Nitpicker on the English

I'm surrounded in a sea of Chinese characters, so the occasional sign using the  Roman alphabet always strikes my eye. And then when the English has even the smallest problem or peculiarity I whip out my camera and record it. What a nitpicker I am.

A good website.

Health concerns aside.

Sometimes when the sentiment goes on for too long you know there is going to be a problem.

I am willing to be a patient for joy and maybe rehabilitation but the pain part doesn't appeal to me.

Everybody likes handmade buns.

What is the difference between the ancient early period and the ancient late period? Redundancy?

Makeup on a car, sounds appropriate.

Warning signs

Warning signs are a difficult genre. They have to short and sucient. They are doubly hard to get right when they are bilingual. But i know straight translation using a dictionary is going to produce problems. Here are some examples.

From Generalissimo's residence. What if smoking calms you?

Lifesaver actually sounds to dramatic, maybe "rescue circle" is more appropriate.

Direct and to the point.

At the train station. Character for word transliteration.

Give credit where credit is due.

Fresh Fish Market

While in KaoHsiung we took a few buses to a fresh fish market along the coast north of KaoHsiung.

Of course, the seafood is fresh because we're in the fisherman's port just behind this market, but I also think that because there are no middlemen, the prices are much cheaper than those in KaoHsiung, maybe 10 miles away.

We arrived there late in the day, and they were selling fish with a "Dutch Style" auction. In this style, the auctioneer starts at a high price and goes down incrementally. The first bidder wins. So you have to be faster than your fellow bidders but you don't want to be too fast and get too high of a price.

Tonnes of different kinds of seafood.

Belt fish

Cuttle fish

 Squid

Shrimp(they were still jumping, just to show off how fresh they were)

Big Fish too.

ShuiJiao at the Five Spotted Horse

While in KaoHiung we had ShuiJiao at the Five Spotted Horse restaurant. In Chinese the name of the restaurant is shown in the business card below.

ShuiJiao is similar to pot stickers which are called "guo tie", but unlike potstickers, ShuiJiao are steamed not fried. Being steamed is healthier than fried and the ShuiJiao doughy skin might be a little thicker than the potsticker skin.

The most important part is the filling. Usually is meat and some vegetables and the steaming(or frying) cooks the inside and brings out the flavor. I remember, Ely and I were once in Xian and had a dinner of 20 different ShuiJiao. The fillings started with the usual pork, beef ... but towards the end there were the unusual ... frog, pigeon. I think after the first three or four we stopped seeing a difference. 20 ShuiJiaos is a lot.

Here is the spread four of us had at the restaurant:

The dumplings in the steamer are baozi. The millet soup was complimentary. There were also leek stuffed in fried bread, a chunjie which is a meat and onion stuffing rolled in fried onion bread. The Shuijiao are the black and green dumplings. ShuiJiao is normally uncolored but the green coloring comes from yam leaves. That's not too unusually, Italian pasta is often green with spinach extract. But what about the black ShuiJiao. Here the coloring comes from the ink of octopus. It must be healthy.

The story about the name of the restaurant comes from a poem written by LiBai(701-762) of the Tang Dynasty. The restaurant name is the subject of the poem. In the poem LiBai meets and old friend and wants to go drinking with him because this chance may never come again. At this time, Libai is poor but because this chance might never come again he says he will sell his "painted horse" to buy wine to drink with his old friend. The poem is kind of a "carpe diem" to friendship.

Florence translated the poem for me but it's amazing that the same Chinese written 1300+ years ago speaks to Chinese with the same sentiment of those bygone days.

The 3 characters of the restaurants name are in the upper right corner, marked with red commas.

Ireland in KaoHsiung

This past week I was in KaoHsiung. KaoHsiung is the big, modern city compared to Tainan, so I always see something new. In Tainan, restaurants will open with a French, Italian or even German theme, so it's not unusual to see these places in KaoHsiung. But how about an Irish restaurant?

This resturant on the first floor of a department store served potatoes in any way you can think of.

I thought they might also serve Guinness but no such luck.

While I was in this area, I ran into an old friend.

Haircut Time

I've been in Taiwan for almost 2 months now and my visa needs extending. but it also is time to get a haircut.

It was looking at little shaggy in the back(this was a tough shot).

So I went to one of the many local barber shops and became handsome again.

I noticed Barber shop poles are rotating like in US but they have a much more varied design. Here's the cheapest shop I could find in Tainan. Multidirectional and multicolored pole.

This is where I actually got my haircut.

Not restricted to stripes.

Any shape or color will do.

 pokadots too!

It doesn't take too much to open a barbershop but the personality of the barber determines whether I come back or not. This time the barber was talkative and I felt relaxed. She even tried to tach me a few Taiwanese words. I'll probably go back.

Because I've never had a regular barber, I always like to ask this question before I leave.

"How often do you think I should come in for a haircut?"

Then looking into their face, you can see their mind whorling. If they say "next week" you know something is wrong. The correct answer is "2 months".

Coolpix camera and more Pingxi pics

This is the camera I'm now using in Taiwan.

It's a good camera, small enough to fit in my pocket, so I carry it with me where ever I go. I have 2 complaints:

           1. It takes a long time to boot. Between when I turn it on and can take a shot the opportunity has passed. I sometimes think it have a version of Microsoft Windows as it's operating system.

           2. Like most cameras nowadays it has too many options. There are at least 20 setting for different camera modes(portrait, night sky, dim light, wide angle, landscape, ... ) I've no way of knowing which on to use, and if I have to switch before the shot then the opportunity has probably passed. 

But there options make a tremendous difference, here are two of my shot of the Pingxi lantern festival, followed by three shots with probably the correct setting that someone else sent me.

My shot #1

My shot #2 psychedelic

Good shot #1

Good shot #2

Good shot #3

I guess the advice must be what I should have learned from my programming days: RTFM => "Read The F***king Manual"

Windpower in Taiwan

On top of one of the engineering buildings on the Cheng Kung University campus we have a wind turbine.

Being on the west coast of Taiwan, the wind can be fairly strong but it is not consistent. Sometimes the windmill is not moving at all. This problem of siting is the make or break criterion for whether windmills are economically feasible. An irregular wind make the investment not worthwhile.

In the CiJin park in KaoHsiung they also have small windmills but mostly as decorations. Notice the propeller is chained down in this photo.

But from the train from Tainan to Taipei there are now a string of windmills south of HsinChu. I think HsinChu is called the "windy city" and is actually the sister city to Chicago. So it sounds like a good place for siting.

These windmills look like they're a 100 feet in the air the propellers maybe 50 feet long(I'm just guessing). But in the few times I've taken the train only a few have been in operation. Again I think that the economics make it better to shutdown the windmill unless the wind is strong enough to drive it at it's optimal speed.

Not to be left out, my dorm is also in the windmill business, we just haven't figured out the transmission problem yet.

Pets in Taiwan

It seems more and more people in Taiwan own pets. Because living spaces are small in the past I think tropical fish were popular but now it seems to be dogs. I don't see many cats, there could be house cats, but I don't see them on the street.
In the parks, there are ponds big enough to support turtles but they are discarded pets that the owners got tired of.

Tainan seems to have a large number of stray dogs, these probably were pets that just outgrew their living arrangements and were dumped somewhere. I suppose unwanted dogs in Tainan are dumped in KaoHsiung and unwanted dogs in KaoHsiung are dumped in Tainan. KaoHsiung is 3 times larger than Tainan so this doesn't seem fair. KaoHsiung and Tainan are about 1 hour drive apart.


This is a universal problem because:

All cute little puppies grow up to big dogs.

and

All cute little kittens grow up to be cats.

What looked like fun turns in to a problem when they grow up.

I remember when my Dad had a "farm" about an hour's drive from Minneapolis. The place was full of strays. Reluctant dog owners would drive their pet out to the countryside and dump it, hoping a farmer might need an extra dog. The dogs would band together and the motley pack would chase the dairy cows. The farmers couldn't let that happen, so they'd take a shotgun to the pack of strays. Problem solved, so much for responsible pet ownership.

Tainan has it's own packs of strays(no photos necessary). They hang out in the parks. Dogs in Tainan seem quite docile, but in packs they get territorial and can be intimidating.

The small parks around Tainan are full of dog poop. It's especially bad when the park is next to a large apartment complex. It isn't the strays that poop in the park(they poop anywhere they want). It's the dog owners that think their dog is just a fertilizing machine. I never see any dog owners in Tainan pickup after their dog has done his duty.

Here's a riddle in English: "shitty dog owner"

Does this mean the dog is shitty or is it the owner that is shitty?


This year is the year of the rabbit. So a lot of cute baby bunnies were for sale and probably given as pets. But I predict, that these cute little bunnies will grow up to be rabbit problems. Then they will be dumped in the parks, where they will be torn to pieces by the stray dogs. Another problem solved.

Taiwan Coffee

Until I went to QiShan I didn't know coffee was grown in Taiwan. Like most Asian countries, tea is number 1. I suppose anyplace that can grow coffee can also grow tea, so it makes sense to grow the more popular crop. But in QiShan they had a small area selling coffee. It comes in plastic envelopes, enough for one serving.

Inside the envelope is a filter paper packet of coffee.  You tear off the top of the envelope and put it on top of a cup.

The packet is both brewing vessel and filter the ingenious paper wings lets it sit on top of a cup.

The paper wings are strong enough to support the coffee and the hot water added.

Nice engineering.

Most Taiwanese places have a boiling hot water dispenser(usually for making tea) but this water works for this coffee making setup as well.

It's a one cup alternative to expensive Starbucks but I doubt it will catch on. First off, tea bags are looked down on in Taiwan. Rightly so, because a tea bag usually contains the leaves and stems that would be unsellable as tea. The paper tea bag conceals what an inferior product it is compared to "loose leaf" tea. Second, the cache of drinking coffee in a cafe would be missing if you just took you caffeine fix at home.

I'm not fussy about tea or coffee, just as long as it is strong(Seattle strong). It doesn't even have to be hot, just warm is fine for me. When I finish the packets from QiShan, I switch back to Nescafe coffee crystals, now that's convenience.