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. 

Hump day

Yungnane took a trip to the US last week, to attend a conference in Baltimore and then talk to some university officials in the area to get information on the university governance project that he is involved in, and for which he has asked me for some input at various points during my stay here.  It turns out his itinerary had routed him first through the Tokyo airport, where he happened to be when the earthquake struck.  They grounded all flights for awhile, and essentially Yungnane had to spend 24 hours at the airport to take the same flight to the US the next day at the same time.  He commended the airport folks for fairly quickly getting blankets and water to everyone who was stranded there.  His delay then caused him to miss the slot at the conference where he was scheduled to give his talk.  That's how it goes sometimes.

Tuesday afternoon, he and I took the high-speed train up to Taipei, where I was scheduled to give a talk Wednesday morning at the National Academy of Civil Service.  The NASC is involved in the process of training civil servants, and providing other professional development activities such as presentations like the one I gave.  Civil servants from around the country were invited to attend, and about 180 showed up for a day that included my talk in the morning, lunch, and then a talk by a hotel executive in the afternoon. It was a fairly senior crowd.  Their civil service system goes up to grade 14, and folks at that level would be the highest ranking career managers serving under the appointed officials who hold the top ministerial positions in the various government agencies.  The folks who showed up for the talk were grades 9-13, so pretty senior managers in most cases.  I talked to them about "collaborative governance" -- how government agencies can work with businesses, nonprofit organizations, and citizens to better serve the public interest -- and Yungnane was my interpreter.

It is easy enough to get a sense of the importance of an event or occasion here by the amount of formality or ritual that precedes it, and by the people you meet in the process.  Yungnane and I arrived at the NASC building at about 6:30, where we were scheduled to eat dinner at their cafeteria.  We were met by Yvonne and Sue, the two staff members responsible for coordinating our visit.  I had been emailing Yvonne over the past week regarding arrangements, etc., and Sue had had contact with folks from USC when we had a delegation here last year to meet with alumni on the island, and one of my colleagues gave at talk at NASC last May.  Since the building is sort of a conference center, and some students come in for a number of weeks at a time for their training, the building has some guest rooms in which we were to stay for the night, so Yvonne and Sue took us up to drop our bags off before heading to the cafeteria.  We joined a table where the vice-president and chief secretary (Yungnane said he was a chief of staff) were already eating, along with some other folks, and since the rest of the cafeteria was filled with young people eating dinner before either going home or back to work or up to study (I'm not quite sure which), my guess is that the senior guys were there specifically to have dinner with me and Yungnane.  We were done by about 8:00 or so, and after Yungnane and I found a spot where we could use their wi-fi and spend a little time online, I headed up to my room, read a little of Alex Grey's book on The Mission of Art, and called it a night early since we arranged to head to the cafeteria for breakfast at 7:30.

In general I don't like to eat that early, and it's a bigger challenge when the food is stuff I'm not used to putting in my stomach at that time of the day.  When we reached the food line, I saw that they had all the makings for what could have been a pretty good chicken sandwich -- a nice big sesame bun, some sliced tomatoes, onions, and red cabbage, fried eggs, and some little breaded chicken cutlets.  I passed on the bun and the chicken, had an egg and some of the veggies, and a little bowl of sort of a porridge-like rice soup.  At 8:30 we went by the auditorium to make sure I could access my presentation on line, got a cup of coffee while we were doing that, then we had a little downtime in our rooms before heading back to the auditorium at 9:45 before a 10:00 start.  While waiting and having tea in a little room off to the side, we were introduced to a few more of the big-wigs who were there for the event, including the Vice Chairperson of the Civil Service Protection and Training Commission, the agency in which NASC is housed, and then the Minister in charge of that commission, who is also the President of NASC.  It turns out he's a Stanford grad too, getting his PhD from the School of Education there in 1985, and it was he who then introduced me to the audience, which I didn't really anticipate, but thought was kind of cool to have someone that high-ranking introduce me for a talk.

I don't usually get nervous before making a presentation, but as I was starting to get a sense of the magnitude of the event during that time leading up to the start of the show, I have to admit I was feeling a few butterflies in my stomach.  I was also a little worried about the timing of the whole talk -- you never know with a translator how much time it will take to cover material, and I was concerned that I had put more info into the presentation than I would be able to cover in the time allotted.  And I wasn't really sure, if I had to cut back on some material, what would be best to leave out.  But once I got going, I was able to get a sense early on that it would be easy enough to cover everything that I had included and that I would even have time to be able to elaborate in places, to go beyond the translated copy of the notes for my talk that they had all received in a booklet when they arrived.  The "case" I was focusing on as an example to clarify the conceptual points I was making was the pollution problem in Tainan that Yungnane has been studying for years, and that I have been learning about during my time here.  It was good to have him as a translator since he has more familiarity with the case than I did, and he even corrected some misinformation I had provided to Yvonne when he translated my written notes for the printed material that the audience members had received.

All in all, the whole thing went smoothly and quite well, I think.  I was scheduled to stop at 11:40 to allow 20 minutes for Q&A, and actually came to a close at 11:42, so I figured that was pretty good for no rehearsal of any sort and a little uncertainty about how much time it would take.  There were a number of questions from the audience, and more hands were up than we had time to address before the lunch break at noon, which was seen as a good sign that people had found the talk interesting.  I got some nice compliments from the staff, and Yungnane felt it had gone well too, so I guess everyone was happy enough.  At the end, they gave both Yungnane and me a nice framed photograph taken as we were in the middle of the presentation, which I realize isn't all that hard to do with today's technology but still impressed me as a nice touch.  One last kind of amusing data point:  I often get paid a small honorarium when I give a talk here, and Yungnane had told me that would be the case this time as well.  When Yvonne paid me on Tuesday night, I realized that it was a little more than what he had indicated it might be, and more than I have been paid elsewhere, so that was a nice surprise.  Not that it was all that much, but what really made me laugh was when I realized that my fee for that one speech essentially covered the cost of my little dorm room for the entire 15 weeks I'm in Taiwan.  Crazy.

After the talk, we had a quick lunch in the cafeteria, again eating with the highest-ranking officials, and then when the rest of the group moved on to the afternoon session, Yungnane and I had a little more downtime before we needed to head over to the Ministry of Education to meet with a staff member there about the university governance project.  We met with a woman that Yungnane has been working with on this project for awhile, who wanted to get my input about the situation and how to move forward.  The idea is to create a new "board of regents" for NCKU and another university in Taiwan, as sort of a trial run or first step in creating a new governance system that could eventually get implemented throughout the entire public university system in the country.  In essence, the board would take on some oversight responsibilities that currently the central government has responsibility for, but invariably with organizational changes of this type there are corresponding changes in different parties' levels of power, control, and autonomy, and players not happy with those changes tend to resist the governance changes being proposed.  So our conversation focused primarily on where those sources of resistance are likely to be and what kinds of strategies or approaches Yungnane and Flory can utilize to reduce this resistance.  It was a nice, informal, productive conversation, and I was drawing notes on a piece of paper as we went that helped to diagram the issues we were discussing, and I realized how much I prefer that kind of interaction to the more polite, stylized, ritualized conversations that are almost inevitable when high-ranking folks are involved.

When we finished our discussion, Yungnane and I walked over to the high-speed rail station, bought some little boxed dinners to go, and caught the 5:36 train back to Tainan which, after making the local connection back into town, got us back to his car at 8:00.  It was nice to get home relatively early, with the psycho-emotional benefit of knowing that I had made it over the biggest hump in the trajectory of my stay here, as this was the definitely the "main event" of my time here.  It was also the first presentation of the research I am doing with Yungnane, so getting that material organized into presentation form was the first key first step towards writing up a paper to submit to a journal.  The NASC folks are going to send me a DVD with my speech on it, so I'm thinking of starting by getting that transcribed, as that would essentially constitute a first draft of the paper and save me some time writing.

In addition to getting through this presentation, I'm also on the downhill side of the slope in the sense that last Thursday was the halfway point in my stay here.  It's kinda weird that time is simultaneously passing both quickly and slowly.  I suspect that, as the amount of time left decreases, it will feel like it's passing even more quickly.  I realized I better start planning to do the few things I really wanted to do while I was here this time, to make sure they get built into my schedule before it's time to head back to the US.  There are some small islands off the main island that I'm interested in visiting, and as the warm weather arrives I will be more enticed to take the ferry out for a visit.  I guess future updates will clarify if and when I make that happen!

Shockwaves and fallout

I’ve been struggling since Saturday to write something to post about the crisis in Japan.  The scale of the human tragedy there is hard to fathom, and the risks now posed by the nuclear radiation fallout almost seem surreal.   The systemic damage is overwhelming, and its hard to imagine how long it will take the country to overcome their shock and despair, get everything cleaned up, repair whatever can be, and get back to any semblance of normal.  Having watched a number of videos online, I have to say that tsunamis amaze and baffle me, and its crazy how much more destruction is caused by that shockwave plowing through the water than from the earth shaking as hard as it did -- apparently, the quake was so big and strong that the whole coast of Japan moved as much as eight feet!   Yet the country might have remained in decent shape had the tsunami not swept through with its incredible destructive force.  Instead, we now face what is quickly turning into a global calamity.   I have a feeling this could well be the tipping point for the planet, and my best guess is that we should expect things to get crazier from here on out.  So I've decided to write about why it is that I think that way.

So let's start with a question:  how might we think differently about earthquakes and other natural disasters if we took seriously the idea that Gaia, Mother Earth, really is a living, breathing, conscious being?  A number of years ago scientist James Lovelock proposed what he called the Gaia hypothesis, the premise that the earth is indeed a single, interconnected living organism -- one big, self-regulating ecological system.  Of course, this is not an entirely new idea.  Before the god-religions came along and wiped out the old beliefs, most people on the planet worshiped the goddess, the life-giver, the earth mother, the mysterious and fickle provider.  Indigenous peoples around the world still tend to see the land, and the planet itself, as sacred, as a manifestation of spirit, worthy of respect if not worship, of admiration and care rather than disregard and abuse.  Many teachers from these cultures have been trying to point out for quite some time how problematic is the white man's way of thinking of the earth as just a mass of matter, a large source of resources for humans to use up as quickly as we can.  To a considerable extent, this one mistaken notion is at the heart of the problems confronting humankind.  And the nuclear disaster we now face in Japan and wherever else it spreads is just the latest and biggest lesson being given to us to help us recognize the folly of our ways and to teach us that a new and different path is necessary.

Maybe my own logic on this topic isn't readily apparent, so here's a brief version.  Why do we have nuclear reactors at all when we know that, if a big accident happens, they can produce widespread, long-term damage that essentially makes life untenable in the region of the worst fallout?  Back in the '70s, in the context of an oil embargo and concerns about energy security, the powers-that-be determined that nuclear energy was a cheaper, more efficient way of producing large amounts of energy than solar, wind, and whatever other cleaner alternatives were up for discussion at the time.  This valuing of short-term efficiency and discounting of long-term risks is built in to the world of finance, and economic thinking more generally, and financial/economic criteria dominate large-scale industrial decision-making such as this.  The power of economic ideology grew right alongside the process of industrialization, the hallmark activity of the modern era, reflecting older mercantilist ideas that international trade of regionally-produced goods was a primary factor influencing national well-being.  Mercantilism itself, and the interconnected system of powerful bankers and merchants it created, emerged shortly after the Catholic Church had managed to get rid of most of the remaining adherents of the older, earth-based "religions," the pagans who honored and celebrated nature and thus were tortured and killed as witches and heretics.  The ascendence of secular scientific thinking at the same time helped to instill the mindset that the earth is composed of essentially inert matter, comprised of chemicals that we learned to mix and match and separate and manipulate to create phenomena that don't exist in nature.  The technical advances enabled by greater scientific understanding spawned the significant increases in productivity brought about through modernization and industrialization, and led in turn to a corresponding emphasis on production and consumption as the primary activities of human life.  Producers had the possibility of getting rich, by utilizing cheap natural resources to manufacture products that people wanted to buy.  Consumers had the possibility of getting comfortable, by acquiring all sorts of products that made their lives easier, healthier, and more enjoyable.  With both sides of the logic encouraging increased production and consumption, economic growth became the primary goal for the nation-state.  Add population growth in to the mix, and the system somewhere along the line started to become untenable, with resource depletion becoming a problem in some areas and environmental destruction a problem in many others.  Despite these problems, the growth imperative led naturally to increasing demand for energy throughout modern civilization, to fuel the factories that make our stuff, to light the cities in which most of us live, to drive our cars wherever we feel like going, to run the computers that keep us all connected.  To make sure we have enough energy, the powers-that-be wage war in the Middle East to try to maintain control over the supply and distribution of oil and natural gas, and they build nuclear reactors around the world despite the fact that their waste product is extremely toxic and lasts for a long, long time.

So, if we don't care about the earth, and think of the planet only as a place filled with a bunch of resources that we can use for our own self-gratification, where minimizing cost and maximizing efficiency are the primary objectives, we end up doing stupid things that eventually can come back to bite us in the ass.  Environmentalists have been trying to point this out since the early 1960s, and here we are 50 years later, and they still tend to be thought of as a fringe group, with a perspective too radical to be taken too seriously in major government or corporate policy decisions.  I don't imagine any of the people who have protested nuclear power over the years would get much gratification at this point from saying I told you so.  But in the face of whatever radiation poisoning results from the explosions at the Fukushima reactors, we shouldn't deny the fact that we were warned, and we should acknowledge that environmentalists' concerns are legitimate and should be taken into account in national and corporate policy making.  Humanity's survival, or at least that of civilization as we know it, may well depend on some radical changes in the nature of our economic and industrial system.  Hopefully a lesson from Japan is that the time is now to shift to a more sustainable path of development.  It is an encouraging sign that 50,000 folks came out over the weekend in Germany to protest that country's nuclear energy policy, and governments around the world have announced that they are "taking a look" at their current or planned nuclear energy programs.  Some folks are already suggesting that Fukushima will essentially spell the death-knell for the nuclear power industry.  

The broader economic reverberations of this earthquake also seem fairly easy to predict.  Despite the optimism of some observers (actual quote from Larry Kudlow on CNBC:  "The human toll here looks to be much worse than the economic toll and we can be grateful for that" -- what a great verbalization of the perverse economic mindset!), it's hard to imagine that the financial shockwave generated by the earthquake's destruction won't lead to the collapse of our house-of-cards global economy that is already reeling from all the madness of the last few years.  I mean, in a world where all the major countries and mega-banks are already hugely in debt to each other, where exactly will all the "money" come from to deal with the zillions of dollars of damage caused by this earthquake/tsunami/nuclear meltdown?  Some have suggested that this will surely lead to the bankruptcy of the insurance companies that are responsible for covering major portions of the damage.  And given the interconnectedness among the major financial institutions on the planet, one thing we've learned through the economic near-meltdown we've been going through is that some of them are "too big to fail" in the sense that, if one of them goes down, it could bring a whole lot of others with it, and thus a whole national economy.  So it's hard to imagine that the significant impact of this earthquake on the Japanese economy won't, over the next number of months, produce its own tsunami that will spread across the ocean of finance and slowly but powerfully wreak havoc on vulnerable economic shores around the world.  But if there is a global economic collapse, maybe the bright side is that it will force humanity to come up with a new and different kind of economic system that doesn't entail raping the planet and poisoning all of our critical life support systems (the water, air, and soil we need to stay alive).

While discontinuing our dysfunctional patterns is surely necessary for the future health and well-being of the human race, taking better care of the environment just to enhance life for humans doesn't necessarily reflect any awareness that Gaia is a living being who has some needs of her own that should be addressed in order for her to be happy and healthy.  What if we knew that spreading chemical fertilizers and pesticides over much of the arable land on the planet was giving Gaia a nasty skin disease?  Or that polluting all the rivers and streams around the world was tantamount to poisoning her bloodstream?  Or that pumping billions of barrels of oil from below ground was draining a life-critical fluid from her body?  Or that dumping tons of toxic emissions into the atmosphere was making it really hard for her to breathe?  Or that the fallout from a nuclear reactor meltdown shuts down part of her nervous system?  What if, like many good mothers anywhere, she's just bloody tired of being abused, and taken advantage of, and treated as though she didn't matter, or worse, as though she were not even alive?

A common metaphor for those who see the damage humans are doing to the planet is that we are like a cancer on the Earth body, or a tenacious parasite growing and spreading and destroying all the vital elements that keep that body functioning.  However, since living organisms readily display the capability to heal themselves, the Gaia hypothesis suggests the possibility that Mother Earth might have some ways of her own for dealing with the biggest threat she faces.  As I've heard it said, we need to remember that, in this contest of man versus nature, nature is the home team and gets to bat last!  So how do we know that earthquakes and floods and hurricanes and droughts and plagues and all sorts of other calamitous events aren't simply one of the means available to Gaia to, in a sense, fight back against the disease that has infected her system?  How would we know if the number of humans operating in all-take-and-no-give mode has finally surpassed her tolerance limits, her willingness and/or ability to take it any longer?  What if, for her own sake, Mother Earth needs to kill a bunch of us off?

While that may or may not be part of the story of what's going on here, I'm gonna take this one step further.  What if Gaia is not only alive, with natural survival instincts -- what if She is really a spiritual being, like all of us are?  What if she has a soul in the same way we have a soul?  What if her soul is engaged in a process of development just like ours are engaged in a process of development?  What if the earthquakes are a natural and inevitable part of a process Mother Earth is going through as she transitions from one phase of her life to another?  What if these are the contractions and pangs she -- and we -- have to go through in order to birth her new self?  What if the new paradigm is arriving along with some kind of "new earth"?  What if a lot more "earth changes" are on the way in order for the transformation to be completed?

I realize these questions sound way too crazy and/or way too scary to even think about, but the fact of the matter is that there is a lot of information out there that triangulates around the idea that some kind of major transition point is arriving, and lots of weird phenomena are being detected around the world that suggest changes at a macro level may be happening (e.g., a pole shift, changes in the magnetosphere), to an extent that we have no way of understanding their causes or predicting their consequences.  The whole 2012 phenomenon is rooted in information provided by an old Mayan calendar system based on a framework of interlocking, nested cycles of time that apparently include some long cycles of over 5000 years, one of which is now thought to be coming to an end, bringing with it the possibility of some kind of planetary transition as we begin a new cycle.  I suppose it's easy enough to dismiss all that as foolish pop culture folklore based on vague tribal mythology, but how would any of us know if there were actually some natural, inevitable consequences of reaching the end of one of those long cycles?  (Maybe that's kind of like a year in Gaia's life, so now she's doing a little housecleaning to get ready for her big birthday bash!)

There is a compelling storyline that can be found on the internet which suggests that the paradigm shift that humanity is going through, the change in consciousness that is waking people up all over the world, is all part of a process that we are in a sense "scheduled" to go through now -- and I suppose that timetable may have something to do with certain cycles that drive the evolution of the universe.  This shift is an event that has been foreseen in prophecies from lots of different wisdom traditions, and even if none of the prophets could predict precisely what it would look like when the time came, there are plenty of signs that the time is now for the prophecies to come true.  Some are inclined to put an apocalyptic spin on the whole drama, and might even refer to the coming trauma as the end times.  I'm betting on something different, and keeping my focus on the new beginning that I believe will emerge out of whatever collapse and destruction are set to occur.

One aspect of this storyline, which I will confess to taking seriously given everything else I've learned and come to believe in the last fifteen years of my life, is that humanity's shift to a higher level of consciousness goes hand in hand with an analogous shift in Gaia's consciousness, the she and we are "ascending" together.  And for all of us, we can only shift to higher consciousness if we remove the lower vibrations from our system, the negative energies, all those thoughts, feelings, words, and deeds that do not resonate with light and love but instead are derived from some fear provoked by the illusion of darkness.  In order for Gaia to make the shift that we are on the verge of, she too needs to release some of the negative energies she has been storing up for years, so that she can raise her vibration to the level she needs in order to make her own transformation.  (There are reports that the Schumann resonance, Earth's background base frequency, which used to be thought of as a constant frequency, has risen significantly in recent years, e.g., from 7.8 to 11 cycles per second.)  One way some of that energy is being released, the story goes, is through all the seismic and volcanic activity happening in the Pacific Rim's ring of fire as well as a few other hot spots around the world.

Those communicating this storyline indicate that there is more clearing left to do, more earth changes yet to come, that Gaia is now making the last, hardest push -- to use the birthing metaphor -- to bring a new life into being.  My understanding is that this clearing is essentially taking place at the energetic, spiritual, metaphysical level, but that it is going to play out in a very physical way here in the material plane.  In short, word is we need to expect more big earthquakes, probably more volcano eruptions, maybe more powerful storms, and who knows what else, all of which will look very destructive from the limited perspective of normal human consciousness, but when viewed from the higher levels are seen as a necessary part of the process of replacing the old with the new, of removing the darkness from the planet and enabling us to see clearly that we are light-beings taking the next big step in our evolutionary journey.  Ironically, each of the devastating events that have shocked the world in the last decade -- 9/11, Katrina, Banda Aceh, Haiti, and now Japan -- has evoked a huge outpouring of compassion by people around the world, and inspired uncountable acts of bravery, kindness, generosity, helpfulness, and other light-based reactions that have had the net effect of raising the vibration of our collective consciousness so as to facilitate this whole process of transformation.  If more disasters strike hard in coming months, at least part of the purpose is to get us to stop relying on our old destructive systems and to force us to develop more healthy ways of living grounded in such principles as caring and sharing.  Like an addict who won't/can't give up his bad habit even when he knows it's dysfunctional and counterproductive, maybe humanity is going to have to hit rock bottom before we take seriously the idea that we have to make some radical changes in our lifestyle.  

So I've been sitting here all week with a strange kind of ambivalence.  I can certainly empathize with the shock and dismay and deep sympathy that so many folks around the world have been feeling in response to the devastation suffered by the people of Japan.  And I can relate to the fear and concern people have about the possibility of radiation poisoning, as Taiwan isn't all that far away from Japan and questions were raised early in the week as to whether the winds might blow it in this direction and if we would be safe from the fallout.  And I can surely identify with the unsettling knowledge that, at any moment, the next "big one" could happen right below my feet.  Not only am I familiar with that notion as a resident of southern California, but I felt a little tremor here the other night that reminded me -- not that I had forgotten -- that Taiwan is on the ring of fire too and thus prone to earthquakes.  There was a strong one (7.6) here in 1999 that killed almost 2500 people, centered very near Yungnane's hometown in the middle of the island, where I had visited just the year before.  I don't live in fear of that happening, or worry about the possibility that it will, but after all the vivid images of the incredible destruction in Japan, I guess it's just more starkly clear how traumatic such an event would be if you're in the middle of it.  

All those reactions are balanced by my conviction that this is something we have to go through, as part of the divine plan, in order to clear out some negativity from the planet and to confront humanity with the need to develop new systems and structures, and adopt new processes and patterns, that will transform how we as a society live.  For so long I've been thinking about life on the other side of the paradigm shift, and trying to communicate to people what some of those new systems and processes could look like, that I haven't put much attention at all on the difficult transition period we almost inevitably have to go through to get to the other side.  In recent years, as predictions of coming earth changes have become more compelling, I have become more accustomed to the idea that many people, maybe most of us, are going to have to live through some difficult, chaotic circumstances that are not going to be easy or comfortable.  Each new disaster somewhere in the world that uprooted and displaced large numbers of people seemed to affirm the validity of this premise, and yet it still felt as though we were waiting for the other shoe to drop, as it were.  Now, with the magnitude of the destruction in Japan, the seriousness of the situation caused by the reactor meltdown, and the economic and political shockwaves that will almost inevitably reverberate through global society, it finally feels like major change is upon us. Maybe this will be followed by other cataclysmic events that make it difficult for the world to continue business as usual, or maybe this is enough to stimulate a turning point on the path of development of human civilization.  I really have no idea how it's all gonna play out, but I have to say, the story has got me on the edge of my seat.   

Talking in Taipei

This week saw the beginning of a series of talks I will be giving at various venues around the country.  It started last Saturday, when I gave a lecture to a class of PhD students that Yungnane teaches in the business school here at NCKU.  This is an international program, taught in English, and there were students from a number of countries -- including one American and one Aussie -- so I spent about an hour and a half summarizing some of the history of the field of organizational theory for them.  I think it went pretty well, and was a fairly easy presentation both to prepare and deliver.

Then Monday evening I walked to the train station in Tainan, got on a local train for the 22-minute ride out to Tainan's high speed train station, and then caught the 6:49 train heading up to Taipei.  Jose met me on the train when we stopped at the Taichung station, and we rode together the rest of the way into Taipei, arriving at about 8:30.  Once there we took a taxi to our hotel, which is affiliated with National Taiwan University, where I was going to give a talk the next day.  After getting settled into the hotel, we decided to go out for drinks, so we made our way to a bar we had been to before on one of my previous trips to Taiwan, the kind of place that draws as many gringos/ex-pats as it does local folks, with prices that reflect that clientele.  We each had a couple pints of Boddington's, along with a plate of calamari and a plate of nachos (tortilla chips are definitely one of the things I miss when I am out of the US for awhile), and the tab was nearly $50.  Not terrible, equivalent to some places in LA I'm sure, but definitely more expensive than lots of other options available here.  It was pretty quiet since it was a Monday night, maybe only about 10 other folks in the place, but it was nice to have some good beer and the food and just kick back and relax for a bit.

In the morning we got up and had a light breakfast at the Starbucks right outside the hotel, and then walked over to the university, which wasn't too far away but it was a cold windy morning so probably seemed a little longer.  In addition to his faculty position at Tunghai University, Jose is also a director of the Taiwan Public Governance Research Center at National Taiwan U., and he teaches an undergraduate class there as well, so he had asked me awhile back to give a lecture to that class.  I gave essentially the same lecture as I had for Yungnane's class -- in fact I had prepared the lecture for Jose's class before Yungnane asked me to lecture for his class, so it was easy enough to agree to Yungnane's request even though it came just a day before the class met.  Jose had also invited some public officials to come to the class, so there were about five or so of them present as well.  I again did the lecture without any translation, as the students are supposed to be sufficiently fluent in English to understand.  I have no idea how much they were actually able to follow, whether they got most of the details, but if nothing else the powerpoint slides give them a chance to at least read the basic points I was covering.

Here's a picture of Jose on campus:

After class we walked over to a cute little pizza place for some lunch, where they cooked us three small pizzas in a wood-burning brick oven in about five minutes, one a mushroom pesto, another a "ginger Superman" (with shredded ginger, some salty egg, and a third ingredient I can't remember now, probably onion), and then a banana-almond pizza that we thought of as dessert.  There are some all-you-can-eat pizza places in Rio that also serve an array of dessert pizzas, which the students in the Lab last year thought were really great, but I don't think I've seen that in the States yet -- maybe I'm just not paying attention, or don't get out enough!  Anyway, all three were tasty, and I washed mine down with a so-so, non-alcoholic malt beverage from Germany that I decided to try.

After lunch, we headed over to an international flora exhibition being held in Taipei for a couple months.  Given that it was still rather chilly and breezy, and I was still dressed up in my coat and tie and dress shoes, walking around the exhibit for a couple hours wasn't as pleasant as it could have been, but we did see a rather impressive display of orchids, another cool exhibit with displays representing different climatic zones, a variety of displays from a number of other countries, and some exhibits representing Taiwanese flora and Chinese-type gardens.  Despite the weather, there were a number of people at the exhibition, and the line for one exhibit -- called the EcoARK and made at least in part out of recycled plastic bottles -- was too long for us to stand in and wait.  I wondered if the same exhibition in LA would draw the same number of people -- I'm inclined to think not.  I suspect most Angelenos, and maybe Americans more generally, aren't all that interested in the varieties of plant life and the ways they can be used in artistic expression.  There seems to be much greater appreciation for that in Chinese culture.

We left the exhibit in time to pick up my suitcase at the hotel and taxi across town to the National Cheng Chi University campus, check in to a different hotel over there, and then walk to a nearby restaurant where we were to meet a number of USC alums who were gathering for dinner at 6:30.  The group included Min-Hsiu Chiang and his wife Mei, both of whom are on faculty at NCCU.  Min-Hsiu actually graduated right before I joined the faculty, and his Center for the Third Sector at the university had sponsored my six-week visit here in 2006.  Also present was Jen-Hui Hsu, who was in one of our doctoral cohorts very early in my time at USC and is now Dean of the College of Management at Shih Hsin University, a private university in Taipei. I'm pretty sure Jen-Hui has served a stint as a university-level administrator there too, and in that sense I guess that, of the many USC alumni from my School now on faculty in Taiwan somewhere, he has risen to the highest level in the university.  Min-Hsiu also just served a 3-year stint as Dean at another local university, but now he is back on faculty at NCCU aiming to start another research center exploring the role of non-government organizations in Taiwan and China.

Jamie Shao and his wife Hsiao-Yun Yu were there, both of whom are on faculty at Chinese Culture University, with their nice campus up in the hills north of Taipei.  I was chair for Jamie's dissertation exploring the one-child policy used in mainland China a number of years ago to slow down their population growth.  Jamie is actually from the mainland, but Hsiao-Yun is Taiwanese, and he has been living here since leaving USC.  Finally, there was Ching-Ping Tang, who is on faculty at NCCU as well, and from what I gather has probably been the most successful at getting his research published.  When I told him that I had heard he had been fortunate enough to avoid having to take on any administrative roles yet, he announced to the table that he had just been elected by his colleagues as the head of his department and would be starting a three-year term in that position in August.  Jen-Hui had brought along some special 90-proof "wine" made on Taiwan's Kinmen Island, which we drank out of tiny little shot glasses, so Ching-Ping's announcement prompted a collective "bottoms up" as we toasted his success.  I also gave him my condolences! 

Dinner ended around 9 PM, and I was happy that we were all calling it a night so I had a chance to get a little down-time at the NCCU-affiliated hotel Min-Hsiu was putting me up in for the night, before giving a lecture to his class the next day.  This was a class of both graduate and undergraduate students, and I was not giving the same talk as I had for Yungnane and Jose, but instead was giving a presentation that I had actually worked way too many hours the previous week preparing.  I was using a new presentation software for the first time, a tool called prezi, which is cooler than powerpoint but which took much longer to prepare since I was still way down on the learning curve.  In the morning I walked around and found a little bakery store to buy a morning roll, and walked a little further and found the anticipated Starbucks, so had some coffee with my roll and read a little of my book.  At 10:30 two undergrad students who work for Min-Hsiu came to get me and take me to the restaurant on campus where we were having lunch prior to the presentation at 12:30.  We were joined for lunch by Jenn-hwan Wang, a sociologist who graduated from UCLA and who Min-Hsiu indicated may be the next president of NCCU.

View from my hotel room:

The talk went well enough -- I hadn't rehearsed or anything, and I had a 90-minute slot and figured the talk would probably be shorter than that, and even though I didn't really monitor the time as I went, I ended with about 10 minutes left which gave time for a couple questions from the class.  The focus of the talk was one variant of the message I try to give most of my students in one form or another, that the world is changing and they have the opportunity to be part of that, to help make it happen.  I think at least a few of them were interested in the main thrust of the story, but it's always hard to tell how most people are reacting to the fairly novel message I'm throwing at them, whether they get it, or even care very much.  But I can't control their reactions, my job is just to plant the seeds...!

After the talk, a group of us headed up into the hills behind campus to go to one of the many tea houses that are operating up there.  We'd had a nice sunny morning, but by mid-afternoon it was fairly cloudy and hazy so the view wasn't as great as it could be, but at its best it can be a pretty spectacular view.  Most places you go in Taipei you can get your bearings because you can almost always see the remarkable 101 Building, which not too many years ago was the tallest building in the world, now second or third according to Jose.  It towers so high above everything else in the vicinity, and even though you have to go through a tunnel underneath some hills to get out to the part of town where the NCCU campus is, when you head up to the teahouses you can see the 101 beyond those hills, jutting so far into the sky above the hills that it almost seems a bit other-worldly.  I drove up to the teahouse with Min-Hsiu and Mei, along with a couple of the students who had helped out in the morning and at the presentation, and then a little later we were joined by Kevin Yeh and another man, probably one of his colleagues, but I never really learned who he was.  Kevin is on faculty with Jen-Hui at Shih Hsin University, and he's someone I got to know a little better than most of the others when he and I traveled around Taiwan for a number of days on one of my previous trips here.  Kevin is 50, his wife is 43, and they just had a baby girl a year ago -- he said it's a lot harder now that it was when their son was born nearly a decade earlier!  I can imagine...

After tea and snacks, we drove back down the hill, where we met Jamie and Hsiao-Yun at the entrance to the NCCU campus, who were then going to take me out for dinner and then to the train station.  We went to a very popular dumpling restaurant -- this is the third of their branches I've been too and it's always a pretty hoppin' place.  We had a 15-minute wait, but it was probably double or triple that by the time we were done.  Dumplings, chicken soup, fried rice, and a green vegetable made our meal, simple but tasty.  We then stopped in at the Starbucks located in the same mall as the restaurant for a cappuccino, before heading over to the train station.  I got on the train at 8:30, back to the Tainan station by about 10:15, then the local train ride back into town and a walk home from there, arriving back in the dorm after 11 some time.  I was definitely pretty exhausted, not just from the traveling and speaking, but I'm not all that used to days were I spend 10 hours straight talking with or to other people.  When I teach about personality types, one of the points I make about the difference between introverts and extraverts is that the latter are energized by interacting with people whereas the former are drained by that and need to re-charge by being alone.  After two pretty full days of talking to people up in Taipei, this introvert was kinda drained, and happy to be back home all alone in my quiet little dorm room.

Going along for the ride

I woke up Sunday morning feeling a little lethargic, in kind of a bad mood for no apparent reason and not really feeling like doing anything.  I scanned the news online for a bit, got a little food to eat, and then around 11:30 the phone rang.  I thought it was probably Jose calling to talk about some notes I had sent on Friday night about possible topics for me to discuss when I lecture in his class next week, and I didn’t really feel like talking to anyone yet, so I let it ring and figured he would probably call me on skype.  When that didn’t happen, I thought maybe it had been Yungnane calling instead, so I checked email to see if he had sent a message there, and sure enough he had.  He was inviting me to go with his family to visit an organic farm that afternoon, which admittedly didn’t sound all that intriguing.  I laid on the bed for a little while trying to figure out if I was going to say yes or no.  I almost always say yes to such invitations, sort of as a matter of policy, partly because I don’t like saying no especially in the absence of a very good reason.  So even though I wasn’t all that keen on the idea, I finally decided that getting out of the room for a couple of hours would be better than sitting around in a bad mood not being very productive.  So I called him up and told him I would go along.  By then it was 12:15 and he was going to swing by at 1:00.

I should learn by now that when I make plans to go do something with someone here it is probably not going to be as easy and straightforward as it first sounds.  So when I get in the car Yungnane tells me that we’re going to Kaohsiung, which is Taiwan’s second largest city, about an hour drive south of Tainan.  I’ve been to Kaohsiung before and like it there -- it’s actually my favorite city in the country.  It’s right on the coast, and the river running through downtown has been developed into a nice area with shops, walking areas, etc. that make it an attractive location for locals and tourists.  The city itself is more spread out, with wider streets and a less congested feel than the other major cities.  I’ve made the comparison to folks before that Kaohsiung is to Taipei like LA is to New York.  It’s got a mellower vibe, a nicer climate, and for my tastes seems like a preferable lifestyle.  So while I wasn’t necessarily disappointed that we were heading down there, this was my first clue that the trip probably wasn’t going to be just a quick couple of hours out at some nearby farm, which is what I was anticipating.  

The next clue came when, on the way there, Yungnane placed a call to Luke Hsiao, another USC alum who lives in Kaohsiung and who I had visited with the last time I had been there a few years ago.  Luke is the one person I’ve known in my life who seems to be what some might call a “player,” although I’ve never really known for sure how much of that is real and how much is just sort of an image that he likes to convey.  He definitely seems to like money, and appears to be pretty interested in making more of it, but I don’t know if he comes from a wealthy background or if he’s just managed to have some success on that front as an adult.  (Apparently he legally changed his last name recently to the Chinese character that means “gold”!)  Luke is on faculty at a private university in Kaohsiung that was founded by a wealthy businessman who is also involved in numerous other business enterprises and who at some point decided to use some of his money to start the university as well as an intriguing elementary school that I visited last time, where the whole theme is oriented towards creating an environment in which kids are happy, based on the premise that they will then be more willing and able to learn.  For awhile, Luke was working directly for the President in some sort of staff position, which put him at a higher level in the game than where most young professors end up, and has probably helped him to become reasonably well-connected in the Kaohsiung area.  Anyway, the plan was for Luke to meet up with us later on, which seemed to imply that our itinerary would include more than a stop at the farm.

 

Before too long we arrive at the Jing Yaun Leisure Farm, where there is a long line of cars waiting to pay an admission fee and go park.  While there were some fields right there growing what I presume is some organic produce, I soon deduce that that is not the main draw here.  Instead the place has been designed as an attraction for families with young kids, as there are pony rides, a little equestrian center where older riders are running around on horses jumping over fences and such, a number of tropical birds on display (not even in cages, just hanging out on posts or more elaborate contraptions that have been built for them), a few goats that kids can pet and feed, and a turkey wandering around, as the humans stroll through the fairly small area that has been created to house all of the above.  There is a picnic area with barbecues where families are cooking their lunch, and since the facility is right next to the Kaohsiung airport, a little walk down the road there is some kind of café up on the second or third floor of a building where people can sit and watch planes taking off.  We spend probably no more than an hour there, if that, and pile back into the car to head to our next stop, which Yungnane had described in terms something like a little fish market near the harbor that has a good restaurant where we’ll get something to eat.  The plan, as I understood it, was that Luke was going to meet us over there.

Yungnane explained that the place we were going was actually out on an island, and the road soon went down into a tunnel that went under the water and resurfaced on Cijin Island, where we headed past a port area that he said was the seventh busiest port in the world back in the 70s.  Not too much longer we ended up in a long, slow-moving line of traffic that was heading where we were -- as this was another holiday weekend in Taiwan, I guess the throngs were headed out to enjoy whatever it was the harbor/fish market had to offer.  After crawling along for probably a half-hour or so, we finally came to the area that was the main draw, and here masses of people were out on foot and bikes along side all the cars and ubiquitous scooters, with a promenade -- or what in Latin America would be called a “malecon” -- along the seafront to the left and a big kind of market area on our right.  We had it in mind to go rent some bikes to ride along the path next to the water, so we walked for about 15 minutes down a street packed with pedestrians and lined with little stands selling food, clothing, sunglasses, and a whole array of other knick-knacks.  Somewhere along the line Yungnane talked to Luke again, and now the plan was for him not to meet us here but for us to meet him later back on the mainland for dinner at “a five-star restaurant.”  Apparently he had indicated we shouldn’t get there too late, for whatever reason, and so now we decided that it would take too much time to rent the bikes, make our way back through the crowded street, ride along the malecon for awhile, bring the bikes back through the crowded street, and then turn around and walk back to the car, so we nixed the bike-riding plan.  Instead, we started walking back to the car, with a quick stop along the way to buy some ice cream from a place that would definitely have some marketing problems if it were in the US:

Instead, with the orange sun sinking close to the horizon, we walked down to the malecon to an area where a number of folks were flying kites.  The boys wanted their parents to buy them a kite to play with, but they declined to do so.  However, as we were walking away from the vendor, a young lady came up and explained that she and her boyfriend had bought a kite earlier and now they were done using it, and since they didn’t want to take it home with them on their scooter, she offered it to the boys.  They were very happy to take it, so we stood there in the warm late afternoon sea breeze for a little while as they sent it skyward and the sun slowly descended into the haze and out of sight.

We got back in the line of slow-moving cars this time heading off the island, and after about an hour we ended up in downtown Kaohsiung at the very nice Ambassador Hotel.  When we walked in the lobby I recognized it as the place Luke had put me up when I had visited here previously.  We found our way to the restaurant where he was waiting for us, and we proceeded to have a dinner of dim sum Taiwanese-style.  Dim sum is another Cantonese style of food, served in small bite-sized portions that often involve some kind of doughy exterior with a wide variety of things inside, usually steam-cooked I believe.  We had a nice mix of dishes, that I gather were Taiwanese variations on the dim sum theme, including some yummy little rolls made with/from water chestnuts that, because they were a little sweet, we saved until the end.  After dinner, Luke wanted to take us up to the bar at the top of the hotel (20th floor) for a drink, since a fireworks show down in the harbor was scheduled for 9 PM and the table he reserved for us in the bar was going to give us a great view out the window of the fireworks exploding in the sky.  He ordered a plate of fruit and a bottle of nice red wine, of which he seems to be a particular fan, as well as some french fries and fried calamari that the boys polished off by themselves (I hadn't noticed, but maybe the dim sum wasn't their thing).  Sure enough, right on time, the fireworks went off, and everyone in the bar watched the brief but beautiful display.  Luke said this was the penultimate day of Kaohsiung's new year's celebration (OK, I thought new year's was over like two weeks ago!) and that tomorrow night they would celebrate the end with two shows at 7 and 9 instead of just the one show they'd been having up til then.

At some point during dinner Luke suggested the idea that I should just stay in Kaohsiung that night, and he and I could go out after Yungnane and family headed back to Tainan.  Up in the bar he was more specific, indicating that we could go out and get a massage.  That sounded like a good enough idea to me, and even though I wasn't at all prepared to spend the night, I figured I could manage without the overnight accessories I'd normally have with me.  I didn't have any obligations the next day, and in fact it was a holiday in Taiwan such that the NCKU offices were going to be closed anyway, so I figured why not take him up on his offer.  Now, I had gone with Luke to get a massage last time I was here, so I knew what to expect.  In fact, not just with Luke, but I had traveled around Taiwan that summer with another USC alum, Kevin Yeh, and he had also taken me for a massage a couple times during our travels.  I suspect that there are cheaper and simpler ways to get a massage in Taiwan, but both Luke and Kevin apparently like these more upscale places with a higher standard of service.  The massages are good and long, so I was happy to take advantage of Luke's offer, even if it meant extending my afternoon outing into an overnight trip.

We said goodbye to the Yang family and headed over to the massage place.  We were taken upstairs to our room, where one of Luke's friends was waiting for us.  The room had four massage tables, although these are more like chaise lounge chairs that can either lay flat or have the front half raised up at varying angles.  Up above each chair/table is a TV, with lots of cable channels including a few showing movies in English, and they each have their own remote control so you can choose what you want to watch.  The massages I get in the US usually take place in a private room with soothing music playing in the background, so it's a little odd to have multiple TVs going on at the same time, but so be it.  I change into the cotton shorts and tops they provide, Luke sits down with the rest of the bottle of wine from the bar and decides to get a foot massage, I kick back in my chair ready for my body massage.  As the masseuse worked on me, I realized I was more sore than I had realized.  My neck and shoulders can always use some work, given how much time I spend on the computer, but in working on my legs I figured that my muscles must be that sore from all the stair-climbing I've been doing!  After about an hour of working on me while I'm laying on my back, she has me turn over and places a number of hot towels on my back while working more on my arms and legs.  I can hear Luke's masseur pounding on his legs as part of the foot massage he's getting, and by now I'm mostly oblivious to the television.  Another 30-40 minutes of work and we're all done, I'm definitely pretty relaxed, by now it's about 1 AM, so thankfully Luke had no further plans and it was time to head back to his place to get some sleep.

He implied that he was going to sleep in in the morning, and then we would go out for some brunch, and the impression I got was that that may not happen before noon.  I knew I wouldn't sleep that late, and would prefer an earlier start to get back to Tainan, so just in case I borrowed a little notebook computer from him so that I could go online in the morning and read the news and do some email if/while I was waiting for him to roust.  I was up by 9 AM or so, and by noon I was starting to get hungry and wanting to get on with the day, and a little later Luke finally showed up at my bedroom door, only to explain that he had been up for awhile and was down in the living room watching the Academy Awards, which was just about to announce best picture.  I guess he had been expecting me to come out whenever I was up, and I figured he was going to let me know when he was awake, so I was a little dismayed that the miscommunication may have delayed the start of the day for awhile.  On the other hand, by now it didn't matter all that much!

Luke asked if I preferred spaghetti or seafood for lunch, and I opted for the former as the first thing to put in my stomach for the day.  After watching the acceptance speeches for The King's Speech, we headed to an Italian restaurant that he was familiar with, and while being seated learned that this was the last day for the restaurant, it was shutting down because it wasn't making money.  Our server, who was probably a member of the proprietor's family, thus encouraged us to try the "best" (read most expensive) item on the menu, which was a piece of Kobe beef.  Luke doesn't eat beef, apparently, and given how hard she was selling it, I broke down and went ahead and ordered it.  Fortunately it came with soup and salad and then dessert and a latte, so then the price didn't seem too out of control, but I was feeling kind of silly for ordering it especially when the main course itself wasn't all that spectacular.  So I made sure that Luke let me pick up the tab for the lunch. 

Somewhere along the line Luke had indicated that, after lunch, he wanted to go back to get another massage.  It seemed kind of unnecessary to me, even a little extravagant, but he says he usually goes there three times a week or so, so maybe in his life it isn't all that unusual.  Given our history, the assumption is that this is his treat, so rather than resisting and making any kind of insincere argument that I need to get back to Taiwan, I figure I might as well go.  When we get there and go through the same ritual to get started, I actually verbalized that this time I'd take a foot massage, but when the masseuse came around it was clear that I hadn't effectively communicated that message, so I proceeded to get another -- and to be honest, even better -- long massage.  This time, while I'm on my back, one of the stations is playing the movie The Sting, which I still think is one of the best movies of all time, so was able to watch the rest of it right up til the end before I turned over to have her work on my back.  The massage oil, the hot towels, the two hours of methodical body work, it was all quite luxurious, certainly worth sacrificing a few hours back in my little dorm room in Tainan! 

Needless to say, after the massage Luke wanted to go out for an early dinner before getting me to the train.  This time he wanted seafood, so we picked up the same friend who had met us the previous night and went to a cute little outdoor place with short tables and stools, which I think Jose had explained to me earlier is sort of "Tainan style" or maybe at least southern Taiwan, and with the seafood laid out on ice for customers to choose.  We started off with some sashimi, one piece each of two different fish, and then came a dish with chicken and cauliflower (I thought this was a seafood place!), and rice with some salmon baked in, and a juicy, bitter vegetable that was thinly sliced and put on ice that we then dipped in 1000-island dressing.  We got two of the biggest shrimp I've ever seen that had been skewered and grilled, some clams in their shells dripping with a garlic-basil concoction (that was good!), a Japanese-style chicken wing -- straightened out and skewered and then maybe baked, not sure how they cooked it.  Our main dish was a nice big piece of fish that had been cooked with little strings of shredded vegetable to add a bit of flavor.  Also needless to say, Luke had brought another good bottle of red wine along for the dinner.  An interesting feature of meals in Taiwan is that you aren't supposed to take a sip of your beer or wine alone, ie you're always supposed to toast someone and drink with them.  So with many light clinks of our glasses, we slowly made our way through the bottle of wine as we polished off most of the food on the table. 

We finish up dinner at about 7:30 and the plan is for me to catch an 8:10 train back to Tainan.  We park Luke's car at his house and then walk a couple blocks to the main metro station in Kaohsiung.  There are two lines in the city, a north-south and east-west, and they meet below a big intersection at street-level with at least three very big, obvious station entrances.  The system is only a few years old, not sure if it was running when I was here last, but this was my first time to ride it so was excited to see what it was like.  Very new, very modern, very clean, what you'd expect.  The trains come about four minutes a part, at least that was the length of time indicated on the LED information sign right after we missed the previous train -- a little jingle plays throughout the station to let people know when a train arrives.  We're on the metro by about 7:45, and it's only one stop to the train station, so we get there in time to buy my ticket and find the right platform.  Luke points out I can by a ticket without a reserved seat at the machine, but if I want to reserve a seat I need to go to the ticket window.  He advises on the latter, or else I might have to stand for the trip back to Tainan.  But the man selling tickets said all the seats were sold out already -- this was the end of a holiday weekend, and lots of people were traveling.  So it turned out that I stood the whole way anyway, although it wasn't that big a deal since it was only a 30-minute trip with no stops along the way.  I was back in my room by a little after 9:00, and didn't manage to stay up for even an hour more, hitting the sack before 10, happy that I'd decided to go along for the ride to the organic farm.