“We are completely sold out of surgical masks and [sanitizing] alcohol”
Sign for foot massages
Food Panda, which along with UberEats has taken Taiwan by storm just as other services have done in China
Daily garbage truck rounds – the trucks play Fur Elise and you have to run behind them to dispose of your trash
All along the watchtower – a watchtower for a Japanese colonial era prison which has been turned into a park
The other surviving watchtower in the prison
Taiwanese Starbucks food menu – they have flatbread pizza and pasta!
Temple night on Lantern Festival – Year of the Rat
“Gold paper” to burn for your ancestors for them to receive the blessings of wealth
Temple shots
This is a 結緣 bookshelf/library in the temple, with a lot of free literature on Buddhist/Daoist teachings and other religious texts relevant to worship. I got some of my own:
Incense – I didn’t take pictures of the deities directly, at least not this time
For next time, I have some videos of a lantern festival parade…various deities and their holy entourages
Now, the current trip in Taiwan as I wait out the coronavirus on the Mainland
Fort “Red Hair,” which is what the locals called a Dutch colonial fort in Northern Taiwan. There are a few other forts around Taiwan dating from the Golden Age of Exploration (including Spanish ones).
Taiwan has been colonized repeatedly and only marginally under the control of the Ming rebels and later the Qing dynasty. When the island was returned to Chinese rule after World War 2, there was a lot of resentment among the locals for the government of the Republic of China on Taiwan. There still is…
The adjacent building became the British Ambassador (Consulate?) residence after World War II. They had a dandy exhibition about British fashion, tea culture, tennis etc.
Even more Japanese colonial architecture in Northern Taiwan
Guanyin Mountain, across the Tamsui river where I used to live
Tamsui is a popular street food location
“Oxford College”
Self-explanatory
I toured Taroko Gorge again, a massive canyon in Hualian, Taiwan
More monkey business
Cat in a box
Asparagus juice – complete with picture of caucasian babe bending over. It’s an ok beverage
I am writing from Hualian (Eastern Taiwan) and Taipei, Taiwan. This is after the Chinese central government extended the Spring Festival holiday and the Shanghai Municipal government delayed the opening of businesses even more until February 9, because the coronavirus is really doing a number on the country.
Taiwan only has 10 confirmed cases of the coronavirus as of this writing, with almost 200 cases in Shanghai and counting. One death in Shanghai: It’s mainly been older people and or individuals with pre-existing conditions passing away, but it’s hard to tell who the rest of the people are. Facemasks are no longer readily available in Taiwan, with the government limiting everyone to purchasing only 1-3 masks per store per day, and forbidding the export of masks to China. Weird flex but ok. In addition, I will only be able to bring up to 5 boxes of facemasks (50 per box) to China, not that I can find that many anymore.
“Please leave N95 masks for medical personnel”
Forget about the virus, I’m just worried that there won’t be enough food when I get back, but from what I can tell online at least some people seem to be out and about back in Shanghai, much to the detriment of local quarantine efforts. It’s hard to keep people indoors for more than a week.
Anyways, I was in Taiwan for Christmas as well, so here is a two-part photo essay combining those times and the current stay. Enjoy!
Oyster pancake in the night market, which is a pancake made of egg, spinach, yam powder/paste and oysters with some orange sauce added.
Night market, where I had other food like fried chicken, pork’s blood cake, bird’s eggs, etc.
F-16s climb into the blue sky from a Taiwanese base in Hualian
Beach in Hualian
Not so appealing – grab a doll, except it’s a cockroach
Cats on rooftops of Japanese colonial era houses – Taiwan was a Japanese colony from the end of the Sino-Japanese War in 1895 to the end of World War II in 1945. It retains a lot of Japanese influence even today
More Japanese houses, now owned by the Taiwanese government/military
Election posters for Han Guo-Yu, who did not win, above a betelnut stand, a common sight in Taiwan
More Japanese colonial architecture, which later became an officer’s club for the American military after the end of WWII
Before we start with the Shenzhen photo essay, I want to highlight how integrated QR codes are into daily Chinese life. You can scan QC codes (or have your own code scanned) using WeChat or AliPay to make retail payments, but you can even scan (indeed, must scan) a QR code to pay your electric bill. Take a look:
A lot of vendors (including taxis, fruit stores, etc.) leave their QR codes up for customers to scan and submit payments, while most established retail stores will bring a QR code reader to scan the QR code that is randomly generated from your WeChat or Alipay app.
Interestingly, because Alibaba (which makes Alipay) is headquartered in Zhejiang and Tencent (which makes WeChat) is in Shenzhen, only Alipay is available in much of Zhejiang, and WeChat Pay in Shenzhen, in a sort of e-payment turf war.
Ok, on my way to Shenzhen: Starbucks are everywhere in China but their menus are different than the ones in the states. Just check out these items below. They have to compete with shops selling crazy flavored teas and boba drinks, so they come up with these exotic beverages:
“Modern Mixology” replete with coffee mixed with lemon and other monstrosities“Fortune Chestnut Molten Mocha”
Now I’ll let the pictures speak for themselves:
Shenzhen airportHotel LobbyNow we need theseBeware of crush
Tencent, the internet giant that makes WeChat and other apps, is headquartered in Shenzhen
All the people going into Tencent in the morningShenzhen skyline
You can (and sometimes have to) order by QR code at restaurants by scanning a code like this at the table (including the table number) or the counter:
It will bring up a menu of items which you can add to your shopping cart and checkout with, this is a screen capture from the Luckin Coffee payment menu, which is like a cheaper Starbucks which is still decent:
Mmm, durian cashew nuts!
You pay in the app, and once your order is ready, you pick it up from the counter or they bring it to your table.
Lunchtime in Shenzhen, which is a huge business center rivaling Hong Kong or Shanghai:
A restaurant devoted entirely to serving frog dishes, which I did not partake in:
Special Soldier in Fast Food
Frozen ads on the plane for Shanghai Disneyland, which is now closed because of the coronavirus:
Obviously there was more to the trip than just this but hopefully it gives you a flavor…
My life has gotten a lot more exciting over the past couple of months so I haven’t gotten to writing the Phables recently. But now things are clearly getting very exciting over here, so I’m back at it again.
First, mandatory pictures of ordinary life in Shanghai:
View from the Bund to Lujiazui, in the Pudong New AreaArt Deco buildings on the Bund, a former foreign concession area
But probably the biggest question on everyone’s mind is how it is being in China during the coronavirus.
It’s clear that people’s attitudes changed drastically after the government announced that there was people-to-people transmission of the virus, because then it seemed more like SARS, which a lot of people still remember. Then the masks started coming out more in public and at the office, where previously few people were wearing them. As readers of the blog will remember, I was just in Wuhan as recently as last November, so this current crisis comes as quite a surprise.
Nicole, the laundromat dog
I remember SARS, as I was attending local junior high school in Taiwan at the time. There were accounts of the virus spreading until finally someone in our school (or their family member) was infected, so they shut school down. I do remember distinctly one vignette, that is when we were put in a different classroom to wait for the school day to end and everyone to be sent home (we had to wait because some people’s parents were still at work I imagine), everyone was wearing masks in a classroom with a projector.
Decorations in a fancy SH karaoke place
Our teacher or some admin person thought it would be a good idea to play a movie for us while we waited to go home, so they picked the enlightened choice of Resident Evil. Good times.
Anyway, in lighter news, I recently went on a business trip to Shenzhen, which is a very advanced city in southern China, less than 2 hours away from Hong Kong by road. I could do some research into how Shenzhen is one of the special economic zones (SEZ) of China that was first opened up to world investment and trade, but I’ll let you figure out the details. I’m just going to show what I saw, since that’s the sort of day-to-day details that seem to interest my readers. Tune in next time for the Shenzhen photo essay…
This is part of the back-to-back posts on China adventures!
The weekend before I represented my company at a forensics conference in Wuhan, China. Wuhan is a huge city about two hours away from Shanghai by plane, so I flew out from the airport closer to the city in Shanghai (Hongqiao).
Air travel in China has gotten a lot better since the days of “rude inflight behavior” that was quickly quashed by the government.
The ride to the hotel from the Wuhan airport was very long, and featured row after row of tall, dark apartment buildings. It felt a little bit dystopian, Ghost in the Shell-like.
The Hetian hotel itself was nice – Hetian means field of lotuses – and the accommodations were pleasant. They did have creepy pandas at the entrance and rip-off Peppa Pig statues though. Why are there always creepy animal statues everywhere in China? Is it just creepy because they are putting cutesy things in non-family spots?
Anyway, allow me to introduce a little about part of what I’m doing in China. Over the course of civil litigation in the United States, there is a Discovery phase where the litigants have to surrender (almost) all of their records related to the case. The scope of discovery is determined by a judge or simply by management if they are doing an internal investigation.
Right?
So our job is to go and collect as instructed by lawyers all the documents and data related to the scope of discovery, including emails, Word, Excel or Powerpoint documents, mobile data like text and instant messages, other specialty data types, sometimes social media, scanned and paper documents, everything. Obviously this can get to be a lot of data.
“Greatly nurture and actualize the core values of socialism”
Then we process and load that data into a database where lawyers and (our) investigators can review the documents in a page-by-page format.
Military Olympics in WuhanWuhan University
In my next post, I’ll go over some details of the conference.
Overall Naruto/One Piece influenced. Starts with street urchin, Aladdin-type Naruto character running through streets and jumping between platforms. He wants to become King one day (Emperor? Hokage?) but there are other more illustrious competitors in his way, captains from rich backgrounds. The captain(s) set out to hunt the street urchin and set traps in the sewers (barbed wire strung by cronies) to catch him and limit his movement. Now this is a counter-insurgency against freedom fighters.
Captains look like this, though I dreamed images of their full bodies and uniforms on the bridges of their ships and other cityscapes
Somehow people start playing ultimate frisbee and I take an uber to a public park where I recount heroic tales of the rebel glories to youth who are listening over a stone table, including the story of hijacking a spaceship (any undefended can be exploited). But I am ambushed by one of the captains who can change shape/form (so can I), so they become a t-rex and start chasing after me and the youth. To escape, I transform into underwear and drift along the ocean. The T-rex ignores me to chase after other prey, but other cronies come to investigate me. [I start to wake up and think] Now I have to change back into a venom-spitting dinosaur to fend them off, but I am the resistance leader and my cover will be blown.
Commentary: I really don’t have much to say, except that I could’ve transformed into something cooler than underwear. Underdog story?
I (Twitter: @philipwhsu) wanted to showcase some of my creative writing and ramblings – “phables,” – so I started this site.
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