Last night I witnessed a comedy, like in three-acts Shakespearean sense. Since I got here there have been posters and pamphlets all over Taipei promoting Canada D’eh. The literature explained it as a celebration of Canadian confederation held on a beach in Danshui on June 27 featuring a performance by Grammy-nominated artist Colby O’Donis. There are so many questionable things in that last sentence alone I don’t know where to begin.

The fact that the party was on June 27 and not July 1 was understandable. While Canada Day falls on a Wednesday, a big party night in Taipei, you need a weekend to get people out to a beach party. So my mostly Canadian friends and I piled onto the MRT and took the 40-minute ride to Danshui, the final stop on the red line. From the subway station there were free shuttle buses transporting party-goers to beach. As we walked in, the scene and the extent of ridiculousness began to dawn on me. There was a canopy containing the bar, food vendors, a booth featuring live instruction on how perform CPR and a display of prize-winning agriculture including a very large, very malformed pumpkin. On the beach organizers erected a stage with lit-up maple leaf, around which a procession of fake mounties on real horses trotted around.

Stranger still, most people were walking around in Canadiana wear. Taiwanese, Americans, other random westerners were only too eager to slap maple leaf stickers onto one cheek and wear a McCain temporary tattoo on the other. (Yes the Canadian-processed-food brand McCain, which brought us such delights as Deep’n Delicious cake and Smiles, was a sponsor.)

We arrived around 7 p.m., about mid-way through the 12-hour-long beach party. By that time the tide had gone out and it was too dark to go swimming.  According to signs on the beach, swimming in the dark is a prohibited activity. Still the emcees were made to humourously threaten and plea for anyone in the water to get out. Making sure to repeat this between each performance, the final broadcast informed us that Taipei police would find us and fine us. They weren’t kidding. Authorities had range rovers set up at the edge of the water and were blasting spot lights into the Pacific Ocean.

The performers were a mixed and strange bag. Skareoke delivered what their name promised: wordless ska. Their take on the genre is the elevator muzak of ska with the occasional Kenny G flourish. The second headliner was an excellent local band called Won-Fu (旺福). Xiao Min, male vocalist and lead guitarist, kept saying the most adorable things like “I wrote this song about the famous, my favourite…Jimi Hendrix! This song is called ‘My Name is Jimi Hendrix.’” Their messy/rocky/go-go-60s-girl pop had the entire crowd waving their arms and clapping along with the earnest, unabashed excitement usually reserved for teenage girls and the local Taiwanese.

And then there was Colby O’Donis. My friends and I had no idea so we did some pre-concert research. We were able to piece together that he was the formerly anonymous male who sang the brief solo in Lady Gaga’s “Just Dance” and also, apparently, has a solo career. He reminded the audience of this claim to fame by singing tiny bits of the song and then abruptly stopping then bait-and-switching into his own material. After the Gaga reference, the song that got the biggest response was the dance routine he and his overdressed back-up dancers did to the Black Eyed Peas’ “Boom Boom Pow.” It’s a wonder no one passed out from dancing in their velour sweatsuits in the Taipei heat. After Colby’s departure, a DJ set up and fueled short-lived, albeit, decent beach dance party.

Canada D’eh’s WTF-factor was through the roof. Maybe it’s my Torontonian arrogance but probably the least Canadian thing you can do is celebrate Canada Day. At most you have an impromptu night of drinking with friends because it’s a statutory holiday or go to a free concert if the band is worth seeing. Seeing real Canadians declare their pride was equally funny and weird. But then to see other people pretend to be Canadian even more so. (Since when was Canada cool?) I enjoy and expect these kind of flagrant and gaudy displays of nationalism from other countries but to be the one being celebrated was more confusing than flattering. Three years ago I spent Canada Day in Ottawa, an actual all-out raucous party. People were drinking on public transit (very wild behaviour by Canadian standards), jumping into fountains and puking everywhere. I never thought I’d find a wilder Canada party but here it was, washed up on the beaches of Taiwan.

posted by vicky at 6:45 pm under Asia, Music, Taiwan
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Every day a barrage of unfamiliar sounds parades through Taipei’s streets. There are the scooters that putter through the streets and into the city’s many lanes and alleys. There is the old man who mumbles sweet-monotone nothings into a bullhorn while driving a loud vehicle, every morning around 9 a.m. And then there is the MIDI version of Für Elise (circa mid-90s Angelfire websites) that is blasted at 10:30 p.m. every night in my neighbourhood except Wednesday and Sunday. When I start to hear the sounds of Beethoven bleat, I know it is time to take out the garbage.

Taking out the garbage has never been such a confusing and communal experience. In the Netherlands, the process was was almost exactly like it is in Canada. Waste is separated from the recyclables, garbage is collected in a bag and placed in a bin, recyclables into a separate bin and both bins are placed on the street on a designated day to be picked up. The only twists were that organic waste has its own container in Canada and in the Netherlands glass bottles were brought to giant neighbour containers and separated by colour. It never occurred to me that there was any other way to dispose of waste even existed until I got here.

A few days after I moved into my apartment I asked my landlord, who only speaks Mandarin, where to put my garbage. After performing an abridged version of Für Elise, she mimed 10:30 p.m. and Shida park for me. Finally, I had a starting point for what would become a two-week journey. After consulting a few English speakers, I found out that special garbage bags needed to be purchased and any other plastic bag would be denied. So off I went to Wellcome, the local supermarket to buy some. The bags are blue and each comes with a sticker, printed with a currency-like texture, declaring each bag’s unique serial number. I purchased one pack of 20 bags cost $45 NTD and happily began to collect trash.

My next obstacles came in a set of two. After further investigation I found out that organic waste could not be placed in these blue bags and had to be packaged separately. Used toilet paper, for the record, is not organic nor usually flushed down the toilet. There is still a furious debate about whether Taipei’s sewage system can handle having toilet paper flushed into its old pipes and soiled paper is collected garbage bags. (More on this in a future post I’m sure.)

This rule about organic waste did not bode well with the pile of fruit peel that was collecting in my room and the consequent fruit flies. But being home at 10:30 p.m. proved to be a more difficult task than I thought. I found myself packaging illegal garbage full of organic waste and secretly dumping them at the public garbage bins at Shida Park, the park in front of my apartment. However, my method is not as a bad as some people I know who keep bags of organic waste in the freezer to stave away the rotting until they find the right moment to toss it.

This cycle continued for a few weeks until I could stand the mystery and my failure no more. Finally, one night, I schlepped out of the house, towing my blue bag as well as my cardboards and plastic bottles. I made it no further than about halfway down my street before an old woman stopped me and took my recyclables. Confused, I let her have them figuring it would probably take more effort to figure out why she wanted them. At 10:30 a series of trucks pulled up in front of the park and the neighbourhood got to work. The garbage men pulled giant blue bins off the truck for everyone to dump their organic waste into. (The dirty bags that contained them were thrown in the back of the regular garbage truck.) Had I not parted so soon with my recyclables I could have throw them onto the separate recyclable trucks. I consulted some fellow foreigners and apparently people show up early to take others recyclables in order to sell for money. Their haul takes away from the money the government would be making but who really wants to argue over, literal, scraps?

It’s been about two weeks since I first completed this ritual and it’s about time for me to do it again. My immersion into Taiwanese life is slow but moving along. Now I just have to figure out what that old man is yelling in the morning.

posted by vicky at 9:46 am under Asia, Taiwan
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Dear Schwarma/Doner Kebab,

It’s been a while since we’ve been together. I’ve been thinking about you a lot. Every time I walk by a giant metal skewer, strung with meat, you still make my head still turn. Last time I saw you I was in Ximending, Taipei’s trendy teen shopping area. I wanted you but I had eaten already. Sometimes I think about making the trip there especially for you.

Long distance relationships are never easy. I don’t think of myself as unfaithful but here in Taipei I just can’t help myself from looking around. It’s happened a few times when I was drunk but I’m finally ready to admit it to you and myself.

There’s this stall at the entry to the Shida night market, our neighbourhood’s communal kitchen and pantry. You grab a plastic basket, pair of tongs and start grabbing. There are similar stands further inside the market but lack the selection that this one has. I can choose from shiitake mushrooms, king oyster mushrooms, entire green peppers, sweet potato wedges, sausages, octopus tentacles, fish balls, tofu, tiny fish filled with eggs, cauliflower, chicken cutlet, onion rings, fries, hash browns, green beans and rice wrapped in seaweed. I select my favourites and hand them over to the lady who chops up the larger pieces, separates them according to cooking time and accesses their worth. She assigns my basket a number, tosses in a few strands of leafy greens for flavour and sends it off to meet its deep-fried fate. (And here I thought the Dutch loved deep-frying.)

After the frying process, the basket’s contents is emptied into a bowl where I have white pepper, chili powder and minced garlic added. It’s then flipped around in the bowl skillfully to ensure even distribution. From there my snacks are packaged into a tiny paper bag via a large metal funnel. A few skewers are shoved in and the paper is thoughtfully placed into a custom-sized plastic bag to keep it from burning my hands. I’m not trying to make you jealous but it’s really, really hot.

It’s not that I’ve found a replacement for my new favourite drunken food. To be honest, with you, I always feel better the morning after. Waking up after my rendez-vous with this stall, I always feel slightly guilty (and garlicky.) Still I think we’re going to have to take a break this summer. I’m young and I need to experiment you know? But you have, and will always have, a special place in my heart.

Love,
Vicky

posted by vicky at 4:17 pm under Asia, Food, Taiwan
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Life in Taipei doesn’t seem much like island life, or at least the kind of island life seen on television. When the urban Taiwanese need to get away from the big city their solution is to hole themselves up on another, smaller, island. So before class started, my friends and I took a very brief vacation the hustle and bustle of Taipei and headed to Green Island, a tiny island off the eastern coast of Taiwan.

 Getting there required a six-hour-train ride to Taitung and then an hour-long ferry ride. Lonely Planet had advised us that the ferry was a vomit-inducing machine, so we piously took motion sickness pills. I actually would describe the ferry ride as easy and pleasant, if not for the frigid air conditioning. When we arrived I found the small-town life I’ve always wondered about (and also only seen on television) set against lush, mountainous terrain. There wasn’t much to do but fly through the scenery on our scooters on the 20 km of road encircling the island. Its claim to fame is the hot spring, one of the three natural saltwater ones in the world.

I’ve never taken an “adventure” vacation before and still can’t say that I have after this one. If adventure means snorkeling in a group of 20 while keeping one hand on the string of buoys being pulled around by a guide, then yes I have gone adventuring. Contrary to what the brochure promised, there is no off the beaten path on Green Island. There is no searching required to see see how the locals live. The deer tied up in front of people’s houses aren’t pets so much as dinner for themselves or to be served in one of the few restaurants.I can’t imagine what other industry it has other than tourism and maybe fishing.  The main drag that tourists frequent for food and accommodations is only fancy enough to feature a 7-11 and dessert parlour dressed up like a seafood restaurant.

Green Island is the opposite of where I grew up. It’s the small town, picturesque paradise versus the sprawling post-war suburb that you urge others not to visit. Somehow I can’t imagine sharing my home with tourists. I felt it in Amsterdam last year too. Living there means having to alter your bike route to avoid the hoardes (not whores) in the red light district and having the drunk and stoned as permanent fixtures on your landscape. If the city folk commute to nature to find peace of mind, do those that live among the trees and the sunbathers still find it the same place?

posted by vicky at 5:44 pm under Asia, Taiwan
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