The end

Sometime in the beginning of last week I started to experience the psycho-emotional effects of the fact that my time here was nearly over.  Menno, the former Dutch ambassador whose office is in the same suite as mine, asked me a few days ago if I was feeling sad yet, and I acknowledged that I was.  What he didn't ask was whether I was sad because I was leaving, or sad because I was going back to the US.  That would be a harder question to answer.  It's certainly a little of both.  But even that doesn't fully explain what I'm feeling.  The truth is that I have a fair amount of ambivalence on both sides of that equation -- I'm a little sad and a little happy on both counts, for different reasons.

The ambivalence about leaving reflects mostly my ambivalence about Taiwan more generally.  If I'm happy to be leaving, it's mostly because I'll be glad to stop climbing four flights of stairs every time I return to my room, and to get away from the constant sound of traffic as well as the hot humid weather which is now very definitely on its way, and beyond that, I guess it's just that it's been enough time here, and I'm ready to move on to something else.  On the other hand, life here has been pretty good, not a lot of expectations or pressure and lots of flexibility to do what I wanted.  Once I got settled in -- adjusted to my living circumstances, learned where to go to get food, developed the kind of "variable routine" I tend to build into my life wherever I am, and figured out how to keep the ants (mostly) at bay -- things were all in all fairly easy and enjoyable.  My normal day, as usual, has included a mix of reading news/information on-line, processing emails, getting work done on the papers I'm writing and the presentations I've had to prepare, reading and commenting on things for students back at USC, and -- OK, I'll admit it -- usually a game or two of spider solitaire (or as I like to call it, the devil's game!) somewhere along the way.  All those "normal" days have been punctuated by a number of trips, to Taipei, Taichung, Kinmen, Kaohsiung, and Kenting, with opportunities to see a number of former students who I am fond of.  And in the midst of all that, there've been a few interesting outings and good dinners with Yungnane and his family -- the fireworks for the Festival of Lanterns, riding bikes at Cijin Island, eating the still-alive sea urchin, and plenty of others that I've written about.  Saturday, we had our last little trip together, at least for this time around. 

They picked me up a little after 9 AM and we went first to this little breakfast place we'd been to once before, a very busy place where the ladies cook their food right out on the sidewalk in front and you squeeze in between the stoves on one side and the table with all the hot food on the other, grab what you want, line up to pay for it, and then go find a place to sit down.  After a little green onion pancake thing and some veggie dumplings, along with a soy milk, we were on our way.  We headed north on the freeway, turned east towards the mountains, climbed up a few hundred meters and came to a little town that had a number of hot spring spas, where we were going to spend the next few hours.  The facility had gender-separated indoor rooms with a hot pool, small cooler tub, and wet and dry saunas, as well as a gender-mixed outdoor facility where we spent most of our time.  A main attraction out there was the mineral mud you could smear all over your body, which we all did, and the boys did multiple times.  There was one hot pool where you could get in with the mud on your body, so that the water itself was saturated with those minerals.  There was also another "clean" hot pool and then a cool pool, so we rotated among those.  There was also a big swimming pool, and even though it wasn't a hot day, swimming around for a bit felt good.  Then there was maybe the most unique part of the experience -- sitting with your feet in a pool where a bunch of little fish come and nibble the dead skin off.  I figured why not, so I sat there for awhile as they nibbled away -- it was a little ticklish but other than that not a big deal.  The fish ranged in size from about an inch to a big one about 4-5 inches long, and I could definitely feel it when it was him who was doing the nibbling!

We spent about three hours at the spa, then headed over to a restaurant on the side of the road heading back down the hill, with a view out over the river valley back behind us.  The restaurant's specialty was chicken, which they cooked as a whole, I think by dipping it into a big pot of what I presume was boiling water, although I don't know if there were any seasonings in the water.  I do know that they removed the insides of the bird and stuffed it with garlic gloves and a bunch of leaves -- think the equivalent of big bay leaves -- to add some flavor, and then we dipped the meat into a pepper seasoning.  When I say whole chicken, I mean with head and feet, which came on the tray with the rest of the chicken, albeit already chopped off.  I guess I wasn't entirely surprised to learn that they don't eat the head, as that seemed a little extreme even for folks who do eat shrimp and fish heads (one of the other dishes they ordered included fried little fish and shrimp that they ate whole -- I passed on that).  But Yungnane did say they all liked chicken feet, which I think is pretty normal in Chinese culture, although I didn't notice if anyone ate these particular feet.  We had other dishes along with the chicken and the shrimp/fish plate, including one made with mountain pig which, when they told me that, I said, kind of questioning, "shan zhu" which I knew was the literal translation of those two words, and Yungnane looked pleasantly surprised and said "yes, that's right!"  There were two green veggie dishes of things I'm not sure I've had before but both tasty, one served hot with garlic mixed in and the other served cold with mayonnaise (go figure) spread on the top.  And Yungnane and I split a big Taiwan beer, which tasted pretty good after all the sweating we did back at the spa.

Before heading back to Tainan, we stopped at a funky place where some kind of crack in the earth had created both a little spring as well as the release of some natural gas that burns continuously -- the sign said the place was first discovered (at least by a Chinese guy -- I bet the indigenous folks on the island knew about it before then) back in 1701.  It's crazy that that fire's been burning for at least 300 years, but for all we know, maybe it's been burning for 300,000!  We lingered at that spot for awhile, including a few purchases of food or drink from one or another of the many store/restaurants lining the walkway out to the Water Fire spring, and got back into the car at about 5:30.  It was a sleepy ride back to Tainan, but I got alert for long enough to get a picture of an amazing orange sun burning through the haze as it lowered towards the horizon.  We pulled into town just as it was setting, and since I wasn't yet ready for dinner, we decided instead to go get some coffee and a pastry.  With Yungnane and I both awake now, his wife started asking for my thoughts on some interesting questions about religion, the 2012 scenario, UFOs, etc., so we chatted about all sorts of serious topics as we ate our snacks and I shared with them some of my crazy ideas about what I think is going on on the planet.  Of course, Yungnane had to translate everything I said in order for her to understand, so I have no idea what actually got transmitted as my response to any of her questions. 

As we headed back towards my dorm, Yungnane pointed out the building where his wife takes painting lessons.  That was noteworthy since, when they arrived in the morning, they presented me with a painting that she had painted -- quite lovely, actually, some purple mountains behind a tree-lined lake.  When they gave me the painting, they also gave me a pencil drawing that Jack had done, I think an image of, or at least inspired by, one of the creatures from one of the fantasy games that kids play these days.  It's clear that they're both talented, which makes me wonder if or how it is that artistic talent is passed down genetically.  Yungnane and I agreed that we had precious little of it -- I told him that drawing stick figures still gives me a little trouble.  Anyway, as we approached the dorm, Yungnane was expressing his appreciation for my being here, and I guess I can tell that his family has also enjoyed having me around -- Jack, who is always being encouraged by his parents to talk to me in English -- decided to express his affection with a least one phrase he knew, chiming in from the back seat with a nice "I love you"!  We all got out of the car, I got my artwork out of the trunk, gave a hug to all four of them and said goodbye to his family. (I saw Yungnane briefly this morning to say goodbye).  I don't think you can spend that much time with people, under enjoyable circumstances I mean, without developing some bonds and attachments to them.  I suspect that's an inherent, essential property of our human-ness.  Which I guess is why the Buddha pointed out that "life is suffering."  Suffering is a direct result of our attachments, and in this case that suffering manifests as the sadness I feel at leaving behind some nice people who I am fond of and have shared good times with.

So, while it's fair to say that I have some ambivalence about leaving Taiwan, the strength of those emotions puts me closer to the "indifferent" side of the meaning of that word -- I could stay or I could go, and be fine either way.  In contrast, my ambivalence about returning to the US is much stronger in both directions, both looking forward to it and not.  The downside is dominated by my frustration with what Amerika has become as a country, and the miserably dysfunctional role our nation-state is playing in the community of nations.  Really, I am ashamed at this point to be an American -- I am dismayed by the progressive onset of the police state mentality, and by the stories I read about police brutality, TSA gropings, whistleblowers dying and disappearing, and other manifestations of government repression; I am horrified by the number of people we are killing in way too many countries around the world, and by the amount of depleted uranium we are spreading around those countries to destroy future generations as well; I am disgusted by our continuing support for industries that are destroying our planet, and by the lies our leaders tell us to cover-up how bad the problems are; I am angry at the sell-out mainstream corporate media who disseminate propaganda as though it were news, and at the gullible majority of the citizenry who still believe what they're being told; I am flabbergasted by how much of the American people's "wealth" has been stolen from them by the banksters, and by the fact that the people haven't really done a damn thing to try to stop them or make them "pay;" I am apprehensive about the coming collapse of the US dollar and all its economic ramifications, and about the effects all that will have on the people I love.

When I'm in the US, there's sort of a constant underlying buzz of cognitive dissonance in my consciousness, the disconnect between all those things I feel about the country and my actual presence there and participation in American society.  That disconnect is a big part of the reason why I have spent as much time out of the country as I have over the last number of years, especially after it was clear to me that 9/11 was a false flag event and that the bad guys had suckered us into believing that a new Crusade was necessary to retaliate against our purported enemies.  I'm tired of all the lies our government tells us to make us believe what they want us to believe, and to be honest, it is tiresome for me to live in a place where most people believe the lies and those who don't are ridiculed and discounted.  There's so much about this silly bin Laden story that doesn't add up, so much counter-factual evidence, so many signs that they're just BSing us, and yet it sounds like Americans are pretty much swallowing all it hook, line, and sinker.  And with the predictable "Al-CIAduh" threats to blow something up in retaliation, the fascists running the show now have a good excuse to "tighten security" some more, implement whatever new restrictions on our freedoms they feel like.  I've got to pass through security in American airports three times in the next month or so, and I'm not at all excited about that.  Even if/when getting through security is not a hassle, it's just an in-your-face reminder to me of all the bad things Amerika has become.  I resent the whole phenomenon, as an unconstitutional search "without probable cause." 

The fact that I'll be passing through three airports soon points to another reason why I have some emotional reluctance to return to the US.  The reality is that I'm only going to be there for a month before heading off to Europe for much of the summer.  So really, now is the time when being a nomad on sabbatical is going to get challenging.  Like I said, it has been pretty easy living here, things have been stable and organized, but from here on out things are going to be a little more up in the air about where I'm going and what I'll be doing.  I've got about a week and a half in LA, then another week in Phoenix, and then a conference in New York.  That's what is definite, and I know where I'm sleeping up until June 5.  But then I am going to be camping in the Adirondacks for a week before flying to Copenhagen to start traveling around Scandinavia for awhile.  I've booked a campsite for my first two nights camping in NY, but I've still got a lot of leg work to do to line up where I'm going to be staying in Norway, which is the first country I'll be traveling around.  So returning to the US means becoming a little "unsettled" if you will, plus having to allocate a bunch of time online to do the necessary planning.  I guess the bottom line is that my life gets more challenging upon leaving Taiwan, and it's hard to look forward to that.   

All that said, there are definitely some things I am looking forward to, some reasons why I'm excited to be getting back home.  I am most psyched about getting back out to Sylmar to play disc with J and Bryan and Boehm.  I've been pretty sedentary here, and there hasn't been a lot of "play" time, so I'm definitely looking forward to a little co-recreation!  I also have USC's graduation this week, which is why I set my return date for now.  Two of my PhD students, who I've been working closely with for a number of years, are graduating, so I definitely want to be part of that celebration with them.  Beyond those specifics, I'm looking forward to seeing friends and family, people I love and care about, folks I haven't had much communication with while I've been here.  As my frustration with America has grown over the years, and I've contemplated the possibility of trying to move somewhere else, I've realized that the toughest part of doing that would be leaving behind nearly everyone I care about, and being pretty much on my own wherever I chose to go.  Being on my own wouldn't necessarily be the tough part -- I'm OK with being alone at this point in my life.  But not being able to spend time with people I love, indefinitely, I think that would be hard. 

When we were talking over cake and coffee the other night about all the craziness that may be coming down the pike in the next 18 months, Yungnane assured me that if things go to hell in the US like I think they might, I was certainly welcome to come back to Tainan.  It is interesting that I have a stronger personal network here in Taiwan than I do pretty much anywhere else on this planet, in terms of the "social capital" I could draw on to help me stay alive, for example, if the world goes into survival mode.  That probably isn't entirely true, since I am tapped into the "Trojan family" and thus part of a strong community there.  But in the midst of LA, even that powerful network may not be able to get access to the key resources -- food, water -- people would need to stay alive.  Here in Taiwan, in terms of my own personal connections, good relationships with people who might go a little out of their way to help me out if need be, my network is pretty good, extending from Taipei to Kaohsiung with a number of points in between.  Not that Taiwan is the place I would most want to ride out the storm -- the northeast coast of Brasil seems much more enticing -- but one thing this island has going for it is that it could probably come pretty close to being self-sufficient in terms of food if circumstances forced them into that.  And one thing I will say about Taiwanese culture -- people that I interact with in stores and restaurants and wherever -- they tend to be cheery and polite with a ready smile.  When I mentioned that to Jose, he said that he was proud of his countrymen for having that quality.  So all in all, I think things would be a lot saner here than in LA if some kind of global chaos were to ensue.

I don't know if we are going to get to that point or not, and certainly I hope we can avoid it, but underlying all my other emotions about heading back to the US and into an uncertain future is my concern about the radiation spreading around the planet, the possibility/likelihood that it will continue to get even worse, and the reality that soon there may not be any real safe place to be.  A few weeks ago I started wondering if I should skip my Scandinavia trip, as I was wondering about the wisdom of walking around outdoors "unprotected" for all that time.  Given the location of Japan and the nature of the wind currents, it seems like the northern hemisphere may have it worse than the southern, at least for the time being, so I started thinking I should head south instead.  But I guess two things led me to conclude that there was no sense not going to Europe.  First, whatever the effects of radiation are, in terms of causing cancer, etc., I guess it is "probablistic" in the sense that it increases the risk of getting cancer but -- in the absence of a high enough dosage -- won't necessarily do so.  Since I am healthier than most people, and have some faith in the notion of "mind over matter" when it comes to health issues, I figure I have some control over whether or not I will suffer any long-term damage caused by whatever radiation is now circulating through the atmosphere.  Second, I guess I reached the point of realizing that the amount of uncertainty regarding what is happening, what will happen, how bad things will get, where things will be the worst, and all that, is high enough that it doesn't make a lot of sense to try to plan around it, and much more reasonable to just go ahead and live my life the way I want, the way I have it planned, and deal with whatever consequences whenever they come.  In short, it didn't seem like a good idea to bail on my trip just because of some vague fear about what is or isn't going to happen down the road.

So, barring any unforeseen events that preclude me from doing so, I'll be getting on a plane in about 24 hours, and then three hours earlier I'll be landing in LA (I love crossing the international dateline this direction, so you get to live a few hours of your life over again!).  I'm quite sure that I will be happy to be back, as I usually am, and I definitely look forward to sleeping in peaceful Santa Monica tomorrow night (even if it is in the little motel room -- bathroom down the hall -- that I've booked for the week).  Regardless of all my thoughts and feelings about the US as a country, I have to say I really do like living in Santa Monica, and it's always good to be there when I'm not somewhere else.  I also know that I'll be excited soon enough about heading east from there and to points beyond, on the continued adventure that awaits me in the midst of all this craziness unfolding on the planet.  I'm gonna go find some peaceful little Norwegian island above the Arctic Circle and spend the summer solstice contemplating the mysteries of the universe in the glow of the midnight sun!

Peace and love, everybody -- this is Peter in Taiwan, signing out.

Talking about UFOs

It's Saturday night, 10:30 PM.  I got back a little while ago from dinner with the Yang family.  This time I invited them out, dinner on me, although as usual they drove, picked the restaurant and the food, and in this case, brought a bottle of wine that Yungnane and I split.  (I think his wife doesn't drink -- I've never seen her do so.)  Yungnane had given me a choice of red wine or Kinmen Kaoliang "white wine," which is definitely a misnomer since it is really a 58-proof liquor that they make in Kinmen, which is where Jose and I visited last weekend.  I explained all about it in the post that got deleted -- we had dinner with the vice-president of the company that makes it as well as one of the guys directly involved in making sure the liquor comes out tasting the way they want it.  They of course brought along a bottle to our dinner together, so I had enough Kaoliang liquor that night to last for awhile.  I was happy to drink red wine tonight with what turned out to be a rather spicy dinner.

My trip with Jose was good.  We rented a scooter and essentially spent our two days there riding round the island of Kinmen as well as a smaller island, Lieyu or "little Kinmen," that was a short ferry ride away.  Kinmen is right off the shore of mainland China, across from the city of Xiamen, whose skyline across the water is already impressive and still growing -- we could see the big cranes building some new skyscrapers.  Our sightseeing experience was dominated by the presence of the military on the two islands, and their role as Taiwan's first line of defense against potential Chinese aggression.  Back in the 1950s, China and Taiwan took turns shelling each other, with tens or even hundreds of thousands of shells hitting Kinmen over an extended period of time.  The people in Kinmen realized at some point that the high-quality steel from the shells could be refashioned into knives, so after awhile Kinmen became known as a place where excellent knives are produced.  In August of 1958, China actually stormed the beaches of Kinmen with 9000 soldiers (maybe even more, but that's one number I read), but the Taiwanese mounted a successful resistance that led to the surrender of the Chinese troops after a couple of days of fighting in and around the villages dotting that part of the island.  (My deleted post explained how this battle and the on-going tension between the two sides was actually a continuation of the Nationalist vs. Communist civil war that resulted in the Nationalists essentially retreating to Taiwan with the Communists taking over the mainland in 1947.)  Somewhere in the midst of all that tension little Kinmen was well-fortified in terms of preventing an attack, including a large number of land mines buried along the coast of much of the island.  As we traveled on our scooter along the road circumnavigating the island, there was a constant presence of barbed wire fence with little red signs warning that there were land mines buried on the other side.  Jose told me that some company had been contracted to remove the mines, and later on we did indeed come across a crew of  men who had been hired to do that work -- their orange jumpsuits and metal detectors gave them away!  Jose stopped and asked a guy a question, but he asked it in English so I figured he assumed the guy was not Chinese.  When he asked where they were from, the guy said Cambodia.  I thought that was a pretty interesting case of outsourcing by Taiwan's government...

It's now Sunday night -- I knew I wasn't gonna get too far last night, and that I'd likely be writing this post in bits and pieces over the next couple of days.  On Friday, I finished a rough first draft of the paper I'm writing with Yungnane, which now means putting lots of finishing touches on before it is really ready to go.   He and I are meeting next Wed. to go over lots of details I wanted to discuss with him, and in the meantime I'm checking references, tracking down citations, etc. -- the detail work that makes academic writing a bit of a grind.  I gotta admit, I kinda like the freedom of a blog, where I can pretty much say whatever I want however I want.  (Well, OK, no, not in Chinese.)  There's a blogger named Les Visible, who has the Smoking Mirrors website I link to under Favorite Blogs, who actually has four, I think it is, different blogs that he writes, each with a voice a little different than the others, maybe targeted to slightly different audiences.  I've read a lot of his Smoking Mirrors posts, and he frequently verbalizes the very same sort of things I've just been reading and thinking about.  If I want to keep blogging after I'm done in Taiwan, I think I'm going to either have to create a new blog or this one will indicate that I am still "in Taiwan" even though I'll really be in some other part of the world.  With a new blog, maybe I could use a different voice -- hmm, have to think about that.

I've enjoyed writing the descriptions of some of what I've been doing here, but I also have to admit that, with all the interesting, crazy things going on in the world, it was always tempting to write about global events rather than the ultimately pretty trivial details of my experiences here in Taiwan.  I did try to provide links to lots of interesting material that I came across in my daily scanning of news and information and opinions on the internet, but also made the choice to just provide the links without saying much about them in the posts.  I have no idea if anyone has clicked through on any of those links, but I suppose just scanning the titles provides a pretty good clue of some of the things that I'm interested in and intrigued by. 

One of those, obviously, is UFOs.  Back in 1995, after I got tenure at USC, all of a sudden I had a little more free time and flexibility than I'd had for the previous six years.  And during those six years, the "world wide web" pretty much came into being, with all sorts of information now available online and easy to get access to.  With free time to explore a bit, one of the things I was curious enough about to start looking into was the UFO phenomenon.  Starting that search with an open mind, it wasn't long before I had seen enough information and evidence to draw the conclusion that Earth probably is being visited by entities from places beyond our world, and that "the government" (and this could mean some sort of "shadow government" that is really calling the shots) has been covering up their knowledge of that fact for quite some time.  For a number of years now, there have been groups actively working to try to get the government to "disclose" its knowledge about the existence of aliens and, presumably, their access to alien technology.  (This ties in to the "free energy" issue, which is the "game-changer" technology we need to move global society forward into a new paradigm.)  These folks are not kooks -- a number of them are serious researchers who have done the hard, time-consuming work of trying to track down and verify UFO events, get access to government documents, build the case about a cover-up, etc.  Anyway, that's one storyline that I've paid a little attention to over the years -- keeping my eye out for new evidence (eg, an astronaut being quoted as acknowledging that there are UFOs, the story of lots of folks in Stephenville, Texas seeing a UFO traveling near Bush's ranch at Crawford, cool videos of UFOs that people post online, etc.) and for information about efforts to expose the long-standing cover-up (eg, a press conference at the National Press Club where lots of reputable people provided information about their contacts with UFOs, news about governments providing access to their UFO files, and the first story I posted when I started this blog, that Chinese TV announced that the Obama administration was close to making the disclosure announcement). 

With that as a little backdrop, it was interesting to me that, on the way home from dinner with the Yang family a couple weeks ago, Yungnane translated his wife as asking me, out of the blue, what I thought about UFOs.  So I said that I believe they're real, that there's lots of evidence from lots of very credible witnesses that something is flying around our skies that transcends the technological capabilities of the human race (to the extent that we know), and that there's good reason to believe that the government is covering up information relevant to the above.  I explained that this had been one of the issues I had paid some attention to over the years, but when Yungnane concluded that I must then be an "expert" on the subject, I assured him I wasn't at all.  But then the next morning I got an email from him asking me if I would talk to his class about UFOs!  The request surprised me, first just that he would allocate time in his class to this topic, and second that he would want me to come talk to his students about it.  So I assured him again that I am not an expert on the topic but that I'd be glad to talk to people about what I've learned over the years.  That class is tomorrow night.  The plan is for me to first give my talk on collaborative governance, which I presented in Taipei with Yungnane as translator, and then after that to talk about UFOs.  At first I thought it would be a funny juxtaposition, but the irony is that my interest in collaboration and my interest in UFOs sort of came along at the same time in my life, and the two topics are kind of fused together in my own personal narrative as they relate to the "new paradigm" I've been talking about since way back then.  So I'm hoping it will be easy enough for me to segue from one to the other tomorrow night...

It's Monday night now, and I've finished the class.  I gave the collaborative governance talk, with Yungnane translating as we went, and then there were a fair number of questions afterwards, so when all that was done it was about 8:30, and Yungnane told them that I was now going to talk about UFOs til class ended at 9, and there was sort of a collective "oooh" from the class.  And these were mostly working professionals in their 30s and 40s, not a young crowd, so without much introduction or segue, he just let me start talking.  I told them some of what I explained above, about my search for information and the conclusions I drew, and then I elaborated on a few specifics that I think are interesting and thought they might too.  Once I had agreed with Yungnane to do this, I looked around on the internet a bit for useful information, and somewhere came upon a documentary video made by a guy named James Fox that I watched last week (its' the history channel documentary on UFOs that I gave the link for under Cool Videos).  This documentary focused on a press conference held in 2007 at the National Press Club in DC where a bunch of high level military officers, pilots, etc. shared their first-hand information about UFO sightings (some pretty up close and personal).  It also included some  conversations with many of those guys as they elaborated on the stories they told at the press conference.  I had read about some of those stories before, but certainly not all, and to see and hear these guys explain what they know, all I can say is that it would be pretty hard for anyone but the most narrow-minded skeptic to watch this video and not take the UFO phenomenon seriously. 

Yungnane's class is on public policy analysis, but I used the time I had left (actually, nobody got up to leave at 9 PM so we went a little long!) to cover some basics of the story and only scratched the surface on some of the relevant policy issues the existence of UFOs suggests.  But that's what's kind of crazy to me -- the implications of an alien presence, with whatever advanced technologies they have, are just ASTOUNDING, and yet we are collectively indifferent about the whole subject.  Sure, individually, everyone's got their beliefs, their stories, their curiosities, their best guesses, but collectively we have essentially decided not to talk about it.  Fine, you've got your tabloid stories, but everyone knows that's not "real" news, and people can talk about UFOs among friends and family, but a major news organization is not likely to touch the topic with a ten-foot pole, and our "leaders" are happy to act like they've never really given the matter much thought at all.  Apparently the military denies doing any investigations of UFO phenomena, which seems kind of remarkable if it were actually true!  Essentially they're saying that they just don't care enough about it to look into it, which is undoubtedly a lie, but my point is that they can claim to be disinterested and apparently that just seems fine or normal.  Even when there are major events, sightings seen by hundreds or thousands of people -- like the famous "Phoenix lights" from back in the 90s -- they make the news for awhile, no one really comes up with a good explanation for what everyone saw, but pretty soon life moves on and people go back to focusing on what they normally focus on and eventually the mystery and intrigue fade away and the event itself retreats into irrelevance.  Really, it boggles my mind how Americans can remain agnostic and indifferent about a potential alien presence in the midst of all the evidence suggesting something funky is going on.  I suppose maybe it's really just denial -- I guess the fear associated with the idea of advanced space beings hovering in our atmosphere is enough to make people just want to ignore the whole situation.  Understandable, maybe, but not very wise.

Besides, why should we assume that any space visitors would inevitably have negative intentions towards us?  Why not expect that they would come in peace, or even to give us some help?  I figure the main answer there is that we are projecting onto them what we believe about ourselves -- that humans are inherently selfish, competitive, and warlike with an innate drive to expand our domain.  And of course the media play on this perspective, by giving us blockbuster movies about fending off alien attacks that subtly or not just serve to feed the fear.  So yes, if aliens are anything like what we expect them to be, like what we believe humans to be, then we could be screwed.  But I'm going with the hypothesis that it's not so simple, that there might be some "good guy" aliens and some "bad guy" aliens, with different motives and modi operandi, but including some who really would like to help us get out of our mess and have some means at their disposal to do so.  One version of events, that I mentioned in class tonight, is that the ETs started paying a whole lot more attention to us earthlings after we demonstrated our capacity for nuclear weapons -- the explanation being that nuclear explosions are a greater risk to the whole space-time fabric than our scientists are aware of, such that explosions here can cause problems elsewhere in the cosmos where some of these space brothers are trying to live their peaceful happy lives.  Once earth humans started putting them at risk, I guess they felt a need to monitor things here a little more closely and make sure we didn't do anything stupid out of our ignorance about how the whole system works (ie, the "unified field" the physicists discovered last century).  The ETs' interest in things nuclear also seems to have been demonstrated in the frequent UFO sightings in Japan around the time of the earthquake/tsunami/nuclear meltdown.  I would bet money that they are working "behind the scenes" to prevent that radiation from being as bad as it otherwise would have been.

On the other hand, really, I have no idea what's going on.  I feel very confident about the claim that living entities from beyond the confines of our little 4D world are appearing in our biosphere, as the evidence in support of that hypothesis is overwhelming (especially compared to the alternative explanation that everyone who "sees" a UFO is crazy or hallucinating or on drugs or just confused by some optical illusion).  You can't explain away the Phoenix lights that way.  Or the officers and pilots in the documentary, at the National Press Club.  Something is out there, of that I'm sure.  Who they are and what they're doing here -- well, I've got my conjectures and conclusions based on my filtering of all the information on the topic I've digested over the years, but I have no way of knowing yet how much of that is right and how much of it isn't.  But to be honest, I'm kind of expecting to get some answers about all that before too much longer.  As I told the students tonight, and as I say one way or another to lots of students I teach, any day now...

Given my confidence that we are being visited by beings from elsewhere (footnote here:  elsewhere doesn't just have to mean some other part of the physical 4D universe as we know it, but could include other dimensions that essentially co-exist with ours but beyond our perceptual awareness), a corollary conclusion is that the government has indeed been covering up their knowledge of, and probably some interaction with, some of these beings (dead and/or alive).  When I brought this possibility up in class tonight,  one of the ladies just spontaneously asked "why," and the first answer I gave was because of their fear that there would be mass panic if the populace knew that aliens were hanging out within range of contact.  If things really did get started with Roswell in 1947, it's easy enough to imagine that the powers-that-be would want to keep the story under wraps at that point to prevent any kind of large-scale panic, right in the wake of WWII and the beginning of the Cold War, etc.  But I suggested to the students that all those governments that have contributed to the cover-up are now in a bit of a double-bind.  Even if they wanted to let the people know that the UFOs are real, if they felt we could now handle the info without going nuts, they would essentially have to confess that they've been lying to us all these years.  And what government (read: politician) is ever going to do that! 

On the other hand, an argument can be made that there is a slow process of "disclosure" already underway, as at least a few governments around the world have been opening their UFO files, making them accessible to those who want to review them, which will have the effect of letting "official" information spread out to the public, adding credibility and legitimacy to whatever information is contained there.  In the US, I don't think they've gone that far yet, but there are a number of researchers who for years have been asking for and gaining access to US files through FOIA requests, in an ongoing effort to get the government to provide more information than it has shared about what it knows about the phenomenon.  The 2007 National Press Club event was affiliated with a group called The Disclosure Project, which I think was founded by some of the key researchers who have for years been documenting the government's cover-up efforts and trying to uncover the secret entities that have had responsibility for dealing with UFO activities.  By getting extremely credible witnesses to insinuate that the government withheld information from the public about real events that they were directly involved in, The Disclosure Project keeps making it harder and harder for the government to continue to pretend that it doesn't have any interest in or information about the topic.  So rather than just coming out and admitting it, all at once, like I guess the Chinese were predicting Obama was on the verge of doing, it seems like the strategy is to let the realization about the reality of UFOs diffuse more slowly and incrementally -- open up the information bit by bit, let people get acclimated to the idea over time rather than have to deal with the strong reactions of a sudden and explicit verification of the facts...

OK, now it's Tuesday night, time to wrap this up.  I've gone back and read what I wrote above, so I guess now I have just a couple more things I want to add, to try to bring a little closure to the story.  If there is an alien presence, and if the powers-that-be are aware of that fact, then it is reasonable to conclude that our present circumstances are likely to bring that information out into the open one way or the other.  Between the Gulf oil spill and Japan's nuclear disaster, the planet has taken two huge, serious blows to the health and well-being of the global ecosystem that keeps us alive.  The full-scale effects of these events may still take some years to do their damage, but that damage is likely to be severe.  In the short-run, it will likely contribute to higher food prices and economic problems more generally, which will probably result in even more widespread unrest around the world as the masses get more and more angry at the banksters and their corporate minions who are the cause of most of these problems. 

If there is a systemic economic collapse, there will be the need for some kind of monetary system reform, of the kind Soros and his crowd as well as the BRICS partners have all been discussing over the last few weeks.  That may be a moment of truth for the planet, to see whether those implementing a new system create one that continues to privilege the financial elites or one that is more populist in its design.  In other words, that's sort of the crux of the matter as to what the nature of the "new world order" will be.  Will it be a new world order still run by the elites for the elites, or will the new monetary system signal a change to something new and different?  I think that, behind the scenes, at the top level of the game, there is a sort of battle going on around this issue.  To the extent that our bankster rulers represent and embody the dark forces on the planet, I have a feeling there are also some lightworkers, some "white knights," who are operating at high levels of the game countering the efforts of the dark cabal to impose their system of world-wide control.  If that's true, if there really are two alternative strategies that are being proposed and offered to global leaders as a way to get out of our current financial fiasco (ie, systemic bankruptcy -- so much more debt spread throughout the system than there is money to pay it all off), then the geo-political alignments that are in play these days may very well reflect who's aligning with whom on which side of that fight.  (That's just a hunch, I have no information to that effect.)

I guess my point here is that the big issues taking place in the world right now, here in our 4D material plane, may actually be manifestations of a more metaphysical battle between light and dark, with the latter doing everything they can to maintain control of a system they created that is now falling apart all around them, and the former working diligently to wrest control of the planet away from this dark cabal.  My understanding is that the ETs are not indifferent to the outcome, nor just passive observers of the process.  While there may very well be some ET types (eg, the "reptilians" that David Icke has brought to the world's attention) that are conspiring with the dark forces, there appear to be some who are working to help free humanity from the constraints imposed upon us by the dark, constraints that they've been developing for most of the last 12,000 years or so.  And part of humanity gaining this freedom is to become aware that we are not alone, that reality is quite a bit more expansive than we have been led to believe, that our little 4D reality is embedded in a very complex, multidimensional universe (multiverse) that is filled with all sorts of beings "living" at lots of different levels of consciousness.  And some of those beings are here now, at this "moment in time," to help Gaia and her inhabitants transition to the next, higher level of consciousness (5D).  It's this jump to a higher level of consciousness that is the essence of the paradigm shift I've been talking about for so long.

Over the years, teaching about the new paradigm in my classes, and the possibility that it could arrive more quickly than anybody ever thinks is possible, I have sometimes joked that if a UFO ever decides to land and aliens get out, the paradigm is going to change immediately.  But it's not a joke.  If a UFO ever decides to land and aliens get out, the paradigm is going to change immediately.  The impression I've gotten is that, up til now, they have largely been constrained from doing this, that there is some kind of rule that says they are supposed to wait until they are invited, in a sense.  Thus, disclosure -- if it ever comes -- will almost be tantamount to an invitation, because once the cat is out of the bag, so to speak, there won't be a lot of good reasons for them to remain mostly hidden and elusive.  They may as well land so that we can start figuring out what's really going on, and step over the threshold into a new era of human civilization.

The dark forces running the planet want to avoid disclosure, because it essentially means that they have to give up control.  In other words, the dark forces have been actively working against the process of our evolution to a higher level of consciousness, because the only way they can maintain their power, and in some sense maybe even their existence, is to keep us functioning at this lower level.  Rumors are they would rather "take the planet down" than give up their control, which may well explain why in the case of both the Gulf and Japan they made decisions that increased rather than decreased the amount of damage caused by the original disaster.  Other rumors are that they have planned a mass population die-off, maybe in part to bring the world back closer to its carrying capacity of human beings, and that they've built huge underground bunkers where they think they could go live for a few years if things got too unbearable here on the surface.  I don't know how much if any of that is true, but I would have to say that whoever is calling the shots on the planet sure seems to be doing more to mess things up than to make things better.  Maybe that's intentional.

If the dark forces want either control or destruction, and are doing everything they can to pursue those goals, then the light beings are here to make sure we transition successfully into 5D consciousness.  One of the cool things about 5D consciousness is the recognition that darkness is an illusion, a perceptual error associated with not having enough light.  In 5D there's enough light that there is no darkness, which means that the global transition to 5D consciousness -- which may well be the event implied by the end of the cycle in the old Mayan calendar, which of course has become associated with the year 2012 -- will entail the removal of the dark energies from the planet.  That's why lots of old control systems are falling apart, or losing their legitimacy, or facing a crisis, or whatever.  If there really is an "end" to a cycle that is giving rise to a shift in collective consciousness, then it could be that there is some point in time when this process is "supposed" to be completed, such that more and more events are likely to transpire that move the process along more and more quickly.  The Gulf and Japan have increased the urgency of discontinuing our destructive patterns, and to the extent that these toxins in some way also threaten the health and well-being of Gaia herself (not to mention all life on the planet), there is probably growing urgency among the light beings to escalate the process of transformation. 

So, I guess what I'm saying is this -- don't be surprised if UFOs start making themselves even more obvious, if the media start giving a little more serious attention to the possibility of their existence, if governments continue to let out more information about what they know, if insiders or whistleblowers come forward with more information about what's really going on.  And who knows, maybe one day a UFO will  land, and an alien will get out and say something like "yo, wassup" and then the new paradigm will begin!

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.

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.

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.

Chillin' in Taijiang

Awhile back Yungnane scheduled us to take a trip to the nearby Taijiang National Park on Sunday the 27th.  Last week he told me that the driver would come to pick me up at 11 AM.  What I knew by then was that, after picking me up, we would get Joanna Yu, then swing by Yungnane's place and head out to the park, where we where going to meet up with a biologist friend of Yungnane's, who we were then going to have dinner with.  It was easy enough to assume that we'd be out til at least mid-evening, so this was essentially going to be a "day off."

Joanna is another USC alum from our PhD program, but instead of returning to Taiwan she stayed around USC and has been heavily involved as the key staff person working with an international masters degree program offered by our School.  It turns out that her hometown is here in Tainan, and she was going to be in town for a few days so Yungnane invited her along on our trip to Taijiang.  I got the call that the driver had arrived, and headed outside to realize that not only was it a cool day, as I had anticipated, it was also wet, apparently having rained earlier that morning.  After getting into the van that Yungnane had hired for the day, we headed to Joanna's parents' house and met her outside, which was then only a couple of blocks from Yungnane's home.  We stopped there and his whole family piled into the van and we took off out of town.

Our first stop was for lunch.  We pulled into an out-of-the-way restaurant, that had a large group of about 50 people packed around five tables in the main room, probably a tour group, so they put us in our own little side room where the seven of us sat around a big round table.  We had the usual varied assortment of dishes, including some cold shrimp to start, something with oysters and some veggies in a nice sauce, a dish with veggies and probably some animal intestine cut into little slices (when I asked what it was, Joanna said if I liked it she'd tell me what it was; I didn't ask again) in another sauce, some sashimi, some fish we cooked in a broth that was boiling over a burner on the lazy susan, another whole steamed fish, and a Hakka dish with squid, a variant of tofu, and some vegetables that was my favorite of the meal.  The Hakkas are a large "ethnic" group on the island, in the sense that they come from a particular region in southern China and speak a dialect that is different from the Taiwanese dialect that lots of other folks here speak (the Chinese characters used are the same for both, but they are pronounced differently), both of which are different from the Mandarin which is the dominant, formal language both here and on the mainland (although on the mainland they now use a simplified version of the Chinese characters, whereas in Taiwan they have kept the old, more detailed versions).

After lunch, we were not scheduled to meet up with the biologist until later, so we had a chance to look around on our own some prior to that point.  Taijiang National Park is just beyond the part of Tainan where the An-Shun plant property is located, the polluted area that is the focus of Yungnane's research and that I talked about in my presentation in Taipei last week.  So we first stopped there to take a look, which gave me a chance to take a few pictures since I didn't have my camera with me the previous time we had gone out there.  Here's the reservoir and some large pipes that I presume were used to dump effluent from the plant into the reservoir, and Joanna and Yungnane in front of the sign warning that the area is polluted.

We also drove down a little road next to the Lu-er river, where we could see all the contraptions that locals had (apparently illegally) set up to grow oysters.

Where the mouth of the river meets the ocean, technically the Taiwan Straight, they had created a little stone monument to mark the spot where the Chinese general Koxinga presumably landed in Taiwan before defeating the Dutch and kicking them off the island.  They also seemed to be developing a nearby building, maybe as part of the effort to mark this as an historical spot.  Out here next to the ocean, it was definitely pretty chilly, and I was glad I had added an extra layer before heading out in the morning.

Taijiang National Park was established to protect a wetlands area north of Tainan that is winter home to a relatively rare bird species, the black-faced spoon-bill, as well as a variety of other birds and marine life that live among the mangroves and the brackish water.  Two separate rivers drain into this area, and flooding over the years has brought enough silt down into the area that it filled in some of the land and essentially pushed the ocean back some.  Some old Dutch maps and drawings I saw at the temple while we were waiting for the biologist to arrive indicated the existence back in the 1600s of some sort of peninsula in this area that apparently doesn't exist now that the land mass has increased. 

We were waiting for the biologist at the Sihcao Dajhong Temple, which I had stopped at briefly with Jose, Yu Li and Wesley way back when they came down for a visit my second weekend here.  The temple operates two short little boat rides, one of which we were scheduled to take, through an area called the Green Tunnel.  Finally, Prof. Tzen-Yuh Chiang from NCKU's Biology Department arrived, although not alone but with two other older gentlemen, one a Japanese man whose name I never learned, and the other an American named Peter Raven who I learned was the head of the botanical gardens in St. Louis.  While we were waiting, Yungnane had indicated we were being joined by an internationally-known biologist, or something to that effect, so I presumed that one or the other of these two -- more likely the American -- was the one he was talking about.  Finally, with everyone gathered, we got onto the boat for the 20 minute ride back and forth through the Green Tunnel.

After finishing our little jaunt through the mangroves, our group got back into our cars and headed over to another area where Yungnane had arranged another boat ride out into the wetlands were we would have a better chance of viewing some of the birds of the region.  For this ride, they had us all put life vests on, which I was more than happy to do not for fear of the water but because it gave me another layer of clothing on what by now had turned into a rather cold afternoon.  And once we got out onto the water, with the breezes blowing, it was definitely cold, to the point of being distracting and even uncomfortable.  (By the middle of the boat ride, I was fantasizing about a hot shower.  I remember thinking that I had been colder on a ski lift once...!)  Our guide on the boat was a local man who knew everything about the area by virtue of having been living and working in this environment for probably most of his life.  He was making the trip barefoot, although he kept his head warm with a nice hat with earflaps.

He took us first to a viewing platform where they had set up a number of little telescopes for us to look at the birds with.  Then we stopped at a little fishing platform he had built, with a very clever mechanism for raising and lowering a big net into the water as well as a little hut the fisherman could sleep in if circumstances called for it.  Finally, we stopped at one of the oyster-growing platforms, which don't entail much more than dangling strings from the wood or bamboo poles and letting the fertilized oyster eggs attach themselves and starting growing.  I think he said it takes about six months for them to grow, along with their shells, to the point you would harvest them.  He cut a couple of them open, and one of the Taiwanese guys with us swallowed one just like that, with Yungnane's older son then following suit.  Someone asked me if I wanted one; I declined.  Unfortunately, my camera batteries were running out by this point, so I didn't get many pictures, but here is one of the birds off in the distance and another of the oysters growing on the string.

It was late afternoon by the time we got off the boat, so that was the end of our day in the Park.  We drove back into town and stopped first at Yungnane's place, where we all got out except for Joanna -- the driver was taking her back to her place, as she was leaving for the US that night.  It turns out that her mother had passed away, which is why she was in town, and she had apparently extended her stay to spend the day with us out in Taijiang.  Then Yungnane and I said good-bye to his family and we headed to the hotel where we were scheduled to have dinner with the biologists who had been on the trip with us.  We parked at the Shangri-La Hotel, which is the big glass tower at the mall that I posted a picture of awhile back, and went up to the top, the 38th floor, where the restaurant was located.  After waiting for awhile, which included a number of attempts by Yungnane to reach his friend Prof. Chiang on his cell phone, we finally got verification that they were on their way, and learned that the dinner was being hosted by Chiang's Dean.  Soon enough, Peter Raven, the Japanese man, and three other guys accompanying them arrived, and shortly thereafter Chiang showed up.  Yungnane had already determined that he couldn't tell whose name the reservation was under, so when Chiang showed up, with apparently further confusion on the matter, I guess he called his Dean and learned that we had all assembled in the wrong hotel, and that the Dean was waiting for us in the restaurant at the right hotel. 

So we all went back down to our cars, drove about 15 minutes across town, and finally ended up in the right place, where the Dean of NCKU's College of Bioscience and Biotechnology and a number of others were waiting.  This was clearly a bigger deal than I had anticipated, and it was obvious that Peter Raven's presence was a key factor in the event.  As we were getting seated, I ended up sitting down on his left, at a big table that could seat around 20, with about 15 of us there.  I had already thought, and then Peter said, that this was the biggest lazy susan he had ever seen. 

Sometimes, at a high-end dinner like this, the "fancier" dishes include things that I am less fond of eating, just don't enjoy as much, and that was the case at this dinner.  The first soup on the table had some chunks of fish fin as the meat.  We also had some nice abalone early on, and then later some baby abalone cooked and looking in a way that made us think they were mushrooms until we ate them.  I had a very large shrimp, and when I asked where they may have come from, thinking it may be Vietnam as I'd heard they grow big shrimp there, someone said maybe Japan, which I think then generated a little nervous laughter!  We had some baked pigeon, a leg/thigh, that was tasty enough, and I asked Peter why we didn't eat pigeon in the US, and he didn't really know, other than just a culture belief that it is sort of a dirty bird or something.  The one thing in the meal that I was least keen on eating was the sea cucumber.  A sea cucumber has sort of a gelatinous texture to it, soft and squishy, and despite its name I guess it's actually a member of the animal kingdom and not the plant kingdom.  I've tried it before, I took a bite last night, but really, I just don't need to eat that.

The table was too big to try to maintain a single common conversation, so invariably there were lots of little side conversations going on, which meant that Peter and I got to chat a little here and there throughout the dinner.  I knew he was head of the botanical gardens, but I assumed from his presence in this academic crowd that he must have a university affiliation too, so I asked if he was at the Univ. of Missouri at St. Louis, or at Washington University, and he answered by explaining that, since 1880-something, the head of the gardens has to be a faculty member at Washington U.  I learned that Prof. Chiang and at least one other Taiwenese man at the table were students of his sometime back.  When I asked what had brought him to Tainan, knowing that he had spent a little time up in Taipei too, he explained that he was getting an honorary degree from NCKU the next day.  Aha!  Now the whole dinner made sense, the nice place, the big crowd, the coats and ties (and me still in my cargo pants, t-shirts, and tennis shoes), the Dean springing for an expensive spread...

So, after spending a chilly afternoon together in the Taijiang wetlands, I inadvertently sat next to the guest of honor at our 5-star dinner, Dr. Peter H. Raven, George Engelmann Professor of Botany at Washington University-St. Louis, and President Emeritus of the Missouri Botanical Garden.  After dinner was over, and everyone had said good-bye to everyone, Yungnane drove me back home where I went upstairs and took the nice hot shower that had been in the back of my mind for many hours.  I didn't last much longer after that, and soon laid down for a good night's sleep.