Are we there yet?: June 2005

gym

My gym sells crystals now. Opposite of the juice bar counter, they have their little shop for sports clothes and yoga mats. And crystals. About half of the shop has this big display case with rose quarz bracelets, amethyst balls, glass buddhas and jade piglets. I'm not really sure why. Does wearing a quarz bracelet make your cardio work-out more effective? Are you supposed to carry a jade piglet in your pocket to intensify your stretches? Or maybe they think lifting the glass buddha is more fun than lifting a dumb bell? Or maybe you're supposed to use one of the bigger pieces for smashing the pseudo-European plastic gothic pillars with golden angels on top that they put next to the changing room while they're redecorating the spa? Or one of the crystals in your pockets saves you from the stupid trainees who feel that certainly the little foreign girl (who has been using the machines for 2 years and is minding her own business) is too stupid to adjust the height and weight and start readjusting right after I had it all the way it was supposed to be and who obviously only understand a "No, thanks, I can handle it." after you bellow it for the third time? I guess I should try that next time :-S

Tigerwomen at the Taipei Film Festival

I went to watch the Tigerwomen at the Taipei Film Festival today. It's a documentary on three Taiwanese women, an old Chinese opera singer who was sold by her parents to an opera troupe when she was four; a writer whose most famous book I read when I was 17 and a 23-year-old movie director who had a smashing success here last year with a gay love story. I became friends with the director, Monika Treut, last year when she asked if she could stay with me for a couple of weeks and so got to hear a lot about the preparation and some of the filming.

Apart from the personal thing, the nice thing about a movie like this is that it depicts the Taipei I know and live in, in small things like shots of areas I know, pictures of the ubiquitous motor scooters, scenes from movies I've seen or the many references to the Presidential elections that of course were a big topic last year.

Yesterday, I went to watch Wayward Cloud, the latest movie by Taiwanese director Tsai Mingliang. Tsai Mingliang is famous for not having much dialogue in his movies, and I usually love movies like that. However, watching his renowned What time is it there? left me really bored (It seems to be one of those movies that are a success overseas because of their shere foreignness). But though there is even less dialogue in Wayward Cloud, it's impossible to get bored with that movie. I just loved how he manages to express so much about Taiwan and Taiwanese without using any words. The final scenes were a little bit too much for me, though. Anyway, surprise, surprise, after the movie, Tsai Mingliang turned up at the theater, and I happened to meet the Taiwanese personality that I have been wanting to shake hands with ever since I moved to Taiwan (I poured his little brother wine once, completely forgot about that and, a few weeks ago, happened to come across an old post of mine on Forumosa where I had posted that). He is very nice, very Taiwanese and not at all as aloof as you would think somebody would be who has that much success with his movies. I got myself some melon juice on the way home.

The day before yesterday, it was Stupeur et Tremblements, after the autobiography of Amelie Nothomb. I've read quite a few of her books and enjoyed them, a) because she's obviously a little crazy and b) because her French is so easy to read for me. The movie was veeery close to the book, and I think Sylvie Testud did a great job as Amelie-San. But all in all, it was a bit boring, and my main peeve was the voiceover. At least to me, it didn't seem necessary at all, on the contrary, rather annoying. Before the movie, I bumped into two French guys who said they didn't like it because the Japanese were depicted so badly. I guess it is indeed a bit unlikely that a Westerner working in Japanese company would have that much bad luck. But she does manage to make about every mistake a Westerner could make, I guess. And watching her with the calculator made me cringe. I perfectly know that feeling when you calculate the same numbers ten times and get a different result every time.

tv

In the more than 3 years that I've lived in Taipei, I never bothered to get cable or any other kind of tv programming. As much as I miss MTV and the like (I'm not kidding), every time I involuntarily happen to watch some Taiwanese tv, I know it was the right decision. The main purpose of Taiwanese tv seems to be to drive you mad. Well, I guess the cooking shows, dubbed Korean soaps and silly game shows are sort of okay if you're into this kind of thing. News, however, seem simply unbearable. Like, two days ago. As every other day, I went to the gym and started pedalling on the exercise bike in front of the rows of muted tvs. I usually choose a position between HBO, Cinemax and CNN, scan the newsbar of CNN and can or can not be bothered reading the Chinese subtitles for whatever is on on the movie channels (and try to avoid watching the ubiquitous snakes on National Geographic right next to HBO).

Anyway, above Cinemax, they had some "expert" analyzing somebody's Chinese name (you should have seen them after the President's grandchild was born: every channel had their own expert analyzing the stroke order, number and combination of the newborn's name and predicting its future from that). And just above HBO, they had a news channel with breaking news: A plane had taken off from our domestic airport that morning and - gasp - landed again after 2 minutes in the air. And there were - gasp - almost 80 people on board. And nobody - gasp - knew why the plane had landed again. And every news channel was trying to get the airline's president for an interview, and he - gasp - didn't know what was going on either.

So for the whole two hours that I was in the gym, there were always at least two news channels showing the same half minute of a plane taking off and landing and then the plane in question standing at the airport, and the airline's president in his news conference over and over again. And that's what most Taiwanese news programs seem to consist of: repeating about half a minute worth of filming for five minutes in a row and repeatedly hour after hour, blowing up insignificant events like domestic rows and car accidents and making it sound as if Taiwan was the most dangerous place in the world to live in (which btw, according to the World Bank, it actually is - due to the fact that seventy three percent of Taiwan's population are threatened by at least three natural disasters). And a lot of Taiwanese who regularly watch the news seem to think that Taiwan is indeed a very dangerous place (like my friend's Taiwanese boyfriend who told her it was waaaay too dangerous for her to have a technician install the washing machine for her while he was out - I told her to ask him what he thinks how I'm handling life, being on my own most of the time). Whereas most Westerners here agree that Taiwan is one of the safest places they've lived in. Sadly enough, Taiwanese newspapers aren't that much better. Taiwanese media seem to prefer sensationalism over serious journalism, as a friend of mine (who unlike me is a real writer) pointed out a while ago.

And what's up with the snakes on National Geographic? Are they having "Snake Year"? I don't mind snakes, I think they're fascinating, I like to look at them in the zoo, and the two or three times that I actually came across a snake outdoors, I was honestly thrilled. However, watching snakes in close-up, biting into the camera or eating baby squirrels every single time I'm doing my work-out sort of freaks me out.

Alex, guck mal:
Ich hab mir "Iris" Schuhe gekauft :-)

:-)

TIVAC and MMOT

I passed by TIVAC (Taiwan International Visual Arts Center) and the Miniatures Museum of Taiwan today (two more things to cross out on the "Sites and Exhibitions in Taipei" list).

TIVAC currently features an exhibition of rather private Mao Zedong pictures taken by a photographer couple, Xu Xiaobing and Hou Bo, who were close to Mao from 1938 to 1961 (they’re both over 80 now and live together in Beijing). Not surprisingly, the exhibition is somewhat disputed in Taiwan whereas the Mainland China media celebrated it as "a landmark debut" and "break of political taboo". A friend told me that her Taiwanese boyfriend got mad at this attempt to show Mao in a gentler light while in a Taiwanese tv report, they interviewed a university student who had just been in the exhibition and kept going on about how "intellectual" Mao was – yeah, right.

I had seen a lot of these pictures before – a German magazine ran an article on Xu Xiaobing and Hou Bo years ago when I was still at university and basically published the same pictures of Mao with his daughter or Mao resting.

Before leaving TIVAC, I leafed through their magazines and books and found a book with b/w photos, mostly portraits, taken in Taiwan between the 1920s and the 1950s by Deng Nanguang. I’ve been looking for some b/w pictures of Taiwan's recent past for a while now. A couple of weeks ago, there was an exhibition at the National History Museum, with pictures by Tsai Huifeng, taken in the 1960s. They were nice enough (I liked the ones featuring cats) but nothing special. The pictures by Deng Nanguang however are much better, they seem to have something extraordinary in their composition and expression (as far as I can tell, not that I would actually be in a position to judge pictures). Needless to say, I bought the book. And walked over to the Miniatures Museum.

The Miniatures Museum which I always thought exhibited miniature landscapes of whatever is actually more for kids or real hard-core doll-house aficionados but quite ok if you don’t mind that a) they have absolutely no English signs on the outside of its B1 location in a nondescript office building (which is weird enough considered that the museum is featured in every tourist map and museum guide); that b) they must have “forgotten” the English descriptions for half of the exhibits; that c) the available English descriptions were translated from Chinese by somebody non-native (some of the expressions are very obviously the first pick in the dictionary); that d) they play Kenny Loggins as background music and that e), very Taiwanese, they don’t wait with cleaning until AFTER closing but start about an hour before closing up so that you have to move out of the way of feather dusters and cleaning cloths if you happen to get there shortly before 6pm.

subscriptions

I did it!!! I cancelled the subscriptions. And updated the guest list. Wow!

lists

I'm known for being a list-addict, I have lists for everything.

My most important list right now is the piece of paper where I listed what I should do first after coming back from Singapore, important things like paying the rent and changing my SPIEGEL and BRIGITTE subscriptions and writing those emails that I promised to write weeks ago and post my apartment on Forumosa and figure out what I want to do with my stuff. Needless to say, I haven't managed to cross out a lot in the past ten days (I finally managed to pay the rent yesterday) :-S The list, however, keeps getting longer.

I have a few more lists apart from that, stuff that I always wanted to do and would now have the time (sort out my Shanghai pictures, update last year's diary...) if I didn't waste it posting on a blog or diddling around and not doing much more than go to the gym and say Hi in the office and bite my nails while reading some old SPIEGEL or shallow thirty-something novel. I have a "last Taiwan shopping" list, too. I've managed to cross out two things so far (a ceramic from the Handicraft market and the Taiwan version of Monopoly). I have a list of things I want to do at home (wash my winter sheets and clean the windows!!!! I guess the rain was a good excuse so far). I have a list of places in Taipei that I still want to see before I leave. No energy for that so far except for the Taiwan map exhibition at the newly opened National Taiwan Museum (great for everybody who is into maps!). And I'm trying to set up a list of who I want to invite for my farewell party (if I could manage to decide where and when I'm going to have it) - this would basically be a combination of a couple of guest lists for birthdays and some year-old parties... And my movie list desperately needs updating.

Maybe I should go and get those subscriptions calls done...

dinner

I just realized that it was waaaay past dinner time and dashed out to get something at one of the many foodstalls across the road. I came back with fruit for breakfast (mangoes, papaya, pineapple, watermelon), 3 baozi and some douhua, soft sweet doufu with green beans and starch pearls:

Reiner tends to look really disgusted every time I get it. I'm still trying to figure out how to survive without it after moving back to Germany.

lounge bar in Halle?

Saturday was almost a good day, and it got better when Reiner suggested to go to that new lounge bar here in Gongguan, Common Place. After some fried mozarrella sticks and jalapeno peppers and a couple of GT's, just when I was about to sink back into my common "how in the world can I leave this place?" mode again, I actually had an idea: Maybe opening a 70ies-themed lounge bar in Germany might make me miss Taipei less? I immediately snatched Reiner's cell phone and text-messaged H and my sister and brother. My brother offered his services as bar keeper and then kept going on about his new car. My sister called to tell me she'd take care of the decoration, claiming that she had better taste than I (she shut up when I told her about the 70ies theme) and then offered to help out as waitress. H first replied that this might be the perfect use for my sofa (doesn't he like the jungle pattern???) and then told me flatly that in his opinion, there is no need for a lounge bar in Halle. Well, whatever. Reiner and I had a lot of fun thinking up details like the 70ies wallpaper, the perfect partitions (cloth? paper screens? bead curtains?), the music (Taiwan-style lounge music - maybe I should buy a few more cds before I leave????), the food (standard Taipei lounge bar fare like fried mozarella sticks and sausage combos), drinks (Taiwanese teas? Maybe there's another business opportunity here) and some individual touch (bar cats??? - Common place has at least two cats one of which looks like Tuesday. And when we walked in, somebody had a tiny red tiger in his lap, obviously another bar cat).

And we found the perfect name, of course: Tuesday :-)

When I walked home, after roaming the Eslite bookstore (at quarter to midnight, mind you), amusing the cashier staff with my incomprehensible German chatter, buying a new Bridget Jonesy-Thirty-Something novel ("Thirtynothing" by Lisa Jewell, I spent the whole sunday reading it but didn't like it as much as her other novel "One-Hit Wonder") and grabbing the newest POTS from the stack, I came across the red alleycat who resides opposite of the 7-Eleven and is incredibly affectionate for an alleycat (he held me back by putting his paws around my ankle when I tried to go home after petting him the other day). He looked rather scared, was limping and wouldn't come down from the wall when I called him. I was too tired to persist and decided to come back later to take a closer look. But when I walked by just now, he was nowhere to be seen.

the perfect cat

A friend keeps calling her fatty Tuesday because I told him that she weighs almost 5kg (I had to weigh her to figure out how much her and the transport box will be for the flight to Germany). Anyway, she's NOT fat! And she's the perfect cat: intelligent, funny, affectionate, talkative sometimes and very quiet on other days. Actually, she's not really a typical cat. A friend described her as more of a mixture between a dog and a little child. She actually does little tricks when she's mad about not being the center of attention. She loves almost everybody, and almost everybody loves her. Except for H. He was stunned how a cat can be so focused on a human being (= me), he says that's so uncatlike. And he's not exactly looking forward to sharing me with her. I guess she can be a bit a little possessive at times. And when I come home after being away for a couple of days, she's usually so excited that she spends the whole day telling me what happened while I was away and protesting against my leaving her alone. And though she will hardly say a word all day when it's just the two of us, the moment I pick up the phone to call somebody, she loves to say hello.

I got her from Poagao, a guy I know from Forumosa, the expat internet forum that used to be my second living room here in Taipei. It was 1 October 2002 (a tuesday - hint, hint), and she was a mere two months old and so tiny that I wasn't really sure I could do this, raise a kitten. And she already loved to talk.

She's grown quite a bit since then, and she's gotten a little more quiet. And I'm sure she'll do fine in Germany.