Asa Dotzler: Firefox, Mozilla, Humans, and the Internet We Want

The first talk was by Asa Dotzler, Mozilla’s Director of Community Development, who was last in Japan seven years ago for the launch of Mozilla 1.0. Asa’s talk took us back to the history of the Internet and its great impact on all people. He reminded us that the values which built the successful internet of now are those of participation, transparency, interoperability—all of which are currently threatened by the forces of commerce. We must work together to balance the forces of commerce to prevent exclusivity.

Asa argues that the web browser—as the window through which we access the internet—has an important role to play in ensuring the open web. 23% of the world uses Firefox as its browser, spreading Mozilla’s non-commercial values with it. He retold the Netscape 7.0 popup-blocking fiasco as an example of commercial forces working against the public good.

While Firefox doesn’t have the great revenue stream of its competitors, what it does have is an impressive community, as demonstrated by the Mozilla gumi in Japan. There are over 1000 contributors to Firefox code—almost 10 times the number of actual employees—not to mention the thousands of daily testers who support this development. As we look forward to Firefox 3.5, it will support over 70 different languages, thanks to the great work of localization communities and organizers.

Asa argues that the key to Firefox’s success—and the success of the open web—is the involvement of users in its development. Firefox is a better product due to this community process, and he encourages users to get involved however they can to continue this success.

Bob Chao (趙柏強): Activities of the Taiwanese Mozilla Community

Bob Chao is the Community Liaison for the Taiwanese Mozilla Community, MozTW. As his day job, he works for Creative Commons Taiwan at Academica Sinica and is also affiliated with Dharma Drum University’s School of Philanthropy.

Bob started off by remarking that the Taiwan is in many ways much like Japan: both use Kanji or Hànzi (漢字) for writing, both love baseball, and both have great senses of humor. Bob then gave a quick overview of the Taiwanese internet space. While there are no official numbers, Bob reports that Firefox has between 10-15% market share in Taiwan, and most are still using IE6. The most popular social networking service in Taiwan is not even on the HTTP web, but rather is PTT.CC, a telnet service. For this reason, there are two Taiwanese Firefox extensions to add telnet support. Taiwan is also a leader in mobile technology and Bob is looking forward to Fennec, the upcoming Mozilla mobile browser.

MozTW started in 2004 on the site moztw.org with hosting by the Open Source Software Foundation of Academica Sinica. MozTW now hosts a number of forums, wiki, and a planet as well as the popular Mozilla Links news blog. Some of their off-line activities include:

• Firefox Parties for major version releases,
• A “Firefox month” campaign for Firefox 2, including a tour of talks at different college campuses,
• Their own local Firefox mascot, Foxmosa (狐耳摩莎),
• Regular seminars and tutorials on localization, web standards, add-ons, etc.,
• Community education courses for basic web applications, and 自由新生代 (Freedom for Generation Z) seminars on open source software for high school students,
• A weekly gathering in Taipei called MozTW Lab,
• A monthly BarCamp-like gathering in different locations called MozTW Gathering.

On-line, they also run a Top Extensions contest one month after each major release. This past April they also ran a campaign called Experience IE8 (體驗 IE8) to highlight new features of IE8 which already existed on Firefox. This MozTW site became the first hit for Google searches for “體驗 IE8”. They are also currently working on Project GFX, a social network around Firefox usage, with a public beta planned for this summer, with the aim of further growing their local community.

In late 2009, the MozTW community will be involved with Mozilla Service Week and another 自由新生代 (Freedom for Generation Z) seminar series for high schoolers. Bob states that the MozTW community aims to help spread open standards and open content on the web, not just the Firefox browser through these efforts.

mar: Natural Language Interfaces and Ubiquity

mar is a very active contributor to a number of localization efforts and Japanese SuMo who has been working on various modifications to Ubiquity’s Japanese support. mar introduced Ubiquity with a quick demo and showed how easy it is to write new verbs in JavaScript and jQuery.

A linguistic interface has the advantages of increased efficiency, precision, and great extensibility. Like many software projects, however, its roots were in English. mar then gave a general overview of the functions of Ubiquity’s parser and his work on making Ubiquity better support Japanese. I finished up at the end by highlighting some of the features of the upcoming parser for Ubiquity, Parser 2.

Canvas Programming in the Cloud Computing Era (har har)

gyuque is a community member who caused a storm earlier this year with his demo of 3D rendering in 2D canvas. [slides]

gyuque gave an explanation of how different aspects of the 3D in 2D canvas demo were done, like how he accomplished texture mapping using affine transforms, and how the ray-tracing approximation was done on-line. He concluded that forcing 3D in the 2D is unreasonable and absurd—but that 3D canvas API’s are actively being developed at Opera, Mozilla, and Google. He demoed versions of his js touch demo ported to Opera Canvas 3D, Google O3D, and Gecko Canvas 3D (demo here). He compared and contrasted the various API’s and concluded that those who are interested in learning Canvas 3D technology now should try and familiarize themselves with all three systems.

Lightning talks

Mr. Horin (jus) MC’d a series of eight lightning talks with a gong to kick people off the stage after exactly five minutes. Without further ado…

1. Yuriko Ikeda spread the word on the J2 outdoor Mongolian barbeque parties,² with the first J2 held in 1989. The dates are announced on Usenet, but information is also on j2.org. It’s an open source Mongolian barbeque, so people bring their own food and take their trash back. The next Kanto (eastern Japan) J2 will be held on 2009-09-06. [slides]
   
2. piro of clearcode, the famed developer of about 25 add-ons, advocated for building unit tests into add-ons. Unit tests may be hard to write and difficult to maintain, though, so piro wrote UnitTest.XUL (abbreviated UxU) which offers a framework to make the unit testing task less painful. He then mentioned some successful uses of UxU.
   
3. dynamis of Mozilla Japan presented 10 ways to enjoy open source software: [slides]
   
   1. use it,
   2. talk about it,
   3. support other users,
   4. document and translate,
   5. test it, report it,
   6. suggest new features,
   7. design, illustrate, and mock up,
   8. write add-ons,
   9. develop: “bugs are waiting for you,”
   10. embed it into your projects.
4. potappo gave an update on the Mozilla Developer Center Japanese translation. He introduced MDC, described the ramifications of the move from MediaWiki to DekiWiki, and made a call for contributors. [slides]
   
5. Taro Matsuzawa (btm), head of Mozilla-gumi, gave a quick overview of his Mozilla hacking experience (including definitive proof that it helped him lose weight). He’s now more involved with community development, including running the regular Firefox Extension Development meetings in Tokyo. He would now like to help support people interested in hacking the core of Mozilla itself and hopes to dragoon more people into doing so.
   
6. Masahisa Kamataki from the Japan Open Office User Group showed off the add-on (extensions) functionality in Open Office. He first covered some news, including UNESCO’s promotion of Open Office and the promise of further interoperability with Microsoft Office in the future. He then introduced three Open Office add-ons: the Sun Report Builder, Sun PDF Import beta, and Sun Wiki Publisher. Add-ons can be written in Java and C++, but some do not require any coding.
   
7. Kazuyuki Ashimura of W3C discussed the multimodal web which goes beyond HTML + CSS. He described the architecture of MMI and gave a vision for such ubiquitous devices. He noted that the W3C Multimodal Interaction Working Group is currently going through a rechartering process.
   
8. An anonymous presenter presented some ideas for a new issue escalation system for Mozilla. He believes a bugbase could also act as a knowledge base to support users and act as a hub for developers. Some ideas are up on this website. He’d love to get people involved with this mozwiki project, as well as further development of bugzilla-ja. [slides]
   

Talk session with Hirotaka Yoshioka and Satoko Takita

The last session of the night was the talk session with Hirotaka Yoshioka of Miracle Linux and the Yokohama Linux Users Group and Takita Satoko (chibi), the Chair of Mozilla Japan, in the style of many Japanese radio talk shows. They stepped through the history of the web and recounted some tales from their experience in the early web. They discussed their struggles for and with internationalization of web technology and their initial reactions to open-source software. They noted that open-source projects used to be used only by those who contributed, but now many open-source projects are used by many who are not active contributors themselves. They discussed the status of various open-source projects in Japan and how they’ve attempted to get people involved.

Yoshioka and Takita finished up by giving their conceptions of the future of the web, as the internet becomes more and more ubiquitous and continues to change the way we live our lives. The internet will continue to develop and transform, and its continued creative development is best spurred through open and free development.

After the party there’s the afterparty

And with that, Mozilla Party JP 10 came to a close and the participants moved to the afterparty. I personally wasn’t able to make it, but makoto has some photos of the great food and various shenanigans up on his flickr.

Thanks to Mozilla gumi and the various sponsors for putting on such an outstanding event! It was great to feel the overwhelming energy of the Mozilla community here in Tokyo.

Related posts:

1. Mozilla By The Numbers
2. Light of Firefox (tomoshibi 灯) from Mozilla Japan
3. The (Shiretoko) Revolution Begins Now

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Note: Many of the considerations here are specific to Fulbright English Teaching Assistants (ETA’s) in Taiwan. If this exact grant doesn’t apply to you, you may be better off simply taking a look at the IRS’s guide for Fulbrighters and also the Tax Guide for U.S. Citizens and Resident Aliens Abroad. I am not a Certified Public Accountant, tax advisor, nor Enrolled Agent¹ so your mileage may vary. Consider yourself warned.

Leaving the States

First, make sure that any employers you’ve had so far this year know some permanent address of yours (your parents’, say) and will send your income statements to that address come next January. If they only have some temporary address of yours, try to see if you can change that record with your employers before you leave. Worst case, you won’t get one in the mail, and you’ll call them up when you start your taxes and have them send it to you then.

Your Taiwanese income

In terms of actually doing your taxes: there are a few things to note, most of which they will tell you during orientation or afterwards:

1. Your Fulbright payment will not exist in Taiwan for tax purposes—i.e., you do not pay Taiwan taxes—but they will count toward US taxes.
2. The ETA-ship payments, according to the IRS’s own guidelines count as wages, not as scholarships, for tax purposes as, after all, they’re paying you to teach.
3. You will not, however, receive a W-2 form for your “wages”—instead you’ll get a nice letter from the Foundation (with your income in US$) which you can use as proof of those wages.

All of the above are pretty straightforward. The bottom line is, you pay federal taxes just as if the job were in the US. The only major difference is that approximate payments will not be withheld from each paycheck like it would be in the US.

Filing your federal taxes

The fact that you’re filing from abroad, however, adds a few other issues:

1. Whenever you file from abroad, you get an automatic two month extension on filing. While there’s no penalty to do this and file by June 15th, if it turns out that you do owe taxes, those taxes will still have interest accruing since April 15th. So it pays to just figure it out earlier rather than later.
2. If you end up being out of the US for more than 330 days, as some ETA’s may (depending on their itineraries, or if they decide to stay in Taiwan afterwards), there’s an option to take a Foreign Earned Income Exclusion (IRS Form 2555), which lowers your tax liability in the US (and thus, lowers your taxes). It’s a bit complicated, however, so even if this option applies to you, if you’re like me and enjoy doing your taxes, you can calculate your taxes both ways: with and without Form 2555. My personal experience was that, as I was already filing for certain educational credits (Lifetime Learning), it didn’t matter whether I used it or not, so I didn’t.

State and local taxes

Finally, there’s the issue of state and local taxes. The bottom line is that you pay state and local taxes only for wages that were made in those states. The way this is done in most states is by filing a non-resident/partial-year-resident form which makes you calculate your total adjusted income and also your your adjusted income in that municipality, and charges you the appropriate tax based on your income in that place. As your Taiwan wages weren’t in any US state, they won’t count toward any state or local taxes.

Help is just a phone call away

If you get confused along the way, there’s always the option of calling the IRS. The IRS has a 1-800 number for individual taxpayers (1-800-829-1040), and 1-800 calls are free from Skype.

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2. Survival Tips for Visiting Taiwan
3. Family in Taiwan

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Verdict: suitcase 18kg, guitar 6kg. I think I’ll make one more box to send at the post office tomorrow morning.

I feel like a caveman. THAT IS ALL.

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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.¹ I haven’t found great soup udon in Yilan but I did find some fabulous fried curry udon.

The (unfortunate) best way to describe this shop is “half-a-block from the entrance of the night market, across the street from the condom store.” For the past month or two, since I found this store, this has been my dinner every Tuesday before Chinese class. Here are some pictures from when Aaron and I went.

The curry udon is 55 dollars. The other two flavors were unfortunately not as good. I haven’t tried anything else at that store, but I really don’t know why I would. The store also has Coke, Sprite, and Apple Sidra in glass bottles which taste great.

Real Ramen (Luodong)

I asked a few locals where I could get “real ramen”: not that instant schtuff but the fresh firm yellow noodles in a variety of soups with different toppings.² The place that was recommended to me is just down the street from the Luodong night market, past the post office and toward (but before) Zhengzheng elementary school.

They had all the classic soups, like pork broth, soy, and miso, and they all came with wonderful fixin’s. Highly recommended.

The Diner (Taipei)

The Diner, Taipei

The Diner is a classic American diner in Taipei near Da-an Park.³ Other places may advertise “American breakfast” but this is the real deal. It took us a disgustingly long amount of time to find it but it was worth the wait and, with the proper directions or address, I know you, gentle reader, will find it with ease.

The Diner has a great atmosphere. While there isn’t much of a counter, there were soft bench seats and a real diner feel. It even had a print of Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks on the back wall. Nice touch, though it makes me miss the Institute.

Michelle and I split a mushroom and swiss and a California burger. A&W Root Beer was available, so we bit.

We also saw the most disgustingly large burger this side of the Pacific two tables down that just had to be documented. I finished the meal off with their pecan pie, served warm and soft with some vanilla ice cream. Amazing.

“Steak” and bread-covered soup (Yilan)

Aaron and I went out to get some Taiwanese 牛排 (nǐupǎi, ‘steak’) after our last Classical Chinese class. The particular place we went was inside the Yilan night market. We ordered the meal, meaning we got some soup and some salad. This soup had a thin pastry-esque top to it. In classic Taiwanese style, however, the bread was slightly sweet, making it interesting—not bad—in the savory soup.

The Taiwanese interpretation of “steak” is a bizarre concoction. It’s steak on a skillet alright, but with some extras. The steak is laid upon a bed of “spaghetti” (close, but not quite) with some mixed vegetables and a fried egg on top. You have your choice of black pepper and some other sauce although our waitress recommended the half and half.

Once you get over the fact that you don’t live in America, it’s really quite delicious.

Tavoli pizza (Yilan)

Aaron called this “the best pizza in Asia” (possibly only matched by The Tree in Beijing which I went to back in January). The owner went to Cornell and speaks English fluently. She returned to Yilan and opened this restaurant, bringing much needed amazing boutique pizza to Yilan.

I’ve had the white chicken pizza and BBQ beef pizza which were both fabulous, and nibbled at others’ Formaggio (lots of cheese) and Margherita. They also have a great caprese salad with fresh mozzarella (!). I was about to die when I tasted balsamic vinegar.

Tavoli also serves good fresh American-style lemonade, A&W Root Beer (cans), and an Italian import beer. It’s not cheap by Taiwan standards, with a meal registering 200-300 dollars (still cheap by American standards), but definitely worth every penny.

All that being said, the photos above aren’t all about the pizza, but that’s just because good company is the ultimate ingredient in a meal.⁴

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1. Ichifuku ramen—一福ラーメン
2. Lantern Festival
3. A Saturday in 台北

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

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3. Weekend update: 師大 café, 南方澳, and 淡水

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Chiayi is a medium-sized city (270k people, so still way bigger that Luodong or Yilan) on the plains of southwestern Taiwan. The good news about getting to Chiayi is that there is a high speed rail station—the bad news is that that station is actually about half an hour east of the city by car. I took a taxi into the city Thursday night, but took the free shuttle service on Sunday.² As is the case with most cities on the west coast, it personally took me more time to go from Nanao to Taipei than to then take the high speed rail down to whatever city… such is life on the east coast: sans high speed rail.

The conference itself was Friday and Saturday. This particular conference was limited to speakers who were current students or recent MA or PhD graduates, so many of the talks were exploratory and less developed. They were still a lot of fun for me to see, though, especially as many of them were on Mandarin or Taiwanese, so there was a lot of data and phenomena that I’d never even considered. It was also great to see professor Luther Liu, an eminent researcher of Chinese comparatives, whom I met in 2006 at the Chicago Workshop on Chinese Linguistics, as well as many other friendly professors. I my gave my talk on Saturday and received an award for my paper.

You can see Luther Liu and I talking in this first picture below… try to find us!³

Each talk at the conference was followed by prepared constructive criticism by a “commentator” who’s a professor with similar research interests. As a corollary, while all the speakers at the conference were younger, a good number (30+) of professors from all around the island were in attendance as well. I believe this annual conference is an excellent opportunity for ling students in Taiwan to have their work known and criticized by professors outside of their own departments, and also to get to know others in their field. It fosters a sense of community among young researchers outside of their own schools—I’d love to see more such activities back in the US.⁴

On Saturday evening after the conference I went out with some MA students from Tsinghua University (國立清華大學, or simply 清大). As one was originally from Chiayi and another went to school there, I was in good hands for finding the best local food. We first hit up a stand to get some 火雞肉飯 (turkey rice) which is a Chiayi delicacy… it’s so simple yet so delicious!

Afterwards we walked around in their night market, eating some Finally, here’s a photo we took in front of the traffic circle which is a Chiayi landmark. Thanks for the good times!

Next up is the International Symposium on Chinese Languages and Linguistics (IsCLL) that I’ll be attending (but not presenting at) in a couple weeks, so I look forward to seeing some of my new linguist friends there again!

Related posts:

1. 新年快樂! Chinese New Year with Andy
2. Spring is for Speaking: JSConf, WordCamp SF, IACL
3. Co-schooling in Dongshan

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Part of the series: Exploring Nanao

1. Exploring Nanao, part 1
2. Exploring Nanao, part 2: hot springs, waterfall, and beach
3. Exploring Nanao, part 3: sports day, hot springs, Sayun’s bell, and 高峰

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.

The day started with a performance by our school’s very own orchestra (well, after the national anthem, of course). This was followed by a communal running-around-the-track, Atayal dance performance by community members (mostly middle-aged), and the kids dancing to Buklavu.

This was followed by a judo performance. The judo offering is one of the four “special characteristics” (特色) of the school; the other three are the orchestra, aboriginal dance, and reading.

A special event offered particularly for the parents and other community members was the log sawing competition. It took the form of a relay, with teams organized based on the “neighborhood” (鄰), of which there are six in Nan’ao village.

The festivities concluded with the aforementioned relay.

The kids had a lot of fun throughout the day, probably particularly enjoying the fact that school was then dismissed at noon. Kids bought food at the night-market-like stands right outside the school.

Hot spring

We teachers were then invited to a banquet at the head of the PTA’s house. Having the rest of the afternoon off, a few of us teachers decided to go to the Nanao hot springs. There were some major renovations there since I last went and took a bath… there’s even a roof now! The water was, unfortunately, pretty lukewarm, though.

Sayun’s bell (莎韻之鐘)

Special ed. teacher Mr. Cai was kind enough to take us around in his car, so we next stopped by Sayun’s bell (Chinese: 莎勇之鐘, Japanese: サヨンの鐘). The Sayun bell is a memorial to an actual Atayal girl named sayun hayung who died in 1938, located right near a truck stop/gift shop/coffee shop off of the 蘇花公路 (sūhūagōnglù, Suao-Hualien highway).³

The story goes, sayun greatly respected her Japanese teacher and was saddened to learn that he would leave and go back to Japan. She was carrying his luggage for him and was going to send him off when a big storm knocked her off a bridge and into the river, drowning her. The story was picked up by Japanese mainland news (read “propaganda”) as a hear-wrenching story of the Taiwanese indigenous people respecting and loving their Japanese teachers and, by extension, Japanese rule. There was two Japanese songs written about this incident (1941, see lyrics below, courtesy of Chienese wiki) and a Japanese movie (1943) was made as well.

The story was also recently referred to in the popular (in Taiwan) 2007 film Island Etude (練習曲 liànxíqǔ), which has a little five minute segment retelling the story at the bell (complete with historical rendition featuring a guy I know who lives in Nanao!).

The original memorial bell is apparently owned by the family (or was thrown away, according to the Japanese wikipedia article) but this newer bell and memorial was built in 1998. It’s an interesting relic of the Japanese era right in my backyard.

Gaofeng (高峰)

高峰 (gāofēng) in Chinese simply means “peak,” and that’s the only name I know for our next destination. We drove up a steep one-way path up a mountain (an unmarked road off the highway between 武塔 (wǔtǎ) and 漢本 (hànběn) stations) and went up to the top. Along the way we could see some beautiful scenery over the ocean, though it was a cloudy day so we couldn’t see too far.

Up on the peak we first walked around a traditional Chinese-style single-clan courtyard with a few houses around it. There didn’t seem to be anyone home. They seemed to have some fascination with game pieces… there were some dominos scattered in one part of their lot, 象棋 (xiàngqí, Chinese chess) pieces elsewhere, and some 麻將 (májiàng) tiles actually stuck in the concrete in another place. I felt like it would make for a good setting for a mystery novel.

All around us were some beautiful 日日春 (rìrìchūn, Catharanthus roseus (Madagascar Periwinkle)) and not-so-wonderful 檳榔 (bīnláng, betel nut, a kind of palm) trees.

There was a beautiful stream nearby as well as a hose with water from a small man-made reservoir, which Mr. Cai used to clean the car.

Going further into the mountain, we saw even more houses and some beautiful farms, mostly with cabbage. Mr. Cai explained that many of these farmers were actually relatively well off people (and retirees) from Luodong or Yilan who bought this land and come to farm there as a hobby or in retirement. We found a small Daoist shrine as well, as a testament to his statement that these farmers were not aboriginal but of Han Chinese descent.⁴ At this point, though, it started raining more heavily, and we decided to call it a day and head back home. All of us had a wonderful and relaxing day exploring Nanao!

Related posts:

1. Exploring Nanao, part 2: hot springs, waterfall, and beach
2. Exploring Nanao, part 1
3. Atayal cultural festival

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This, together with my currently daily train commutes, have led me to further explore the world of podcasts. I’m now a proud subscriber of “The Bugle: the Audio Newspaper for a Visual World,” with John Oliver of Daily Show fame and Andy Zaltman, distributed by The Times of London. Like a weekly audio Daily Show, except more British and thus more ridiculous. It’s fabulous fun, and perfect for those of us who hate reading.

Here’s a snippet from this past episode:

USA and Britain are once again at the top!, of the western world’s teenage pregnancies – also called the two countries most committed to the war on terror. … What it also suggests is, as nations, we get overexcited in the prospect of an easy conquest without really thinking about the long term consequences.

So true.

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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.

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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.

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1. Atayal cultural festival
2. ETA-ROC and Another Weekend in Taipei
3. The Food I Ate

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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!

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1. Linguistics in 嘉義
2. ETA-ROC and Another Weekend in Taipei
3. Family in Taiwan

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Part of the series: K80, mitcho (+Magi!)'s haphazard trip to China

1. Going to China just got more expensive
2. Hong Kong
3. 北京 Part 1: Fulbright love, the Forbidden City, the Temple of Heaven, and Houhai
4. 北京 Part 2: Summer Palace, bargaining, The Tree, and fried apple pie
5. 北京 Part 3: The Great Wall of China! and noodles

Here we are in Hong Kong, on part one of K80 and mitcho’s haphazard trip to China. Let our mistakes give you wisdom.

We were coming in from Taiwan a.k.a. the Republic of China. If you’re a Republic of China national¹ you can get a visiting permit from Taiwan. But if you’re a foreigner in Taiwan, you have to stop in some other country to apply for a Chinese visa. (China can’t have an embassy in Taiwan, because Taiwan is part of China! Duh.) Thus, we’re spending this weekend in Hong Kong.

Lesson 1: If applying in Hong Kong, give yourself a good weekday or two

Here’s the deal. You can apply for a Chinese visa at China’s Foreign Ministry in the Hong Kong SAR. They’re open Monday through Friday and, for express service, you need to get the visa to them before noon (1:30 at some travel agencies) and pick it up in the evening—you can’t pick them up, either, on the weekend. You may have heard that you can get a Chinese visa even on the weekend: this is only if you have a longer layover in the Hong Kong airport, and you can get the visa in transit—you can’t get the visa on the weekend just by going to the airport.

As our flight to China is scheduled for this coming Sunday, that means we need the visa today. In our case, as our flight came in around 11 this morning, this meant an adrenaline rushing couple hours to apply for the visa before a travel agent’s 1:30 deadline. When we finally applied for our visas, though, we encountered another surprise.

Lesson 2: China just raised visa fees for US citizens. Because they love us.

Normally a single-entry visa to China costs HK$150 for most countries, plus whatever expediting charges. Fine. But going to China just got more expensive. As of January 20th, 2008, the base fee for US citizens went up to HK$1020. Not for everyone—just for US citizens. Because they love us.

Now you know.

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1. 北京 Part 3: The Great Wall of China! and noodles
2. Hong Kong
3. Survival Tips for Visiting Taiwan

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Day 1: Trains, buses, and talk

I met up with everyone in the morning at the Hualien train station. Living in Nanao, I actually live really close to Hualien (about 40-50m) so I just elected to take a local train and meet the crew there. We then drove around to a couple interesting coastal points. (The one taking pictures below is Dale… I’m sure his blog will soon have photos more beautiful than mine.)

An unfortunate theme of the trip was riding coach buses on ridiculously narrow roads atop steep cliffs, winding back and forth for thirty minutes at a time, and then check out a vista for 15 minutes, then get back on the bus for another half hour.

In the evening after dinner we had the Midyear Conference proper. We got status updates on all the grantees’ research projects, and we ETA’s presented on our experiences thus far. Some of these research projects are really fascinating, and I had a great time listening to everyone. I felt the same thing as the last time I met many of these scholars at Orientation, that I miss academia: the research, the people, and the stimulation. ^^

Day 2: Taroko National Park

The Taroko National Park (with a beautiful website worth reloading over and over) is one of Taiwan’s six National Parks. Taroko is named after the Taroko people (“truku” in their language, Seediq, the other Atayalic language¹). It is a mountainous region a main river and its thirteen tributaries, with rich ecosystems. Hualien is known for its stone exports and Taroko also is quite rocky. That said, the photos speak for themselves. ^^

Ah, Fulbright fraternity. ^^ We had lunch at the Grand Formosa hotel up in Taroko. More camaraderie ensued. ^^

After lunch many of us walked over to the Buddhist temple across the river. The sky which had stayed overcast for most of the day actually was sunny for this one hour window or so, resulting in gorgeous photos. I also got to have Erik fill me in on a number of temple-related subjects, including who Dizang (地蔵, じぞう, in gold below) actually was. The white bodhisattva is Guan Yin (観音, かんのん). There was also a beautiful pagoda.

Again, they’re Buddhists, not Nazis. Finally, here’s a scene from Myst VI: Buddhist Temple:

In the afternoon we took an hour and half hike along one of the many trails in the park. Many of the trails require some sort of permit, even with a tour guide, but this was one of the open ones. At one point I found a bunch of white shells along the trail—odd, as the trail was a good ten feet away and five feet above the river.

There was a bridge right outside the trail with some cute stone lions.

A couple of them looked just like me!

At night, a number of us walked out toward Hualien downtown, which was about a 30 minute walk from the hotel. We checked out their pretty big and hip night market, and I was amazed by how large the city felt, and how many young people I saw (sorry, no pictures). Maybe it’s just where I live now, where the people my age are either out in another city at school or already married, but it’s really refreshing to see people my age.

Day 3: Hualien: American streets, rocks, martial law, and cheerleaders²

Hualien is a beautiful city, one of the largest on the east coast (larger than Yilan or Luodong), known for its jade and mochi (麻糬 in Taiwan, pronounced in Taiwanese, like mwájǐ or something like that—don’t ask me for Pe̍h-ōe-jī.) This morning one of the grad student researchers Katie and I took a walk. Our first stop was a nearby museum with a strange rock (奇石) collection, including the head of Lee Teng-hui, and an outdoor sculpture park.

Right behind it was a pillbox on the hill above the ocean, a relic of Taiwan under Martial Law. Note that the pillbox is pointed at the city, not at the ocean.

As we walked around, we saw some old run down Japanese houses, and then ran into some cheerleaders. We were totally confused as to what was going on, but it was apparently some sort of fire department demonstration/show for kids, and that was some supplemental entertainment.

We then walked down to the Pine Garden (松園別館), a café, art and concert venue, which originally was a Japanese government building. The lore says that this was where Japanese soldiers were given their sending-off sake before going on their kamikaze missions, some of which left from Hualien. It seemed like a beautiful little venue, and had some cool decorations on a few of their windows.

There were also some trees with IV’s in them. Apparently they’re pesticides.

Something I was amazed at how American the streetscapes felt. Walking down their sidewalks (!) along their wide streets, it just felt like the geography of a spread-out, hilly Midwestern city. They even have English on the post boxes (sort of). Not quite rows and rows of houses with the windows painted blue, but very American nonetheless—it was oddly both comforting and disconcerting. ^^ I’m sure there’s even more in Hualien still worth checking out and as it’s so close from where I live, I’m sure I’ll be back again.

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1. 新年快樂! Chinese New Year with Andy
2. Family in Taiwan
3. Linguistics in 嘉義

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Oh my god, it’s Obama! The banner is actually for the Taiwan Solidarity Union party, one of the third-parties here in Taiwan (but it’s part of the Pan-Green Coalition).

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Happy New Years to all!

I greeted the new year in Yilan with some friends from Fo Guang. We cooked some Thai food and raw food and ate at one of our teachers’ apartments. We had a great time.

I hope your New Years was just as great!

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2. Lantern Festival

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Last night we ETA’s put on a Christmas culture show for the public at Yilan Presbyterian Church.¹ I was pretty worried I wasn’t going to make it due to a Chinese presentation, but I was lucky enough to get in on the action. The show involved singing, dancing, Christmas trivia quizzes, and even a magic show. It was all in English but those who showed up seemed to all enjoy it, and we all had a great time putting it on.

Today it was Nanao Elementary’s turn to have a big holiday event: a big orchestra concert. Their orchestra program just started this February, so this was their first concert ever. We met up around 5pm for a buffet with all 100+ kids and teachers.

The concert started around 6:30. It reminded me of all the holiday recitals I went to growing up to go see Naomi perform. Each grade went up and did a little performance first, and then the orchestra went up (mostly 4-6th graders) and played some great tunes. The kids were fantastic, especially considering how long (or not) they’ve been playing.

You really have to see it to believe it, though, so here are some videos:²

There were also many little kindergardeners and little siblings around. You could tell they’d heard their older siblings practicing at home. ^^

And finally, here was one of the big hit songs from the night: La Bamba. I’ve previously mentioned that my kids like to (and can) dance—here’s more videographic evidence. ^^ Keep in mind that these are fourth and fifth graders.

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Christmas Day in Nanao was decisively un-Christmas-like. It was quite sunny this morning, with a fox’s wedding. Personally, I really miss the snow. I saw a picture of someone on a white mountain and was really excited, but it was explained to me that the mountain was covered in salt, not snow.

We had a Christmas event at Penglai this morning so all the class Christmas tree got lined up in front of the school tree.

Some kids performed The Gift of the Magi as a skit, then each grade went up to perform an English song and dance. They were adorable, and they all worked so hard on the performances.

At the end the principal dressed up as Santa and threw candy at the kids.

… and when I say throw, I’m serious.

Merry Christmas!

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Day 1: Shilin night market

I met my mother, father, and sister at the Cosmos Hotel where we were staying Friday night. I took them out to the Shilin night market, a Taiwanese tradition. We bought t-shirts, ate lots of things on sticks, saw a man pushing a cart full of guava, and people picking up their stands and running from the cops (technically, the “I’m going to set up a table on the street and sell stuff” part of the night markets are illegal).

Day 2: Exploring Taipei

We went on a Japanese bus tour of Taipei, led by this older Taiwanese guy with great Japanese, though sometimes just a bit off (Bailey would have called him “precious”). We visited:

Longshan Temple (龍山寺);

Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall National Taiwan Democracy Hall;

a market with various traditional foods;

a Taiwanese tea demo and explanation, which was really interesting;

the changing of the guard at the National Martyr’s Shrine (kind of like Yasukuni Shrine), where the guards aren’t allowed to move or blink (I think) for about 40 minutes at a time, and then a guy comes up and covers their face and says some spell so they can move;

and of course the National Palace Museum, where we weren’t allowed to photograph anything. After the tour we went to the top of Taipei 101 and got to enjoy a great night view of the city.

Taipei 101 features an open view of its tuned mass damper, which they’ve named “Damper Baby.” It’s neat, actually, how they took something that is normally only interesting to engineers and tried to make it cute and sexy. It even has a bio, complete with blood type (O, in case you were wondering).

Day 3: Rainy day in Yilan

On Sunday we went to National Center for Traditional Arts (國立傳統藝術中心) near Luodong. We saw some crazy show with all different sorts of animals which I’m sure made more sense if you understood what they were saying and an exhibit on paper craft of all different sorts, including origami. The main attraction there is the traditional arts street, a red brick street with all sorts of stores selling traditional food and crafts. The leather shop had a pig mask.

We then had dinner in central Luodong: some delicious hot pot while sitting on a glass floor above koi fish.

We got some deserts and took them back to the hotel they were staying at. Naomi was excited by the 苺大福 (traditionally, mochi with strawberry and red bean paste inside) from 85°C.

Day 4: Nanao and Jiufen

On Monday I took the morning off from school and showed them around Nanao a little bit. The weather kept getting worse as typhoon Mitag came rolling through. My family still got to see where I live, one of the schools I work at, and have a nice lunch before heading out.

On the way back out to Taipei, my family (without me) stopped in Jiufen (九份), a touristy town atop a mountain on the northeast coast of the island. The town, originally populated due to a gold rush, has some beautiful mountain alleys and tea houses. The city is now popular with Japanese tourists, as some parts of the city were used as models in Spirited Away. My family went to one tea house and enjoyed the tea and atmosphere.

My family went back to Japan Tuesday (Day 5), with my parents leaving later back to the US. It was really nice to be with all of them, even for such a short time.

Related posts:

1. 新年快樂! Chinese New Year with Andy
2. ETA-ROC and Another Weekend in Taipei
3. Exploring Nanao, part 3: sports day, hot springs, Sayun’s bell, and 高峰

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But then later I looked a the sleeve. It has some non-verbal instructions on one side…

and, just in case that didn’t work for you, there’s an image of the end goal as well:

Recall that the cashier put the sleeve on for me. That’s just crazy.

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A little while ago I read a NY Times blog entitled Chinese Recycling by Anne-Marie Slaughter. The piece opened as a description of the collection of food waste on Yangtze riverboats and went on to compare this situation to food production and consumption in the US. The article—in my opinion unfortunately—did not continue to discuss the tradition of responsible recycling in East Asia.

Not everyone lives on a riverboat, and recycling in the city is of course far more challenging. The exact things Slaughter frowns upon, such as plastic packaging, are the enemy. Trash and recycling pickup in Taiwan does not involve leaving it on the side of the street… the trash car,² followed by the recycling truck, come down the street playing a catchy tune (the same as in Japan, in fact). You have to run out and give them your trash and recycling (and organic waste, another category), sometimes running after the trucks a bit. There’s nothing passive about it.³ Unlike Japan with its anal retentive trash pickup, there aren’t any monthly recycling calendars dictating when you can take out your old stereo. But in some communities there are certain days of the week for glass, aluminum, etc… in the rural community where I live, they take all recycling every day, together, but the recycling man on the truck sorts the recycling right as you give it to him. I try to give my different types of recycling separately to make his life easier.

Taiwan has also cracked down on plastic bags—in some places, you can get them, but you’ll have to pay a dollar or two NT (about 5 cents US). Some places don’t have them at all. The Anya Hindmarch “I Am Not A Plastic Bag” bag has also been a big seller in Taiwan, receiving media attention as 環保包 or 環保袋 (huánbǎobāo, huánbǎodài, “the environmental protection bag”). Here’s a photo of one I snapped at the ETA-ROC conference.

Failing to properly dispose of garbage, recycling, and organic waste lead to pretty steep fines. In addition, businesses, especially restaurants, are subject to compulsory recycling programs. Even McDonald’s has separate trash and recycling bins, with photos of what items go where right on top. Taiwan recycles 26.6 percent of all its waste, as of 2006, up from 5.87 percent in 1998. The efforts put into the consistent and professional trash and recycling programs have also cut down on customs such as trash burning which pollute the air. This and various legislation have vastly improved both water and air quality in the past 20 years.

With the pressure of being a small island nation comes a heightened responsibility for the responsible use of its land and resources. Taiwan is a leader in this area, continuously improving its waste management systems through innovation and legislation. Such practices would be interesting to compare to many American communities.

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