Sheldon is doing research for a school paper on LGBTQ use of social networks as a support mechanism and specifically on blog use. He could use your help. If you are part of the LGBTQ community, please complete his survey, available at http://www.zoomerang.com/Survey/?p=WEB229X5XCADKY.
If you know others who would be willing to complete the survey, please direct them to the same link.
Thank you.
I’m a little slow getting these entries about Taipei posted as I have a lot of video and was hoping to do some editing for each entry. That, however, isn’t going to happen.
Tawn all wrapped up and ready to take on the cool weather in Taipei.
Saturday morning after breakfast we took a taxi to Taipei 101, previously the tallest building in the world and still the tallest in East Asia. Taipei as a whole is pretty flat and spread out so there are few buildings – and none immediately nearby – that challenge Taipei 101 in any serious way.
The morning, as you can see, was still misty with a light drizzle falling nonstop. In fact, the top of the tower was shrouded in passing clouds from time to time, promising a less than unlimited view. After debating whether it would be better to wait and hope for clearer weather, we finally decided to go ahead and ascend to the observation deck on the 89th floor as many tour groups were arriving.
The design of Taipei 101 incorporates many elements of feng shui, the system of aesthetics that balances astronomy and geography to receive the results of positive qi, or energy. For example, the structure is built to resemble bamboo, a supple and quick-growing grass. There are lucky coins placed on the four sides of the building and the edges are adorned with metal embellishments that look like stylized clouds. It is actually a very graceful building.
The elevators to the observation deck are supposedly the fastest in the world, reaching 1,010 meters/minute on the upwards journey and 600 meters/minute on descent. The ride from the 5th floor ticket queue to the 89th floor observation deck takes 37 seconds and, surprisingly, your ears don’t pop too badly thanks to a system of pumps that move air into and out of the passenger cab.
The view from the deck was limited, although it was interesting to watch clouds blowing past the building below you. Also, there was one side of the building (the downwind side) where the clouds were stacking up behind the building. I did shoot some video, but nothing to share with you yet.
Photo courtesy of Andy
Tawn and I with a mural of Taipei 101 and downtown Taipei on a sunnier (and more cartoonish) day. Below, Tawn and Sugi pose in the gift shop with a “damper baby”, the mascot of Taipei 101 whose image is based on the 660-ton pendulum mass damper that sways to offset building movement caused by earthquakes or strong gusts of wind. Notice that the eyes and mouth of the damper baby spell out “101”.
We spent most of the day in the malls surrounding Taipei 101, shopping and eating as there wasn’t a whole lot else to do on such a dreary day. That was fun enough, though, as it is about the company more than anything else.
Photo courtesy of Andy
Tawn poses in front of the Louis Vuitton store’s Christmas display.
Before heading out to the night market for dinner, I managed to get this decent shot of Taipei 101 at night, taken in front of Eslite Bookstore’s flagship location.
More about the night market (which was drier) tomorrow.
Saturday morning we met Andy and Sugi in the lobby of our hotel (Park Taipei Hotel – highly recommended) and walked to a nearby restaurant for breakfast. The section of Fu-Xing South Road near the hotel has many restaurants well-known for their breakfasts, some of which serve 24 hours a day. Andy took us to Yong He Dou Jiang (永和豆漿) at the corner of RuiAn and Section 2, Fu-Xing South Road.
The first sign that this would be good eats was the queue stretching out the front door and onto the sidewalk. There were two, in fact: one for food to-go (many people in that line were carrying their tiffins or, as I believe the Singaporeans call them, their tingkats) and the other for dine-in.
The kitchen is right at the front of the shop, open-air under with a glass wall and window facing the interior dining area. This is a busy and efficient kitchen with each person performing their tasks in a compact area; no wasted motions here. The menu has variations of no more than a dozen items, if that, so it is more of a production line than anything else.
Our basic breakfast was four bowls of warm, sweetened soy milk, sesame pastry with fried “donut” inside, rice rolls (hidden under the sesame pastry), steamed Shanghainese style pork dumplings called xiao long bao, and some fried turnip cakes (not pictured).
Soy milk is not something I generally enjoy drinking but for some reason I find that when I have it in Asia, it is much more enjoyable than when I have it in the US. It isn’t chalky and there’s no artificial vanilla flavor added to it. It is especially nice when using it to dip the pastries.
The pastries, referred to colloquially as “Chinese donuts”, are thin strips of unsweetened dough that are fried up. In Thailand, these are generally shorter pieces but here in Taiwan (and most other places I’ve had them) they are a good ten inches long. The ones we had were wrapped in a thin sesame pasty. You dunked it in the soy milk then took a bite.
The dumplings (in the background) are one of my favorites, although this particular restaurant’s were underseasoned. They are made with a ground pork filling that has a small cube of gelatinous broth put inside the wrapper and then are steamed. The broth liquifies and when you bite into it, you get a generous burst of “soup” with the meat.
The other thing we had were rice rolls (kind of like sushi) wrapped around a Chinese donut and stuffed with a dried, shredded pork and pickled veggies. Very tasty!
This proved a tasty and filling start to our drizzly day.
We arrived Friday morning about 11:00 at Taipei’s International Airport after a smooth, three-hour flight from Bangkok. Andy was kind enough to arrange for a car to pick us up and we were in the city before twelve-fifteen. Amazing considering the distance from the airport to the city.
After a bit of freshening up, we met Andy and his girlfriend Sugi in the lobby of the Park Taipei Hotel, off to our first stop, the Chiang Kai-Shek Memorial Hall, below.
This impressive memorial to the first president of Taiwan is part of a larger grounds that include the National Theatre and the National Concert hall, two traditionally designed buildings.
Inside the memorial hall we witnessed the impressive changing of the guard ceremony at the top of the hour. There is some video footage I will edit of this. Worth watching because – horrors! – one of the guards dropped his gun during the intricate maneuvers.
The military guards have to stand still for an entire hour. Unable to move, they have to rely upon a civilian guard to come over, straighten their uniform and mop their brow.
In the museum below the memorial hall was an exhibit of more contemporary Chinese scrolls including this cute one of an old couple perusing a photo album.
Tawn posed near one of the large doors leading into the museum level of the memorial hall.
In the evening we went to Ximending, the shopping district on the west side of town that is the home of hip and trendy youth culture. Similar to Shibuya in Tokyo, it is bright lights and tons of shops catering to an endless stream of people, mostly younger.
There’s shopping for everyone. Sugi found a beautiful leather bracelet that she really liked so a few minutes later, Andy was shelling out some New Taiwan Dollars.
There are some really nice graffiti in one section of Ximending.
Lots of street vendors serving foods of every kind. Taipei is known for its good eats and tomorrow evening we will be dining at the night market. Stay tuned for that entry. Here was a fresh fruit vendor who was being shooed away by the police for being in a no-vendor area.
One thing I found a vendor selling that really surprised me: corn dogs!
Never one to shy away from publicizing my failures, missteps and adventures in the kitchen, I decided on Monday to film my attempt at frosting a layer cake. Having only done this a few times before, it was … quite a production. But as long as I can learn lessons from the experience (and eat the mistakes!) then that’s the important thing, right?
The cake turned out looking okay, if a little lopsided.
The reason for the cake was my birthday, which I share with several other people. I celebrated in conjunction with Jason, an Australian friend who turned thirty this year.
Our little dinner party group. From left to right:Benji, Matt, Kobfa, me, Jason, Bundit, Zenya and Tawn.
Jason and I have blown out the candles and prepare to cut the cake. Speaking of the September Issue, you can probably tell that one of us is a bit more of the fashionista.
Oh, the sad thing is that I made a mango coulis to go with this, poured it into a squeeze bottle and placed the bottle into the refrigerator to chill, subsequently forgetting to serve it with the cake. D’oh!
Out of the blue I received an email on Monday from a friend whom I have not seen in fourteen years. We’ve traded very occasional emails, decreasing in volume to about once a year as of late. The friend was in town on business and suggested we meet for dinner so last night we did.
When we last saw each other fourteen years ago, it was on my first trip out of the US, visiting him in Singapore. He had just returned from almost ten years living and studying in the states and he was doing his compulsory military service. Already, though, he was laying the groundwork to achieve great things, becoming one of the first people to identify themselves publicly as gay or lesbian in Singapore. In the years since, he has become very involved in pushing for more rights for GLBT people across Asia.
Back when we first met while still in school, I could already tell that he was going to accomplish a lot in his life. My pride in knowing him has not diminished even as our communication has grown less frequent.
The opportunity to meet again and to introduce him to Tawn was a nice one. There was a little awkwardness (I felt, at least) because it has been easier for me to keep up with his activities due to his visibility, than for him to keep up with mine. Such is the life when you are friends with a public figure, I suppose.
I hope we’ll stay in touch in the coming years. He remains a passionate person who is committed to important social causes. I enjoy seeing his success. I also hope that we’ll be able to connect again on the level that led to our friendship in the first place, a level beyond the banalities of “What have you been up to?” and “So who are you seeing now?” That takes time to reestablish, perhaps.
Fashion. There is sort of this caricature of me that I’m not the fashionable person but that Tawn is. Of course, Tawn’s taste is impeccable and his interest in fashion is very high. (See his blog, Bino on Fashion) But that doesn’t mean I’m disinterested in fashion or don’t appreciate it. I just rarely put too much thought into matters of fashion.
Last week we saw The September Issue, the new documentary by R.J. Cutler that is essentially the story of the person who inspired The Devil Wears Prada. Anna Wintour, the editor-in-chief of Vogue magazine, is the high priestess of fashion, nearly singlehandedly starting trends and choosing what is in and what is out.
The real star of the film, though, is Grace Coddington, a former model who is the creative director at Vogue. Somewhat of a yin to Wintour’s yang, Coddington fights to include things she thinks are beautiful and deserving, even going behind Wintour’s back in one sequence to order undone some airbrushing she thinks is unnecessary. Coddington and Wintour both started at Vogue the same day twenty years ago and have this interesting relationship that is both collaborative and antagonistic.
Watching this film provided an interesting insight into the world of fashion. It also helped me coalesces some of my feelings about fashion.
Left, one of the photos from the September 2007 edition of Vogue as part of a shoot that Coddington designed.
If I’ve earned a reputation as a fashion phoebe, it is because (aside from my general lack of style in dressing myself) I don’t see a need to know which designer is whom, what the latest style is, and what color will be in next autumn.
Who is the designer at the house of Dior? I don’t know. What is the significance of the Channel Chanel 2.55 bag? Couldn’t tell you, although Tawn has tried to educate me in these matters many, many times.
But when I watched the film, I enjoyed seeing the display of moving art worn gracefully by the deadly serious (and deadly skinny) young ladies strutting the catwalk. Whatever happened to smiling models? Wouldn’t people prefer to buy fashions that appear on friendly looking ladies?
I enjoyed seeing the passion and joy of some of the people involved in the business, especially the care Coddington gives to designing each photo shoot and the passion that young designer Thakoon Panichgul, a Thai-American whom Vogue selected for a young designer award and who is featured in the movie, puts into designing a modern take on the white t-shirt. These people love what they do and are very gifted artists.
No, the thing that disinterests me about fashion is best exemplified by one of the various subeditors or whatnot who in the movie is caught on film constantly saying a different thing to each person, complimenting the ideas of whoever is talking and then back-stabbing them when they are out of the room. That reminds me so much of what I found in the movie industry when I lived in LA. Petty, petty, petty rivalries, hangers-on, and people whose interest was not about the art but about their inflated sense of self-importance.
There’s a lot of that in many fields, I’m sure. But I think fashion has to take the proverbial cake in terms of people who try and use fashion and style as a way to validate themselves and to elevate themselves over others rather than as a way to truly express themselves as individuals.
After about a week and a half of kind of drifting away from Xanga a bit, I decided this morning that I need to get back to it. I enjoy the relationships I’ve developed through Xanga and it is a very effective way to keep friends and family up to date with what’s going on in my life. That said, I’d just like to say, “I’m back.”
Villa Market is a local chain of western-style grocery stores, the first such chain in Krungthep. They produce a monthly magazine for customers which this month featured the incongruous headline “Thank God for Chicken! Celebrate with turkey”, leading to much head-scratching on my part.
Yesterday was my thirty-ninth birthday. An Australian friend, Jason, shares my birthday (although nine years younger) so he and his partner along with our mutual friends came over for dinner. I’ll have those pictures for you in a few days.
A lot of people get worked up about birthdays. For some reason, I don’t. I enjoy getting older and think life continues to get more interesting as each year goes by. Perhaps more pragmatically, I don’t see the point in fretting over something that is inevitable. That would be like ruing the tides.
I’ve also been away from Thai lessons for two weeks because the World Film Festival of Bangkok has occupied some of my free time. Which means I’ve been missing my latte art!
Left: the original pig latte that I received. Right: the same latte with some embellishments by me.
Bitter Brown cafe also does cocoa art. Here is a bear. A mouse? A rat? I’m not sure what it is meant to be, actually.
It is easy to get caught up in everything else that is going on in life and to start spending less time at the computer. However, I’ve pulled myself back and have something to share with you. Last Friday I had to do a border run, fulfilling a requirement of Thai visas that I exit the country every ninety days. Normally, my travel schedule is such that I don’t have to leave the country just for the purpose of leaving the country.
Deciding to have some fun with it, I made it my project to tell the story of my trip through a short video. This forced me to pay attention to everything I was doing and think about how to most effectively convey the experience. After editing and viewing it, I must say that I’m pretty proud of it. My best video to date! I hope you enjoy it.
In the past two weeks, I received news about deaths from two different friends in the Bay Area. The first was about our friend Eric’s mother. The second was a high school classmate and former coworker, Lisa. Both lost their lives to cancer, pancreatic and ovarian, respectively.
In a world in which hundreds and thousands of deaths occur each day and in which each news cycle contains gruesome stories of murder, war, starvation and and natural disaster, I paused to reflect on the lives of these two women. As some of you know, I write letters to my nieces, now ages three and six, which are sealed and kept in a box for them to open when they turn eighteen. I’d like to share with you an excerpt of what I wrote to my younger niece, Ava:
Dear Ava,
I received news of the loss of two people, one the mother of a friend and the other a former classmate and coworker. Both died younger than they should have, which is sometimes the way of the world. Both of them left behind many people who cared for them and cared about them deeply. And their loss reminds me of an important lesson, one I hope you’ll learn at the earliest possible age.
Life is precious and short and all too often we lose those we love unexpectedly and earlier than we want to. And even when our loved ones do live a long and full life, we are still destined to lose them. Because of that, each moment we have them in our lives is a valuable one, much too valuable to spend with a heart filled with anger or hatred or scorn. Instead, fill those moments with love and kindness and forgiveness, because one day we will no longer have the opportunity to tell the people we love, “I’m sorry; I love you.”
…
I hope both Mrs. K’s family and Lisa’s family are comforted by the memories they have of these special ladies and that their tears of sorrow are interspersed with laughter as they think of the good times they enjoyed.
I hope that each of us can learn and relearn the lesson brought by their family’s loss because it is a loss all of us have, or will, experience. Don’t waste time with anger; fill each moment with love.
christao408 