Monday, April 25, 2011
Long story shortened
I worked for about four hours today on a post detailing my three days in Taichung last week where I gave two talks, and then my weekend with Jose sightseeing on a scooter in Kinmen, a little island that is part of Taiwan but right off the mainland of China. About 10 minutes ago, due to something quirky my computer is doing plus a particularly unfortunate use of the autosave feature of the blog software, I lost everything I wrote. There's no way I can allocate the time to recreate all that, plus it would drive me crazy to try to remember all the things I wrote, so instead of just not posting anything, I decided to at least explain why there hasn't been anything for awhile and why it may be another while before there's another one.
Sunday, April 17, 2011
Chinese lessons
I've been taking some Chinese language lessons while I'm here. I've had six two-hour sessions one-on-one with a tutor, which have been enjoyable, certainly, but also a bit of work -- really, I can feel my brain tired after doing the various exercises she runs me through. I didn't really expect to get to the point where I could/would say very much in Chinese to anyone, but wanted to learn at least a little about the structure of the language, sort of the logic behind the system, since it is so different from English and the Latin-based languages I have some familiarity with. I was just intellectually curious, mostly, but since a culture is so inextricably tied to its language, I figured a better understanding of the language might also provide useful insights into the culture.
Chinese is made of characters that represent words, so they don't have letters in the way that English does. Each character (as far as I know) is pronounced with a single syllable, and multiple characters are added together to create other words. There are a couple thousand basic characters, and I have no idea how many combinations of these to make additional words, but it is no doubt thousands more. I had one teacher for the first three lessons, and one of the exercises she gave me to do was to memorize a set of about fifteen characters that were relevant to food, some real basics like rice, noodles, soup, beef, chicken, pork, etc. So I studied these at home, trying to memorize the picture, the sound, and the meaning of each of these characters. She'd given me the characters on little one-inch squares, so I'd stare at if for awhile, looking at the lines in detail, looking for patterns in the lines, trying to create some little pictorial clues that would help me remember what that character meant, all the while trying to associate it with the sound that goes with it. Then it was like I was back in elementary school doing flash card exercises -- I'd mix the characters up and then pick them out at a time and try to remember the sound and meaning, and after doing that a number of times, I could pretty reliably get them all right. All well and good, until I realized that if I saw any of those characters again at a smaller scale and/or in a different "style" of writing, it was much harder to recognize them. Whereas I had started the lessons a little more interested in learning about the written characters and less concerned about trying to learn how to say much, it became clear that this wasn't a good strategy, that "picture recognition" -- which I thought would be easier for me since I'm more of a visual learner -- was gonna be pretty hard and it would be much more practical to learn to say a few things.
My second teacher has been working more on speaking, and this certainly has its own complexities. Each basic character, or syllable, is comprised of an initial sound and a final or ending sound. Simplifying things a little, say there are X initial sounds and Y ending sounds, for a total of X times Y possible combinations, although I don't know for a sure that they're all used -- I suspect most of them are. But then it gets worse, because each ending sound has one of five tones, subtly different ways of saying the same basic sound. The best analogy is how we change the inflection at the end of a sentence, make it go up a little, to signify that it is a question. So, in Mandarin, you can make it go down, make it go up, make it go down then up, keep it high and flat, or have it kind of fall off. So that means there are X times Y times 5 different basic sounds, and my guess is that that provides enough to cover all the basic characters in the language. So we spent most of one lesson practicing the different tones, and some of the combinations. Getting to the point of pronouncing them reasonably accurately is not necessarily so hard, but what does become difficult is trying to remember which tone goes with a particular syllable that represents a particular character with a certain meaning in English. So, if I can get to the point of remembering that fish is pronounced "yu" in Mandarin, cool; and if I can also remember which character it is, since there are four little marks that look a bit like a fish tail at the bottom of the picture, great; but to get me to also remember that it is second tone, so I'm supposed to make the inflection of the vowel go up, well, that just adds a level of difficulty that almost makes you want to give up. I had dinner last week with a group that included a Canadian married to a Taiwanese woman, and he confessed that he had essentially given up on worrying about trying to get the tones right. I can certainly relate, although there are bound to be plenty of examples of how using the wrong tone for a word can change the meaning of what you are trying to say drastically, to the point of being pretty funny or rude or who knows what. But the risk of me doing that seems pretty far beyond the point that I'm at now, or will be before I leave. I can formulate a few trivial sentences in my head, but I haven't really uttered one out loud yet to anyone other than my teacher.
The process of learning how to say the words is facilitated by the use of what they call "pinyin," which is essentially a system of phonetic spelling that shows how the word should be pronounced. Great, except that whoever came up with the system didn't really do a good job of picking phonetic spellings that reflect how English-speaking people would say them. There are a few deviations that I've learned over the years by getting to know the names of a number of Chinese students. So, the sound 'eng' is pronounced more like 'ung,' and 'ui' is like 'way,' and 'ang' is like 'ong.' I've been learning more of these deviations in my lessons. For example, 'liu' -- the word for six -- is actually pronounced more like 'liou,' and 'mian' -- noodles -- is more like 'mien.' So the whole time you're using pinyin to help you learn how to say the words, some part of your brain has to be keeping track of all those little variations at the same time, in order to pronounce the word correctly. Throw in the little markings they use in pinyin to indicate which of the five tones you're supposed to use, and trust me, trying to accurately read a sentence written out in the phonetic pinyin is not really an easy task. If I get one right, and my teacher responds with an enthusiastic 'dui dui luo bo sen' (yes, yes, Robertson), I definitely feel a little sense of accomplishment!
A lot of the signage here in Taiwan -- street signs, stores signs, etc. -- includes both the Chinese characters and the pinyin spelling, although usually without the markings that indicate which tone you're supposed to use. So, in theory, there could be five different characters that were all spelled 'yang' in pinyin, even though with different tones they would all be pronounced a little differently to clarify which word was being used. I suspected as much, but decided to confirm that when I went to the doctor with Yungnane's assistant to get my Chinese herbal medicine. The doctor's family name was Yang, as is Yungnane's, and in the set of little flash cards I had used to learn the food-related characters, one of them was 'yang,' meaning goat or sheep. (I though that was kind of weird, using the same word for both -- like they think it's the same animal? Or don't ever need to make the distinction? Strange.) I sort of assumed that Yungnane's name wasn't the same character as the one for goat/sheep, but when I saw the doctor's name I asked Charmaine if the character for the name was different than the one for the animal, and she verified that it was. Not only that, but I guess there is a particular character associated with the name, so everyone named Yang uses that character. Another word I learned was 'tang,' which means soup, but I'm gonna assume that my colleagues and students named Tang aren't really Dr. or Mr. or Ms. Soup, but use a different character as well.
Across my six lessons, I've learned a few common verbs, nouns, and pronouns, along with a few simple phrases that could be useful in daily interaction -- like 'mei guanxi' which means no problem. I've learned the numbers zero to ten -- although it's surprising how hard it is to keep all those readily accessible in my brain at the same time; I guess that old idea about humans only being able to remember about seven bits of information may have something to it. There's a pretty simple logic to the rest of the numbers above ten, so in theory, with a couple of exceptions, if I can remember 0-10 I can know the rest of them. For example, two is 'er' and ten is 'shi,' so twelve is 'shi-er' and twenty is 'er-shi' and twenty-two is 'er-shi-er.' I've also learned a couple interesting features of the language that further contrast it with English. For example, to make it clear that a sentence is a question, they add a little word at the end of the sentence, either 'ma' or 'ne' (although there may be others as well that I haven't learned). Now, some words have a question built in -- like the word what, I think, and probably when, where, etc. If the sentence includes a question word, you don't need to add the extra word at the end, but otherwise you need to do so in order to clarify that you're asking a question. So 'ni you che' is the statement 'you have a car' and 'ni you che ma' is the question 'do you have a car?' My understanding is that 'ma' is used at the end of a yes/no question, and 'ne' is used at the end of other kinds of questions. The second feature is that they have something called "measure words" which -- if I understand this right and I'm not sure I do -- are used in a sentence to indicate that you are measuring or counting something. So 'wu' is five and 'ren' is person, but you say five people by saying 'wu ge ren,' with 'ge' being the measure word. Apparently there are lots of different measure words, that are associated with specific things or maybe categories of things being measured -- so I think my teacher said that 'ge' is used only when referring to the number of people, whereas another measure word -- 'zhi' -- is used to refer, I think, to the number of animals. I don't really understand why the use of a number itself isn't a pretty clear sign that you're counting/measuring something, but there must have been some reason once upon a time for adding these words into the mix.
The teachers have used some written materials for our lessons, and I have been transcribing all the words and phrases I've been exposed to into my own little notebook, both to consolidate all that information into one place and with the hope that writing it down might help instill it in my brain a little better. After the first set of fifteen Chinese characters, which I did write in my notebook, I've stuck to just the pinyin and its English meaning. Writing the characters takes a fair amount of time, when you're doing it for the first time. I asked someone if they are taught a certain way to write the characters, ie a particular order to the set of strokes you need to make, and they confirmed that children are taught one specific way to write them. It seems to me that that must be quite a task for Chinese kids, to learn how to recognize and write the thousands of characters that comprise the language, but I suppose cognitively it isn't all that different from American kids learning to recognize and write the thousands of words in the English language. I've been told that, on the mainland, some time ago they started using a simplified set of characters, with fewer details and thus strokes needed to write them, but in Taiwan they have kept the old, more complex characters, and some of them really do have a lot of detail to them, and it takes a little effort to make sure you've transcribed them correctly. The fact that there are now two different systems of written Chinese characters in use adds further complexity to the fact that there are lots of different ways the same written characters are pronounced -- different dialects, I guess you'd call them, all based on the same written language. Mandarin is the dominant spoken version of these characters, but lots of Taiwanese folks also speak a Taiwanese dialect, and bounce back and forth between the two easily. (It would be interesting to know what prompts that "code switching.") If I pay attention, and the conversation is in one or the other, I think I can usually tell which of the two they're speaking. I don't know how similar or different the pronunciations of the two dialects are, if they are sort of variations on a theme or if there's been wide divergence over the years (centuries). In Mandarin, real good is 'hen hao' and I learned last night that in Taiwanese it is something like 'jin hou,' which is close enough that you can see how it could have come from the same starting point some time back. But my understanding is that, if someone is able to speak only Mandarin, they would not be able to understand Taiwanese.
So, there are plenty of challenges one faces in trying to learn Chinese, and then of course there's the final hurdle of actually trying to use any of that knowledge in real life. I went into a restaurant one night, and when I pointed to the item on the menu that I wanted to order, the waitress responded by saying 'mei you.' I kinda shook my head and shrugged my shoulders, which is my clue that I didn't understand, from which it is easy to infer that I don't speak any Chinese, but she then just repeated herself, and I kept acting like I didn't know what she was saying, and I think at some point she may have even said 'mei you' one more time, but in the absence of getting anywhere, she then just turned and walked away. Once she was gone, it dawned on me: I recognized that phrase, I knew what that phrase meant -- it means 'don't have'! Ha, now I understood the problem, they didn't have the item I had ordered, so when shortly thereafter a different waitress walked up and also said 'mei you,' I shook my head yes in understanding, pointed to another item on the menu, and she walked away with my order. Alright, my first successful -- if slightly delayed -- use of knowledge of Chinese to deal with a little problem I encountered!
Not surprisingly, learning some of the words and phrases associated with eating is the most useful place to start, especially here in Taiwan where eating really seems to dominate the culture. Maybe I already mentioned in a previous post how, in talking this over with Jose, it seems that there really aren't a lot of things people here do for entertainment other than getting together to eat; or, maybe said a little differently, people here really enjoying eating and so it becomes a top priority for how to spend time with family and friends. (One interesting aside is that there is almost a total absence of a "bar scene" here. That's generally true of the country as a whole, but even around a major campus like NCKU, there aren't any bars and pubs that I've come across where the students gather to hang out and drink. I've been told that really isn't something people do.) Anyway, I learned that the word for eat is 'chi' and the word for rice is 'fan,' but if you refer to eating in general, without specifying what in particular you are eating, you use the phrase 'chi fan.' So if someone showed up and you wanted to ask if they had eaten yet, the word for eat would be chi fan. My deduction here is that, historically, rice has been such a basic staple in the diet that eating, in general, implies having eaten rice, such that the notion of 'eating rice' became synonymous with the act of eating. Of course, if want want to be more specific, you don't say 'chi fan' but you would replace 'fan' with the item you are asking about. So if you want to ask if someone had eaten chicken it would be 'chi ji rou,' with 'ji' meaning chicken and 'rou' meaning cooked. Another interesting feature of the language is that instead of eating soup they drink it, meaning they don't say 'chi tang' for eat soup but 'he tang' for drink soup. That certainly makes sense in a culture that uses chopsticks, as I'm sure historically the primary way of eating soup was to hold the bowl up to one's lips to drink the broth while using the chopsticks to grab whatever solid ingredients were in the soup. It certainly remains a perfectly acceptable way to consume soup now, although spoons are not uncommon when soup is ordered in a restaurant. In this context, I was amused when I learned the word for spoon a little while ago: 'tangchi,' or soup eat. Of course. It's the utensil you use to eat your soup instead of drinking it. Funny.
Actually, that's the kind of thing I was interested in learning about the language, to see how they combine simpler basic words/concepts into more complex words and ideas. Like the word for weather is tian qi, with tian meaning sun and qi meaning air. I would love just to sit down and go through a list of words that are interesting or important to me, to see how -- like with spoon and weather -- they are formed by adding two or more basic concepts together to come up with a representation of something more complex. I've only got a couple lessons left, so I don't know how many more of those I will have a chance to learn before I'm done, but regardless, it has been an interesting experience already, even just the few basic things I've learned, and I'm glad that I decided to allocate a little of my time and attention while I'm here to taking these Chinese lessons.
Chinese is made of characters that represent words, so they don't have letters in the way that English does. Each character (as far as I know) is pronounced with a single syllable, and multiple characters are added together to create other words. There are a couple thousand basic characters, and I have no idea how many combinations of these to make additional words, but it is no doubt thousands more. I had one teacher for the first three lessons, and one of the exercises she gave me to do was to memorize a set of about fifteen characters that were relevant to food, some real basics like rice, noodles, soup, beef, chicken, pork, etc. So I studied these at home, trying to memorize the picture, the sound, and the meaning of each of these characters. She'd given me the characters on little one-inch squares, so I'd stare at if for awhile, looking at the lines in detail, looking for patterns in the lines, trying to create some little pictorial clues that would help me remember what that character meant, all the while trying to associate it with the sound that goes with it. Then it was like I was back in elementary school doing flash card exercises -- I'd mix the characters up and then pick them out at a time and try to remember the sound and meaning, and after doing that a number of times, I could pretty reliably get them all right. All well and good, until I realized that if I saw any of those characters again at a smaller scale and/or in a different "style" of writing, it was much harder to recognize them. Whereas I had started the lessons a little more interested in learning about the written characters and less concerned about trying to learn how to say much, it became clear that this wasn't a good strategy, that "picture recognition" -- which I thought would be easier for me since I'm more of a visual learner -- was gonna be pretty hard and it would be much more practical to learn to say a few things.
My second teacher has been working more on speaking, and this certainly has its own complexities. Each basic character, or syllable, is comprised of an initial sound and a final or ending sound. Simplifying things a little, say there are X initial sounds and Y ending sounds, for a total of X times Y possible combinations, although I don't know for a sure that they're all used -- I suspect most of them are. But then it gets worse, because each ending sound has one of five tones, subtly different ways of saying the same basic sound. The best analogy is how we change the inflection at the end of a sentence, make it go up a little, to signify that it is a question. So, in Mandarin, you can make it go down, make it go up, make it go down then up, keep it high and flat, or have it kind of fall off. So that means there are X times Y times 5 different basic sounds, and my guess is that that provides enough to cover all the basic characters in the language. So we spent most of one lesson practicing the different tones, and some of the combinations. Getting to the point of pronouncing them reasonably accurately is not necessarily so hard, but what does become difficult is trying to remember which tone goes with a particular syllable that represents a particular character with a certain meaning in English. So, if I can get to the point of remembering that fish is pronounced "yu" in Mandarin, cool; and if I can also remember which character it is, since there are four little marks that look a bit like a fish tail at the bottom of the picture, great; but to get me to also remember that it is second tone, so I'm supposed to make the inflection of the vowel go up, well, that just adds a level of difficulty that almost makes you want to give up. I had dinner last week with a group that included a Canadian married to a Taiwanese woman, and he confessed that he had essentially given up on worrying about trying to get the tones right. I can certainly relate, although there are bound to be plenty of examples of how using the wrong tone for a word can change the meaning of what you are trying to say drastically, to the point of being pretty funny or rude or who knows what. But the risk of me doing that seems pretty far beyond the point that I'm at now, or will be before I leave. I can formulate a few trivial sentences in my head, but I haven't really uttered one out loud yet to anyone other than my teacher.
The process of learning how to say the words is facilitated by the use of what they call "pinyin," which is essentially a system of phonetic spelling that shows how the word should be pronounced. Great, except that whoever came up with the system didn't really do a good job of picking phonetic spellings that reflect how English-speaking people would say them. There are a few deviations that I've learned over the years by getting to know the names of a number of Chinese students. So, the sound 'eng' is pronounced more like 'ung,' and 'ui' is like 'way,' and 'ang' is like 'ong.' I've been learning more of these deviations in my lessons. For example, 'liu' -- the word for six -- is actually pronounced more like 'liou,' and 'mian' -- noodles -- is more like 'mien.' So the whole time you're using pinyin to help you learn how to say the words, some part of your brain has to be keeping track of all those little variations at the same time, in order to pronounce the word correctly. Throw in the little markings they use in pinyin to indicate which of the five tones you're supposed to use, and trust me, trying to accurately read a sentence written out in the phonetic pinyin is not really an easy task. If I get one right, and my teacher responds with an enthusiastic 'dui dui luo bo sen' (yes, yes, Robertson), I definitely feel a little sense of accomplishment!
A lot of the signage here in Taiwan -- street signs, stores signs, etc. -- includes both the Chinese characters and the pinyin spelling, although usually without the markings that indicate which tone you're supposed to use. So, in theory, there could be five different characters that were all spelled 'yang' in pinyin, even though with different tones they would all be pronounced a little differently to clarify which word was being used. I suspected as much, but decided to confirm that when I went to the doctor with Yungnane's assistant to get my Chinese herbal medicine. The doctor's family name was Yang, as is Yungnane's, and in the set of little flash cards I had used to learn the food-related characters, one of them was 'yang,' meaning goat or sheep. (I though that was kind of weird, using the same word for both -- like they think it's the same animal? Or don't ever need to make the distinction? Strange.) I sort of assumed that Yungnane's name wasn't the same character as the one for goat/sheep, but when I saw the doctor's name I asked Charmaine if the character for the name was different than the one for the animal, and she verified that it was. Not only that, but I guess there is a particular character associated with the name, so everyone named Yang uses that character. Another word I learned was 'tang,' which means soup, but I'm gonna assume that my colleagues and students named Tang aren't really Dr. or Mr. or Ms. Soup, but use a different character as well.
Across my six lessons, I've learned a few common verbs, nouns, and pronouns, along with a few simple phrases that could be useful in daily interaction -- like 'mei guanxi' which means no problem. I've learned the numbers zero to ten -- although it's surprising how hard it is to keep all those readily accessible in my brain at the same time; I guess that old idea about humans only being able to remember about seven bits of information may have something to it. There's a pretty simple logic to the rest of the numbers above ten, so in theory, with a couple of exceptions, if I can remember 0-10 I can know the rest of them. For example, two is 'er' and ten is 'shi,' so twelve is 'shi-er' and twenty is 'er-shi' and twenty-two is 'er-shi-er.' I've also learned a couple interesting features of the language that further contrast it with English. For example, to make it clear that a sentence is a question, they add a little word at the end of the sentence, either 'ma' or 'ne' (although there may be others as well that I haven't learned). Now, some words have a question built in -- like the word what, I think, and probably when, where, etc. If the sentence includes a question word, you don't need to add the extra word at the end, but otherwise you need to do so in order to clarify that you're asking a question. So 'ni you che' is the statement 'you have a car' and 'ni you che ma' is the question 'do you have a car?' My understanding is that 'ma' is used at the end of a yes/no question, and 'ne' is used at the end of other kinds of questions. The second feature is that they have something called "measure words" which -- if I understand this right and I'm not sure I do -- are used in a sentence to indicate that you are measuring or counting something. So 'wu' is five and 'ren' is person, but you say five people by saying 'wu ge ren,' with 'ge' being the measure word. Apparently there are lots of different measure words, that are associated with specific things or maybe categories of things being measured -- so I think my teacher said that 'ge' is used only when referring to the number of people, whereas another measure word -- 'zhi' -- is used to refer, I think, to the number of animals. I don't really understand why the use of a number itself isn't a pretty clear sign that you're counting/measuring something, but there must have been some reason once upon a time for adding these words into the mix.
The teachers have used some written materials for our lessons, and I have been transcribing all the words and phrases I've been exposed to into my own little notebook, both to consolidate all that information into one place and with the hope that writing it down might help instill it in my brain a little better. After the first set of fifteen Chinese characters, which I did write in my notebook, I've stuck to just the pinyin and its English meaning. Writing the characters takes a fair amount of time, when you're doing it for the first time. I asked someone if they are taught a certain way to write the characters, ie a particular order to the set of strokes you need to make, and they confirmed that children are taught one specific way to write them. It seems to me that that must be quite a task for Chinese kids, to learn how to recognize and write the thousands of characters that comprise the language, but I suppose cognitively it isn't all that different from American kids learning to recognize and write the thousands of words in the English language. I've been told that, on the mainland, some time ago they started using a simplified set of characters, with fewer details and thus strokes needed to write them, but in Taiwan they have kept the old, more complex characters, and some of them really do have a lot of detail to them, and it takes a little effort to make sure you've transcribed them correctly. The fact that there are now two different systems of written Chinese characters in use adds further complexity to the fact that there are lots of different ways the same written characters are pronounced -- different dialects, I guess you'd call them, all based on the same written language. Mandarin is the dominant spoken version of these characters, but lots of Taiwanese folks also speak a Taiwanese dialect, and bounce back and forth between the two easily. (It would be interesting to know what prompts that "code switching.") If I pay attention, and the conversation is in one or the other, I think I can usually tell which of the two they're speaking. I don't know how similar or different the pronunciations of the two dialects are, if they are sort of variations on a theme or if there's been wide divergence over the years (centuries). In Mandarin, real good is 'hen hao' and I learned last night that in Taiwanese it is something like 'jin hou,' which is close enough that you can see how it could have come from the same starting point some time back. But my understanding is that, if someone is able to speak only Mandarin, they would not be able to understand Taiwanese.
So, there are plenty of challenges one faces in trying to learn Chinese, and then of course there's the final hurdle of actually trying to use any of that knowledge in real life. I went into a restaurant one night, and when I pointed to the item on the menu that I wanted to order, the waitress responded by saying 'mei you.' I kinda shook my head and shrugged my shoulders, which is my clue that I didn't understand, from which it is easy to infer that I don't speak any Chinese, but she then just repeated herself, and I kept acting like I didn't know what she was saying, and I think at some point she may have even said 'mei you' one more time, but in the absence of getting anywhere, she then just turned and walked away. Once she was gone, it dawned on me: I recognized that phrase, I knew what that phrase meant -- it means 'don't have'! Ha, now I understood the problem, they didn't have the item I had ordered, so when shortly thereafter a different waitress walked up and also said 'mei you,' I shook my head yes in understanding, pointed to another item on the menu, and she walked away with my order. Alright, my first successful -- if slightly delayed -- use of knowledge of Chinese to deal with a little problem I encountered!
Not surprisingly, learning some of the words and phrases associated with eating is the most useful place to start, especially here in Taiwan where eating really seems to dominate the culture. Maybe I already mentioned in a previous post how, in talking this over with Jose, it seems that there really aren't a lot of things people here do for entertainment other than getting together to eat; or, maybe said a little differently, people here really enjoying eating and so it becomes a top priority for how to spend time with family and friends. (One interesting aside is that there is almost a total absence of a "bar scene" here. That's generally true of the country as a whole, but even around a major campus like NCKU, there aren't any bars and pubs that I've come across where the students gather to hang out and drink. I've been told that really isn't something people do.) Anyway, I learned that the word for eat is 'chi' and the word for rice is 'fan,' but if you refer to eating in general, without specifying what in particular you are eating, you use the phrase 'chi fan.' So if someone showed up and you wanted to ask if they had eaten yet, the word for eat would be chi fan. My deduction here is that, historically, rice has been such a basic staple in the diet that eating, in general, implies having eaten rice, such that the notion of 'eating rice' became synonymous with the act of eating. Of course, if want want to be more specific, you don't say 'chi fan' but you would replace 'fan' with the item you are asking about. So if you want to ask if someone had eaten chicken it would be 'chi ji rou,' with 'ji' meaning chicken and 'rou' meaning cooked. Another interesting feature of the language is that instead of eating soup they drink it, meaning they don't say 'chi tang' for eat soup but 'he tang' for drink soup. That certainly makes sense in a culture that uses chopsticks, as I'm sure historically the primary way of eating soup was to hold the bowl up to one's lips to drink the broth while using the chopsticks to grab whatever solid ingredients were in the soup. It certainly remains a perfectly acceptable way to consume soup now, although spoons are not uncommon when soup is ordered in a restaurant. In this context, I was amused when I learned the word for spoon a little while ago: 'tangchi,' or soup eat. Of course. It's the utensil you use to eat your soup instead of drinking it. Funny.
Actually, that's the kind of thing I was interested in learning about the language, to see how they combine simpler basic words/concepts into more complex words and ideas. Like the word for weather is tian qi, with tian meaning sun and qi meaning air. I would love just to sit down and go through a list of words that are interesting or important to me, to see how -- like with spoon and weather -- they are formed by adding two or more basic concepts together to come up with a representation of something more complex. I've only got a couple lessons left, so I don't know how many more of those I will have a chance to learn before I'm done, but regardless, it has been an interesting experience already, even just the few basic things I've learned, and I'm glad that I decided to allocate a little of my time and attention while I'm here to taking these Chinese lessons.
Wednesday, April 6, 2011
Kenting with the Yangs
I got back last night from a three-day trip to Kenting with the Yang family. Kenting is the area on the southern tip of Taiwan, technically a national park but people don't refer to it as such -- instead it is essentially known as the primary beach destination in the country, and as far as I know it really is the only place on the island that has what would be thought of as a beach culture. When I saw Luke in Kaohsiung a number of weeks ago, he told me that there is a music festival in Kenting every spring, and it happened to be this weekend, although that certainly wasn't the purpose of our trip. There was also some kind of national holiday this week, so I guess the boys had a couple days off from school, plus it is spring break week for NCKU, so I think all that was part of why the trip was scheduled for these three days. Yungnane invited me along fairly recently, when he called to find out if I would be comfortable staying in the same hotel room as his family while we were there. Other than that, I didn't have too much information about what was planned, but as usual, figured it was good to go along regardless of what it would entail.
They picked me up at about 10 AM Sunday morning, and we had breakfast in Tainan before leaving for the three-hour trip to Kenting. We got there about 2 PM and it was time for lunch, so our first stop was at a little restaurant that was crowded with young people who, my best guess was, were there for the music festival. I can't remember all the food we ate, but we did have some duck soup, which may have been the specialty of the place. After lunch we stopped for what I was told would be "mango ice" -- the same idea as a snowcone, with fruit poured over some ice in a bowl, although it turned out not to be mango and apparently wasn't as tasty as Yungnane had been counting on. We then headed over to a local police station, where Yungnane was hoping to talk to someone about the possibility of trying to organize local community members to prepare for a disaster in the area. This has been one of his research foci over the years, starting back when he studied the local response to the 1999 earthquake that struck near his hometown of Nantoe and continuing with some research on the response to a flood a few years back in the southern part of the country. Kenting is the home of one of Taiwan's nuclear reactors -- the others are all in the north, near Taipei -- and especially in light of events in Japan, Yungnane is interested in getting the local community members in the Kenting area to be better prepared for the problems that would arise if some kind of disaster were to unfold there. While his wife and boys waited outside somewhere, he and I sat in a room while he first chatted with a young man who worked at the police station, and then a community leader showed up who Yungnane talked to for another hour or so, all of it in Chinese so that I had no idea what they were saying. But Yungnane seemed satisfied with the conversation, indicating that the community leader agreed that organizing the community for this purpose would be a good idea.
We got back in the car and headed out to a different area, but by now the traffic had gotten a lot worse as people were going out for the evening, either to one of the venues were the music performances were to be held or to the place we were headed -- the local "night market." As we got closer to the night market, the traffic got very heavy, and we inched along for probably an hour or so before we got close enough to find a spot to park the car and walk. In this case the night market extended for at least a mile or so along a main street in the area, lined primarily with little food stands selling all sorts of edibles, as well as the permanent stores and shops that were no doubt happy to capitalize on the massive influx of visitors for the weekend festival. They didn't shut down the road to auto traffic, but the place was dominated by people -- mostly under the age of 25 -- who were strolling up and down eating, drinking, shopping, and people watching. All in all, Taiwan is a pretty conservative place in terms of how people look and dress, but given the mix of the rock-and-roll and beach cultures, there was definitely more skin, tattoos, and wilder hair styles in sight than any place I had ever seen in any of my trips to this island. The Yangs sampled a few of the food offerings from the stands -- buying me a grilled octopus-on-a-stick even after I tried to indicate I wasn't too interested -- and then we stopped for dinner at another crowded restaurant. After walking around some more, we headed back to our car (where we, and everyone else who had parked on the same street, had gotten a ticket), and got back in the long, slow-moving line of traffic to make our way out of there and over to our hotel. When we finally got there, we checked into our room with three double beds all lined up next to one another, and it wasn't too long before we were all asleep. By the time Yungnane had gotten around to making reservations, most places were booked up because of all the folks there for the festival, which is why we all needed to share a room. He told me later that the room cost NT$4000, or about US$135, and while it didn't bother me to sleep in the same room as his family, I was a little disappointed to find out, in the morning, that all the hotel provided to dry off from a shower was what amounted to not much more than an oversized, absorbent paper towel. So be it -- water evaporates!
Our first stop in the morning was for a quick breakfast, which for me consisted of a little patty made of egg, flour, and cheese along with some "milk coffee" (or maybe its "coffee milk" -- hot milk with enough coffee in it to flavor it) and then we headed over to a 7-11 for some "real coffee" (although ironically the lattes they sell there are pretty much the same thing -- a cup of mostly milk with a little espresso added in) and to wait for a friend of his who would be joining us for the day. His friend is an administrator at NCKU who is from the Kenting area, and he came down for the day with his wife to show us around some and participate in the afternoon's "work" activity. Kenting has two little peninsulas that stick out at the southern end of the Taiwan, so we proceeded to drive up to a higher elevation on the bigger, more eastern of the two, where we had a nice view of the peninsula and the Pacific Ocean.
We then headed down to the coast and stopped at a spot that had a few restaurants lined up next to each other, where we proceeded to have a seafood lunch consisting of some sashimi, abalone with mayonnaise, oysters (out of the ocean, instead of from the "farms" like those in Tainan), fried fish, shrimp, sea mushroom (an "animal" that I was told grows on coral), pepper pork (apparently made with mountain pig, which Yungnane indicated was wild rather than farm-raised), fish soup, and the delicacy of the day, a sea urchin. When we first arrived, there were a number of sea urchins on a table, which were clearly still alive as their porcupine-like spines were moving. The staff proceeded to cut one open and we ate the meat inside raw (even while its spines were still moving), dipping it into a soy-wasabe sauce like you do with sashimi. It wasn't bad, but a little disconcerting to have the animal still kind of alive while you're eating it.
Next we drove up to a tea farm, and visited with a couple women who I guess were the proprietors while drinking some tea and munching on some salty, pickled root of some sort, maybe a turnip or something similar -- I didn't like it much so only had a couple pieces. There were two dogs running around that the boys were playing with until Eric got too close to one of them, which proceeded to bite him on the lip and drew blood -- he was stoic though, and didn't cry, but his lip was pretty swollen for the rest of the trip.
We then left the tea farm, and the peninsula, and headed back towards the main part of Kenting and found our way to the Kenting Maldives Hot Spring Hotel, where we were scheduled to have a focus group discussing Yungnane's idea of community organizing for disaster response. Our host was the owner of the hotel, and three other gentlemen showed up for the meeting, along with Yungnane, the NCKU administrator, and me. Yungnane had arranged to pay a small fee to all the participants, including me, even though I didn't say a word during the entire two-hour conversation which was conducted entirely in Chinese. Yungnane thought it went pretty well, and the hotel owner was apparently receptive to the whole idea, and since he is both a successful businessman as well as a former and maybe future politician, he is likely pretty well-connected and could help move this project forward.
The meeting ended at about 4 PM, and the day had gotten cooler and windier by the time we finished and headed up to higher elevation again to a spot that provides a nice view of the valley on one side (with the nuclear reactors in sight, right next to three big windmills generating energy as well) and, after a short walk, the Taiwan Straight on the other. I hadn't brought a jacket with me because Kenting was supposed to have nice warm beach weather, and since I felt a cold coming on the night before, I was a little bummed to be out in the cool breeze.
We didn't stay there long, and headed next to a little seaside community that was sort of run down, not necessarily a big tourist draw although the administrator thought that it would have some potential if someone were willing to invest some money into developing it a little further. We walked around a bit, checking out the area, before stopping in at one of the restaurants for our seafood dinner. I can't remember all the dishes we had, but the main food was a couple of fish that the administrator chose from a freezer full of fish on ice.
After dinner, our last stop for the night was the Yoho Beach Resort, a very expensive resort that the NCKU administrator critiqued for turning a nice beach into private property that local community members couldn't access (although Yungnane indicated that his friend had complained about this fact, which then led the resort owners to open access to the public), and for being given the right to violate some rules (e.g., against cutting down certain trees) that regular citizens could not. We had coffee/tea and some cookies, with the conversation again entirely in Chinese, so I was a little bored and hoped that no one minded when I finally saw a copy of the Taipei Times, a newspaper in English, which I read while they all chatted away. We finished up there about 8:30 or so, the administrator and his wife headed back to Tainan, and the rest of us headed to our hotel -- not the same place as the night before, but sort of an apartment (Yungnane's explanation made it sound a bit like a timeshare arrangement) that had three separate bedrooms for only NT$2800. It also had a pool and hot tub, and since I had been cool for most of the last few hours, I was more than happy to go sit in it for a little while with Yungnane while the boys played in the pool. By 11:00 I was pretty wiped out so I hit the sack and got a good night's sleep before getting up and spending a little time online for the first time in a couple of days, managing to watch the NCAA championship basketball game while everyone else (other than Yungnane, who gets up early) was waking up and getting ready to leave.
The room came with breakfast, some cold milk coffee and hot sandwiches delivered to the door, but by the time we left we didn't drive too far before it was lunchtime, so we stopped at a place that markets itself as offering pig leg, i.e., part of a leg bone with some meat on it. Along with that there was a Hakka dish of some cooked leaves with pieces of fatty bacon on top that I didn't much care for, a tofu dish that was pretty good, another green vegetable, and some fish soup. That was the least enjoyable meal of the trip, and by now I was wishing I had some say in the food we were ordering -- all the seafood we had been eating was good enough, but I clearly didn't have the same enthusiasm for it all that everyone else seemed to. The fact that the cold I felt coming on Sunday night had now fully materialized, with annoying sneezing and a runny nose, made me want to get back to some sort of comfort zone, so I was happy when we were back in the car by about 1:30 which I thought would get us home by about 4:00. I was looking forward to drinking some Emergen-C that I had brought along with me in case I felt a cold coming on, and was bummed that I didn't have immediate access to it when I felt the first tickle in my throat that always signals the onset of the rest of the symptoms.
Once we were back in the car and on our way, Yungnane told me something to the effect of him having told his boys he would take them somewhere if they had a conversation with me in English (both of them are in "cram school" studying English in the afternoons after their regular school). With a little help from their mother (who doesn't speak much English -- in fact I didn't really realize she spoke any at all until she said a few things during this trip), they started asking me some simple questions, including what sports I liked and whether I would like to go someplace to ride bikes. This went on for a few minutes, and then I sort of dozed off in the car, until I looked up and saw that we were off the freeway, and I asked Yungnane where we were and he said we were going over to Cijin island (near Kaohsiung, where the five of us had gone once before on the day we went to the organic farm, before meeting up with Luke for dinner and my unexpected overnight stay down there) to ride some bikes. I realized then that that had been the incentive to get the boys to talk in English, and apparently they had done enough to warrant the reward, so off we went to the island. I was a little bit dismayed, as my best guess was that this would delay our return to Tainan til at least 8 PM and no doubt included another meal on the road. But I was certainly not about to complain, and figured if nothing else a little exercise would be a good thing.
We stopped at the place to rent the bikes, and us four guys rode away down the path next to the water as mom opted out and stayed behind at the car. We rode for awhile, and it was fun enough that I stopped caring about the delayed return to Tainan. We turned around and rode back to the car, and decided then to head the other direction to go get some ice cream at the "Modern Toilet" ice cream place we had stopped at on our previous trip. Then we went over to a beach area where some surfers were catching some small waves, and the boys played in the sand for a bit while their parents stood watch, and I hung out next to the bikes as it slowly grew dark. Finally we piled back into the car, drove about a mile down the road, and sure enough stopped at a very busy restaurant for some dinner. Yungnane had told me on Sunday that one of their decision rules for where to eat is if the place is crowded, and so I asked him if he had stopped here simply because he saw a lot of people there, and he assured me that, no, they had eaten here before and knew it was good.
It was kind of an amazing place. There were all sorts of plates of different types of food already prepared and sitting on big tables, and customers would go grab the plates of food they wanted and take them to a table. I saw all sorts of things that looked like they could be good, but no one asked me what I wanted and instead we sat down with plates of pork and a garlic sauce to dip it into, some clams on the half shell with sort of a cocktail sauce on top, a green vegetable (Yungnane always gets at least one green vegetable since he knows I like them), a whole fish with a sweet-and-sour sauce on top, and a plate full of quartered tomatoes that were still mostly green. I knew that they treat tomatoes more like a fruit here, and that dinner usually ends with a plate of fruit, so I correctly guessed that that's what they were for. I was anticipating that they would be a bit bitter, but we dipped them into a fruity sauce and they were actually quite good. The whole process didn't take much more than a half hour, so I joked that this was much healthier "fast food" than we eat in the US! On our way out, one of the tables was full of plates of fruit -- pineapple pieces and strawberries along with the tomatoes -- and a lady behind the table was talking into a microphone. I asked what she was saying, and Yungnane explained that she was announcing that the plates were now going for NT$50 (less than two bucks), and that as it was getting late in the day and the end of the long holiday weekend, the price was dropping so as to avoid having any fruit left over that would just end up spoiling. So we grabbed a plate of strawberries, put them into a plastic bag, and headed back to the car. Fortunately the ride back to Tainan from Kaohsiung isn't all that long, no more than an hour, and we pulled up at my dorm a little before 9 PM. I thought I might crash right away, but after getting my Emergen-C and taking a shower, I felt a little better, so I caught up on some news and email before going to bed a little before midnight.
Today I made arrangements with Yungnane's assistant to take me to go buy some Chinese medicine for my cold. I came down with a cold when I was in Beijing a number of years ago, and I asked one of my Chinese students who was with me then if I could get some herbal medicine for it, and she took me to a place where, for hardly any money, I got some packets of medicine that I mixed with water and drank a few times a day, and my symptoms were literally gone in about two days, instead of the seven-plus that my runny/stuffy nose usually lasts when I get a cold. So Charmaine took me to see a doctor today who prescribed me three days worth of Chinese medicine, for about US$10, that I will take four times a day, and I'm hoping it will be just as effective this time around. She also brought me a better chair for me to use in my dorm, as the little wooden one I've been using started to make my back tight a couple of weeks ago, to the point that I've been reluctant to spend much time sitting in it. I'm down to less than five weeks left here, and I need to focus now on finishing the paper I am writing based on my research with Yungnane, so hopefully this will be the last adjustment I need to make to enable me to wrap things up successfully and painlessly.
They picked me up at about 10 AM Sunday morning, and we had breakfast in Tainan before leaving for the three-hour trip to Kenting. We got there about 2 PM and it was time for lunch, so our first stop was at a little restaurant that was crowded with young people who, my best guess was, were there for the music festival. I can't remember all the food we ate, but we did have some duck soup, which may have been the specialty of the place. After lunch we stopped for what I was told would be "mango ice" -- the same idea as a snowcone, with fruit poured over some ice in a bowl, although it turned out not to be mango and apparently wasn't as tasty as Yungnane had been counting on. We then headed over to a local police station, where Yungnane was hoping to talk to someone about the possibility of trying to organize local community members to prepare for a disaster in the area. This has been one of his research foci over the years, starting back when he studied the local response to the 1999 earthquake that struck near his hometown of Nantoe and continuing with some research on the response to a flood a few years back in the southern part of the country. Kenting is the home of one of Taiwan's nuclear reactors -- the others are all in the north, near Taipei -- and especially in light of events in Japan, Yungnane is interested in getting the local community members in the Kenting area to be better prepared for the problems that would arise if some kind of disaster were to unfold there. While his wife and boys waited outside somewhere, he and I sat in a room while he first chatted with a young man who worked at the police station, and then a community leader showed up who Yungnane talked to for another hour or so, all of it in Chinese so that I had no idea what they were saying. But Yungnane seemed satisfied with the conversation, indicating that the community leader agreed that organizing the community for this purpose would be a good idea.
We got back in the car and headed out to a different area, but by now the traffic had gotten a lot worse as people were going out for the evening, either to one of the venues were the music performances were to be held or to the place we were headed -- the local "night market." As we got closer to the night market, the traffic got very heavy, and we inched along for probably an hour or so before we got close enough to find a spot to park the car and walk. In this case the night market extended for at least a mile or so along a main street in the area, lined primarily with little food stands selling all sorts of edibles, as well as the permanent stores and shops that were no doubt happy to capitalize on the massive influx of visitors for the weekend festival. They didn't shut down the road to auto traffic, but the place was dominated by people -- mostly under the age of 25 -- who were strolling up and down eating, drinking, shopping, and people watching. All in all, Taiwan is a pretty conservative place in terms of how people look and dress, but given the mix of the rock-and-roll and beach cultures, there was definitely more skin, tattoos, and wilder hair styles in sight than any place I had ever seen in any of my trips to this island. The Yangs sampled a few of the food offerings from the stands -- buying me a grilled octopus-on-a-stick even after I tried to indicate I wasn't too interested -- and then we stopped for dinner at another crowded restaurant. After walking around some more, we headed back to our car (where we, and everyone else who had parked on the same street, had gotten a ticket), and got back in the long, slow-moving line of traffic to make our way out of there and over to our hotel. When we finally got there, we checked into our room with three double beds all lined up next to one another, and it wasn't too long before we were all asleep. By the time Yungnane had gotten around to making reservations, most places were booked up because of all the folks there for the festival, which is why we all needed to share a room. He told me later that the room cost NT$4000, or about US$135, and while it didn't bother me to sleep in the same room as his family, I was a little disappointed to find out, in the morning, that all the hotel provided to dry off from a shower was what amounted to not much more than an oversized, absorbent paper towel. So be it -- water evaporates!
Our first stop in the morning was for a quick breakfast, which for me consisted of a little patty made of egg, flour, and cheese along with some "milk coffee" (or maybe its "coffee milk" -- hot milk with enough coffee in it to flavor it) and then we headed over to a 7-11 for some "real coffee" (although ironically the lattes they sell there are pretty much the same thing -- a cup of mostly milk with a little espresso added in) and to wait for a friend of his who would be joining us for the day. His friend is an administrator at NCKU who is from the Kenting area, and he came down for the day with his wife to show us around some and participate in the afternoon's "work" activity. Kenting has two little peninsulas that stick out at the southern end of the Taiwan, so we proceeded to drive up to a higher elevation on the bigger, more eastern of the two, where we had a nice view of the peninsula and the Pacific Ocean.
We then headed down to the coast and stopped at a spot that had a few restaurants lined up next to each other, where we proceeded to have a seafood lunch consisting of some sashimi, abalone with mayonnaise, oysters (out of the ocean, instead of from the "farms" like those in Tainan), fried fish, shrimp, sea mushroom (an "animal" that I was told grows on coral), pepper pork (apparently made with mountain pig, which Yungnane indicated was wild rather than farm-raised), fish soup, and the delicacy of the day, a sea urchin. When we first arrived, there were a number of sea urchins on a table, which were clearly still alive as their porcupine-like spines were moving. The staff proceeded to cut one open and we ate the meat inside raw (even while its spines were still moving), dipping it into a soy-wasabe sauce like you do with sashimi. It wasn't bad, but a little disconcerting to have the animal still kind of alive while you're eating it.
Next we drove up to a tea farm, and visited with a couple women who I guess were the proprietors while drinking some tea and munching on some salty, pickled root of some sort, maybe a turnip or something similar -- I didn't like it much so only had a couple pieces. There were two dogs running around that the boys were playing with until Eric got too close to one of them, which proceeded to bite him on the lip and drew blood -- he was stoic though, and didn't cry, but his lip was pretty swollen for the rest of the trip.
We then left the tea farm, and the peninsula, and headed back towards the main part of Kenting and found our way to the Kenting Maldives Hot Spring Hotel, where we were scheduled to have a focus group discussing Yungnane's idea of community organizing for disaster response. Our host was the owner of the hotel, and three other gentlemen showed up for the meeting, along with Yungnane, the NCKU administrator, and me. Yungnane had arranged to pay a small fee to all the participants, including me, even though I didn't say a word during the entire two-hour conversation which was conducted entirely in Chinese. Yungnane thought it went pretty well, and the hotel owner was apparently receptive to the whole idea, and since he is both a successful businessman as well as a former and maybe future politician, he is likely pretty well-connected and could help move this project forward.
The meeting ended at about 4 PM, and the day had gotten cooler and windier by the time we finished and headed up to higher elevation again to a spot that provides a nice view of the valley on one side (with the nuclear reactors in sight, right next to three big windmills generating energy as well) and, after a short walk, the Taiwan Straight on the other. I hadn't brought a jacket with me because Kenting was supposed to have nice warm beach weather, and since I felt a cold coming on the night before, I was a little bummed to be out in the cool breeze.
We didn't stay there long, and headed next to a little seaside community that was sort of run down, not necessarily a big tourist draw although the administrator thought that it would have some potential if someone were willing to invest some money into developing it a little further. We walked around a bit, checking out the area, before stopping in at one of the restaurants for our seafood dinner. I can't remember all the dishes we had, but the main food was a couple of fish that the administrator chose from a freezer full of fish on ice.
After dinner, our last stop for the night was the Yoho Beach Resort, a very expensive resort that the NCKU administrator critiqued for turning a nice beach into private property that local community members couldn't access (although Yungnane indicated that his friend had complained about this fact, which then led the resort owners to open access to the public), and for being given the right to violate some rules (e.g., against cutting down certain trees) that regular citizens could not. We had coffee/tea and some cookies, with the conversation again entirely in Chinese, so I was a little bored and hoped that no one minded when I finally saw a copy of the Taipei Times, a newspaper in English, which I read while they all chatted away. We finished up there about 8:30 or so, the administrator and his wife headed back to Tainan, and the rest of us headed to our hotel -- not the same place as the night before, but sort of an apartment (Yungnane's explanation made it sound a bit like a timeshare arrangement) that had three separate bedrooms for only NT$2800. It also had a pool and hot tub, and since I had been cool for most of the last few hours, I was more than happy to go sit in it for a little while with Yungnane while the boys played in the pool. By 11:00 I was pretty wiped out so I hit the sack and got a good night's sleep before getting up and spending a little time online for the first time in a couple of days, managing to watch the NCAA championship basketball game while everyone else (other than Yungnane, who gets up early) was waking up and getting ready to leave.
The room came with breakfast, some cold milk coffee and hot sandwiches delivered to the door, but by the time we left we didn't drive too far before it was lunchtime, so we stopped at a place that markets itself as offering pig leg, i.e., part of a leg bone with some meat on it. Along with that there was a Hakka dish of some cooked leaves with pieces of fatty bacon on top that I didn't much care for, a tofu dish that was pretty good, another green vegetable, and some fish soup. That was the least enjoyable meal of the trip, and by now I was wishing I had some say in the food we were ordering -- all the seafood we had been eating was good enough, but I clearly didn't have the same enthusiasm for it all that everyone else seemed to. The fact that the cold I felt coming on Sunday night had now fully materialized, with annoying sneezing and a runny nose, made me want to get back to some sort of comfort zone, so I was happy when we were back in the car by about 1:30 which I thought would get us home by about 4:00. I was looking forward to drinking some Emergen-C that I had brought along with me in case I felt a cold coming on, and was bummed that I didn't have immediate access to it when I felt the first tickle in my throat that always signals the onset of the rest of the symptoms.
Once we were back in the car and on our way, Yungnane told me something to the effect of him having told his boys he would take them somewhere if they had a conversation with me in English (both of them are in "cram school" studying English in the afternoons after their regular school). With a little help from their mother (who doesn't speak much English -- in fact I didn't really realize she spoke any at all until she said a few things during this trip), they started asking me some simple questions, including what sports I liked and whether I would like to go someplace to ride bikes. This went on for a few minutes, and then I sort of dozed off in the car, until I looked up and saw that we were off the freeway, and I asked Yungnane where we were and he said we were going over to Cijin island (near Kaohsiung, where the five of us had gone once before on the day we went to the organic farm, before meeting up with Luke for dinner and my unexpected overnight stay down there) to ride some bikes. I realized then that that had been the incentive to get the boys to talk in English, and apparently they had done enough to warrant the reward, so off we went to the island. I was a little bit dismayed, as my best guess was that this would delay our return to Tainan til at least 8 PM and no doubt included another meal on the road. But I was certainly not about to complain, and figured if nothing else a little exercise would be a good thing.
We stopped at the place to rent the bikes, and us four guys rode away down the path next to the water as mom opted out and stayed behind at the car. We rode for awhile, and it was fun enough that I stopped caring about the delayed return to Tainan. We turned around and rode back to the car, and decided then to head the other direction to go get some ice cream at the "Modern Toilet" ice cream place we had stopped at on our previous trip. Then we went over to a beach area where some surfers were catching some small waves, and the boys played in the sand for a bit while their parents stood watch, and I hung out next to the bikes as it slowly grew dark. Finally we piled back into the car, drove about a mile down the road, and sure enough stopped at a very busy restaurant for some dinner. Yungnane had told me on Sunday that one of their decision rules for where to eat is if the place is crowded, and so I asked him if he had stopped here simply because he saw a lot of people there, and he assured me that, no, they had eaten here before and knew it was good.
It was kind of an amazing place. There were all sorts of plates of different types of food already prepared and sitting on big tables, and customers would go grab the plates of food they wanted and take them to a table. I saw all sorts of things that looked like they could be good, but no one asked me what I wanted and instead we sat down with plates of pork and a garlic sauce to dip it into, some clams on the half shell with sort of a cocktail sauce on top, a green vegetable (Yungnane always gets at least one green vegetable since he knows I like them), a whole fish with a sweet-and-sour sauce on top, and a plate full of quartered tomatoes that were still mostly green. I knew that they treat tomatoes more like a fruit here, and that dinner usually ends with a plate of fruit, so I correctly guessed that that's what they were for. I was anticipating that they would be a bit bitter, but we dipped them into a fruity sauce and they were actually quite good. The whole process didn't take much more than a half hour, so I joked that this was much healthier "fast food" than we eat in the US! On our way out, one of the tables was full of plates of fruit -- pineapple pieces and strawberries along with the tomatoes -- and a lady behind the table was talking into a microphone. I asked what she was saying, and Yungnane explained that she was announcing that the plates were now going for NT$50 (less than two bucks), and that as it was getting late in the day and the end of the long holiday weekend, the price was dropping so as to avoid having any fruit left over that would just end up spoiling. So we grabbed a plate of strawberries, put them into a plastic bag, and headed back to the car. Fortunately the ride back to Tainan from Kaohsiung isn't all that long, no more than an hour, and we pulled up at my dorm a little before 9 PM. I thought I might crash right away, but after getting my Emergen-C and taking a shower, I felt a little better, so I caught up on some news and email before going to bed a little before midnight.
Today I made arrangements with Yungnane's assistant to take me to go buy some Chinese medicine for my cold. I came down with a cold when I was in Beijing a number of years ago, and I asked one of my Chinese students who was with me then if I could get some herbal medicine for it, and she took me to a place where, for hardly any money, I got some packets of medicine that I mixed with water and drank a few times a day, and my symptoms were literally gone in about two days, instead of the seven-plus that my runny/stuffy nose usually lasts when I get a cold. So Charmaine took me to see a doctor today who prescribed me three days worth of Chinese medicine, for about US$10, that I will take four times a day, and I'm hoping it will be just as effective this time around. She also brought me a better chair for me to use in my dorm, as the little wooden one I've been using started to make my back tight a couple of weeks ago, to the point that I've been reluctant to spend much time sitting in it. I'm down to less than five weeks left here, and I need to focus now on finishing the paper I am writing based on my research with Yungnane, so hopefully this will be the last adjustment I need to make to enable me to wrap things up successfully and painlessly.
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