Taipei banquet

On the last night of the conference, which was also the last night of my week in Taipei, we were treated to a multi-course banquet in a private room at an incredibly luxurious restaurant called Victoria.  Enduring the ridicule of my table-mates ("are you one of those people I read about who documents every second of their lives?"), I got pictures of all but the appetizer course, which I now present here for your delight and amusement.

This is the menu.  I've added some numeric labels which will be of help to us later on.

It's too bad that I didn't think to get a picture of our appetizer plate, which was probably the most interesting thing served to us, as it included a slice of pressed mullet roe.

For the rest, though, you can enjoy the banquet in the same sequence that I did:

So-called because it smells so good that a vegetarian monk would leap over the abbey walls to get at it.

They brought it to the table like this only to show it off; then they took it away and rolled it up for us.

As this banquet attests, the organizers of this conference had plenty of money to throw around.  They made up all these posters, banners, and name tags.  The conference papers were bound in a high-quality volume with water-resistant covers.

They had everyone's names and affiliations in both Chinese and English, for example this conference attendee (who graciously allowed me to use his sign here).

There's a nice outdoor courtyard (it's raining, of course) in the center of the Humanities Building where the conference was held.

Why is my Chinese weird?

There's something about my Mandarin that strikes people in Taiwan as odd.  I still can't figure out exactly what it is about the way I speak that they react to.

During my week in Taiwan I got a lot of comments like this:

"Your Chinese sounds very standard." (你國語講得很標準。)
"Your Chinese sounds refined."（你國語講得很文。）

These two comments are quite different from the "Oh, you speak Chinese so well!" variety of comment that all Chinese language learners, regardless of ability, hear frequently from Chinese people.  They are picking up on something unusual about the way I speak.

I was also asked "Did you study in the mainland?"

So at first I thought that these comments must all be due to the fact that my pronunciation includes some features that are more common in the Beijing area than in Taiwanese Mandarin.  For example, I distinguish the retroflex (curled tongue) sounds transcribed zh ch sh from the non-retroflex sounds transcribed z c s.  So in my speech, sān 'three' and shān 'mountain' are distinct; for most Taiwan speakers, they are homophones pronounced sān.  I also have a so-called "neutral" or "unstressed" tone in some syllables where Taiwanese speakers have a full stressed tone.  For example, I say xuésheng 'student', not xuéshēng.  Again, this is more common around Beijing than in Taiwan.

But I asked a few people and they said quite emphatically that I don't sound like I have a mainland Beijing accent.  And in fact I don't.  My Mandarin is something of a hybrid reflecting the various places I've lived and studied, including both Beijing and Taipei.  So something else is going on.  Something about sentence intonation, accent, word choice -- not sure what it is, but it gets me noticed.

Taipei coffee and food

As I mentioned in my earlier post, Taipei is a much more sophisticated city now than it was two decades ago. At my first meeting in Taipei (I'm on an advisory board for study abroad programs in China), I was amazed when we were offered a choice of espresso drinks from a nearby café. But the food that was spread out for us to eat was just like what I would have expected to see in the early 90s.

Some of these things are decent Chinese snacks, but quite a few are horrendous pseudo-Western foods.  In particular:

(Just in case you're wondering, that's a strawberry-egg-lettuce-mayonnaise sandwich.)

(Those are hot-dog halves, disguised as wholes.)

At last something real: delicious dàntǎ 蛋塔 (egg tarts).

The snacks may not have been good, but the views from Chengchi University were spectacular.  That's Taipei 101 (formerly the tallest building in the world) in the distance in the center-right of the picture.

We had a rather unpleasant Western style lunch in a restaurant on campus.  Here's what I saw in the restroom after lunch:

The ad deserves a close-up.

Suffice to say there is no shortage of sexual innuendo to be seen.

For dinner we went to a restaurant called Lianchi Ge (Lotus Pond Pavilion).  It's one of those vegetarian restaurants where much of the food looks (and occasionally tastes) like meat.  It's said that this cuisine was created for Buddhist monks who missed their pre-vow sinful eating habits.

Yes, that's a piece of "salmon sashimi" on the left.

Here are my seconds, featuring "pork", "chicken", and "maguro sashimi".

All the above happened on Sunday.  Monday, the next day, was the subject of the previous post.

On Tuesday I went on a tour of the National Palace Museum (great as always), followed by lunch at the Grand Hotel, and an afternoon/evening at Dànshuǐ 淡水 (Tamsui), former capital of Taiwan under the Portuguese and Dutch.

The view from our private dining room at the Grand Hotel:

The lunch banquet menu:

The only picture I took at the famous Red Hair Fort at Tamsui was this poster of Herbert Giles, one of the inventors of the Wade-Giles transcription of Mandarin, beloved of several generations of Western Sinologists.

The views at the waterfront were quite spectacular, and only enhanced by the threatening clouds.

Excellent use of the word "saporous"!

Ah, good ol' Taiwanese squid-on-a-stick:

Dinner in this lovely restaurant, the Red 3 Café.

Food was blechy.  Don't bother eating Western in Taiwan.  Stick to the squid-on-a-stick.

Wednesday we had a reunion for all the Sino-Tibetan conference attendees who had worked together at Berkeley on the STEDT project.  It was also at a vegetarian restaurant where the food looks like meat!  But not the same one.

What I liked most about the restaurant was the crazy coffee machine, which sucked milk out of a carton through a tube for steamed-milk espresso drinks.  There's also a bean grinder on top.

I was so excited by this machine that I had to film it in operation.

The other thing that obsessed me during this week in Taiwan was the walk signals.  I loved the way the little animated green walking man would start rushing as time drew short.  I spent several days trying to film this, but kept failing to get the shot I wanted.  Sometimes the timing of the animation clashed with the frame rate of my camera, so it didn't show up properly.  Other times there was bright sunlight obscuring the image, or I couldn't get a clear shot without standing in traffic.  Or it was pouring rain.  Finally, after several days of frustration, I got it.  Notice how at 14 seconds the little guy starts to run like mad:

Burning Question of the Day

Why NetCafé when you can NetRoom?

More Taipei

I'm already back in Matsuyama, after a grueling 14-hour journey that started at 5:30 am. A bit ridiculous, considering I was only in flight for about 3 hours total.

Lots more to say about Taipei, though. On Monday I moved from the little boutique hotel to Academia Sinica, the big government-funded research institute where my linguistics conference was going to be held. I had a few free days because the conference wasn't to begin until Thursday.

When I arrived, I couldn't check into my room in the Activities Center right away, so I hung out for a bit in the lobby. There was a lot of noise coming from the auditorium. I peeked in, and was greeted by this extremely cute and entertaining sight:

On Monday afternoon I went with my good friend Weera to look at my old neighborhood around National Taiwan University campus (公館 Gōngguǎn). In 1994, when I was studying there, I went out to Academia Sinica once. As I recall, it took forever to get there by bus -- at least an hour -- and around the research center was mostly farmland, only a handful of small restaurants on the one little street outside the gates. But now the area around Academia Sinica is all built up, and the new subway system has a stop only a mile or so away. So now traveling between the two locations is a breeze.

The subway system is great. Like all major transit systems around the world these days -- including even Seattle! -- Taipei has an RFID-chip travel card that you can load with money and use on a variety of forms of public transportation. But since there is a minimum 500 NTD to start a card, I just bought individual subway tickets. Or tokens, I should say. The system is really innovative. Instead of giving you a little paper card with a magnetic strip -- which is subject to getting mangled in your pocket, or to fluttering away on a breeze, and anyway ends up in landfill -- the ticket machine spits out a hard little plastic coin, like this:

But it's not what it appears. Inside is a little RFID chip which knows how much money you've paid. You wave it over the sensor as you go through the turnstile, and it records the stop you are entering. When you exit, you drop it into a coin slot. The fare is checked against the distance you've traveled, and the coin is ready to be reused.

When we got to our destination the rain was coming down torrentially. In Seattle we rarely have thunderstorms, and never have rain that crashes this heavily and unrelentingly. The intensity of these afternoon storms in Taipei is rather unsettling. Fortunately, many of the sidewalks are covered. (Commercial buildings in Taipei generally have a set-back first story, essentially creating a double sidewalk. The outer sidewalk, the real sidewalk, is where all the motorbikes are parked. Sometimes there is also some room to walk. The inner sidewalk is covered by the floor of the story above, providing shade in summer and protection from precipitation. When it's really hot it's nice to walk along the inner sidewalk and get blasted by arctic air-conditioning as you trigger the automatic sliding doors of the shops and restaurants that you walk past.)

This is what a Taipei thunderstorm looks and sounds like:

We couldn't make it from the subway stop all the way to NTU campus staying covered, and even with umbrellas, there was no way we could be out in the rain for long without getting completely soaked. So we made our way gingerly to a cafe. Taipei is now full of fancy coffee shops, many with European names, something unheard of when I was living there in the early 1990s. Weera and I made our way to a Tiramisu (提拉米蘇) Cafe, and sat for hours over mochas, chatting.

That snack is surprisingly good. Cheesecake outside, blueberry inside, cookie on the bottom. We got a little pack of five of them.

Eventually the rain subsided, and we made our way over to the Gongguan neighborhood and campus. It was already dark. I originally wanted to go see the dorm I had stayed in (and that at least one reader of this blog also stayed in), but due to the lateness of the hour we canceled that plan. Campus was little changed -- I recognized some of the buildings and the main roadways. It would have been easier in the daytime. The area around campus was completely transformed, however. Only the church and the McDonald's were recognizable. It was so hard to get coffee in the 1990s -- there was one little shop one of my exchange student classmates discovered, it was incredibly expensive, but some of us liked to sit there nursing a $6 cup of hot chocolate and do our homework in air-conditioned comfort. Now there are so many cafés you can't help tripping over them as you walk around.

We had a late dinner of dumplings and zhajiangmian, and then headed back home.

To be continued in next post ...

Taipei

It's certainly been an interesting experience for me to spend a week in Taipei. I lived here for 3 months in 1989. Then for a full year in 1993-94. Since then, I've only been back once, for just a few days in 2005, and didn't have a chance to experience the city (other than a quick visit to Taipei 101).

Taipei has of course changed a lot in 16 years. There's now a rapid transit system, which is fast, efficient, and comfortable. The city is more sophisticated and internationalized. But it very much feels the same way it did when I last lived here.

It's still extremely ugly. I know no other city that seems to entirely lack a single attractive piece of architecture. Not only are the buildings hideous to start with, they seem designed to age poorly, to attract and show grime.

Taipei still smells like

• incense
• auto exhaust
• stinky tofu
• wet cardboard
• steamed meat

Young guys still ride motorbikes wearing flip-flops.

When I was an exchange student at National Taiwan University, the main street nearby (Roosevelt Road) was torn up for the new subway line they were building. Construction was loud and went on through the night. Traffic was a nightmare.

As I walked from the airport bus a few blocks to my hotel, I found that the street my hotel was on was torn up for the new subway line they were building. Construction would be loud and go on through the night. Traffic was a nightmare.

"Taipei Rapid Transit - Quality First"

As I recall, signs like this used to say "Safety First". I don't know if the change from safety to quality should be taken as a good sign or a bad sign.

Here's a brief scene of traffic near my hotel. Note the huge numbers of motorbikes, the noise, the chaos. Note also the diagonal crosswalks.

The first few days I stayed in a really neat little boutique hotel that would not have seemed out of place in New York City. It was called Dandy.

The hotel was decorated in a spare modernist style, with the rounded rectangle as the main decorate theme.

My room was small, but pretty fancy.  The double blinds were very effective against the tropical sun.

I never did figure out what that white thing in the corner was.  Very heavy metal object.  I think maybe some sort of safety device.  Perhaps it could be extended out the window and used to lower oneself to safety in event of emergency?

A condom was provided in the room.

The Chinese says "Digital Condom".  I don't figure that.

This is the view out my window in the morning.  It seems a very typical Taipei scene.  The owner of the little breakfast shop across the street is out in his shirtsleeves watering his plants with a hose.

My first evening I wanted to get good beef noodle soup.  On the advice of the hotel staff, I went to a nearby place called "Old Zhang" (founded 1958).

One of the great things about Asian airports is that they have fantastic bus service.  Big comfortable limousine-style express buses run frequently from the big airports into the city.  They don't cost much and they get you where you need to go.  When I got to the bus ticket counter I saw that the bus I needed to get me into Taipei was leaving in about 2 minutes.  I pulled out the 500-dollar bill (about US $15) that I had remember to bring with me from Seattle -- I had brought it home from Taipei five years earlier -- to pay for the ticket.  "I can't take this," the woman said, "It's old.  We don't take those bills any more."  Fortunately, I had also changed some yen into Taiwan dollars at Kansai airport, just on a hunch.  I was able to buy my bus ticket and run onto the bus just before it left.

This is the bill I had tried to use:

One of my errands was to go to a bank and exchange it for a new bill.  This is what I got for it:

Looks like the main difference is the silver security stripe. Front and back images are the same.