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.