Merry Christmas

Yes it was a week ago.  That's when I got back, after 18 days on Turtle Island, my longest trip yet, in probably the harshest weather I've experienced in Taiwan so far.  But that makes it sound bad.  It isn't so bad.  Just windy.  And surprisingly cold.  Constantly.  Taiwan doesn't have heaters, especially not in a coast guard barracks.

So why so long this time?  I did say 12 days, didn't I.  Well, a funny thing happened.  I forgot the radio signal receiver, probably the one most necessary thing to do my job.  So I had to stay an extra week to collect the data I didn't get the first week, and I spent the first week picking plants.  My boss told me to make a field checklist to use before going into the field from now on.  Guess what's number 1.

It wasn't bad though, although a little lonely at times.  We had to move into the coast guard barracks because the visitor center was boarded up for the winter (so no internet) and I got to get to know a couple of the soldiers.  I also am on better terms with the dogs, mostly because I feed them cookies.  They love cookies.  One old grandmother dog decided to make me her master the last few days and follow me everywhere.  It was actually kind of nice to have a companion to come with me when I went hiking in the woods with my yagi antenna.  One day I had to climb through the thick underbrush of a steep slope where I had stupidly dropped a book (of all things to carry and lose in the field, a book?) the day before, and she and her two grandsons came with me.  They were just the right height to fit under the giant elephant ear plants and tangled bamboo vines, so they raced around like mad in the brush around me, occasionally coming to sit nearby, panting, grinning, and watching me struggle through the tangle of foliage.  They were really happy about running around in the forest.  I think they were bred to be hunting dogs, in England, long ago, for a man in breeches and a red coat, to root out ducks or something.  I think I fulfilled their purpose, or something vaguely like it.

A clearing of elephant's ears

Jolly good show, dogs.  Jolly good.

The last day scared me a little.  The boat only comes every 6 days in the winter, and this trip brought the maximum number of people, 17 total, including repairmen to fix the cell phone tower on the island, repairmen to fix the internet in the control tower, some random coast guard-soldiers in orange jumpsuits that looked like they were still in high school who just stood around, and the captain's friends who just came to take pictures and hang out in a gazebo about a hundred feet away from the dock.  One of the coast guard told me I couldn't get on because the boat was too full, at the max of 17 including the captain, a rule that is strictly  upheld in the winter.  Well eff that.  I'd like to say I fought my way on, but I just got on.  Nobody cared.  That guy was just being a dick. Eighteen days is enough.  I wanted to get home.  For Christmas.

So I'm back.  Until Jan. 6, at least.

Going

Going to the island... not going to be internet (for real) unless I break into the now-boarded-up visitor center to connect online.  Or if the coast guard has some I can borrow.  Sad how I depend on these things sometimes.

I've been busy with applications and stuff.  Hopefully I can get most of it done in the (relative) solitude of the island.  I hear it will be cold - for real? or just Taiwan cold.  Although Taiwan cold is a persistent but mild chill that slowly wears you down to the bone.  Although always above freezing, it follows you everywhere since there are no heaters here.  So you feel coldish in the end.  Not the worst I've felt though.

Anyways, perhaps this is the last post for 12 days.  Perhaps.

One Hundred Days

One hundred days after my grandmother was cremated, we moved her from her temporary resting place to her formal eternal resting place.  Her urn was strapped to her eldest son and a small procession of golf carts climbed up the tomb-laden hill that would hold her entire family's final resting places.  She is the first inhabitant.

Chinese traditions and a lack of space on a small island have created huge parks of tombs which range as widely in architecture and appearance as the residences of the living do in Taiwan.  Our family invested well in eternal real estate - the windswept hill is neatly kept by a professional company, all smooth reflective grey marble, silently overlooking a rugged seashore below.  We chanted buddhist rites and made offerings to the god of the earth and to our grandmother.  We burnt her paper money to play mahjong with so she could make friends with her new neighbors.

Rest in peace, Nai-nai.  You are home.

A Taiwanese Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving is one American holiday that hasn't made its way to Taiwan yet.  So they're not sure when exactly to start putting up Christmas decorations and playing Christmas songs.  I've been seeing Christmas trees and hearing jingly songs for a week already.  Has this already started in America?  I'm not sure if they celebrate Christmas here either, or if it's some kind of corporate gimmick for pushing products or a homogenizing side-effect of globalization.

One of my coworkers knows that Thanksgiving has something to do with Indians because Pet Society on Facebook started featuring Indian-themed items or something, and another coworker learned about turkey stuffing in his poultry science class in graduate school.  Poultry science?

Anyways, today was Thanksgiving.  My mom told me to eat something special and record it, so here it is.  I went to Guang-Hua Technology Market with some co-workers and ate the following things:

Black bean tofu soup with peanuts, mung beans and 粉粿 (a kind of chewy jelly made of sweet potato starch)

Green scallion-oil-pancake (a literal translation - I have yet to see an appealing, yet accurate, translation of this dish)  The message on the wrapper is particularly fitting.

(Not pictured: one of those rice triangles wrapped in seaweed and stuffed with some kind of meat (salmon) that they sell at 7-eleven)

Okay, it's not much of a Thanksgiving Dinner.  But I got to spend it with some nice people, and isn't the core of Thanksgiving about spending it with people?

Enjoy Thanksgiving!  I miss you all in America!

Monkey!

Man, working in the zoo is awesome. Sometimes I feel like I'm in a children's story. Yesterday, a lady came in and told us to take care of her monkey for her. The monkey ran around and got into all kinds of trouble and we had to clean up after its mess!

Oh no!

But seriously, little monkeys are really neat. Maybe because they're so close to human. I think it's funny how we were casually given responsibility over a monkey.


His name is Lychee. He had to be raised separately from his mother because his father broke his arm when he was little.

What do you do

...when you have a chance of realizing a former dream, but you're too busy trying to live your life, now?

For a while I wanted to learn kung fu.  Like, super-learn it and have it permeate the fabric of my everyday life.  Like Wong Fe-hong stuff.  If a cup fell off a table, I'd catch it without thinking kind-of-thing.  And I was lucky enough to have some teachers willing to teach me, for free.  I did my best to learn what they had to teach, but in the end, I just felt like it was exercise.  Occasionally, I might get this glimmer of a feeling that my body had a potential to achieve the grace of movement and composure I had only imagined and seen in movies; but I thought about it too much and my movements remained coarse and approximate, and it all was just exercise in the end.

Yesterday I attended a Bagua Quan class at Jiang Kai-shek Memorial.  I had seen them practicing whenever I attended kickboxing class (definitely more exercise) and I noticed that their movements were like what I dreamed of: efficient, graceful, composed.  The class was how good traditional kung fu classes have been described to me: no belts, just practice, and at a slow pace.  The students moved with precision, having completely mastered each movement before learning the next one.  I learned how to make circles with my hands.

I have confidence that anyone who is willing to learn diligently from this teacher will learn very well.  Just watching him demonstrate moves is like viewing art: in order to describe it, inspires metaphors.  He wasn't quick or powerful; he was water, he was a whip.  He was a really nice guy, but discerning.  He knew I went to kickboxing.  "Don't you get enough exercise?" he asked.

His classes are four days a week.  They cost 4000 NT (120 USD) a month.  I cannot afford that much time in a month.  And if I don't go to all the classes, he won't feel like he can teach me, and the money is wasted on me trying to learn and relearn the same thing.  When I was in Beijing, I payed for a week of classes on Yi-quan, where I learned how to stand in different positions and feel Qi.  I only remember one now.

But for all my rationalizations and excuses, I am just afraid of committing and possibly abandoning a lifestyle I have already constructed.  There are schedules, applications, people to attend to.  Today I went shopping with my cousin instead of my second Bagua class.

I could have told my cousin I didn't want to go shopping with him and left him at my grandfather's house where we had had dinner, to go to class.  I don't even like walking around looking at expensive stuff you could dream of buying.  But he's a nice guy.

The students of the class never talked to me unless the teacher told them to.  They looked right past me, never acknowledging me, even when class was over.  I thought they were stuck-up assholes.  But then again, I never liked talking when I was practicing.  I wanted to concentrate.  I could be like this.  I could leave my cousin who is excited we are going to play Red Alert 2 and aloofly practice kung fu.  But I would lose something else.

The one thing I learned from ANTH 146: Moral Consciousness was that being human means a series of choices that are each a sacrifice.  There is no right answer, only constant sacrifice.

This may sound a little heavy for thinking about whether or not to take a kung fu class, but I think this dilemma is part of a larger problem.  I am unwilling to sacrifice.  I want the good parts of both sides.  This is why I switched my major every semester.  This is why I can't figure out what to do with my life.  There is always something I don't want to let go of, and so I can't sacrifice.  I am thus stuck in between.

Sorry if you read this entire thing.  I'll go back to posting pictures and blurbs soon.

Conferences

I attended the International Asiatic Black Bear Symposium that was held here this week.  I got to hear talks from experts on black bears from all different aspects of research.  Besides the tracking and genetic stuff you'd expect, there are also people analyzing heavy carbon and nitrogen ratios to determine what kind of foods bears ate.  I'm getting interested in what people can do with biology and geography.  Biogeography.  I want to look into that.

Conferences are great.  You get a lot of free food.  That's one of the main reasons why this office was empty during the conference: free food.  The speakers are interesting, if you can understand them.  The conference was in English, and sometimes I couldn't understand the speakers.  I don't know how much my Chinese coworkers understood.  The same as if I went to a conference in Chinese and most everybody spoke Chinese funny because it was their second language, I guess.

But you know what annoys me about conferences?  There always seems to be someone in charge of the microphone who is super paranoid about it and has to mess with it.  I have noticed this is common in Taiwan and this event was no exception.  This one guy would always creep on stage slowly and then wrangle with the microphone stand on the podium, all the while bent over as if he had something to hide behind.  I think he must have chickened out halfway through readjusting the microphone, because he always ran off stage leaving the microphone pretty much in the same position as it was before.  All the while with the bewildered speaker (and audience) watching.  And there was this one broken microphone that made a lot of static that they kept giving to people.  I think they kept getting all the microphones mixed up and forgot which one was the bad one.

Owl

The last few days at Turtle Island became super busy when a bunch of people came to live with me in the visitor center.  The coast guard commander went on leave (he's a nice guy, by the way) and was replaced by up to 8 people all living on the floor and couches.  A-Hong and the graduate student were there, along with some zoo coworker transients on vacation and two (2) separate camera crews.  This project must have a lot of people watching it.  With A-Hong there, we went on nightly walks and bat watches, each trip was sure to find something new that I would never see if I was living on the island alone.  I don't really go out at night alone.

One day, A-Hong and the graduate student picked up an owl.  It practically flew down to A-Hong.  It was a severely undernourished Brown Hawk-owl with a poorly healed broken wing.

We fed it crickets by hand, then 6-inch long centipedes and geckos.  It would sometimes refuse to eat, and we had to rip apart the larger food and slowly feed it in small portions.  Over several days, it grew stronger and could fly up to the ceiling, but it would never be able to be self-sustaining.  So we brought it back to the zoo with us.

Transporting birds is usually done by stuffing them in straight tubes so they can't move their wings or get out.  A-Hong wrapped the owl in his shirt and taped it up.  Man, did it look mad.

So now I'm back in Taipei, and the owl is at A-Hong's house.  I'm going back to Turtle Island on the 20th.

Career choices

I was looking at grad schools and I realized for the nth time that I have no idea what I want to do for a graduate degree.  I pushed away from the desk and sighed in disgust.

"What's wrong?"  I had forgotten he was there.  He was the new commanding officer on Turtle Island, probably about my age and not long out of college.  He has taken up the habit of coming to the visitor center where I live and playing Warcraft 3, sitting opposite to me at the visitor information desk where the internet is.  He never looked like a commanding officer to me.  Right now he's wearing a white t-shirt with its collar stretched out, and he usually walks around in flip flops and shorts, with a blue uniform jacket that looks like the high school gym uniforms in Taipei.

"I'm contemplating graduate school"

"Choosing schools?"

"No, a major."  I smile, embarrassed.  "Are you going to graduate school after this?"

"No, I'm a soldier."

"So this is... your work?"  Usually, Taiwanese males complete their compulsory military duty and get on with their lives.  I always got the impression that it was a brief but necessary obstacle, but it never occurred to me that being a soldier could be a job.

"My career," he affirmed.  Sensing my confusion, he explained: "I didn't know what else to do."



Maybe I should let myself get drafted, after all.

Birds, wind and dogs

Turtle Island is a rest stop for migratory birds.  Some of these birds have flown long, long distances and may have a long ways to go still.  So you see a lot of tired birds here.  I guess this one was so tired it fell over and died.

The Northeast Wind has started blowing, fiercely, relentlessly.  The air has turned cool, kind of like how fall is in my distant memories of America (I have been here that long).  I like to run up to the sea wall and stare at the roiling white caps and the spray against the tiny concrete dock, and lean against the cold, wet sea wind.  It makes me feel like I live on a lonely, rocky, windswept island in the North Atlantic.  Like a lighthouse keeper.
Of course, I am not alone.  There is the Coast Guard here, and their four confusing dogs.  They seem to alternatively like and dislike me, but I think it is just part of some grander scheme.  Once, they came barking and circling down the path towards me, and the white one came to stand confidently by my side while the black ones kept their distance, unwilling to come near me.  I felt like I was in the middle of a standoff.  Keep me out of it, dogs.

Sometimes I get bored and imagine dog politics.

News from Turtle Island!

So there is internet here.  They did fix the internet.  Thank you, somebody out there; I'm sorry I doubted you.

In other news, black foot disease!  Yup, black foot disease is the result of drinking arsenic rich water in Taiwan (and Taiwan only, apparently).  You can get it right here in Turtle Island!  So I will be using bottled water for everything from now on.  Too bad that darned grad student told me there was already enough bottled water on the island and I didn't need any.  Now I think 3 bottles may not be enough.

Don't worry though, they're big bottles.

Now, courtesy of A-Hong:

woooooo

Back to The Island again

I'm going back to Turtle Island again.  I found out at 2 this afternoon and have been rushing to prepare ever since.  It kind of annoys me how sudden this is.  Oh well.

There will be no internet on the island this time, unless they miraculously fixed it while we were gone.  Which is unlikely considering tourist season is over and no one is going to look at the internet anyways.  Except me of course.

I didn't have time to buy any books to read there.  Maybe I'll bring my Biology GRE book.  I think I may download a couple ebooks instead.  Any suggestions in the next tens of minutes?

Anyways I'm off to pack.  I guess I took a mini hiatus last week; now I will be taking another one.  It's going to last one to two weeks.

Oh yea, I bought a bike today, before I knew I was going.  I'm going to have to start controlling my spending from now on.  This month was crazy.

Well, I gotta go pack.

Wish me luck.

I needed some peace.

Bozeman, Montana

Meet Judy

She's a fat bat. I feed her on Thursdays and Fridays, the empty husks of mealworms which I've squeezed out like toothpaste for the tiny and invalid bat, 甜不辣 ("Sweet Not Spicy").

Running in the zoo

I have begun going on short runs in the back roads of the zoo.  I am optimistic about it - the air is relatively clean, the view is of the rugged mountainous outskirts of Taipei, and the roads are empty, except for the occasional cartoonish zoo train that trundles by, full of kids.  I want to avoid these trains if I can; I don't want to become an unintentional feature on their probably disappointing, un-cartoony ride through the monotonously overgrown backroads of the Taipei Zoo.

Today was windy and almost cool, almost like an autumn back in North Carolina, without the crisp air, but with an "ah, dried-sweat" relief of passed summer heat.  I went exploring through a tunnel near the Conservation and Research Center and found my way into the gallery of back doors into the zoo exhibits.  As I ran through this surreal landscape of fake weathered boulders abruptly abutting harsh metal cages, I suddenly came upon a giraffe.  It was already watching me as I came around a corner, anticipating this loud runner with mild curiosity, lips frozen absurdly in a misaligned mid-chew.  It stood like a statue, turning only its head in creaky spurts, rotating with me as I ran by.

A Correction, and more Singapore food

I'm sorry - Hainanese Chicken Rice is chicken-flavored rice, so the name does use the same grammar as the other foods I listed two posts ago.  It guess I just assumed that Singaporeans use funny grammar and that white rice is plain rice.  However, they do not, and white rice actually can have chicken flavor.  I didn't even eat it.  Jeez.

What I did eat in Singapore, and a lot of it, was Indian bing.  I'm calling them by a Chinese label because the English word pancake doesn't seem to do this food group justice.  And tortilla, while it does fall under this same food category in my eyes, is specific to another culture.  Bing to me, are flat, savory bread products that, although flat and round, are not spongy or cakey like pancakes. They are springy, doughy and chewy.  They are best warm, when they are the softest, and get harder and chewier over time.  Okay, I guess you could call them flatbreads, but that sounds like a "Healthy Alternative" entry at a burger restaurant.

Crispy "tissue prata" topped with chocolate and strawberry syrup

Chapati, Prata, Thosai and Murtaba.  I had like two or three of these a day there.  I don't know much about Indian food, but from my experience Chapati is plain and used to dip or grab food, while prata I've seen plain or stuffed with filling (ice cream, onions) or topped with something (chocolate syrup, honey, curry).  Thosai I've seen served in a crispy cylinder the size of a small poster, or stuffed.  Murtaba I've only had once, with anchovies dispersed throughout the batter, like a Korean pancake.

Masala Thosai on the left, stuffed with egg and potatoes, and chapati being dipped into mutton curry on the right

Indian food is a wonderfully sensual experience for me.  The myriad flavors from the myriad and specific spices used in each dish are so complex and deep that each bite is like an endless and unfathomable well of oral stimulation for your tongue to contemplate.  To use my hands to eat is liberatingly messy.  It gives me a new connection to my food, a tactile addition to the sensory palate of eating: in addition to how it tastes, food can also smoosh between your fingertips, run down your knuckles, be warm and wet on your skin, or dry and dusty.  Yea sure, most places in Little India provide forks and spoons, but where's the fun in that?  Most places also provide hand washing stations, too.  I probably went too far with this: smearing food all over, getting it all over my face, people wondering, "why doesn't that kid just use his fork?"  Well it's the tactile addition you're missing out on.

Singapore - Durians

People seem to either love durians or hate them.  Apparently they can have the most delicious flavor which is indescribable, because I have never had a durian-lover explain what it exactly tastes like to them.  To me, its taste consists of a biting odor similar to raw garlic or onions, which overpowers the faintest hints of creamy sweetness, which I'm guessing is what this fruit's adherents love so much and perhaps have better facilities to appreciate; just like how some people are genetically incapable of smelling the change in the odor of their pee after eating asparagus or cannot stand the taste of cilantro.

Singapore had a lot of durians for cheap.  The durian-lovers in our group went crazy, while everyone else went in the other direction, as fast and as far as they could.  I stuck around with the durian lovers, one could say unfortunately.

Singapore - lah!

Well, I am back from Singapore and since I didn't get a chance to write about it there, I will talk a little bit about it here.  We lived in a clean, new hostel in Little India called "The Mitraa," or friend, operated by an Indian-born Singaporean who, along with a Filipino named Nelson, sleeps less than four hours a day.  The front patio was occupied late into the night by a pair of Irishmen who were always drinking and smoking with a quiet Indian student, and any foreigner they could get to play cards with them.


We spent the first two entire days in Singapore visiting their zoos: the bird park, the regular zoo, and the night zoo.  We went from morning till closing time, until our feet hurt and we were hungry because the food in the park was too expensive for us to waste our money on.  My zoo employee companions viewed these park visits with passionate and enthusiastic diligence, maybe a little relieved to be within their familiar field amongst an exotic and unfamiliar environment.

I did get to meet up with Annabelle, who took me away from the parks for a while to tour Singapore's glittering consumerist side - malls, strips and mall food courts.  We had Singaporean food and talked about Singlish, which I think is some kind of creole birthed out of Chinese and Malay people trying to teach each other English.  Indians were probably also responsible.  This diversity and fusion is apparent in the food we ate and their names: "Mee Goreng," "Laksa" and "Hainanese Chicken Rice."  The first is a noodle dish, "mee" being "noodles" in some kind of Chinese dialect, according to Annabelle.  Laksa is a spicy noodle soup, whose name originates in Persian or Chinese or Hainanese (Wikipedia).  And the name "chicken rice" is just funny to me, because it's just two nouns thrown together, as if in a desperate attempt to get the point across that there is chicken and there is rice in here.  The name would make more sense if the dish was some kind of chicken-flavored rice and "chicken" acted as an adjective.  But instead it's like calling a sandwich "meat bread" or a banana split "ice cream banana."  It exemplifies my impression of Singlish.  I do hear that they have grammatical structures in there somewhere; but to me, it sounds mostly like gibberish that might be Chinese, but suddenly has English words, and that convalesces into funny-sounding sentences.

Bread Ice Cream!

Here I go...

Well, I'm going to Singapore.  It's a bit last-minute, a bit arranged through misunderstanding, but hey, when else will I have a chance to go to Singapore?  I thought my co-workers were going as part of a zoo function, and that I could tag along with only the price of the airline ticket to pay.  I should have asked first.  They're going on vacation, and I've just booked myself a vacation too, one month into the job.  There goes half of last month's paycheck.  Oh well, I worked all but one weekend last month.

I hear there's nothing to do in Singapore but shop, and of course go to the zoo.  The food is apparently very good though.  I might be able to see Annabelle who I met in Beijing.  Oh, and people tell me there's lots of birds to see, not that I would recognize any of them.  I'm supposed to take pictures.

So instead of going to Turtle Island again, I am playing in Singapore.  Well, I guess you can't come all the way here and just work.  In fact, you can't be all the way over there and just work too!  Go somewhere fun this weekend!  Pretend you're from somewhere else and explore places that are new and unfamiliar.  Go down that weird road you've always wondered where it led or that town with famous barbecue.  You might have an interesting time.  Maybe more fun than Singapore.

Weee!

Phelps Lake, Grand Teton

Moon Festival

This weekend we visited the Li family tomb, newly purchased from after my grandmother died.  There are places reserved for my father's side grandparents and all their sons, along with their (potential) wives.  I thought this was weird at first, but on the second time returning, I just think it's okay.  Death is part of life; it cannot be denied or hidden, just like farting.  I've seen lots of people fart and burp here without any type of apologetic acknowledgement.  Life goes on.  One thing that's rude though, is showing your teeth.  Sometimes people talk to you with their hand over their mouth, as if they have a giant green thing dangling from between their incisors.  Whether those same people would fart while doing this, however, remains to be seen.

Anyways, the moon festival is about enjoying the moon and a lady in the moon, and a rabbit, and a revolution against the Yuan Dynasty with cakes.  It all works in there somehow.  In Taiwan, people also like to have a barbecue, a tradition started around 20 years ago based on a commercial.  I participated in a barbecue at my aunt's house, under the awning of their front door because it was raining, which also prevented the accompanying traditional moon-watching.  We ate these mooncakes that were really popular that they had seen on TV and went out and bought.  They included non-traditional flavors like taro, curry, mochi and meat:

It tasted kind of like jerky, but a little sweeter.

Some other flavors:

Mochi

Mung bean (left), Curry

Taro

They were all delicious.  Even jerky flavor.  I know, I'm a terrible vegetarian.

Pandas!

They are silly.

One benefit of working in the zoo is I get to see them for free.

What am I doing now in Taipei?

Kickboxing! My friend Megan found a kickboxing class held at Chiang Kai-Shek Memorial taught by a former Danish champion. I went for the first time today. It was pretty fun! We did a lot of calisthenic core stuff and now I'm nice and tired. I have to say, Hinar though, it was not quite as intense as Monkey Kung Fu. I'd have to show them some frog walks and crazy monkey and make them unable to climb stairs. But it's a good workout for now. the Chiang Kai-Shek Memorial area is a nice place to practice kung fu at night. There are lots of other people practicing; maybe I'll go back some time to practice on my own. I'd fit right in.

As for the bats, it's back to sitting in the conference room with my growing pile of stuff annexing more and more of the conference table. I actually have stuff to do now - analyzing my data, figuring out how to map it, and trying to make myself officially employed so I can get some money. And taxes.

Anyways, this post would be no fun without a picture, so here's one:

This is one of the younger bats we caught in the mist net.  The young ones are so nice and tame; they're almost like pets.  This one's all wrapped up because he fell into a pond after getting tangled in the mist net.  He kept sneezing, poor guy.

BACK

I'm back - back online and back in metropolia: Taipei City. Unfortunately, my last few days at Turtle Island were without internet. I did a lot of reading of the only book I had: a Comprehensive Wilderness Medicine Manual. Don't count on me rescuing anyone soon though. If you have a pneumothorax emergency, I don't know if I'd have the guts to stab you in the chest with a pointy object no thicker than a pencil above the third rib to release trapped air in the pleural cavity. Eeesh.

Well how does it feel to be back, you ask? Tired, I say. My legs are still tired from hiking each day on Turtle Island. The one trail that goes along the north shore of the island is pretty rough. I think the biggest danger working there isn't snakes, or giant spiders, or "tiger-faced wasps" (虎頭蜂, I'm told one sting will put you out for half a day, and several stings may kill you); but falling off the edge of a trail. Some areas are right up against a pretty high vertical drop. I would probably get vertigo walking along them if my safety wasn't belied by profusely abundant grass and annoying flowers whose spiky seeds get stuck to everything, growing over the edge and hiding a sheer drop into oblivion. Well not oblivion, but sometimes several meters down. Risk is like that a lot, I find. In the end, despite my fears of bears attacking and then learning about the arbitrary and sometimes temperamental nature of bull bison, the greatest risk of working at Yellowstone was traffic accidents. I think I had more and closer close calls driving than anything else. Who knows though, I've only been there once and there are lots of snakes and wasps. Hopefully there won't be any accidents. Knock on wood.

Return of the Face Spider!

Sorry, it's not a very good quality video. Can you see the face?

How much longer am I going to stay employed? (In which Kevin whines)

I am really bad at this job.  Take a look:

Each line represents the direction from which I perceive a radio collar signal to be coming from.  I've taken them at different points in the study area, represented on this map by the numbered squares.  Supposedly, these lines should intersect, because the radio signals should be coming from the same place, but they don't.  At all.  Radio-tracking is hard here.  Unlike Yellowstone, which was mostly open valley with a couple annoying hills, Turtle Island is just mountains and ravines.  Radio signals bend and bounce around and off mountain walls, reflect off water, and do all sorts of weird stuff that physics tells them to do.

I have to try to figure out where the signal is coming from, if there is one.  I do this by pointing an antenna and listening to a speaker playing the signal that the antenna picks up.  The signal strength is evident in the volume of the beeps from the speaker.  So I wave the antenna around, trying to figure out when I hear the loudest beep.  This isn't easy.  In addition to multiple peaks in volume from signal reflection off things, the signals here don't seem to be consistent and fade in and out, so sometimes I can't tell if I'm moving through a loud area, or the signal is just getting louder.  I feel pretty hopeless right now.  I didn't think I was very good at radio-tracking in Yellowstone.  Even less so right here.  At least the scenery is nice.

Wanna see a big spider?

Bam!  The "Face" Spider.  The back looks like a human face.  The lighting wasn't good enough to capture it though.  They spin giant webs across the trails here.  Supposedly, one bite will hurt for several hours and that's it, but fortunately they're not very ornery.

How am I still online ?

I'm jacking the Turtle Island Visitor Center internet!  They just use it to monitor weather buoys.  I've got a blog to update!

There's been a lot happening lately, and I've got it all mixed up right now, but at the moment one theme running through my head is TV.  There's no TV here, but that's not what this post is about.  It's just that my job lately has been involved in TV somehow.

First there's this guy, who apparently used to be the host of a pretty well-known nature show in Taiwan.  His name is A-Hong, and a lot of tourists recognize him when we're walking around the island.  His show does re-runs on Fridays and Saturdays on twenty-six and the Hakka channel.  I did not know this when I first met him, I just thought he was a crazy tracker guy.  He was the one who discovered that there are bats on this island, while he was doing a project radio-tracking snakes.

On my first night on the island, we went out to catch the last bat to be radio-tagged.  I was watching the mist net when he came back from somewhere, holding an umbrella snake by its tail.  Umbrella snakes are Taiwan's most poisonous snakes, and he saw two of them down the trail, so he brought one back to show me.  How cool of him to do so.  I wasn't sure whether to feel frightened or grateful.  He put the snake in between us and we watched it for a while, and he picked it up and put it  back down a couple times, explaining that the snake, although the most poisonous, isn't particularly aggressive and doesn't necessarily release its poison in a bite.  It isn't a viper, so it doesn't have long fangs or a triangular head.  Then he got distracted by something and went off, still holding the snake by the tail, with his flashlight off.  That kind of scared me.  I would not multitask in the dark while holding such a snake by its tail.

It's kind of weird knowing that he's some kind of famous (at least in Taiwan) TV personality.  I just thought he was a dirty-minded nature guy who knew a lot about everything outside.  Other things I've seen him do is catch a bird with his bare hands, go spear fishing, and of course catch bats.  I seem to also be learning a lot of dirty Chinese from him too.

In addition to working with a TV star, I also have had a TV film crew follow me around for the last two days.  Not me specifically, but the project in general, although I am in a lot of footage, usually fumbling in the background.  I even explain how triangulation works.  It probably sounds pretty awful; they made me redo a part when I used the wrong word for "compass."  But I get to be on Taiwanese TV!  The show is called "Made in Taiwan," and it will be airing some time after October 17th, on a Sunday.  So if you have a chance to watch TV on Taiwan, tune in to the 中視 channel some time.

I must say, I don't really care for being on TV.  You have to do everything several times, so that you can be filmed from a different angle or do something exactly right.  Just walking down a path is pretty annoying when you have to do it three times.  And then when you're a TV star, you've got people yelling at you all the time about your show, and making assumptions about you based on it.  Who knew, television celebrity: a hazard of field biology.

Leaving again

I'm off again to Turtle Island tomorrow (Friday). Supposedly, there may be another typhoon coming, but we'll see. This time, I'm supposed to stay 11 days, 6 of which will be by myself. I hope I'm ready! I hope I have enough food. And I hope that, seeing that I am unable to communicate proficiently and thus protest my case, the island workers don't kick me out of the facilities and force me to live in the barracks with the soldiers. "The oven."

Here's something I probably won't have on Turtle Island:

Delicious mangoes, the size of a baby's head. The flesh so creamy, dense and smooth, and meltingly soft and incredibly sweet. Not a single fiber to get stuck between your teeth.

I've recently re-discovered how delicious Taiwan mangos are. Sorry about the baby head analogy; I really can't think of anything else about that size right now. They weigh about the same too. Just kidding, how would I know? I've never bothered to weigh a mango.

Local Fauna

One of the workers saw a pangolin on the side of the road on the way up to the office so she caught it to show to the Americans. I got to see it today. He's the nicest wild animal I've ever met, and certainly very brave for one that can roll itself into a scaly armored ball. When we let him out of his cardboard box, he just started exploring everywhere. He wasn't scared at all. We practically had to roll him up ourselves:

The pangolin's scales are made of keratin, the same material as fingernails. It's the only animal that has this adaptation. Pangolins have a long tongue for eating ants, but they're more closely related to the order carnivora than to anteaters and armadillos. Males have a musk gland like a skunk, but this one was nice enough not to use it on us. Apparently pangolins are good problem solvers too, according to wikipedia.

She will let the pangolin free tomorrow. He has to get out from under the shelf he hid beneath first, though.

Food at the zoo

Outside the window of my "office," there's a papaya tree laden with green papayas and one golden ripe one. The rest of the ripe papayas are sitting in the kitchen counter waiting for consumption. Despite the heat and humidity, it's nice to be working in a subtropical clime.

Right now, everyone is scurrying around attending to this tortoise seminar that the zoo's Conservation and Animal Rescue Center is holding. Some American and one Australian tortoise advocates have arrived and are being led around, much to their amusement. Taiwanese politeness just seems superfluous to Western eyes. In my experience, too. I'm considered a foreigner here too, and I've had someone bow to me after I helped them with their powerpoint. Bow more than once, actually. And I'm like, "What?" Stop that. It would be a lot more fun and a lot less awkward if they just treated me like how they treat each other. Maybe it was just that one girl. Maybe just liked bowing.

They ordered Pizza Hut for the foreign guests, I guess to give them a taste of home in a foreign land. Except Taiwanese Pizza Hut bears little resemblance to American pizza, what with its mayonaise, seafood and sesame seeds. Take a look:

This is a seafood flavor pizza, apparently popular in Japan. It's streaked with mayonaise and is kind of sweet

Look, this one has hotdogs with mustard! Two American classics rolled into one!

The crust is pretty weird too. Why go through extra work to create little fingers of bread filled with cheese? People here must appreciate crust more than Americans do (see above, hotdog crusts).

So pizza here is pretty different, and that's all I have to say about that.

Why am I still here?

Because of a typhoon, that's why. We tried to get to the island again yesterday, and it was the same deal as the day before, sans the pudgy businessman/spy. After we unloaded again and left, we got word that the island is closed for tourist visits due to waves from a storm way out in the ocean. "Tourists," I guess, includes us although they apparently won't let us stay in the tourist lodgings and instead give us a place that's "like an oven."
We then went to the zoo where I met my employer and I got the radio receiver to fiddle with, along with the user manual (which was in English; they decided I was the best person to read it) and some articles. I also found out that when I do go to the island, it would be for two to three weeks at a time. I sure hope I can get internet there.
So we are grounded for the time being, and now I sit in the meeting room as my temporary office, with not much for me to do except read the articles. My butt hurts from sitting all morning, but hopefully I will be able to buy a bicycle this afternoon and I can be freeeeeeeee. No pictures today because I'm in an office. Or meeting room.

What am I doing here?

Is what I find myself asking (myself) a lot lately. And sometimes other people ask me that too. So I started this blog, so that I can know, and you can know.

Yesterday, I participated in an abortive expedition to Turtle Island, off the coast of northeastern Taiwan. It is apparently very beautiful. However, I never got to step foot on it because the waves were too big to land. I could only gaze at its dark jade peaks sloping out of the haze, and as we got closer, the waves crashing on its craggy coast. Yea I guess it was beautiful. We went with a coast guard boat, apparently to pick up some people in orange jumpsuits. When we couldn't land, the captain told them to swim. They wouldn't swim. We wouldn't swim. So they didn't get on and we didn't get off. We did somehow pick up a man with a laptop from another dock. Business man? On a 1 sq. mile island? Secret agent? He was kind of pudgy. Maybe that makes a less suspicious spy.

I will let you know what exactly I am doing on this island (Turtle Island) when I find out myself. It has something to do with tracking bats.

Here is a view of Turtle Island from the air.