No smoking

At the beginning of this year, more or less around the time I came back to Taiwan, the new anti-smoking law came into effect forbidding smoking in public places like bars, restaurants, universities, etc. I am not sure if it still keeps smoking and non-smoking separations, but I am beginning to doubt it, because I have seen in at least two campuses that it is not allowed to smoke anywhere on campus apart from some special places dedicated for that.


It was unavoidable, I think. Some may think it is a little extreme, —I do not, anymore—, but it looks like the only solution. Of course, as it happens in other places with an ancient culture, as somebody told me here, one thing is the law and another to apply it.


They could also begin to look at cars now.

Taiwan Folk Village

When we stayed in Changhua, we slept in a hotel located a few km from the meeting place; in a place named the Taiwan Folk Village, in Huatan County.


More or less, it consists of a group of buildings showing how the old Taiwanese villages used to be,

with some houses in the style of the different original regions of the immigrants from the main land,


all kinds of different roofs,

a small temple,

a traditional marketplace (closed when we visited it)

and facades with funny shapes.


According to the leaflets laying around in the hotel, they regularly do shows with traditional dances and parties. It seems that there were also some water attractions in the grounds at some point, maybe only on a warmer season, which are now shut down and empty.


Not much maybe, but enough to have a nice walk in the morning of a beautiful day.

Motorcycle

This is evidence that not all the motorcycles in Taipei are scooters. They are a small percentage, but they do exist.

They also come with some special attitude, of course.

Cloudy ceiling

So, this is how the Taipei 101 looked for most of the day.

I wonder if it was sunny at the top.

Typhoon tracking

Some links today. The typhoon season has not started yet, at least in Taiwan. There are two or three months left until it does, but this does not mean that there are not any tropical storms somewhere and that we cannot track them. There are several websites that provide (more or less) real time information about the active storm or storms, or where you can see how the previous ones were. Besides, there is also, ready to use, the list of names that will be used on the new storms, what country gives the name and things like that. Last year, I mainly used three of them:

• the typhoon webpage of the Japan Meteorological Agency
  
• wikipedia pages: this year's new one 2009 and last year's (2008)
  
• typhoon2000: a webpage from the Philippines with pictures and real time information, when there is a storm going on
  

Using these three webpages, at least, it is easy to follow the evolution of the storm, see what is approaching, and decide then if you want to leave your nice little apartment or not.

Little tree

In my visit to the Taiwan Folk Village near Changhua, near which was our hotel, I saw this little tree (or is it bush?) with very curious leaves

It was similar to the ones I used to see during my childhood in Catalonia, but I was surprised by the orientation of the leaves and branches, they seemed to be almost perfectly vertical. I had never seen that and, in my bottomless ignorance, I wondered if it was not the result of some special care (being in Asia, I end up imagining things). Somebody told me then that they grew naturally that way. I need some help from biologists.

Confucius Temple

This is a peculiar building in Changhua, placed in the center of an open space. It is the Confucius Temple, one of the oldest of the island, built in the first half of the 17th century. We just drove by one morning and did not stop, because we were late, but I still had time to take a picture of the outer wall, not of the more decorated and probably nicer inside. For some reason, I like this shot.

What is this floor?

This is an example of the signs located at the mid-point of every flight of stairs in my building in Shida, which inform about the upper and lower floor numbers.

There are many similar to this one everywhere. Sometimes, it seems like there are more than the proper floor signs. They can be more or less elaborate or fancy, but I had never seen any of this type anywhere else. They are very useful to know where you are if you are climbing the stairs and lose track of the floor number.

Lugang

More pictures that I took about a month ago, when I went to the PSROC meeting in Changhua. There is not much to tell about the meeting, because I did not see or do too many interesting things there. Changhua is another of these Taiwanese cities, as in other countries, that do not seem to be much more than a random hodgepodge of buildings and cars. But we still had some free time to visit some of the local tourist attractions.

Leaving Changhua due West, towards the nearby sea, we arrived to Lugang, where there is a famous temple in honor of the Mazu goddess, built in the 17th century after a military campaing in Taiwan of the Shi-Lang general, and rebuilt in the 1930s. It is known as the Sky Goddess Palace (天后宮, Tiān hòu gōng). At the time of our visit, we were in the last week before the Chinese Lunar New Year, and there were many lanterns and lights all over the place.


We visited the temple late—after a late dinner for local standards— and we were almost alone. So, I took many pictures.








Very beautiful... and quiet. Much more than outside.

Trip to Caoling and Longdong

I keep going back to old things, so I can put up some nices pictures. The last Saturday of November, 29th, I went to the NTNU Earth Sciences Department outing to Caoling and Longdong, on the coast, East of Taipei. The first cold days had arrived and that morning was a little bit chilly, but with a perfectly blue sky and a beautiful Sun.

Only a few months before, an old abandoned railroad tunnel had been open to the public again, after not being used for years because of the new tunnel built next to it. Now, the path/road is new. It branches off the road from Fulong and then goes into the tunnel, which can only be used by bikes or pedestrians. The tunnel is about 2 km long, and it has many sound effects of trains coming and going, whistles, the sound of the tracks, etc


At the exit on the southern side of the tunnel,

full of people (we are in Taiwan, don't forget it),

there is a view of a nice patch of the coast

with Turtle Island in front of it.


We went from here to have lunch —lots of fish and seafood, all very tasty—, and after that, we went to LongDong Cape to take a walk. The coastline is very similar to the one in Yehliu, to the North following the coast, but a little bit more rugged


with some cliffs

strangely shaped rocks,


a lighthouse,

a winding path along the crest of the cliffs,

the same type of rocks I saw more to the North,


and a show in the sky


It was more that two months ago, but it was a very nice day. Specially, and it's funny living in an island, because I was next to the ocean after months without seeing it. A very beautiful blue sea, of the kind that fills the eyes and the soul with calmness.

Exceptional audience

Last week's Monday was the full moon and it also was the last day of the Chinese Lunar New Year celebrations. All in all, two weeks. We had dinner in a restaurant in front of our campus and when we left, around 7:30pm, we walked by the small temple close to it. This time, there was a small truck with a big square hole or window on its right-hand side to be used as the stage for a puppet show.

The show was already on, with the usual amount of shouts and special effects, but the audience consisted of only a woman on one side and a man standing behind one of the doors of the temple. Fortunately, it seems that it did not matter if there were a few, or no, human onlookers, because the performance was intended to entertain the gods that live inside the temple. I wonder how the puppeteers will know if they liked the show.

Sky Lantern Festival

Late again, but that is how things are. Last Saturday, I went with a couple of post-docs to Pingsi, about 30 or 40 km from Taipei, to see the Sky Lantern festival. A truly spectacular celebration.


What are the sky lanterns (天燈, tiān dēng)?. At this time of the year, towards the end of the Chinese lunar new year celebrations, people in some places write down good wishes for the new year on the outside of big lanterns, along with their names, and then using the fire burning at the bottom of the lantern, makes them fly.

The lanterns go up very fast and fly away following the wind. If it is dark, the sky is full of small lights, like little stars, floating away.


We also sent up our own lantern. First, write down some good wishes

unfold the lantern

and get the propellant ready.


Large bunches (hundreds?) of lanterns were launched from the playground of a nearby school every fifteen minutes. To create a very impressive effect (pictures are very poor, compared to it)


I see a drawback to the whole thing. When the fire dies down, or sometimes before that, the lanterns fall back down to the ground. From Pingsi, they are supposed to fall into the ocean —as if that was cleaner—, but we saw many fall all over the place. Some even caught fire and landed on trees. Fortunately, everything was very wet, it was drizzling too, and there was no danger, except for your head.

We had to queue for an hour and a half before boarding the buses that would take us back to the city. It is a crowded island.

Lessons

Another not so ordinary week. Several days waking up very early, be it for pleasure, to go jogging, or to go to talks, and several car trips. Maybe that is the reason I have not updated the blog too much; or maybe not.

The TIARA Winter School on Star Formation in Hsinchu started on Thursday. I went there on Thursday —comfortably, because I got a ride from the NTNU students—, with the intention to greet some people I know, specially a student from Barcelona who will stay in Taiwan for six weeks more, and to see how the talks were. You know how that is, general topics I have read many papers about or I have heard about in many talks, and I was not expecting too much.

I was so wrong!. In fact, I went back again on Friday. The talks may not provide me with many new things, but they were very educational, enjoyable even in subjects traditionally difficult, were always good to remember things I am beginning to forget or to learn something new, and particularly to get a new point of view on matters you might think you know about. I even got a couple of ideas to try in my present work. Not bad at all, then.

Back to normal

Today was the first Monday after the Chinese Lunar New Year holiday week. And you could really tell: all the shops were open; there were many people burning ghost money or making food offerings in front of office buildings or shops at miday; or, more spectacularly, they lighted long firecracker strips just before opening businesses —a way of welcoming the new year and to scare away the evil spirits—; or the traffic was back to the usual levels of craziness.

Campus is still almost completely quiet, though. There are more people around, of course, but classes will begin three weeks from now. Time to enjoy the peace this represents, before all the students invade all the stairs and elevators.

As for me, I took a bus very early in the morning to go to a pub were we knew they were showing the SuperBowl. I watched it in Barcelona two years in a row, waiting until very late at night, but here is the complete opposite. The world turned upside-down. By the way, another very exciting end of the game.