el fin
Time to start packing.
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Time to start packing.
This weekend my aunt, my mom, Christine and I went all the way down to the southern tip of Taiwan to play at the beach. Photos are up as a new set: Kenting. I also found out while uploading these pictures that non-pro Flickr users have a limit on the number of sets they can make. So I had to delete my Taiwan set. Aww. So you guys will just have to watch my photostream for any new photos that I take in this last week of being here in Taipei. Our flight gets into Atlanta next Monday night, June 27, at 6:30 p.m. I'll be sad to leave Taiwan but glad to be back home with people I love.
New photos from our daytrip to Danshui, and from today's visit to the Taipei Fine Arts Museum and some temples. I added my photostream to the left side of this page (yay more dynamic content!), so you can see when I've updated that way as well.
I think I have been hanging out with photographers and working for the school paper way too long, because the entire time I've been here in Taiwan I keep seeing everything in terms of still frames instead of as one continuous blur of daily life. Most of the time I have my camera with me, so of course the photos I actually do end up taking and liking I post to Flickr and caption (though if I were really doing this for the paper my captions would have to be much, much shorter).
But there are many more times when life moves too quickly for me to capture on my CF card, so instead I end up taking photos in my head. During this weekend's trip to Hualien and Taroko Gorge, Christine and I took 216 photos between the two of us (and it took us at least two hours to whittle that down to the 30 we posted online). But I'm pretty sure I haven taken many more mental photos than that. I started to jot them down, thinking that maybe I would devote an entire weblog entry to "photos I didn't take": a young couple on a scooter zooming by, dangerously close to the side of the bus we were riding; rows of fish on ice at the open market; signs for coffeeshops that are rip-offs of the Starbucks logo; a stylish girl waiting at the bus stop; bright red lanterns hanging brightly from the eaves of restaurants at night. Lots of my mental photos are portraits, too: of ordinary people doing their ordinary things, as well as of the friends and family we've visited so far -- my mother's friend Chen Mao-san, or my third-oldest aunt as we all are engaged in spirited conversation. I want to take videos of the TV as I flip through the channels in order to show you the strange programs that are shown here; I want to take a picture of, like, every single meal I've had here to show you how different the food is from home (and also as proof that I'm going to come back about 20 pounds heavier). But of course I don't have the patience or the camera lens or the web space or the invisibility to do all that.
Last week I wrote to Alan that I felt like I was spending too much time just sitting around our apartment reading or just not "going somewhere" -- because my mom and my sister and I don't always feel like going to the same place at the same time, and then when we do decide to go sightseeing somewhere, it takes us all a good hour to get ready. But Alan reminded me that sometimes, it's nice to get a feel for what it's like to just live somewhere. So I think I am finally starting to get over the compulsion of doing (and remembering) everything.
I am also appreciating my ability to speak the language. (I am conversational in Mandarin Chinese, though people can usually tell that I'm a waiguoren, or foreigner; I can sort of understand Taiwanese, another commonly-spoken dialect, but I can't speak it.) I get a little bit of satisfaction every time I accompany my aunt or mom to the market and I can understand the banter that goes on between her and the old woman hawking fresh vegetables. The other day it went like this:
(My aunt picks up two bunches of heng tsai, leaving only one bunch remaining.)
Vendor: (in Taiwanese) "Why don't you take the last one, too?"
Aunt: "I don't need that much."
Vendor: "Oh, come on, take it... if you don't, I'll just have one bunch left and no one's going to want it."
Aunt: "Okay, fine, how much?" (as she turns around to me and rolls her eyes)
So it is nice here. It has been a while since we have been back to Taiwan -- my mom, my sister and I used to visit every other summer up until about six years ago. So while everything feels familiar, being older and having studied abroad during college makes me more aware than ever about the difference in culture. I wish you all could be here too, because there are a million tiny little everyday things that I want to share with you all. But neither words nor photos really do any of it justice. Then again, I guess that is the way it is with almost everything in life, not just trips to far away places.
New photos from this weekend's trip to Hualien and Taroko Gorge are up on Flickr as a new set, so if you bookmarked the Taiwan set, you'll want to use this link.