Made in Taiwan (Part 1)

[ Many procrastination. So long tiem. Wow.

I wanted to wait to post this until I'd uploaded and edited all of the videos properly, and wow, that's taken almost a year. Also, I was wrong about only being able to go overseas once in 2013. Hah! ]

Oh yay, time for another 6-day-vacation-to-an-awesome-place post! Since I have so much crap to pay off I'm pretty sure my summer trip to Taiwan is going to be my only overseas excursion this year, but that's OK. Doesn't matter, went to a tropical paradise.

The precursor to this was that post about everything that was getting me down about living and working in Korea, and I'd been so apathetic that I couldn't even be asked to plan my own vacation. I mean, that's pretty bad, right? Not to mention totally out of character for me. I barely even looked anything up online, and when I left was one of the only times I've ever dozed off during a takeoff. 

Halfway through the flight my eyes suddenly snapped open, and I was like: "GYAHH, do you need a visa to get into Taiwan?! ... I would have seen something, someone would have mentioned it. I've got an American passport, I'm sure it's fine. -nods off again-" 

Yeah. It was bad.

What isn't bad, though, is how easy it is to get to Taipei from Seoul. The express train to Incheon is very comfortable, convenient and calm. I'd left almost 5 hours before my flight just to make sure I'd have plenty of time, and watching the early morning sun shining through the misty, peaceful landscape of small rural farms, clusters of woodland and the occasional city or industrial area was very pleasant indeed. Plus, getting on and off the train makes you feel like you're in the future. It involves fancy elevators and subway gates that open in a way that reminds me of airlocks.
The flight itself takes less time than the bus ride to Gangneung, only 2 1/2 hours. 

Day 1

Approaching the island, it really felt like an adventure once I saw those dramatic, jagged rocks carpeted in greenery jutting out of the sea. It wasn't entirely unlike a scene from one of the Jurassic Park movies. While the plane was circling over Taipei before landing I saw a couple of enormous marigold roofs, which I later found out were the tops of the National Theatre and Concert Hall. 

The buses to Taipei Main Station in the heart of the downtown area leave the airport every ten minutes and only cost around $4. 

The Hello Kitty pastry shop in Taipei Main Station

When I got to the station, I found out where the lockers were so I could stash my stuffed backpack while just wandering around Taipei without having any idea of where I was going. It cost about a dollar to keep it in a large, perfectly safe locker on the floor below the main floor of the station for around 7 hours.

I picked a direction from the station and just started walking. It was hot as balls, but not in a disgusting way like in Seoul. The air in Taiwan (and even in Taipei) is cleaner, as it's less densely-populated, surrounded by water and subject to frequent rainstorms. It was like a sauna, yes, but I didn't feel like there was a perpetual layer of filth on my skin or like my lungs were weighed down by warm, dingy, oxygen-depleted soup. It was a cleaner, brighter, tropical heat. Instead of pollution-laden grey haze that settles over everything, limits visibility substantially and makes you feel like you're in Silent Hill, there was only normal fog that rolled in from the ocean.

The direction I'd picked happened to take me straight to the National Taiwan Museum, which is over 100 years old and has a lovely colonial feel to it because of the architecture. Having a good guess about what it was when I saw it but not being completely sure, I did my best to find food before checking it out. I ended up with a side of fried tofu and a side of water spinach at a little fast food-type restaurant, and then with sour and salty pickled plum tea, which I'd mistaken for something fruitier based on the picture. Both were extremely cheap.

I was also amazed by how cheap entry to the museum was: 67 cents. So of course I was like, yeah, fuck it, I'll check this out. They had a couple of stuffed dugongs in the front along with a number of other preserved native animals in simulated habitats, a quipao (or cheongsam) exhibit, environmentally-oriented photography of Formosan island landscapes, and stuff about aboriginal Taiwanese culture, though all the placards and everything were in Chinese. I'm not sure what the Alice in Wonderland-esque rabbit courtier statue near the door signified, but it was neat, too. 

Some of the traditional aboriginal tattoo designs. I
especially like the little stick dudes with spears.

They're big on papercraft in Taiwan, as you might expect from the lovely novel people who brought the world bubble tea and pet cafes. I got crab and pink Formosan deer papercraft cards, a really cute Asiatic black bear bookmark and a couple of postcards to send home from the museum gift shop. These, too, were very cheap.

Immediately behind the museum is the Peace Park, which has some really neat pagodas and is quite beautiful all around. There was a solitary old man feeding pigeons in picturesque fashion. I walked through the park and to one side, having seen a few glimpses of tall and important-looking buildings through the trees. The only thing governing my choice of direction was the thought, "Oh, there's something big, I'll go toward that". 

It's not easy being this stunning. Take notes, ladies.

I walked past the Presidential Office Building, which is opulent and heavily guarded in a very twentieth-century kind of way. The entire time I was walking around, all I could think was that I felt like I was on the set of one of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies or in a Tomb Raider game.

When I finally caught sight of Taipei 101 in the distance via a long main street that broke the treeline, I said, "Ah ha!" and went toward it. That's how I ended up coming to the National Theatre and Concert Hall. 

The scale of these buildings is just really stupid. The only ones I've seen that made me feel the same way are the Met in New York and the Palace of the Parliament in Bucharest. Hence the sort of befuddled look.

The gardens that surround these buildings are quite beautiful, as is the Chi'ang Kai-Shek Memorial Hall. At the time I didn't know what it was, or if it was even him or Sun Yat-sen. I took several pictures of this trying to capture the scale of it as well. The stairs alone are about four stories high. I kind of wish I'd invested in a nice DSLR before going so that I could have much nicer images, but oh well.

What I also didn't know was that there's a ceremonial changing of the guards at the Memorial Hall every hour on the hour, and that I was there in time to see one. Keep watching or skip ahead to two minutes for the best-looking bit.

I went to the edge of this enormous complex and along an ornate wall that was also a covered walkway, skipping what I only noticed was in the bottom of the Memorial Hall - a library and museum - once I was a ways away from it. 

Knowing that Taipei 101 was too far to walk to after I'd already been wandering around in the heat as long as I had, I just took a taxi. The driver was very friendly and spoke more English than I expected him to: after I'd been in the car a good 6 minutes, at a red light, he languidly started the meter. I gave him a look and he slowly turned around and went (read this in your best "Ancient Chinese secret, huh?"  voice): "Eheh. Forgot to... push... the button" with a silly smile. So I said not to worry about it and that I'd give him extra. It was only a dollar anyhow. 

Taipei 101 doesn't look that tall unless you're either very close to it or you get a good view of it from a distance and from higher than street level; nothing in between. I wasn't impressed at all until I was standing under it and said, "Wow, that's pretty fucking tall" out loud. 

I get the gum, food and dogs part, but I'm 
not sure why you can't have yoyos or roses 
in your backpack..

You can't go into the main building itself; it's an office building. I'm sure plenty of idiots like myself try to wander in every day. A young, handsome, friendly, English-speaking (that's right, lock up your sons, Taiwan) guard stopped me, being conspicuous as I am, informed me of this, and told me that I had to go through the mall annex to get to the observation deck, if that's where I wanted to go.

One of the three expensive things of the entire trip, going up there is around $20. I was like, screw it, when am I going to be back here to stand at the top of the tallest stack of take-out boxes in the world, anyway? 

They give you a coupon for shaved ice with mango and a scoop of mango gelato on top among other things, so I went ahead and had one since I love mango and was really hungry. 

Something I'd never seen from the top of an extremely tall building before was a construction site in motion. The backhoes were so tiny and cute-looking, smaller than the Micro Machines I had as a kid. They looked like dots with sticks attached and moved around like clumsy insects. The lush green mountains that cut into the cityscape and big banks of monsoon clouds looming in the background set the view apart from that of other cities; I definitely recommend going up and taking a gander. 

And, of course, on the outdoor observation deck, Rule #1 is No Jumping.

As promised, there is indeed and enormous wind damper insider the tower as well.

The Taipei 101 mall is the hugest, fanciest, priciest mall I've ever seen. Every big name is there, from Louis to Ferragamo to Cartier, and in enormous shop spaces. The design itself is cavernous and impressive. I went to a really neat collectors' shop called Toy World, and I'll just say that I'm glad they didn't have the Nano Block alpaca I found on display, 'cause I would have bought it. I got a couple of Rody Horse goodies for a friend, a couple of Sanrio cookie mascots and smirked at their model Godzilla and Mothra destroying model Tokyo Tower. There were also really cute gourmet macaron and cupcake kiosks.

Outside there are these walls that look like Lego blocks and light up when it starts getting dark.

Actually, most of them seem to be Asian

I eventually found my way to Keelung after wandering through labyrinthine underground shopping malls all confusingly and erroneously labelled "Bus Station", wondering after a while if someone had just chosen the wrong word for the English translation. It took me ages to find the bus terminal I needed, which is separate from the main station and not labeled anywhere in plain sight.

Steph's directions turned out to be really vague, and I had to call the women at her office and have them help me explain which bus stop I needed. The very patient woman behind the desk wrote a note for the driver, who had me sit up front so he could tell me when to get off. As I was leaving Taipei, I also got a photo of the average number of scooters stopped at every traffic light. It's mind-blowing. Why don't other big, crowded cities have this many? It'd be so much easier:

Nothing was really open by the time I got where I was going because it was about 10 P.M., but scootering down to the night market was a blast. I'd never been on a scooter before. We didn't have any luck finding anything vegetarian outside of some fresh fruit and ended up just having some French fries at the big 24-hour McDonald's in downtown Keelung.

Day 2

The first of many surprisingly nutritious 7-11 breakfasts. My favourite thing was definitely
 the little trays of fresh-sliced papaya. Nom

In the morning, before Steph had to go to work, we scootered to Yehliu, a famous coastal "geopark" with cool volcanic rock formations called hoodoos. We had a great time wandering around there and even went to a couple of little beaches where, instead of sand, the ground was comprised of endlessly interesting and varied pieces of coral, shell and sea glass. 

Don't these ones look like weird blobby creatures?

Growing right on the beach with the amazing multi-sand.

When Steph did go into work, she showed me which bus to take, gave me her transit card, and I spent the afternoon wandering around downtown Keelung and laid down the first layer of what was to be a super gnarly sunburn. 

First I went to a Thai restaurant Evanuska had showed me before and ordered mushroom and mixed veggies in curry sauce, an order of fried tofu and mango juice. So, all the food. I needed a meal. 

This corner brought to you by: 'Murica

Then I went to the big cultural centre at the main wharf next to the cruise ship dock - which had a surprisingly nice collection of very recent local artwork - and had a lovely conversation with a painter who lived in Canada for 11 years, who seemed very surprised that I lived in Seoul. She visited once and didn't like Korea or Koreans that much. Apparently a lot of Taiwanese people talk shit (though in a really nice, polite way) about the Koreans and Chinese, but absolutely love the Japanese. It was the only country, I think, that was willingly occupied by them. They just kind of went, "Oh, ok, sure" and let the Japanese build all kinds of infrastructure and run the place for a while. Seems like a pretty good deal. To this day it's a popular Japanese tourist destination, and things like anime and Japanese snacks are ubiquitous.

This one's made of thread. Neat, huh?

After that I wandered around the little back streets downtown near the main market looking for a pair of comfy cotton pants. I found lots of slutty clothes shops and a sex shop, and who I'm fairly confident were prostitues shopping there. Instead of pants I ended up with a sleeveless cotton dress and a thin, flowy navy blue skirt with a stretchy waist that can double as a dress. They were each around $10. 

I popped into the most prominent temple on street level (not the one you can see behind the rainbow building on the hill) and then tried a Green Tea White Chocolate Pudding Frappuccino from Starbucks (which wasn't so great) before heading back. 

We went into Taipei for dinner and ended up at a California Pizza Kitchen across the street from Taipei 101. We shared a spinach and artichoke dip and I had a lychee martini and roasted vegetable salad while Steph had a pina colada and Sicilian pizza. We were pretty tired, so we got the last bus back without going anywhere else. I do so much drinking in Korea, though, that it was actually super refreshing to just go back and sit on a couch (when was the last time I sat on a sofa?) with someone and watch Futurama. And interrupt the more recent Battlestar Galactica with genuinely surprised but extremely inconsiderate interjections about how terrible the camera work is. ;>_>

Day 3

This time we scootered to Jinshan and into Yangminshan National Park to visit a hot spring before Steph went to work. It took us a while to find it and I very sadly somehow lost the video I took of an incredibly ornate temple in the middle of a field next to a small village as we went by. Throughout the park you can see steam rising up from the hot springs at certain points on the mountains.

There's one main road with lots of little turn-offs to different hot spring, hiking and hotel destinations, and the one we were after is one of the few that's still out in the wild (well, kinda), not enclosed by a building. It is on the property of a large, beautiful resort, though.

Going to the hot spring was a bit of a trek, but it was beautiful. There were caterpillars, butterflies and incredible views everywhere. Taiwan truly is a tropical paradise. It's also super hot, and by that point I was carrying a crappy black umbrella to avoid getting sunburned any further, if it was even possible to achieve a level of crispiness over 9000. I don't think you can get heatstroke twice in the same year.

As we told a rapidly-tiring Singaporean family we passed on the way back down, the trek was totally worth it. The springs, welling up with their characteristic pungent volcanic odor from somewhere beneath the rocks, combined with the cold water from a small waterfall. People have simply blocked areas off with rocks to create a sort of terraced series of a few pools, which get progessively cooler the further down you go before just turning into a very shallow, rocky stream that winds through the jungle. Yes, seriously, as far as I'm concerned: jungle. 

The waterfall was really powerful and cold, it was so refreshing.

For some reason it was also caterpillar city. I don't know why, but the stupid little things kept falling in and getting washed away.

Afterward, when Steph had to head off and teach, I got some hot delicious lunch and then went to Waimushan beach and just floated in the cool water and vegged out on the sand. There are lots of cute little fish swimming around, and actually, quite a lot of little purplish jellies getting through the safety net. 

I don't know why, but that steamed pumpkin was SO DELICIOUS.
Just looking at this makes me want some! There's also tofu, water
spinach and steamed broccoli.

This guy had the right idea. 

I know, I saturated the shit out of these, but you could barely see
the thing and now they look cool.

Looking up at the craggy jungle-covered mountains and the steamy island in the distance, I thought, "I really am in a tropical paradise. Only a year ago I was staring up at the sky like that in my old apartment swimming pool wishing I could be somewhere else".

(a)Musings: Korean vs. American Healthcare

Now, this post actually started out as a Facebook comment that expanded to ridiculous proportions, so don't think I'm presenting and structuring a well thought-out and convincing argument complete with multiple citations here. These (a)Musings posts, that's what they are - just rants.

I saw a post about universal single-payer healthcare systems existing in a long list of countries, some of which I wanted to know more about, including that of the country I'm in currently. Certainly the quality of the coverage in Korea doesn't compare to that of many other developed nations, but it's still superior to that of the U.S. At the end of the day, Koreans spend an average of 7.2% GDP on healthcare and related costs, while Americans spend 17.9%. That's coming up on 1/5 of all yo money, bitches. WTF? 

The national insurance of Canada and various European countries covers up to 90% of all necessary medical costs, but in Korea, it's only about 55%. I've mostly paid out of pocket for things here, especially dental work, because fillings, inlays and crowns (the most common things, I would think) aren't covered on the national plan, and STILL, STILL it is SO much better than the U.S. system.

One example is that of my coworker's wife, who's just given birth. She spent about a month at specialty maternity hospital receiving round-the-clock care (apparently giving birth is a 2-month process for Koreans) in plush accommodations for less than $600 per week. It's reputed to be the best maternity hospital in the country.

Let that sink in for a minute and ask yourself how much it would cost to stay in the hospital for an extra week in America because of complications following the birth of your child.

If you have a severe mental illness in Korea you either have a rich family and will live as a perpetual child or you will end up in the subway or on the roadside begging when your parents die. That's it. There's no system to take care of these people because no one wants the stigma of something like a learning disability, ADHD, autism or mild retardation associated with their family. These things are broadly undiagnosed and kids with them are usually just tossed into the general population. Depression and anxiety? Let's not even go there. In many public schools no one is allowed to talk about suicides, under threat of expulsion. Didn't happen. The famous "fan death" superstition is just a euphemism for things like "overdosed on pills", much like people (around 3/4 of all women in Seoul) have never gotten plastic surgery, they just "turned 20 and got prettier", "went on a really effective new diet", etc. 

The U.S. is obsessed with overdiagnosing and overmedicating all of the above because there's so much money to be made doing it. My point in all this is that Korea is in many ways socially regressive and fucked in the head (since hardly anyone's being treated for that), and they STILL have a universal single-payer system worked out that's better than ours. 

Seriously. 

Couple this with our failings in the areas of education and infrastructure and soon people will no longer be able to say things like, "Yeah, well, our quality of life is still way better than most people in the world, though". No. It's not. Compared to other developed nations, our population is ignorant and uneducated, healthcare and many aspects of living in general are astronomically expensive to the point of being laughably unaffordable, and our barely-acceptable aging infrastructure has been crumbling for years because no one's willing to allocate enough funding to fucking fix it. If you don't own a car where I'm from, you're barely a person. Because how do you get to work? Even if you give yourself an extra two hours to get there (when it would take maybe 25 minutes by car, let's say) there's no guarantee you'll get there on time. If the woefully unreliable bus does come sometime within an hour of when it's supposed to, it is slow, filthy, and quite dangerous.

Additionally, I'd just like to tack on how incredibly quickly Koreans do things. With one exception where I waited in an extremely busy English-speaking specialty clinic on a Saturday morning for nearly 2 hours after my appointment time to see a doctor, you're in an out before you even know what happened. I've waited like that in the U.S. just to see my GP more than once, to the point where I just had to leave again without being seen and without a prescription because I had to go back to work or school. Even in Korean hospitals you can mostly walk in, get a consultation, and walk back out in less than an hour. And it'll cost you, like, $8. 
For the most part bedside manner is sorely lacking, especially with male Korean physicians, but you can't argue with 40-minute out-patient procedures that would have taken like 3 hours in the States and cost 10 times as much. 
Prescriptions are the other great thing about this system - they're super cheap. Sure they come packaged in little individual plastic baggies or other suspicious containers, but shit, you can afford them easily. You don't have to worry about how much any basic prescription costs. You don't have to choose between medicine and groceries. Unless you want tomatoes or strawberries or something. 

Point is, everyone should have done it this way from the beginning and then improved upon the system as time went on. Leaving room for competition and mega-high earning potential is healthy and fosters the development of new techniques and technologies and all that great stuff, but who cares if only 17 people in the whole damn country can afford to use them? International recognition is only worth something if what you've developed is applicable or has the potential to be so.

Aleksandr Petrov

Lately I've been finding various light-hearted, cheerful things to occupy my time in an attempt to stave off disillusionment and despair, such as avoiding food, attempting to practice drawing angsty faces from different perspectives, drinking to excess, and reading Dostoyevsky while listening to things like Shostakovich. It's basically fun for the whole family. Bring a razor blade.

Actually, it's not all that bad. I'm just a bit gloomy. You know who else is a bit gloomy? An award-winning Russian animator who is one of only a few in the world to use the rare and difficult technique of creating animated cels out of wet oil paintings on glass that are altered by hand for each movement. I found out about him today because he did very successfully adapted Dostoyevsky's The Dream of a Ridiculous Man into a 20-minute moving canvas.

Source

It's a story about a guy who decides he's going to kill himself. While walking home - his disgust with life and humanity weighing on his mind - a little girl runs up to him, grabs his arm and breathlessly starts begging him for help. It's clear that her mother is sick or injured or something nearby. He shakes her off and keeps going. He figures, "What does it matter? I'm just going to kill myself in a couple of hours anyway, and nothing will exist for me anymore".

He decides he's going to put his pistol to his right temple. While he's sitting in his armchair at the table mulling everything over, though, he just falls asleep, which he's never done before. A formless being takes him through space to another, alternate Earth where the people are pure, filled with love and completely ignorant of suffering. At first he thinks them naive and somewhat inferior in some ways for lacking things Russians are particularly proud of, such as logical sensibilities, science and probably pessimism. But then, he reasons, many beings live without having to explain life to themselves and teach it to others. They just exist and fall into a natural harmony with their surroundings.  

These angelic pseudo-humans don't understand the ridiculous man's inner turmoil when he tries to talk to them about it: absolutely hating people but not being able to stop loving them, and vice versa. But they listen anyway. He spends maybe a thousand or more years among them, and eventually, from being exposed to his nature, they learn to lie. And they enjoy it. Things escalate pretty quickly from there, and soon the first blood is shed. Shocked, the people no longer trust each other, separate, build walls, and start speaking different languages. Animals with whom they had once lived in Biblical-esque harmony fear and hate them, and retreat into the forest. 

The man desperately tries to stop them from doing these things but can't; he's unintentionally corrupted them completely. Eventually they do develop things such as science to understand their lives and create codices of laws by which to govern themselves, having come to understand from an intellectual rather than intuitive standpoint the virtues they once had and lost. They think the ridiculous man mad and threaten to have him put away if he doesn't stop ranting at them.

At that point he wakes up, vindicated of his previous thoughts and with a renewed appreciation for life. It says at the end that he goes out and finds the girl, and that he himself will go on. Kind of like the Russian It's a Wonderful Life, da?

The Mermaid is based on Slavic folktales of mermaids who are actually the spirits of girls who have drowned themselves, usually after being jilted or abused by a man. I like that these, Greek and Japanese mermaids are traditionally very dark and frightening. In the story, a young novice monk sees and rescues what he thinks is a girl who's fallen into an icy river. He continues seeing her and is beguiled. When his elderly master hears her voice, though, he suddenly gets a dramatic flashback of a lover he betrayed when he married another woman, and it's implied that she did indeed drown herself because of it. The mermaid sees the elderly monk and exacts revenge.

His most recognised work, though, is his adaptation of Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea. It took him more than two years to paint the over 29,000 frames on glass sheets four times larger an A4 size, winning him an Academy Award and making it the first large-scale animated film ever. 

Finally, My Love, his most recent film, is based on one of the works of a Russian writer "best known for his idyllic recreations of the pre-revolutionary past" and was criticised not only for seemingly placing technical achievement above creativity, but for being trite, overly sentimental and a "waste" of Petrov's talents. I don't know about all that, though.. It's not exactly horrible. Maybe he's just paying homage to his roots or something.

Sadly, the global economic crisis coupled with the Russian government's cutting of funds for animation studios has meant that, for the last few years, people like this guy have been out of work. This article explains in a bit more detail and warns that, if all of the remaining Soviet generation animators leave or die without passing on their techniques to new ones, it'll have a "scorched earth" effect on their animation market. I guess it's not too soon for WWII references, but that sort of language does imbue the situation with a sense of urgency if it's true.
If there were still a market in the U.S. for traditional styles of animation as opposed to all of this cheap generic CG garbage we've been seeing for the last ten years I'm sure studios would welcome a wave of desperate Russian masters with open arms and we could all pretend it was the 90's again, but I guess they'll have to go somewhere else. 
Hopefully this isn't the last we see of this type of animation. That'd be pretty shitty.