Yesterday, Steven and I went to Yingge yesterday to visit the museum and an old street that sold Chinese knick knacks. On the way back to the bus stop we took a different road and I was surprised to see that the Nazi Party is here in Taiwan!
It turns out that Nazi sounds like a Chinese word and is a play on words, however I thought it was a bit strange that they wrote it in English. Anyway, the thing they make are wax hands.
Today Steven and I went to the store to buy a pcmcia card so that I can plug in the new camera memory stick into my laptop. So far we have purchased 4 other pcmcia cards and they were all incompatible with my laptop, so before we left the store we wanted to test to see if it works on a similar laptop.
This was a smart idea, because returning products in Taiwan can be very difficult, if not impossible. We wanted to make sure that we wouldn’t have a “Fry’s” experience here in Taiwan and we brought the camera so we can test the connection in the store.
Before we tested the memory stick in the pcmcia card I took a photo in the store. We inserted the card and Windows recognized the memory stick. Steven suggested to the clerk to open up the card to see the photo we just took, but he didn’t realize that we already had taken a photo of Steven the other day. The clerk opened up the folder where the photos were stored and opened the first photo on the card. The problem was that Steven was not wearing a shirt in the first photo and he was standing behind the couch, so he looked naked. The first words out of my mouth were “he isn’t naked there” but the clerk was already smiling and Steven was turning bright red.
Steven forbade me from posting the picture up here, so I will leave it to your imagination.
Last night I was out by Ximen. Steven was going into a local McDonalds to get an ice cream and I was outside waiting. He got the ice cream and we were standing outside.
Right next to McDonalds is a man and his wife who sells large stuffed animals. They sell Snoopies, Pikachus and other popular popular cartoon characters here in Taiwan. The funny thing was that he began to yell and scream at his wife, with people standing around him. I had to watch him. It was going so long that I had enough time to photograph him.
Now as an effect to help tell the story I added dialog underneath the picture. I also embellished the parts with the strangers, however the husband was accusing her of sleeping with other men because she could not take care of the home properly. If I were her I would leave him, but there must be something enticing about a man who makes his living selling stuffed animals outside a McDonalds.
I don’t know if he has a lot of business, but I have seen him a few times out there selling stuffed animals, but I have never seen a child approach him. Maybe this small publicity on my website will help make his business famous.
One of our former UI Designers, David, was kind enough to leave two plants with us when he left. The problem was that the older these plants got, the stinkier they got.
The plant, taken before someone threw it away
Right about when we moved to the 19th floor of our building we moved the plant next to a window near the technical writers (far away from where we sit.) Whenever I would walk by one of the writers that was near the plant I would think “Why does Sandra smell so bad?” Not only was the smell stinky, but it filled the entire floor, so you would smell it no matter where you sat – but the smell was always stinkiest near Sandra.
It is hard to describe the smell, but think of old feet, bad cheese, a lingering bathroom smell and rotten chicken all mixed together and you will be close to the smell. It was a sharp smell that hung in the air even after the air conditioner came on full force it would linger.
It took some time, but finally one of the writers began sniffing around Sandra’s desk, and he discovered that it was not Sandra but it is the plant. His immediate reaction was “oh it’s the plant” and he left it there.
For a week or two we would all talk about the plant. Some part of me wanted to keep the plant just so I always had something to talk about, something rancid and festering in a corner that can be blamed. Additionally I was curious what David did to the plant, how it became stinky. I alone wanted to keep this awful plant. My co-workers felt that this could not continue and threw away the stinky plant…
The funny thing is after they threw it away, the smell lingered. We still had one plant, but it wasn’t stinky, it couldn’t be! It turned out that both plants were stinky, and the next plant was thrown out before anyone else lost their lunch after smelling the plant. Before someone tossed it, I took a photo with my camera phone, but I never found out what type of plant it is and why it was so stinky.
I wanted to write a little bit about when I origionally came out. Many of my friends probably have never heard this story, since it happened long before I told them that I was gay.
You see unlike most people, I told my mom long before I told any of my long-time friends…. at least 6 years earlier. I don’t know, but I had the idea at the time that your mom would love you no matter what, but you can choose your friends (and they can choose you as well). I was afraid for a long time and tried to avoid telling them until I was in college. I found out later that this was a mistake and I underestimated my friends, but this is not a story about that.
This story is a nice one, about my mother’s suprising reaction when I first told her that I was gay. I was 14 at the time (yes, 14… I knew this when I was young) and we were on the way to school. At the time I was attending a small Catholic school up the penunsula near Palo Alto. This was a 50 minute drive and we would regurlarly grab breakfast in the morning on the way to school. On that day we were going to McDonalds to get pancakes. This is still a breakfast I will get quite often because (saddly) McDonalds is one of the better places to get pancakes in Taiwan.
After I grabbed both of our breakfasts and headed back to the car we pulled out of the parking lot and headed back towards the freeway via surface streets. I decided I should tell her then so I said “Mom, pull over the car, I have something to tell you and you shouldn’t be driving when I say this.”
I think she heard the seriousness in my voice and pulled over. When the car was safely parked I began to tell her. Yes, I was very scared but I felt that I could tell her anything. I said “Mom, I am gay.” It was as simple as that. No long explination, just a simple statement.
There was silence in the car for some time. This silence made me worry, but she was just thinking about how she can respond to that. Her responce still suprises me to this day. What my mom said was “Jim, thats OK, but you still have to do your homework.”
She was one of the most non-judgemental people I ever knew, and no matter what, she said she would love me. Later she did ask me if it was just a “phase” but when I told her no, she accepted that.
I know many gay men do not have a positive story like this when they told their family, but I was just lucky enough to have such a loving and supportive one.
After eating some Mc Nuggets for dinner, I decided to find out online what they are made out of.
Now I didn’t get too far, but I did find this wonderful article on how Mc Donalds is racist organization and African Americans love fried chicken. Take a look, you are in for an enjoyable article.
Last night I went to the New Years Celebrations surrounding Taipei 101. It looked like to me that 1/2 of the city was there, but there were only about 140,000 people attending, probably due to the unusually cold weather we are experiencing. (It feels like northern California right now!)
I started off the evening taking a cab down to the festivities. We passed a guy with 5-6 golden retrievers and he was tossing Frisbees into the bushes and into ponds and they all would stupidly crash into the bushes or jump into the pond to get the Frisbee.
We then took a few photos of the building all lighted up. They then shut off each section of the building one by one which ended in a fireworks show above the building. The building then was lighted up with rainbow colors for the rest of the night.
On the way out we saw a few guys performing a Taiwanese style of torture that one does to friends called “aluba”.
aluba, noun, The act of picking up a guy by his legs and slamming his crotch into a pole.*
One person grabbed their friend’s back and another one or two people grab the legs and pull them against a large light pole. They pulled as hard as possible to maximize the groin discomfort. They then twisted their friend around the pole back and forth a couple times. Because the night (and the pole for that matter) was especially cold, the torture was more brutal than normal.
You can see the events from last night in my New Years 2004 Photo Album.
Happy New Year!
So many diseases come from Hong Kong, but didn’t necessarily originate in Hong Kong.
I just had a chance to visit Hong Kong with Steven a week ago and I happened to get on the wrong bus and we ended up in a housing district. In many ways I am glad we got “lost” the way we did because we got to see parts that tourists normally avoid.
One of the things that really amazed me were how people lived. I thought Taipei was densely populated, but it is a ghost town compared to some housing districts in Hong Kong! This image on the right shows a cluster of about 10 apartment buildings right next to each other. Each building is around 40 floors tall and each floor holds roughly 25 apartments. Do the math and you will find that each building houses almost 3000 people. This really reminded me of George Turners’ futuristic book Drowning Towers.
One of the major problems with so many people living close to each other is the fact that diseases can spread so easily. No wonder Hong Kong was an epicenter of SARS and is predicted to have huge number of casualties if the bird flu begins to spread in Asia.
I leave you with a photo on the left from a mall in Hong Kong. I was looking up through the glass ceiling and I saw this huge 30+ floor tower looming overhead.
Click here to view more of my photos from Hong Kong.
Steven and I went to Kaohsiung this weekend to visit his family. I have taken the bus many times (which is similar to Greyhound except the seats are made for smaller people) but I have had too many uncomfortable trips where I am just too unhappy, so we took the train this time.
The train system in Taiwan is OK. They are relatively on time and the 5 times I have taken it it has never broken down, but they are not very good on the business/service end. Now train service is very simple to me, I want to buy a ticket and get a seat to sit down in and stay there, but this is not simple here.
Let me give you an example. A train travels to 5 stops. The problem is they SOMETIMES only sell seats if you originate at stop 1. This means if I want to travel from stop 2 to stop 5 I will not have a seat assigned to me. Furthermore, if a passenger is traveling from stop 1 to stop 2, the seat will be booked from stop 1 to stop 5. That means they only assign a seat once, even if the person gets off. The Taiwan train company will then oversell tickets without seat assignments because it has no idea how many people with seat assignments are on a train at any given time.
We were sure to book a seat two weeks in advance to avoid any problems for us, but it seemed as if no-one else did that. The train had at least 10 people for every 5 seats resulting in the entire train isle being filled with people making the trip a bit like the subway. This is very uncomfortable for me because people would always stare at me hoping that I would get off the train so they can take my seat like a dog would salivate staring at a steak in a butcher-shop window.
This was especially troublesome today because of a train “incident” we had between the cities of Chungli and Taoyuan. I just woke up from a small nap and I was looking out the window and then I felt a big bump. We definitely ran over something, but the train kept moving for some time.
Eventually the train stopped and someone announced over the loudspeaker “We are stopping for just a moment, please do not worry.” in Chinese. We stopped for a good 15 minutes and then the train started running again. The issue was at the next stop in Taoyuan they announced over the speaker that we would all have to leave the train and board another train (that already had seated passengers). The reason we had to switch trains was the thing we hit was a large pig, and they needed to clean off the train. They wouldn’t give many details but we imagined that the pig damaged the train.
This was when things got really uncomfortable. People were basically running over each other rushing to be the first person onto the next train to grab a seat if one was available. When we got off the train we just waited and let a bunch of people get in front of us, we weren’t in a hurry. While we waited a nice guy from Canada came up to us and asked us what was going on and we explained that we hit a pig. We ended up having dinner together and talking about our experiences in Taiwan.
The one thing I was thinking on the way home is what type of pig did we hit? What if it was a “God Pig” that rolled away from its farm that day? I guess we will never know about the pig that we hit on the way home.
I was watching our bunny Brownie the other day and we discovered a strange new rabbit behavior. Now most people who know me know that I have had rabbits nearly all my life, but I have never seen this before!
It all started after we got Brownie a new cage. His old one that he grew up in was both small and difficult to clean. He could barely turn around in it and when he would lie down he would stretch from one end of the cage to the other. I knew this wasn’t good, but there arnt too many pet stores here, until Steven found one. We got a really nice cage for ~20 USD. It has a plastic bottom, is made from thick steel cable and can even fold up for easy storage. The top will open up, as will a door on the front and you can remove the bottom wire mesh to clean it. It is really a nice design and I am quite happy with it. (I think Brownie is happy too!)
Ok, now I will get back on topic. So we put Brownie in his new cage and we filled his food bowl. I then placed a large handful of hay into the cage for him to spread around and eat and this is what surprised me – he leaned over and stuffed his mouth full of hay. It was so full that it was sticking out of the sides and it looked quite painful.
Brownie’s mouth up close.
So as I was saying it looked quite painful so I opened up the cage, said no an proceeded to try to take some out of his mouth. He resisted and made the “unhappy bunny” grunts. I then was a little more forceful and took it out but when I closed the cage again he just went ahead and stuffed his mouth full of the hay again.
Brownie sitting and pondering what to do with a mouth full of hay
After I backed off for a while he started to do a little dance in circles and then hop around the cage and brush the hay in his mouth against the cage to make a sound. He kept doing this for a long time and it almost seemed as if he was sweeping cobwebs from his cage, he covered every corner top to bottom.
Brownie is dusting his new cage
After doing this for about 1/2 hour I guess his mouth was tired and the hay started falling out. We saw that he was pushing it out with his tongue and he kept sticking his tongue out after to make sure he got rid of it all. He then went to get a drink from his water bottle and stretched out and went to sleep.
