Thank you so much to everyone who has taken the time to visit my blog during the last 2 years, and especially those who have posted comments. If you would like to email me, my email address is
'roger' and then 'gordon' and I'm at 'gmail dot com'. There are no spaces in my address. Sorry to make it so cryptic, but if I just give it to you, I'll get lots of spam mixed in with your friendly emails!
I'm not out of touch, just not posting on this blog anymore. I'll be adding stuff to my site in future and I'm trying to expand it as much as possible, so have a look periodically.
This is a blog for family, friends or anyone else interested. It's about me and it's about Taiwan. It's also about me in Taiwan. Pop in here every time you want to know what's happening in my life. If you're a first time visitor, PLEASE CHECK THE ARCHIVES FOR INTERESTING PHOTOS AND STUFF. By the way, I love comments on my blog ;)
Saturday, October 28, 2006
Closing...
I've left Taiwan. Sad as it was to go, I'm enjoying living in South Africa again. I'm trying to get into web design and as a start I've made my own page at my own domain. If you're interested, you can take a look at
www.rogergordon.net
It's not the best, but it's a start.
www.rogergordon.net
It's not the best, but it's a start.
Saturday, August 19, 2006
New phone
Friday, August 18, 2006
Alishan 4
Alishan 3
Alishan 2
Alishan 1
My company (Hess Educational Organisation) has a 'foundation' which they put money into in order to help kids in Taiwan who don't have much. I went up to Alishan (Ali Mountain) a week or two ago to help out and had a great time with some good kids. Having a 5 and 12-year-old in the same classroom proved to be a little difficult to control, especially since my Chinese is so bad, but it was great fun anyway. Here's a pic of the kind of view you get from the little school in the Mountains.
Yakiniku
is the general term for (Japanese?) barbecue restaurants in which you pay a set fee and get to barbecue/braai as much food as you want to for an hour and a half. I've been to a few of them recently and can highly recommend them to the meat hungry visitor on a budget. Normally an evening at one of these restaurants costs about US$13 or so.
Friends
Cheers, Craig and Jo!
My church
...just got a website. Visit it at www.taichungchristianchurch.com Here's a picture of a hand and the rest of church during one of our Sunday morning worship services. Oh and if anyone is looking for a Bible based non-denominational church that has bilingual everything, come along and visit us. Address details are on the church website.
Thursday, July 06, 2006
Taichung Science Park - again
Jade Mountain 9
Jade Mountain 8
At the second lodge known as Paiyun lodge, I again got to witness one of the most fantastic night skies of my life. This is my first attempt at doing 'star trails' - long exposure photographs of the night sky. This was a 30 minute exposure which got a bit too bright due to what I can only guess was the light from the milky way.
Jade Mountain 7
Jade Mountain 6
Jade Mountain 4
Jade Mountain 3
Jade Mountain 2
The roads around Taiwan aren't that stable due to the torrential rains, precipitous geography and seismic activity. Nevertheless Taiwan is covered with thousands of amazing engineering models in the form of roads in places that other countries wouldn't even consider. Things do go wrong sometimes and as you can see in this photo, we had to hang around waiting for a road barrier to be erected after heavy rains had washed away a portion of the road.
Jade Mountain 1
I went to Jade mountain 2 weeks ago. Jade mountain is Taiwan's tallest and is so called because of it's summertime green hue. The summit is 3952m high, and the area around it is very beautiful indeed and definitely not to be missed if you are in Taiwan for even a short time. I had such a good time that the Jade Mountain area is my new favourite place on earth. While travelling to the first lodge (known as 'Tataka') our tour group stopped at a restaurant. This old man decided that my foreign face was quite a novelty and warranted a 'Hellooo' from the table opposite. He was too cute not to have a photo taken with. Funnily, 2 or his relatives were about to kill each other over a financial argument regarding their inheritance at the same time, but he didn't seem too concerned...
Tuesday, July 04, 2006
Thanks for visiting!
Noise
Taichung, once it wakes up, is really noisy. It's so noisy that you can't even hear the huge amount of air traffic that passes overhead everyday. At 5am though, it seems that every jet on the island takes off at the same time, leaving a fantastic pattern of jet streams across the sky. I didn't manage to get a good picture of this pattern, but I did capture a plane making it's own streamer in the sky.
Good morning.
Taichung Science Park
To attract money to the city of Taichung, the government has set aside a huge block of land for hi-tech factories. I found the soon-to-be-completed Taichung Technology Park the other day by mistake and was amazed by the incredible looking architecture and size of the various semiconductor foundries I saw there. The security guards were quite picky about photos and cameras, so I wasn't able to get too many decent pics, but hopefully this will give you an idea of the feeling of the place.
Strange fruit
Taiwan Tea
Taiwanese people love their tea and almost every road has at least one tea shop. The variety is quite amazing and you can get anything from straight green or red tea, to pudding milk tea with passion fruit mixture (actually I just made that up, but I'm sure some shop could make it for you). Here are some varieties ordered by ladies at my school.
Golden
What?
Sigh...
Wednesday, June 07, 2006
Typing Chinese...
...is slow, when you're not a good student. I've decided to accelerate my learning I'm going to try to type everything in Chinese, even if I haven't officially learned the characters yet. The general process goes like this...
Try to remember the word you're looking for.
Think about how to 'spell it' in Mandarin phonetics.
Try to remember the correct tone for each syllable.
Search in the back of my book to find the correct tone, and try to remember what the character looks like.
Look for the correct phonetic symbols on the keyboard.
Type them.
Type the correct tone.
Make sure that the character is correct (by this time I've usually forgotten, so I have to check my book again).
And voila! You have successfully typed a single character! Translating 6 written sentences from English into Chinese usually takes me about 2 hours. However, I can do it verbally in about 1 minute.
Saturday, June 03, 2006
Congratulations
Rice Paddy
Tension...
Dragon Boat Festival
Sunday, May 21, 2006
Scooter City
Old Phospor lighting
Well the image is old, from December of last year actually. With my new computer I've increased the brightness a bit so now it's possible to see it properly. I have a watch and a small compass which both glow in the dark and I used them to illuminate my face while I was lying in bed one evening. The exposure was about 2 minutes long.
Sunrise
Friday, May 19, 2006
Always something to do.
Birds?
Yes, the real kind. There really aren't many of them in Taiwan, it seems. Well I guess that's to be expected in the urban area I live in. It's just hard to get used to when there is such a rich diversity of bird life in my home country of South Africa. Anyway, here are some birds and a blue sky, too! What a good day that was ;)
[Correction... It appears that Grace, a friend of mine had my camera when this photo was taken, so technically it's not my photo at all!]
Thursday, May 11, 2006
Wednesday, May 10, 2006
Sunset over Danshui
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