nnozomi | Taiwan and other recent delights

All-purpose post. (Almost all-purpose; I still haven’t quite finished reading all my new books, so book reviews to follow next time.)
業務連絡 to start with. 1) A few posts ago I promised I’d comment on at least one work linked by everyone who commented there; I think I have done so, but if I missed you out somehow, or didn’t comment on the one thing you really wanted attention to, let me know. Also feel free to leave a comment if you didn’t see the original post, the offer is still good; the comments are an excellent ongoing rec list too!
2) It’s about time I sent out a round of postcards. If I’ve sent you one before and you have a different address etc., or would rather not get one this time, DM me let me know; likewise if I haven’t sent you one in the past but you would like one.

Music: A video a few years old of Seong-Jin Cho rehearsing for a recital; notable for his concentration and if you’re curious about how a world-class pianist practices. (Also, shallowly, he’s cute. A reviewer who probably is not well up in K-pop (any more than I am) once described him as “handsome as a K-pop star”; I would not say that’s his style at all, but he’s got good Korean cheekbones and nice low-key good looks.)
Also some of the Kapustin piano sonatas, which sound like a serious jazz pianist improvising, and are in fact written out note for note and rhythm for rhythm; very invigorating.

Chinese: Still absorbed in the silly farming show (you can expect to be hearing about this one for a while; between the two seasons so far there are over a hundred episodes and counting, many of them up to 90 minutes long). Slang and other useful expressions I’ve picked up so far include the following.

・牛, their highest term of praise, which literally means “cow” (nothing to do with farming) but is used to express “awesome” or similar, sometimes slurred to 六 instead (nearly as laudatory is 帅, literally “handsome” but applied by the farmboys to pieces of machinery/technology they approve of)
・巨, literally “gigantic” but used as a “very”-type intensifier, sometimes leading to odd constructions like 巨小, super tiny
・治愈, meaning “healing” and used to convey “relaxing, restful, soothing”
・玩呢, pronounced with a hard 儿 sound in the middle and meaning, as far as I can tell, “you have to be kidding,” “gimme a break,” “well, fuck” or similar
・吓我一跳, literally “you made me jump,” basically “you scared me,” “you startled me”
・真的假的, sometimes shortened to just 真假, “no kidding?” “for real?”

Taiwan! Y and I took a very short trip there and back, 2.5 days and two nights, and loved it. My short writeup below turned out to be ninety percent about food, but what can I say, everything was good. See the photos further below for less appetite-oriented reactions.

Y and I have very different traveling styles—he makes reservations in advance and plans everything out, I just get hold of a map and hope for the best. His plans meant that we had to do a lot of hastening through unfamiliar places to get to our destinations on time (man, Taiwanese train stations are huge, you could get a day’s exercise just transferring on the subway), but also that we got to see a lot of things I never would have gotten to on my own. (It really works out very well; he deals with all the macro-level stuff that I stumble over, while I’m better at “okay, we need to take this subway line and change here” as well as handling the languages.)
Notably the old-fashioned coast town of Jiufen: long, long winding arcades lined with food and trinket shops, very touristy but at the same time very pleasant. Korean and Japanese audible everywhere among the other visitors. Milk with grass jelly, noodle soup with chicken oil, pork on rice, taro balls with sweet beans over ice, grapefruit-juice tea with a half grapefruit squeezed into it. The model for the Sen to Chihiro bathhouse (I forget the English name), swamped with waves of Japanese tourists. Breathtaking views out over the sea, a huge temple flaunting innumerable gold-trimmed dragons in all colors, a triangle-faced pregnant cat sunning on the roof, narrow steep stairways.
On day two we went down to Taichung where my friend A-Pei lives. I was a little nervous because, although she and I have been close friends for, what, seven or eight years at least?, we’ve only met in person maybe half a dozen times if that, we do almost all our interaction on Skype. She and her husband (a laid-back Brit, four nationalities among the four of us) made it easy for us, though, and it all went well. They treated us to the best mooncakes I’ve ever had, with salted egg yolks and purple taro (?) paste and soft flaky pastry, plus mango for Y, and then lunch at a local restaurant where everything was good—tofu pitan with pork floss (a big hit with Y), bamboo shoots, fried tofu, sweet Taiwanese sausage with allspice, you name it. We ended up at the old Miyahara Eye Clinic, an exquisite colonial-era building which is now a very fancy sweetshop, and also paid a call on the well-preserved old Taichung Station where A-Pei used to commute to high school; the lobby is full of old ticket machines and hot-lead slugs for printing, containing complex characters in absurdly tiny fonts.
Evening back in Taipei—a walk along a back street with beautiful older apartment buildings, plus one of the night markets, guarded by an enormous temple with people moving around inside as if it were their living room, offerings of flowers and food and joss paper laid on tables. All kinds of food stalls along with trinkets and cheap clothing and so on. Roujiamo—God damn but that was good, the best thing among three days of tasty things—some mysterious sweetbread things which Y figured were worth a try, douhua with peanuts and sweet beans and tapioca, plain sausage and rice sausage with garlic, hujiaobing with a delicious crackly outside.
Morning walk around the hotel before heading to the airport—more nice little apartment houses of wood or green tile or plain concrete, wood and metal window lattices, trees and flowers everywhere, fruit markets full of unfamiliar tropical fruits, breakfast from a crowded little neighborhood stall—hot doujiang, youtiao, gaoli danbing.
That was one of my more successful Chinese attempts, managing to order for us and to indicate that Y and I were together and that he would like sugar in his doujiang and I wanted spicy sauce on my danbing. On the whole I found that I could say most things and make myself understood in general, but the problem was that I couldn’t understand the answers! How is my listening still so terrible and what do I do about it?

Photos, all from Taiwan: sea views, dragons, decorated walls and a hopeful wall poster in Jiufen; Miyahara Ganka, a nighttime street, and a protective talisman (?); three views from around the park where we ate our delicious breakfast.

Be safe and well.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

trobadora

吓我一跳, literally “you made me jump,” basically “you scared me,” “you startled me”

How is that pronounced? The dictionary gives me two pronunciations for 吓 ...

That sounds like a fantastic trip, and thank you for sharing the pics. Lovely! ♥

From:

grayswandir

I think I've only heard 吓 as xià in Mandarin, and Wiktionary gives xiàyītiào for 吓一跳 (and xiàsǐ for 吓死). But I got curious about the other pronunciation, and from this question post on Reddit, it looks like hè is reserved for a few(?) specific literary compounds (and may also be regional?).

From:

trobadora

Thanks muchly, that helps!

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Taiwan and other recent delights

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