Oops, a long hiatus from blogging. And now back to our regularly scheduled programming. Except not! I will take a break from my usual life musings, which usually focus on my life in Taiwan to talk a little bit about the traveling that I did during the Chinese New Year’s holiday. Of course, the Lunar …
Somewhere back in my subconscious I stored images of Asian eyes peeking out over surgical face masks long before I even first came to China or Taiwan. I, like many Americans, did not really understand anything about this practice. Somehow, I had gotten the impression that it had to do with containing the spread of …
Does looking at a region’s top-watched internet videos count as cultural research? Here are my brief summaries and commentary on Taiwan’s top 2013 Youtube videos, followed by some concluding thoughts. Some things to keep in mind: I have not done anything to look up the back story for these videos, so this exercise of watching …
This past week’s lapse in updates was partly because I wanted to take a break to think about more things to write, and in part due to the fact that today was the birthday of NCKU. In honor of that, there were no classes held today, and instead I joined the Chinese Language Center for …
This is a long, long overdue post on dogs. Taiwan has a large population of dogs, and I strong feelings about Taiwanese dogs. I find that dogs in Taiwan have surprisingly different manifestations than their US counterparts, and therefore, I’d like to share some things about Taiwanese dogs. It is impossible to miss …
I’m going to stew on the second part of my musings about names (focusing more on a broader picture and less on my own personal issues) for a little longer. In the meantime here are some anecdotes. … I was out running, listening to a podcast in which two guys from Taichung just ramble about …
I don’t think I have ever been good at saying my name. Somehow it always ends up getting just a little bit tangled on the tip of my tongue. The “r” and the “m” get smooshed together and the “h” is just dangling there and suddenly the rest of the syllables are pushing to get …
Day four of this week-long-blogathon and I’m feeling the fatigue/writer’s block. There are a couple of topics that I really want to write about but somehow it’s after midnight and I just don’t think I have the energy to do them justice. Instead, here are a collection of things I’ve written while hanging out at …
The cultural understanding of distance is different in Taiwan. While this sounds like a trivial matter to devote time discussing, not only is it something that I encounter frequently in my daily life, but it is also something that I hadn’t considered malleable (nor considered all that much ever) before I moved to Taiwan. What …
[I wrote most of this back in June. Cleaning out old ideas and scraps of blog posts – here we come! Also, lots of pictures for this post.] When I have the chance, I like wandering around in the woods. Here are a few reflections on hiking trails in Taiwan. Taking day trips to …