Strange fruit

As I've noted before, Taiwan has some strange fruit. Here's a disturbingly-purple photo of a type of fairly tastless but shockingly bright fruit, and what it does to your tongue!

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.

Once-Was-Sticky Ball

Some are better quality than others...

Golden

Here's another old photo which I don't think I ever posted. It's the inside of a temple at Sun Moon lake and it's one of the most ornate I've seen.

What?

I have no idea what this means... A lot of English in Taiwan is purely decorative, the way Chinese characters are trendy in the West.

Sigh...

Here's an old photo of some horrible homework. I never knew anyone could get it SO wrong in just 2 simple sentences.

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.

Congratulations

Congratulations again must go to my room mate and good friend Rob Sparrow on his impending marriage to Dorienne Spencer. Here's a photo of a photo being taken of the very happy couple at their Taiwanese 'mock' wedding. They'll get married properly in South Africa in a short while.

Rice Paddy

Long exposure of me running with a torch in a rice paddy. The dip in the light is me falling on my rear end in the mud. It was kind of hard to see what was going on. Good thing only one person saw that happen ;)

Tension...

There's nothing quite as tense as a good game of Table Soccer. This was taken at my church and was a post prayer meeting match between the pastor of our church and one of my mates.

Dragon Boat Festival

This occured on the 31st of May this year. However there wasn't much celebration this time round, because everyone's attention was on the current political scandal involving the president's son. At least one of my classes got to celebrate by having their own dragon boat races.

Scooter City

One of the most prominent things about Taiwan is the sheer number of scooters you see everywhere. This is a shot of a department store parking lot in Taichung named 'Tiger 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

GuGuan is a great place to drive to to see a sunrise if you have the inclination (and can wake up at 3:30am!)

Always something to do.

Taiwan has to be the most convenient country in the world. Where else can you go carting at 10pm on a Sunday?

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!]

Mongolian Style Stir Fry

Just a shot taken at a night market near my house.

Sunset over Danshui

Here's a picture from an area known as 'Danshui' which I'm told means Iron Water in Mandarin. It's about 30 minutes from Taibei (the capital of Taiwan) and accessible via the MRT line. Friends and I visited there on Saturday and I took this picture overlooking the Danshui river at Sunset

Dakeng Scenic area, #2.

Dakeng Scenic area, #1.

Random Taichung night photo.

Taichung Harbour Area

Only occasionally does the air in Taichung get clean enough to warrant taking pictures of the city. Today's heavy rain and strong winds seem to have washed the pollution away for a while, so I took a few random shots from my 24th floor rooftop.

Taiwan's English learning industry is HUGE. Go to any decent sized bookshop, and you'll see racks and racks filled with all kinds of English learning magazines. Most are accompanied with audio CDs and some even have DVDs. A friend of mine works for an English learning publishing company and managed to organise me a job being filmed lip syncing English dialogues with another foreigner, who you can see here. Hope she doesn't mind me posting this!

Here's a cliche'd photo of Taiwan. Rice paddy in the foreground and modern city buildings behind it.

And here are 2 of Taiwan's most famous mucicians, the lead singer for a band called 'Mayday' on the left and 'OO Bai' (which means 500). From what I can tell, OO Bai is kindof the Bono of Taiwan, with his shades and attitude. Corrections welcome!

I went to the 'Tai Kuh' Rock Festival/Concert thing the other day with a friend. It was an awesome experience to see some of the biggest names in Taiwanese music all playing one after another. There were about 30000 people there but they were all amazingly chilled and well behaved, and I didn't spot a single drunk person. Not one. Weird, by western standards, but I really like it. Actually, Taiwanese people are pretty mature and self controlled in general and know how to behave in a crowd. The band playing here is 'Wung Fu', who play kindof 60's/70's style rock with a Taiwanese flavour. They have an unusual dorky sound but are excellent musicians. Good enough for me to have one of their CDs.

Hin Tsong Ming! That means 'so smart' in Mandarin and it's what I thought about Taiwanese people when I saw the local city government using a forklift to pick up cars while they repainted the parking bay lines. I was a bit worried about the forklift tipping over though... I guess this also makes you less confident in the effectiveness of all those mail order steering locks!

I'm in Taiwan so I can post as many red black and white pictures as I want, even if they look mostly the same! This one was taken in the garden of my aparment complex during some light rain.

Just foolin' with soft focus and neon lights.