It's the Little Things...

In Hong Kong, Allison said the place was like Chinatown in Toronto, writ large.

Taiwan, on the other hand, was more different to her. It was all in the little things:



Whereas we might have dandelions or purple loosestrife growing in the neglected ditches alongside roads or barren dirt around vacant lots, in Taiwan, they have... banana trees. O.O



Lay's potato chips. You can see the translated flavor on the bag, "Original". The Chinese translation above it is much more descriptive. It says, "American classic original flavor". In Taiwan, just being American is a selling point. :)



No selling points needed here. :)

Allison said what's interesting is that, even if the bottles were completely unlabeled, she'd still know what it was. How's that for global marketing?

Not Your Average Motel

There's really no suitable translation in English for the type of hotel we stayed at in Taiwan. It was part motel, part hotel, part Las Vegas sensory overload.

It was motel-ish in the sense that every room includes a garage for you to park your car. The door to the room is inside the garage much in the same way many houses have garage entrances.

It was hotel-ish in the sense that the rooms are not cramped and cheap the way we might image motels to be.

And it was Vegas-ish in the sense that... well, check it out for yourself:



This was our room as seen looking left-center from the front door. Neon track lighting in the floor and ceiling and there in the right of the picture, a hot tub built right into the bathroom floor. You can see a TV in the wall at around knee-height.

If you look carefully, there's a black rectangle in the wall behind the curtain behind the big TV. That's the door into a private sauna.



This is the living area and bar. In terms of orientation, this is to the right of the first picture. (The chair in the very left of this picture with my -- *ahem* -- pants on it is at the very right of the top picture.)



And here's the vanity, which was to the right of the hot tub. In the right of this picture is the door to the washroom in which there's yet another TV.

I'd estimate the total size of the room to be about 1,000 sq. ft. Total TV count: 3.

Viva Las Vegas, baby! :)

Zookeeping 101

Our trip to Taiwan was primarily to visit my family. I'm the oldest son of the oldest son, so when my folks heard that I'd gotten married, they were all anxious to meet our new "Kate Middleton", so to speak, haha.

On our second day in Taiwan, my uncle took us to visit a friend of his who owns half a small town. She lives on a gated property with a menagerie of various birds and small animals. In addition to those in the video, she also has a Japanese crested rooster and his hens, a couple of ducks that live on her koi pond, and two large parrots, a blue one and a white one. The white one can say "Hello," and "How are you?" while the blue one says, "Good morning," and "Good night,"... in Japanese. I tried to get a video of them but wound up with just 5 minutes of them eating crackers. (And of course, as soon as I put the camera away, they both started yakking up a storm. Figures.)

Final Scenes from Hong Kong

This is Lan Kwai Fong, the ex-patriot center of Hong Kong.



Most of the restaurants and bars in this area have American, British, or Australian themes and cater mainly to foreigners (or, on weekends, locals who are looking to hook up with a foreigner :P).

We unwittingly wandered into LKF during their Carnival street event. I thought this was totally random; Carnival occurs in February, not sure why they chose November for Carnival. Maybe they just wanted an excuse to throw a party and someone happened to pick Carnival out of a hat. *shrug*

Allison said that she didn't feel like Hong Kong was a different country. "It's like just one enormous Chinatown, really. Not much different from Toronto."

Well, here are a couple of things we don't have in Toronto:



Cell phone service in the subway (which I wish we had).



McDonald's delivery (which I'm glad we don't).

Anyway, that's it for Hong Kong! Next up: Taiwan!

Lamma Island

The territory of Hong Kong is split up into a few parts with Mainland China at its northern border. Coming south out of China, you would enter the New Territories (which have been "new" for decades now), then Kowloon, which ends at the harbor. South across the harbor is Hong Kong Island.

In the sea around Hong Kong Island are the Outlying Islands, of which there are several larger ones such as Lantau Island (where the international airport and Hong Kong Disneyland is), Cheung Chau, and Lamma Island where people live and commute to Hong Kong and Kowloon.

We took a 30-minute ferry ride to Lamma Island on the Sunday of our Hong Kong trip. As of Saturday, the forecast called for rain but lo and behold, the weatherman was wrong; it was blazing sunshine all day.



Lamma Island is a kind of seaside resort town, except without the resorts. There are beaches, quaint townhomes, narrow streets lined with shops, people on bikes, and restaurants by the seashore.

Oh, and there's a power plant on the far side of the island away from town, you might have noticed that in the above picture.



This is a small temple near the beginning of our hiking route across the island. I'm not sure what religion this is; I know it's not Buddhist or Taoist. The picture on the wall looks kind of like a space alien so maybe it's Scientologist.



Lamma Island is not very urbanized so lots of homes have vegetable gardens in the back, and some of these gardens have fruit trees. Mainly, we just saw bananas and papaya; trees that are mainly tall but not very wide. One house had a lime tree, but we passed it before I had the notion to take pictures of everything. :(



And this is a pink flower tree that Allison liked. Although on closer inspection, we found that the pink "petals" were really leaves and the little white puffs in the middle were the actual flowers. Deceptive!

Teppanyaki

I think it's interesting how many cultures, over the centuries of civilization, have developed some sort of heat-a-metal-surface-and-cook-food-on-it style of cuisine. The Mongolians have it, so do the Koreans. And of course, the entire state of Florida is about cooking food on a metal grill over a fire, pretty much.

Allison and I had teppanyaki with my old college friends who are now based in Hong Kong (of which there are surprisingly many), and other former colleagues from back when I used to write ads there.

Teppanyaki is the Japanese version of cooking on a hot metal surface. "Teppanyaki" literally translates to "metal plate cuisine". I think they should have called it "kasainitsuiteyaki", which, according to Google Translator, should mean "on fire cuisine" because, really, setting the food on fire is the best part!



Now my nomination of best party trick of all time (avert your eyes if you're squeamish about freaks of nature):

When we scratch ourselves, the spot we scratched often goes pale (because the body detects trauma and closes off capillaries near the skin surface to reduce bleeding), and then pink or red again (because the body realizes it hasn't suffered an injury and re-opens capillaries and gets blood flowing again).

My friend, Kent, takes this to the next level. Now, I don't know why this happens, but I suspect it has something to do with histamine hypersensitivity. In any case, when you scratch him, not only does his skin go pale and then back to pink again, it... well, it puffs up like this:



This was the first time Allison saw this and she was both horrified AND fascinated.

And that's why Kent used to get all the girls in school. Weirdo. :P

Ocean Park

It was 90% my idea to go to Ocean Park. Allison has had the Charleston Aquarium for most of her life and she thinks dolphin shows are inhumane, so another park dedicated to sealife didn't interest her.

"But Allison," I said, "Ocean Park has pandas!"

She brightened. "Really?" Scowl. "What do pandas have to do with the ocean?"

"Uh... well, they're from the mountains of China... which is a country... with shorelines... uh, on the ocean."

She blinked at me, then shrugged. "Okay, sure. I love pandas."



And as promised, here are some more pictures of An An in mid-pace, and Jia Jia in mid-sleep.


An An pacing back and forth, back and forth.


Jia Jia taking an afternoon nap.

Coming out of the panda building, Allison proclaimed, "It was worth $40 just to see the pandas!"

... but we went to check out the fish anyway. :P


I found Nemo!


Cuttlefish. I'd seen these at the market near our hotel. Cool creatures but not worth $40 at current market prices.


Japanese spider crabs. These had leg spans of 3 to 4 ft. but spider crabs can grow up to 12 ft. in leg span.



So as you can see from this blog post, we made it! :)