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 …
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 …
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 …
In the morning, breezes by the coast seem their freshest, and also just the right amount of playful to highlight some of my favorite parts of biking in Taiwan. Of course, if one is looking for adventure, the best time to fight the coastal winds is at night; oftentimes they are so strong that I …
Sometimes, being “a foreigner” in Taiwan is tiring. I have avoided this topic because I feel that there is nothing particularly fresh that I can bring to the descriptions of my experiences in this regard. Yet recently I’ve wondered why exactly it was that I decided to come back to Taiwan, and face all the …
Some folks back in the States with whom I’ve been keeping in touch have noticed that I start corresponding with them when it’s still very early in the morning in Taiwan. Some amount of abnormal sleeping habits could be attributed to jetlag after first arriving, but that’s long past, and I’m still often awake at …