Tea for two hundred

When there is something to celebrate at my company HQ here, they have a "tea party". Forget about whatever connotations that has for you. The celebration could be for someone leaving the group, having a baby, etc. They buy tea for everyone, which is usually some kind of cold flavored tea. It could be bubble tea but it usually isn't. In addition there's some kind of snack food, similar to what you might find in a night market. It's really a small meal, served at 3:30 in the afternoon. It throws off my eating schedule a bit, but I have to at least try a little of whatever it is to be polite. Plus hey, free food. In typical Taiwanese fashion, there's no real etiquette. Show up whenever you think the food will be there, grab some, stick around or not. I always try to thank the guy who bought, but sometimes we don't even know who it is.

This week they held a huge tea party for our entire division, which employs something like 1000 people here in Hsinchu. Now the next level of celebration requires a lot more stuff. You need an emcee with background music, a few people dressed up in commemorative t-shirts, with graphics that matched the posters and giveaways. They had a giant inflatable pink heart for some reason. Everyone got a box with about 6 different desserts in it. It was quite the production. I wish I had some idea what we were celebrating. My colleagues couldn't figure it out. We were sitting in a location with pretty poor acoustics and they couldn't understand the speakers. There was some kind of a caterpillar theme...like the division has gone through the larval stage and become a butterfly, maybe? Come to think of it, there wasn't even any tea.

A taste of my childhood

Remember the original McDonald's apple pie? That deep-fried pocket of pure joy with the perfect crispy, flaky crust? I hadn't had one in 15-20 years until the last time I was in Taiwan and I discovered that they still had them. Yesterday I went back to make sure that it wasn't all just a wonderful dream. It's real, and it's just as delicious as I remembered.

But seriously, US McDonald's, what were you thinking when you replaced this masterpiece with the pedestrian Baked Apple Pie? I feel like it happened long before the low-cal, low-fat hysteria really kicked in. Whatever the reason is, I'm sure if I heard it I would bang my head on a table. Wanna bet there's a lawsuit or focus group involved? Bring back the original!

A milestone of sorts

Having been away for a month, I had to get a haircut this week. I wasn't sure how I was going to manage that over here. It turned out to be a piece of cake because the hotel offers this service. I thought the whole experience was pretty typical of goods and services here in Taiwan. Specifically...

• They're open late. In this case, 9pm.
• They have a way to work around the language issue. She had a picture book of dudes with different haircuts with zoomed in pictures of the sideburns, etc. Just point.
• It comes with a little something extra. In this case, a vigorous head-rubbing with shampoo, and a little Kim-Jong-Il-style poofing up at the end. I didn't really need those but I always appreciate attention to detail.

Unlike most goods and services here, it wasn't particularly cheap, but that's because it happened at the hotel. Plus, considering she came to me instead of the other way around, I would expect to pay a little more.

Chinese is hard

I'm trying to learn some Mandarin and, at the risk of stating the obvious, it's hard. Suppose for example that you learn that the word for beautiful in Chinese is "mei". You might think that you now know some Chinese, but you don't. Chinese is tonal, so that syllable can be pronounced four different ways depending on how you inflect your voice. Also, like English, the same syllable might have a few different meanings. So "mei" also means each, plum, younger sister, flatter and eyebrow, and several more, according to my dictionary. I believe that if you want to say that each plum flatters a younger sister's eyebrow, that would go mei mei mei mei mei, with the right tones. Now if you knew the tone you could say "beautiful" but it would be tough to understand someone else saying it in casual conversation because they don't draw out the tones like on a language CD. You could pick it up from context, but that's going to be difficult since you only know one Chinese word. And of course you won't be able to read or write your word until you learn the character, and the right order to do the strokes. Also, the characters are different in Taiwan than in mainland China. And also, some people might speak a local dialect such as Taiwanese and not understand Mandarin. Who's ready for word #2?

I took a couple of adult education classes last year, so I'm not starting from scratch. I'm starting to pick up a few snippets of conversation that I overhear. So I'll get some scrap of meaning like "this guy doesn't have something" or "there are 22 somethings". On a road sign I'll often be able to pick out "big" and "mountain" out of a string of characters. It's quite useless at this point but I think the mind likes to try to make sense of its surroundings.

The third in a series

I'm trying to start a collection of pictures of myself with person-sized anthropomorphic food. So far I have been pictured with the dhosa and the kiwi fruit. Here I am taking a bite out of a dumpling at famous dumpling restaurant Din Tai Fung in Taipei. Several people told me about this place and it lived up to the hype with delicious steamed dumplings.

I'm not trying to be snobbish and only get my picture taken with exotic foods, by the way. It just so happens that I've run across more opportunities in Asia. If I see a person-sized slice of pizza or hot dog and I have my camera with me, I'm going to add it to the portfolio.

Temples and Night Markets

Taiwan is all about their temples and night markets. I've been to a few of each already. They sometimes go together. The most lively temple I've been to is the Longshan temple in the western part of Taipei. The temple itself, like the others I've been to, is decorated to distraction with brightly colored dragons and curlicues on the roof and lots of gold on the interior. On top of that there are elaborate temporary decorations like paper lanterns and the tiger here and mechanical puppets. On Saturday afternoon the temple was full of visitors praying, singing and lighting incense and paper money. At another temple near Alishan there was a procession of people setting off fireworks, dancing and doing kung fu. If you're a young boy here, I imagine you beg your parents to take you to church.

The night markets are long pedestrian streets (plus the occasional rogue scooter) with both permanent stores and temporary stalls set up on both sides. You can buy pretty much anything--food, toys, clothes, DVDs, etc., plus there are carnival games for kids. It's a little like an American street fair but they're open every night and there's more variety of everything. I haven't scratched the surface of the street food that you can buy at these things, but it seems like a big part of the culture here. Visitor guides to different places in Taiwan always mention right up front what the local snack food specialties are.