailey just won the Grand Prize at the 22nd Annual Japanese Language Speech Contest in Chicago. I think she’s still in shock and disbelief. The prize involves a round trip ticket to Japan.

She never let me see or listen to the speech, though—now I’m curious.

I’m very proud of her. ^^

The fact that Japanese and Chinese both share the use of Chinese characters. The connection goes beyond simply sharing characters, though: many two- and four-character expressions in Japanese come from older Chinese (these are known as Sino-Japanese items in the biz). This is how I can often “cheat” and use my knowledge of Japanese to guess what some Chinese words are saying, even if I have no idea how to pronounce them.

There are, however, many Chinese-Japanese false cognates—words which look the same and often do indeed have a shared etymology, but have quite different contemporary meanings.¹ As such, I’ve often lamented to friends, especially learners of Japanese or Chinese, the lack of a dictionary highlighting these false cognates and how their usage differs between the Japanese and Chinese. A couple weekends ago I was browsing dictionaries in the Page One bookstore in Taipei 101 and I found exactly that: 誤用度100%日語漢子.

Each spread shows the three sets of cognates, with an explanation of the Japanese use, in Chinese, on the left, and vice versa on the right. It’s a godsend.

By the way, here’s my favorite Chinese-Japanese false cognate:

勉強 (べんきょう)

one’s study (N), to study (V) ~する

勉強 (miǎnqiǎng)

• V
  1. force sb. to do sth. | ¹Bié ∼ tā. Don’t force him to do it.
  2. do with difficulty
• S.V.
  1. unconvincing; strained | Zhège jìhuà ¹hěn ∼. This plan may not work.
• Adv
  1. reluctantly; grudgingly | Tā ∼ xiàole yīxià. He forced a smile.
  2. barely enough | Tā ∼ néng shuō jǐ jù Fǎyǔ. She can speak only a little French.

St. Patrick’s Day for many means a wholesale celebration of faux-Irishness through Guinness and everything green. While I’m not a fan of beer, I decided to put something green together to eat today. One of my favorite food writers Mark Bittman of the New York Times made a chicken with salsa verde but since I can’t find half of those ingredients in this country, I made a simpler non-Irish dish: a green pilaf, based on Bittman’s own recipe. Why not try a simple green vegetarian dish for St. Patrick’s Day?

As an added bonus, I set this recipe to Sufjan Stevens’ Illinois. I was just in a Chicago-missing mood and listening to it while cooking, and it seemed to work so well.

Time: 45 minutes (mostly waiting, though)
2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
1 medium onion, chopped
2 cloves garlic, chopped
Salt and pepper
1 1/2 cups (400cc) chicken stock (I used a bouillon cube—雞湯塊)
1 medium head of broccoli, just the flowers, in small chunks (maybe 3/4-1 cup)
1 cup (250cc) short grain white rice
1/2 cup (130cc) chopped parsley, optional

1. Track 1: “Concerning the UFO Sighting Near Highland, Illinois.” Put oil in a pan on medium heat. Add the garlic, onion, and a pinch of salt and stir occasionally until the onion is translucent or until you hear the piano riff on track 3, “Come On! Feel the Illinoise!” In the down time, you can make sure your chicken broth is heated up in a pot.
   
2. Track 3: “Come On! Feel the Illinoise!” Add rice to the onion pan and stir occasionally until they get clear and start to brown, sometime during the second half of track 3, “Come On! Feel the Illinoise! Pt. II: Carl Sandburg Visits Me In a Dream.” Throw the broccolli in the broth to let cook for the last minute of “Carl Sandburg.”
   
3. Track 4: “John Wayne Gacy, Jr.” Add the stock/broccolli to the rice/onion pan. Heat to a boil and then let cook for the rest of the track. Stir occasionally. Compare yourself to a serial killer as you watch the bubbles.
   
4. Track 5: “Jacksonville.” Cover and cook until the end of track 9, “Chicago.”
   
5. Track 10: “Casimir Pulaski Day.” Enjoy my favorite song on the CD. Turn heat off and let sit, uncover, stir gently, cover again, and let sit on the burner until track 15, “The Predatory Wasp of the Palisades Is Out to Get Us.” Optionally mix in chopped parsley for additional green. Serve.

Happy St. Patrick’s Day!

The Fulbright program sets up an extra “co-school” to work at for a small period of time in the spring, as a means of giving us ETA’s increased variety and different school experiences, as well as letting us touch more students’ lives. For the month of March, I will be at Dongshan Elementary in Dongshan (冬山).

Teaching at Dongshan every day involves taking the train every day, and I’m fully psyched about that. I was first quite worried as there are, according to the online trip planner, only three trains a day that go directly from Nan’ao to Dongshan but this has turned out to be false. It still does mean at least an hour a day on trains, but I’ve got my iPod with wonderful podcasts, and I’m pretty sure my class schedule lets me avoid transfers.

I’m also excited about taking the train so often as Dongshan has the newest train station in Yilan county. It’s a beautiful new modern design of tasteful glass and steel.¹

The school itself is much larger than what I’ve been used to, with five classes per grade of about 30 students each… therefore about 700 students total. A special characteristic of the school is kites… the school has a kite museum and students make kites and fly them. The English classroom closet was also filled with kites.

On the teaching front, I’ll be teaching grades 2, 3, 4, and 6. I’ll be teaching all of those classes once a week, focusing on storytelling. Today I told Jump, Frog, Jump! to second graders. I’ve never had the chance to really use the same lesson plan over and over, and I already can see that I’ll be able to learn a lot through the iterative process.

Thanks.

The Lantern Festival (元宵节) is annually on the 15th day of the lunar year, this year February 21, 2008. Yesterday my Fo Guang friend Aaron and I, after buying textbooks for our upcoming classical Chinese course, met up with Michelle and Jerry in Taipei to check out the lanterns at Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall. Jerry took us first, though, to a casual but very authentic Japanese restaurant, famous for their eel. (Here’s Michelle and Aaron, below:)

Many of the lanterns at the festival were not of the traditional variety…

…but more “artful” ones. Some were made by school teams…

…some were made by elementary school kids…

…and some were the joint effort of a high school and a “Beer Team.”

Many had mice on them, as it is the year of the rat. And then there was this one…

The Memorial Hall was lit up with lanterns and Hollywood lights, and there was a huge glowing orb out in front. Maps described it as the “main lantern,” but really I personally wouldn’t call it a lantern at all. The orb was made up of plastic mouse-shaped balloons that lit up.

Down the street, the festivities continued near the Taipei City Hall, which lit up the streets right under Taipei 101. We all had a great time and enjoyed the lanterns.

I made some pasta tonight for dinner, and decided to share it with Barack and Hillary. I haven’t cooked in a long time here in Taiwan, especially as the noodles down the street are so cheap. Now that I have, though, I do really enjoy the process and the smells, and of course the familiar flavors that are hard to come by. I look forward to cooking more in the months to come. ^^

On a side note, very cool section in the Texas Democratic debate on second language education.

It’s been two weeks now since Chinese New Year—I suppose it’s about time to write up the final adventures of my New Year break. My friend Andy from college who is Taiwanese-American came back to Taiwan to celebrate the New Year and invited me to tag along.

Day 1: New Year’s Eve

The adventure began now three Wednesdays ago, when I took the high speed rail down to Kaohsiung (高雄). Andy showed me around the city a little bit (including the nearby temple with the European-looking knight) and we had the traditional New Year’s Eve dinner, which is one of the most important parts of the New Year. We all stayed up watching TV (and the adults playing Mahjong), then Andy and I then set off some fire crackers at midnight.

Day 2: Exploring Kaohsiung

The next morning I was greeted with more fire crackers and a delicious soup with Nian gao (年糕), a type of mochi, very reminiscent of the traditional Japanese New Year’s お雑煮.

We went out with the family to the park surrounding the Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts. The park features many different public sculptures.

There was also a number of pieces as part of their current exhibit on “container art,” which was pretty cool.

Many people were out in the park on this holiday, and there were many kites in the sky as well. It was a beautiful day. We then walked around through a super busy street market and went home.

Andy and I walked around at night, checking out the night market out behind his grandmother’s house, and near the neighborhood temple. A lot of great things were for sale, like various dried fruts and candies, bootleg DVD’s, and Spongebob Squarepants New Year’s decorations. I had a great time in Kaohsiung and enjoyed meeting Andy’s family.

Day 3: Taichung

On Day 3 we took the high speed rail up to Taipei, where Andy’s other grandmother lives, but stopped in Taichung on the way. Not really knowing what to do in Taichung, we decided to check out the National Museum of Natural Science—in retrospect, a fabulous choice. It was an easy free shuttle away from the high speed rail station.

Andy mentioned that he’d been there when he was very small, and only remembers that he was really scared by the animatronic dinosaurs. Most of the exhibits were in Chinese only, but we both had a fabulous time. We spent the entire day there, from about 10–4, yet only covered half the museum. A highly recommended visit in Taichung.

For some reason, though, there was a flying pig in the evolution exhibit…

And here are a couple photos from the streets of Taichung. Andy pointed out that the “Price Impossible” store actually looked emptied out, making the prices actually impossible.

Day 4: Wulai

The next day in Taipei, we decided to go to Wulai, a more rural township of Taipei county, which is home to another tribe of Atayals. The whole area is quite touristy, but the land was absolutely beautiful, even in the rain. I would love to go back again on a nice spring day.

Taking the old “Wulai wood cart” up along the side of the river, you get to one of the main attractions, the Wulai waterfall.

We then walked around up in the surrounding mountains and the Waterfall Park (we didn’t find the waterfall :(). We had lunch, including some bamboo-steamed rice, and visited the Wulai Atayal Museum which, unfortunately, did not allow photography. It was a small but very nice museum, covering the lifestyle and traditions of the Atayal all across Taiwan, with some nice fun interactive features as well. I thanked the workers in Atayal, “mhuway su,” when I left, and they complemented me on my pronunciation. ^^

At night, we went out to see CJ7 (長江七號), the new Stephen Chow movie, which was a very touching, cute kids’ movie. I highly recommend it. Apple has the trailer up, so it’s probably coming to the US, and not dubbed! It’s kind of weird to have a kids movie not dubbed, though.

Day 5: Going home

The next morning we went briefly to the 228 Memorial Park and National Taiwan Museum before I left to come back to Nanao. My train ride coming home was almost three hours, and it just felt stupid, now that I know that you can go all the way down the island by high speed rail in an hour and a half. Meh.

All in all, I had a fabulous long weekend and got a good Chinese New Year experience. Thanks Andy and family for your hospitality!

Day 3: The Great Wall

Before we finalized our plans to go to China, K80 just had one criteria for an itinerary: to go to the Great Wall of China. We reserved all of our final full day in Beijing to going to the Wall. After our delicious breakfast, we hit the roads, taking a bus from the Dōngzhímén bus station out to Mìyún (密雲) and then a taxi to Sīmǎtái (司馬臺). Compared with other more popular Great Wall sites, Simatai is less restored, less touristy, and a more challenging hiking experience. We gave in to the adventurers within.

The weather was actually pretty nice, hovering right above 0°C, with beautiful clear skies, making up for the rest of China. We could see miles across. The higher up we went, the more of the Wall we could see.

They weren’t kidding when they said Simatai was more challenging of a hike… with some sections >45° up, sometimes it felt like a climb rather than hike… the path also sort of disappeared towards the end.

The whole experience fills with you a sense of awe, especially when you think of the people, real humans just like us (at least, we think), building this hundreds of years ago. Its scope is mind blowing. We made sure to make our visit memorable and well-documented as well.

In the end we turned back after climbing for a couple hours, and when we saw that the next peak ahead of us looked particularly menacing. We took some final pictures and turned back.

K80 made sure to steal a brick on the wall down. Shh… We also saw a frozen river which excited the Floridian.

Noodles for dinner

For dinner we met up with Anna again and her friend. Anna recommended a noodle place where you can watch the guys whip up the different kinds of noodles in front of your eyes… there’s a guy lassoing some into a pot, a guy beating some dough into submission, another shaving little noodle bits off a ball of dough with a knife. These are the Chuck Norris of noodles.

For desert we had what I describe as Chinese 大学芋… some chunks of sweet potato, dipped in hot candy-ness. You then pick some up, dip it in water to let it cool off, and eat it. It was wonderful.

Thus concludes our haphazard trip to China. We all had a fabulous time, enjoying many cultural sites and seeing and making many friends.