Kenting, Taiwan

I could spend a lot of time in Kenting. During the day the sun was bright, beach was shallow and the waves were kicking my trying to learn how to body board ass left and right. At night, the there was kids launching cheap Chinese fireworks, dancing to hip-hop re-edits and pondering as I stare at the dim outline of the Milky Way.

I work for a place that is trying to develop the next biggest and brightest hi-definition TV. But no matter how many pixels they can cram into the largest rectangle, I’d rather have a sky full of stars. On a good night, one can see a bakers dozen stars through the eerily comforting orange-purple glow of Houston sky. So when this city boy gets a chance to look up and lose count of the twinkling lights, I do.

I have less then a month left in Taiwan. The other day I had a quick phone interview with a business reporter asking about the internship program and he asked if I would consider working in Taiwan after school? A couple of nights ago I was asked if I really had to travel, couldn’t I just stick around? That query came attached with an offer of free lodging. I had to pause before I answered no to both of those questions. Life here can be very good and very easy. And compared to a world of mass consumption, fast lives and hard deadlines, I can see why many Westerners choose to spend part of their life here.

One of the things I was scared of and excited about was my lack of connections on this trip. But I am realizing that I will be traveling with good friends for most of this journey and will be meeting more along the way. The other interns here arrive before I did and are slowly leaving; I will be one of the last interns here for this summer and will really miss hanging out with them. I’ve had fun here so far with shenanigans a plenty and expect the good times to keep rolling during the next few weeks...

Hsinchu, Taiwan

Typhoons – 2, Typhoon days – 0. Kaemi was again a let down. When looking at the precipitation weather maps, Hsinchu County was the only spot in Taiwan that was not raining. Sitting on the stairs in front of the dorms and waiting for winds to tip a scooter to over gets is pointless if there is no tipping over to be happened.

Me, Mr. Walker and Mr. Brown have had been working out a routine recently. I hang out with John at night and then I get Guiseppe (he looks like a Guiseppe) to help me through the workday. As a part of the assimilation into the convenience store lifestyle, I have been sampling Taiwan’s fine array of cold canned coffee. Mostly they are the same, but I do have an affinity for Mr. Brown. Stuff is good, but I won’t be surprised if it is found to cause cancer. I have only encountered a couple of places that make good, tasty, so-caffeinated-you-get-a-little-loopy coffee. Yes, Starbucks is one of them.

Exploring is best done in solo or in small groups. I was wandering by myself on the other side of the tracks in downtown and ran across a temple, a really tasty night market, an artists warehouse space (with cheap beer and pizza) and a local Chinese opera. The pit of that performance had this fuzzed out organ going through a cheap amplifier that caught my ear. If you excuse the language differences, the sonic palette here has been fairly similar. The white noise of automobiles, pop music, air conditioners and other sounds of this hyper-connected world are fairly homogenized. But still, I do wish at times that I brought a field recording microphone and a mini-disc player.

I am trying to make the morning pass so I can spend seven hours on a bus to the southern most tip of Taiwan. I have been wanting to go to a beach for a minute; bottle tans just aren't cutting it.

Alishan, Taiwan

Alishan Forest Recreation Area is nature the way it is meant to be experienced: on wide asphalt pathways surrounded by thousands of tourists. A group of 7 interns took the 3 bus, 2 taxi path to Alishan. When we got off the bus we discovered our HI hostel reservation disappeared into the void of cyberspace. Poof. We were approached by a short elderly woman who offered up Japanese style accommodations at her private home stay. We piled into the bed of her little truck to check the place out. Now, I am not versed in the ways of the east, but my understanding of sleeping on tatami futons normally doesn't nessecarily imply cramped musty windowless attic spaces. We instead decided, given our lack of options, on claiming a ground floor bedroom where 4 could normally sleep comfortably.

We explored some of the large park. My interest in iconography only increases as I travel to a places where I can't decipher street signs. However, taking pictures of 36 plain signs listing the details of all the giant trees in the area is a hard project to make interesting. After a bit of wandering and snacking on the local delicacy of crispy pork sheets we had dinner. Not only did I again eat too much, but I had too much monosodium glutamate. Oh MSG, you clever little exitotoxic salt of a proteinogenic amino acid... when I have you it is just like puppy love. The nausea, weakness, chest pains, migraines and overexciting of my poor neurons is just so much that sometimes I just want to explode. Add to this I slept seven dwarves style in a single bed with male heavy group of giggly teenagers and young twenty somethings. The idiom 'not a happy camper' would be quite apt.

Got up at 3:30 AM feeling fine and we went up to the narrow gage alpine train to see the sunrise. Alishan is known for its sea of clouds when the sun peeks over the valley. The humidity wasn't high enough for clouds so it was more like sea of mist; beautiful nonetheless. It has been a minute since I was up for a sunrise. And while I normally don't greet the arrival of the coming day with applause, there was something about sharing that moment with a large gathering of people.

Hung out for a bit to catch some more nature and headed back to Hsinchu with a little stop in Taichung to hang out at one of the intern's family bungalow. Got home and showered and then proceeded to crash out. Sarcasm and headaches aside, I laughed and smiled a lot and feel recharged from this weekend. You know, sometimes it just nice to get away and have a change of perspective...

Hsinchu, Taiwan

It is funny how quickly the novel becomes the mundane. No one in my intern group takes pictures anymore with the exception of group snapshots. Where I once was nervous about crossing the street, now I blindly just walk focused more of the street food I am chowing down then the scooters charging towards me. The neon lights and dust are just a part of the landscape and the stare downs by the children under five just seem to come with the territory.

In the business lexicon (it amuses me that I once taught this stuff to new corporate peons), I would be described as an underutilized resource. Right now I am learning how to use an AFM and supposed to brainstorm new applications utilizing nanotechnology. The former is a bit tedious and requires guidance from busy people and the latter is a broad 5 year goal of mine that I am supposed to somehow compress into 5 weeks. The result is that I have much unstructured, unfocused and unsupervised time. The irony of my position, considering that I enrolled in a expensive and difficult graduate program and traveled half way around the world to escape the fate of being bored, sitting in a cubicle and surfing the web, doesn't escape me.

The other elements of hip hop are well represented in East Asia. On the tempered glass platform under lit with led powered fiber optics in the middle of the traffic circle where the ancient East Gate sits (Hsinchu is known for its traditional glass arts as well as high technology), it is common to see breakers and poppers practicing their moves. There are break dancing studios in downtown and some people in the club can move and not just jerk around arhythmically. There is plenty of graff downtown and in Taipei as well. In Tokyo I didn't understand why writers chose to throw up burners in English. With a country that has a rich history of calligraphy and graphic design, why not spit it out in Kanji? In Taiwan there are more tags in Chinese then English. Some have been amazing, but mostly garbage... this I imagine is a universal trend. I do wonder where on this trip I will see a Houston style ->NEXT<- tag…

Hsinchu, Taiwan

Since the typhoon canceled my plans and since I didn't have the money or energy to bus to Taipei, rave 'til dawn, and bus back in the morning I stayed in Hsinchu. It was much needed time to relax, read and think.

Saturday night we went back to Cammi. We were there on Thursday and I am really tired of the booty hip-hop club scene, though I did manage to enjoy myself. I won't say if I have, once upon a long time ago, surreptitiously drunk outside of a convenience store, but I will say I never pre-gamed inside one. A brightly lit experience that somehow felt a little wrong; but not as wrong as watered down $NT 250 drinks.

We were in the club for about twenty minutes when lights get turned on and the fuzz roll in. Police in other countries make me nervous. I think it is the combination of adolescent distrust of authority, fear of assault rifles and my inability to say "I want to speak to my lawyer". Turns out the 20 plus cops were just doing an ID check, which was pretty silly considering technicaly one can drink at 17. Any 16 year old with the money or the connections to get into an upscale club can be quickly and quietly be stuffed into a closet or jettisoned out a back door. And while the ethnically diverse foreigners were huddling together for protection, Taiwanese kids smushed together to get a snapshot with the police in the background.

Half an hour after fifty leave there was a BMX show in the club. Random? Yes.

Hsinchu, Taiwan

I knew hip-hop was an international medium, but I didn't realize what that meant. I am keeping track of a few things such as my favorite thing I've eaten on a stick (bbq squid... so good) and the least expected place to hear that 'Ms. New Booty' Bubba Sparks song. A touristy clam shack in Japan holds that spot right now. It isn't a US problem of vapid rhymes over bumping beats... this thing is worldwide.

Case in point: The Black Eyed Peas. Now I am not going to lie, I did shake my ass to 'Joints and Jam' and I own the first two records, but everything that came post-Fergie is pre-fab, formulaic, glossy pop drivel. It goes beyond so-bad-its-good back to so-bad-its-really-really-bad. They love the Black eyed Peas here; on the opening chords Taiwanese youth rush the floor and go all stupid dummy retarded. If I was DJing here I'd come with Serato and last half dozen Black Eyed Peas 12"s. I'd be eating caviar for breakfast.

Scratch that dummy part. Haven't heard too much hyphy out here yet. It is just blowing up stateside just like Houston did a while ago. I heard Chamillionaire in the largest mall in southeast Asia the other day. Unfortunately normal speed... They don't know nuthing about DJ Screw in the TW. I guess these things just take time. My prediction is that by the time I get to Europe there'll be no escaping E-40.

International? So you have a Bangladeshi-American in a club in Taiwan listening to a remix of Ying Yang Twins 'Shake': A song from Atlanta with a Jamacan dancehall star and a Miami reggaeton artist which is just an reedit of a Africa infuenced German dance pop classic. Hip-hop makes Esperanto more obsolete.

We are in the middle of a typhoon right now. It'd be a lot more exciting if I didn't have to be at work today. No cows or scooters flying around, just rain. Matter of fact if there wasn't all this buzz about typhoon Bilis, I would assume it was just a rainy day. Hype... all hype. What this typhoon did was kill the plans to go to the mountains this weekend. If the rain clears up, it might be Taipei. Not that its played out or something, I just want to see other parts of the Taiwan other then the dance clubs in its capital. Maybe I'll check out the dance clubs in Kaoshiung in southern Taiwan next weekend instead.

Taipei, Taiwan

Went to Taipei yesterday with to hunt down and acquire a sampler. I ended up with a digicam instead. Guanghua St. is loaded with these small shops hawking laptops, cameras and very very leetle mp3 players. The dozens of places we visited had about the same price for gear, but it was worth the exploration to find a place to shave a few hundred $NT off. A new camera was needed because my old one would start up about 40% of the time with a purple flickery screen. I had to give it a good thwack or 7 for the internal wiring to reconnect and be able to take pictures again. If that solution isn't proof that my 5 years of engineering education were worth the time and money, I don't know what is.

When clubbing in Taiwan as interns we go out baller style. Bottle service at our reserved corner table, a touch of Hugo Boss on my neck and Johnny Walker in my glass. Definitely a bit different then kicking it, sipping Lonestar at the Proletariat while one of my sound bwoys drops something fresh and abstract on the decks. The concepts are the same as getting paid large and spending it to look good in Manhattan or the financial district in San Francisco. The stereotypes of dudes looking for play, women dredging the creek bottom and people hustling to make connections and things happen are just as apt here.

I can get buy food, get around and have a good time in Taiwan without Mandarin or Taiwanese skills, but not being able to communicate is frustrating in surprising ways. It is the subtleties that get lost... Sometimes a quick turn of phrase or a dab of charm is needed, but I just don't have the delivery. I'd get one of those pocket digital translators, but I'd get robbed trying to bargain.

I was reading 'The World is Flat' on the way to Taipei. Outside my bus window pass forests, temples, semiconductor foundries and ugly uninspiring apartment blocks that could have been easily found in Newark or the outskirts of any other metropolis. A motivation for this trip is to gain perspective and some understanding of the forces shaping the beginning of the twenty first century. Before that was 'Kafka on the Shore' by Murakami. I eat up that magic realism stuff like a large helping of mango shaved ice milk. I hope that the things I see and the people I talk to make fertile my dreams and my imagination. The challenge for me is how to make this journey like the last few pages of a Garcia Marquez novel... How do I find a concise way to tie together these two personal motivations? And what do I do then?

Hsinchu, Taiwan

Sometimes I even get surprised by the situations I find myself in. For example if you told me that I would be in East Asia having coffee with engineers and executives discussing the future trends in Taiwanese educational policy after giving a presentation on the technology and entry barriers into the digital dental market, I might have bought it. But more likely I would have told you to go easy, get a grip and please pass to the left.

Or for another example, I would become a regular at a bar called Tipsy (Isn't that name just brilliant?) where the bar tenders are a couple of cute Mandarin speaking sisters that keep pouring me free drinks and call me 'coffee'. There I've been playing Iceman while my abc friend, Maverick, has had the older sister on his sights. The things I do in the name of cultural exchange.

The week has been procrastination, powering through hangovers and last minute panicking for this presentation. Nothing too much exciting... just adapting the life I will have here in Hsinchu for the next 6 weeks.

I think I might take a trip to Taipei again this weekend. I want to pick up a groovebox since I don't think I can keep my sanity without some sort of expensive music machine to occupy my time. Fiddling with bleeps and beats forces me to simultaneously relax, focus and feel if I hope to do it well. Plus, I have been talking about production for years now and it might come in handy later on this trip when I have time on trains I need to kill.

Taipei, Taiwan

Red Bull and vodka is evil. Not only does it taste funky, but it leaves me completely cracked out the next day or two. The boys and I rolled into Taipei on the bus and put our stuff in a HI hostel. ODed on more greasy street food at the Shilin night market and then head over to room 18 for clubbing. How come I travel across the world and all I catch is east coast hip hop? DJ Kool of 'Let Me Clear My Throat' fame (he did that routine twice) was spinning for the well heeled Taiwanese party set. Cool club, but it was hard to start conversations since all I really convey is hello.

Spent the next day wandering around the in the heat looking at parts of old town. I love the dehumanizing scale of civic architecture; it is all about oppressive size. There was some sort of football festival about the gear up at the Chiang Kai-shek memorial and after the prerequisite amount of touristy stuff I went to Da'an park to stumble into Canada day festivities.

Being a white westerner in Taiwan is like that Gershwin song. The basic necessities of life are cheap in Taiwan and one can still have a ridiculously good time. Lots of backpackers looking to teach conversational English and save a little cash before going back to Thailand or wherever. People don't take themselves too seriously and folks I talked to readily admit they little direction or idea of what to do with their life. The honesty is refreshing.

We went back to the Shilin night market where this time I was a little more discriminating with my food selection. Cabbed it over to Taipei 101 area and caught the MC Hotdog concert in the huge warehouse concert hall. He was like dying in my sleep, didn't feel it... though as bikini parties go, this was pretty silly good. Roc Radia dropped a party set afterwards (again with the east coast!?) and then caught the after parties at Plush and the Partyroom. Lost part of my tooth at Plush. Fun, but I seriously have to learn Mandarin if I want to explore the local scene. Back to the backpackers hostel at dusk.

I'm kicking it cubicle supastar style right now and have a presentation I need to get together by Friday. I am getting used to the gig, the food and being surrounded by a language I don't understand, but do feel the occasional pang of homesickness. Ok, gotta get some stuff done before lunch. I do hope it is Chinese again...