Motorcycles in Tainan - One more time

Concerning my series on "Motorcycles in Tainan", I have some more info and pictures:

A   50cc scooter costs about $1000US
A 150cc scooter costs about $2000US


You'd think on a small island like Taiwan, theft wouldn't be a problem because whoever bought the stolen scooter would be found out. But as was explained to me the stolen scooter will quickly be "chopped" in to resellable pieces and parts. There is one pitiful story of one of the Chinese teachers who bought a new scooter on payments, the scooter was stolen and she still has to make the payments. My own Chinese teacher doesn't want to upgrade to a newer scooter because it just becomes a target for thieves.

Here's another picture of a moving San Lun Che.

With a canopy roof!

Such a small engine, no fatties allowed!

Here's an impractical BMW motorcycle next to a motorscooter, there is definitely a size difference.

Here's a better picture of the first scooter I ever owned.

In a recent newsletter for the Tainan Foreign Assistance Newsletter they has some interesting numbers:

There are 1.4 motorcycles/scooter in Tainan, that is 1.2 motorscooter/cycles for every adult in Tainan. And over .5 million motorcycles/scooters are over 15 years old!

In an effort to get the polluting old 2-strokes of the road, the City of Tainan is offering 1000NT for each 10 year old 2 stroke, 1500NT for each 15 year old, and so on up to 3500NT. It looks like the days of the old 2 strokes are coming to an end.

Kaohsiung Electronics

DIY is big in Taiwan, it stands for Do It Yourself. For women this means making your own jewelry, knitting, sewing, ... For guys it means building your own computer, electronics, framing pictures, ...

For me, I've had a chance to self learn some electronics here in Taiwan, there are lots of electronics stores selling electronic tools, kits and components. (You can never have too many tools.)

I used to think the Guan Hua district in Taipei was just the best place in the world for electronic stuff, but Kaohsiung has an even better place, Jianguo Road and Ming Chang Road. For me in Tainan,  this is a great improvement.

As you can see from the map, Tainan(T'ai-nan) is much closer to Kao-hsiung than Taipei. The bus ride to Taipei is about 4.5 hours and 350 NT whereas to go to Kaohsiung is less than 1 hour and at most 106 NT.

Arriving in Kaohsiung, there are great maps in the subway system telling you where you are, but Jianguo Road is right next to the train station.

Jianguo Road has tons of computer and camera stores.
On one street you can do comparison shopping.

At the far Eastern edge of Jianguo Road there is the SunFair store with 5 or 6 floors of all the computer equipment that you might every want.

A little cheesecake always helps.

For me, the interesting road is parallel to Jianguo, one block to the North, Ming Chang road. This road have the electronic components and tools. There are at least 5 stores like this one.

For the hobbyist these places are like Heaven.

Math Images

Sometimes I see an image that reminds me of some mathematical idea. Here's the best of what I've seen so far.

This advertisement is just great math, you'd never see it in the US where people take pride in not being able to balance their checkbooks. The last expression is using infinity as exponent, wow that's big!

I saw this moss on a post at Ali Shan,

It reminded me of the Mandelbrot image.

Here we have a tiling of the plane implemented with Astroturf on top of bricks.

Here's a tiling of equilateral triangles with a subtitling of trapezoids. I know not everyone appreciates this.

Here is a display from the NCKU Museum of precomputer technology for curve generation tools. Such specialized knowledge obsoleted by technology, how pitiful.

This is a playful implemented example of the basis of
mechanics: the 4 bar linkage.

I guess the "point" of pointillism is that a continuous image can be made from a collection of discrete elements.

Mondigliani

In Kaohsiung(GaoXiong) there is an exhibit of Modigliani, a famous contemporary of Picasso. Florence and I have been interested in Mondig ever since we bought an uncatalogued original print from a yard sale in the Georgetown neighborhood of Seattle.

I took the train to Kaohsiung and then the subway to the Aozhidi station from there it is just a mile to the Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Art. It's fitting that on the walk to the Museum, I ran(walked) across this sidewalk graffiti.

Ai Wei Wei is a famous artist in Mainland China now for more than 3 months without and charge or any access to the outside world. mainland China brooks no dissent, and even preemptively detains those who might even be thinking of dissent. The communist dictatorship of mainland China is nothing to play with. But the current leadership has been through the Cultural Revolution and compromise or accommodation is seen as weakness. The US foreign policy always makes us look like chumps, we just don't get it.

Anyway, the Modigliani exhibit was great, lots of historical background, prints and painting. But no taking pictures in the gallery, here are some shots from outside the exhibit.

The is a good movie about Mondig(as we art connoisseurs call him). It gives a good feel for the Paris art community in the 1920's.

I thought I had never been to the Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts before, but actually I have been there a year ago when they has an exhibit of Pixar Animation.

New Chun Lian

My previous Chun Lian were even too ugly for me.

http://mikeess-trip.blogspot.com/2011/02/chun-lian-spring-couplets.html


So I worked on some new Chun Lians to add to my dorm room door.

The top one is: 我爸是李剛.  English: My father is Li Gang.

There is from a famous incident in mainland China where a drunk driver runs over 2 college students and kills one. As he drives off, he calls out: "My father is Li Gang". His father was the local police official and so he thought he was above being held responsible for the murder. This phrase has become a rally cry in China about the corrupt ruling class. The phrase is blocked by the Great Internet Wall of China, that censors any dissent.

The second is my original Chun Lian:

每天芭樂
大夫不来

English: A bala a day, keeps the doctor away.

Bala is local guava, very healthy. I've used the archaic world for doctor 大夫 instead of the more common word 醫生 because it is easier to write. (My Chun Lian, my way.)

On the other side is:

臺灣是臺灣
中国是中国

English: Taiwan is Taiwan, China is China.

The first line uses the traditional characters that are used in Taiwan,the second one uses the simplified characters of Mainland China. The lines express the idea that Taiwan and China are two different countries, no matter what China says.

The bottom middle lines are from a popular gangster movie in Taiwan.

When one gangster realizes that he has sent an assassin to kill someone who turns out to be his son, he says:

"When I was young, I thought I was wind and everyone else was grass. Now I am grass too."


The Chun Lian says:

你是風還是草?
最後都是草.

English:

Are you wind or grass?
In the end, we are all grass.

For the first three I used Mao Bi magic markers, I've given up on using a real Mao Bi(Chinese Calligraphy Brush). The Mao Bi is just to difficult to control.

 
For the fourth one, I devised a new method, I printed it out on the printer and then used a copier to enlarge the characters and print it on red paper. A cheat all the way.

Common Sayings

I have been accumulating a list of expressions that I feel have the same idea in English and Chinese. There are some common sayings in Chinese that are almost word for word similar to a common sayings in English. Were they derived separately or copied from one language to the other, I don't know. But that they express a common sentiment is hopeful. Here's what I've seen so far:

English: May the wind be at your back.
Chinese: 路上順風 - literally: On the road go with the wind.

English: Practice makes perfect.
Chinese: 熟能生巧 - literally: skill comes from practice

English: Don't put all you eggs in one basket
Chinese: 別把雞蛋放在同一個籃子裡 - identical(I believe the missionaries are responsible for this one in China.)

English: Like a fish in waster
Chinese:如魚得水 - identical

English: In one ear and out the other.
Chinese: 左耳進,友耳出 - in the left ear out the right ear

English: Oceans of people
Chinese: 人海人山 - literally: sea of people, mountains of people

English: One of a kind
Chinese: 獨一無二 - literally: unique, no other

English: Don't put off to tomorrow, what you can do today.
Chinese: 今日事今日畢 literally: today's things, finish today

English: The early worm get the worm.
Chinese: 早起的鳥有蟲吃 - identical

English: The trip of a 1000 miles begins with a single step.
Chinese: 千里之行,始於足下 - identical

English: Don't believe everything you hear.
Chinese: 我只想信我看到的 - I only believe what I see.

(As Lou Reed says: "Don't believe anything you hear and only half of what you see.")

Spelling Contests

I think the US and England are the only countries that have spelling contests. For other languages, like French, German, and Spanish, if you can pronounce the word you can spell it. This is because they have rules of pronunciation that don't change per word. Chinese pinyin is the same, if you know the pinyin system and can pronounce the word, then you can spell it out in pinyin.(Knowing the correct characters is another story.)

This situation leads to some interesting problems when a new word is added to French, German, Spanish or Chinese. The pronunciation/spelling has to change to respect the rules of pronunciation of that language. Sometimes the new pronunciation is similar but sometimes not. Ask any Chinese speaker for the Chinese pronunciation of these words and see if you can recognize the name:

Seattle

Vancouver

Christopher Columbus

Sophia Loren

Prince William

But at least by changing the pronunciation, these languages save themselves from the spectacle of spelling contests.

On the other hand, English, the language of England, has a different mode, they accept both the pronunciation of the new word and the spelling of the new word in its native language. This corrupts whatever rules of pronunciation that English could claim. As a language of foreign rulers(Norman French, Hanover Kings, ... ) and the ruled(America, India, ... ) English has accumulated so many foreign words that it has very inconsistent rules of pronunciations. This is what makes learning English the bane of the rest of the world. Here is a typical list of in consistencies for the Wenlin English-Chinese dictionary:

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

     III. Spelling / Pronunciation Ambiguities in English

The following are a few of the many spelling/ pronunciation ambiguities in English that the student should be aware of.
                   Spelling Pronunciation   Example
                      c-       [s]           cell
                               [k]           call
                      ch-      [ tS ]        cheese
                               [k]           character
                      g-       [g]           go, gun
                      ge-      [ dZ ]        gentle
                      gh-      [g]           ghost
                      gu-      [g]           guard
                      h-       [h]           have
                               [ hw ]        white
                      ho-      [ hoU ]       hotel
                               [A]           honest
                      kn-      [n]           knife, know
                      ph-      [f]           photo
                      pn-      [n]           pneumonia
                      ps-      [s]           pseudo
                      qu-      [ kw ]        quick
                      sc-      [ sk ]        scan
                               [s]           scene
                      wh-      [h]           who, whole
                               [w]           white
                               [ hw ]        white (variants)
                      wr-      [r]           write, wrong

I particular like these examples:

bee                   an insect

be                    to be or not to be

beauty              pronounced at your discretion

reminbi            the currency of China spelt with pinyin!

in each of them there is a BE but the spelling is all

inconsistent.

I feel spelling contests are just a memorial to an inconsistency, surely there are more useful uses of our time.

And now for something completely different. In pinyin spelling the tone of each word is convey by a diacritical mark above the most important vowel, like

first tone     āēō
second tone áéó
third tone    ǎěǒ
fourth tone  àèò
no tone       aeo

My eyes are not as good as they use to be so I've been experimenting with color to convey the tone. My scheme as in the text below:

First tone, high, blue because the sky is high

Second tone, rising, yellow because the sun rises

Third tone, falling then rising, green because the falling rising are like branches of tree

Fourth tone, red, because fourth tone is most important.

No tone, black, same as in pinyin

下個月五號是你二十一歲的生日, 我們應該好好地 慶祝慶祝.

xiage yue wu hao shi ni ershiyi suide shengri, women yinggai hao hao de qingzhu qingzhu.

Divination

As part of the Daoist(Taoist) religion, there is a way to communicate with the Gods. Using these wooden moon shaped wooden blocks which are rounded on one side and flat on the other, you can ask the Gods a question and the Gods will give you an answer. You drop the blocks on the temple floor, they clatter and eventually take either of three positions:

 Both rounded on the upside, the Gods have said NO

 One rounded up, one flat up, the Gods have said YES

Two flat sides up, the Gods have said MAYBE.

According to one procedure the Gods have to be asked three times and YES has to come up three times to be a valid answer. In another procedure the first time is to ask the Gods if the question can be asked. On this initial attempt the responses are:

YES - go ahead and ask the question
Maybe - reformulate the question
NO - Come back another day.


Anyway, the Gods are in control so you better just listen to them.

So if there is an equal chance of being round or flat side up, then for one attempt there would be:

50% YES     - 2 outcomes out of 4
25% NO      - 1 outcome out of 4
25% Maybe - 1 outcome out of 4

To check this out, I modified my clappers and did 100 trials.

My outcomes were:

AB             - flat sides up     - MAYBE - 27%
AC and BD - one of each      - YES       - 53%
CD             - round sides up - NO        - 20%


so on the day of my trial the Gods were saying yes above the average and didn't want to say NO much. My blocks are actually made out of wood looking plastic so the Gods were just laughing at me, I noticed that in just the 100 trials, the tips of the blocks were chipped, that's got to effect the outcomes, but the Gods are in control so I shouldn't worry about such details.

I had been looking for these clappers since I saw them at a Daoist temple. I finally  found them for sale at a vendor outside a Daoist temple on Ali Shan. They cost me 200NT.

Like most things sold by vendors there is no marked price and the vendor is just daring you to bargain. My solution is to just never buy from vendors. But this was a tough item to find so I just buckled and bought them, screw the bargaining.

In Taiwanese, I think they are called Buah Bui(I'm not sure of the tones because Taiwanese has maybe 7 tones), in Chinese we have:


擲筊            zhíjiǎo(V)    to throw the blocks
筊杯            jiǎobēi(N)   the name of the blocks    

Ali Shan - Lumber

Being from the Pacific Northwest, there is something familiar about going to Ali Shan. Before there were the tourists it was a lumber town. After the Japanese took possession of Taiwan in 1895, they used Taiwan as a source for natural resources. The cypress trees growing on the Mountains around Ali Shan were cut down and sent back to Japan. The local Tsou tribal people thought of these big trees as their gods so there was friction. But eventually economics trumped religion and the trees were cut down until the 1970's.

There are lots of reminders of this past on Ali Shan, like stumps.

I remembering eating in a restaurant in a logging town in Washington State, the loggers next to me told me:
"The only good tree is a stump." But from the stumps nature fights back, this regrowth from a stump is called "the Four Sisters".

There is machinery left over from those logging days, like this steam powered collector. They basically use cables to drag logs to a collection point on the RR. They use similar collectors in the Pacific NW now, of course they are gasoline/diesel powered.

Gasoline is now about 33NT per liter, that works out to about $4.46 per gallon and that's with the Taiwanese government subsidizing the price. When this old gas pump gave out the last price was 10NT per liter. That's one safe fact of life, the price of gas is going up and will never go down.

Some of the stumps are quite remarkable, they remind me of the novel "Snow Falling on Cedar" which was made into a great movie.

Ali Shan

This semester the field trip was to the highest mountain is Taiwan, Ali Shan. At an elevation of 2663 meters( 8734 feet ) it is higher than Mount Fuji in Japan and on the Asian Continent, you have to go into Tibet before the mountains are higher. Ali Shan is now mostly a tourist destination, from the summit of Ali Shan they can see the sunrise from the East over the Pacific. The Hotels on Ali Shan cater to tourist who wake before sunrise and watch the sun rise from the East.

Ali Shan has snow! On cold days in Taiwan 10C(50F) Taiwanese can drive up Ali Shan and play in the snow.

From Tainan to Ali Shan is about a 5 hour bus ride, so we left about 7AM and got there just before noon. I made a strategic mistake mistake getting on the bus too soon. After which I was surrounded by Spanish speaking students for the entire five hours to and back. I should have waited for others to board the bus and sat next to English speaking fellow students.

Living in the flat plain of Tainan it is easy to forget that Taiwan is mostly mountains.

Other than tourism there isn't much economic activity but there are tea farms on the sides of the mountains.

There have been some landslides on the mountain road up to the summit, this is one time we trust the bus driver to take as much time as he feels necessary.

At the top, tourist walk about the mountain trails, being in Taiwan there are always Taoist temples.

And unique flowers like this protected one leaf orchid.

 

And Magnolias that you never see at the lower elevations.

It was a good trip but the RR line that normally runs at the summit was down so I'll just have to come back another time.

NCKU Museum

On the NCKU campus they have a small Museum with
about 10 exhibits. I have gone to the Museum several times and wrote about it in a previous blog.

http://tainanchineseclass.blogspot.com/2010/01/ncku-museum.html

There were a lot of new exhibits one year latter so it's good to go often, having gone once in the past doesn't cover it forever.

They have a great exhibit on Chinese Locks and how lock technology has progress in the past 4 thousand years. I'm still not very good a taking pictures through glass display cases.

But the exhibit seems to be drawn from a collector's accumulation, which has also been made into a book.

One of the newest exhibits is about Tsoo Wong. He left China after college during the Qing Dynasty. He worked in Britain and went to school at MIT. He was the first aeronautical engineer hired by Boeing.

He returned to China in the 1920's and developed the Chinese Aircraft Industry.

After 1949, he because a professor at NCKU teaching aeronautical engineer. I'm just amazed at these lives that have gone from the days of the Emperor to Computers.

Being an engineering school, the NCKU Museum has a nice display of mechanisms like this 2-stroke engine.

I always feel a little old when they display an antiques what I use to own.