Whoa. I am home from Taiwan.


What can I say? Taiwan is an interesting place. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the China mainland / Taiwan relationship, please continue reading as I will brief you a bit for further understanding. For those who are familiar, please skip down to the section ***(~.~)***:

History Brief 1: Mainland China believes that Taiwan is not it's own country. China believes that Taiwan is a province of China and will be treated as such. In mean terms, the big bad Chinese government in Beijing can, will, does control Taiwan. Even though Taiwan currently has a democratic government, holds elections, and functions relatively free of Mainland Chinese influence, Beijing still maintains that it controls Taiwan. This is the present situation and, although the reasons behind animosity are steeped in history, I will spare you the long explanation of why China-Taiwan relations are like this. But where am I going with this?!

I am going here: ***(~.~)***I found that the Taiwanese do not like Mainland China, what it represents, and especially their tourists, despite the fact that the mainland tourists contribute mass sums of money to be able to visit Taiwan. It was disconcerting. I have only lived in the mainland and felt myself strongly tied to defending the big bad government. What an interesting thought~~ BUT-- enough of my internal struggle with how I really feel about a communist regime...

I visited many places while in Taiwan. I went to Dragon Boat practice with Pamela (the friend who I was visiting) ((Dragon Boat is rowing/crew on steroids)). We went hiking, sat in the hot springs, went to the night markets, ate stinky tofu, and went to the National Palace Museum! The sad part is that I was sick for the entire week and it also rained every 20 minutes for the whole week. Overall, if I were in my 'native' town of Nanjing, this would have put a damper on my mood; yet, Pamela and I supported one another through the week with Airborne, tea, and good spirits. We hit all the bases, went to see the memorials, ate all the fun regional food and didn't let anything stop us on our way.

That is all for now, my loves. I will now digress into Chinese Story Time and pictures:


CHINESE STORY TIME:
The National Palace Museum in Taipei is interesting for one main reason: none of the artwork is native Taiwanese. It is mostly from China. Why would the Chinese put all their cultural relics in a museum in a remote island province and not in Beijing? They didn't.

History Brief 2: Chiang Kai-shek, Mao Zedong's adversary, left mainland China in 1949 because he could not succeed over Mao. Poor China was too engrossed in setting up its new regime that they turned around and found that nearly all of the portable pieces from the imperial collection had been carted away by Chang Kai-shek to his new residence (Taiiiwan) ... it's very much like traveling: you make sure all your big, checked luggage gets safely to your hotel, reach for your wallet to tip the doorman at the hotel and *oops*, someone stole your wallet! -- That's why the Palace Museum is a figurative sore spot for the Chinese mainlanders.

At any rate, we continue:

I went to the National Palace Museum on my own on a rainy day. I was excited. In 2006, I had taken one of my favorite courses at Middlebury on Chinese Painting (Berninghausen, for all your MiddKids). This class really meant a lot to me. It opened up Asian art, de façon générale, to me in a new way. I enjoyed it, I studied it, I loved it. I couldn't wait to get to Taiwan to see these pieces I had studied, since most of them were not in China proper, for reasons aforementioned.

Long story--short, the Museum is too small to display all the pieces at once and not one of the paintings I wanted to see was on exhibition. They had a special exhibition of some unknown artist's work ... I felt miffed, cheated, wronged. So, I did what any mature 24 year old would do: I moped in the museum gift shop.

I was staring at big bowl full of plastic Buddhas when a young kid came up to me and, in broken English asked, "Hi. -- Could you-- be here-- on this?? __", and pointed to his book which was, no doubt, a worksheet from school. I asked him, in Chinese, "Are you here for school?" and he just stared at me, I believe a bit shocked. ((really, what foreigner speaks Chinese?!))

I read the question he pointed to and it said "Find a foreigner at the museum, as him/her where she is from and get a signature from that person." I smiled, sighed, told him I was from America, signed my name. Good deed for the day? Check.

Little did I know that I then became a cultural phenom, myself. Gobs of children (ages 12-14) came to me, asked me in broken English to, "please, name -- ok? -- on my --- write it here" and after I had a mini - lesson on how to say "Please, will you sign your name?" (I made each of them ask me, themselves; what is life without practice?) I felt like I was at the Oscars. I signed so many autographs, I consciously started thinking -- Natty, you have to find a better way to shape your N's, they are ugly.

So after this, we took a huge photo: me and my new friends and I talked with their teacher for a bit. Then I realized why I was so interesting: They were from a remote part of Taiwan. They had never seen a foreigner speak Chinese before. They never knew any foreigner who could write characters before.

They had never seen someone in person who was not Chinese before.


PHOTO TIME:
Cori and our "fruit beers", which tasted like concentrated Luden's cough drops:


Men's Dragon Boat practice:















Getting my hair washed!















Acupuncture on my back/neck:


(This actually felt very good and relaxing. No, the needles did not hurt!)














At Chiang Kai-shek's memorial:


This is an enormous memorial. For the record, I am the one standing in the middle of the doorway with my hands up in the air.

I can hardly see myself!









Taipei 101, taken from Elephant Mountain:


This is the tallest building in the world with habitable floors. It's meant to look like a bamboo shoot.

(NB: Burj Khalifa in Dubai is the tallest building with habitable floors to date, but no one lives in it, so it can't claim it's fame just yet).