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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