Today is coldest day of the year in Taiwan, so today we eat starch balls.

I changed the name of my blog. The other was kind of a place holder until something less pedantic and more experience-based came along. Let me explain.

Today I made like a situationalist and endeavoured to get myself lost to find the "real city" at the heart of Tainan. I was actually too tired to even get lost let alone find my way back again - I went to a dance club in Kaohsiung last night and didn't get home until 6 in the morning - but I did find some interesting stuff. First I was biking around and I saw a sign that said "Beetle Store." Beetles and other insects are of personal significance to me for two reasons: first, Carl Jung was inspired to develop the theory of synchronicity based on an experience he had with a scarab beetle and then also Gretchen, whom you all may know, is farely enthralled with insects and has drawn my attention to them where before they were only good for crawling in my mouth while I slept 6 times out of a year on average. So of course I went in there and they had some really incredible beetles and grubworms that you hoped for the sake of the insect were in the larval stage of a much nicer looking creature. The beetles were all busily jamming their outsized probosci into these tubs of gelatinous goo that reminded me of the cheap grape jelly you can smear on your toast at a diner. They were all so stupidly big that I began to wonder if someone along the line hadn't just made a small mistake along the evolutionary chain. There's a lot of talk over here about what pet you're going to have when you get one and I think I decided right then and there that I would get a pair of the shiny-backed japanese beetles if the opportunity ever arose.

I was riding home along chenggong road, the road that leads to my university, and I kept seeing these prominently displayed banners hanging from lamp posts and street signs all up and down the road. I finally stopped to take a closer look at one of these banners and it said "2008 is the year of health and safety." It made me wonder if the previous year had focused more on senescence and violence, but it seemed to me a concept worth pursuing. It turns out that the mayor of Tainan has, of late become particulary worried about these two key issues and so has decided to make them the focus of his current tenure. He gave these comments to a local newspaper: " Mayor Hsu expressed that the 「Health Center」had to include physical and psychological advise, and emphasized that health was the most important for people.

Everyone should take good care and adjusted if any problem occurred in body and exercise more to maintain the better physical status. Meanwhile, he also hoped that every staff would be healthy because the biggest fortune is health. And 2008 is the year of health and safety in Tainan City, every staff in Tainan City Government would manage well to implement the concept of the healthy life and propagate for all the citizens.

Furthermore, Mayor Hsu said the high-density development especially in the industrialized cities would produce the social, sanitary and ecological problems which included high-density population, crowded traffic, tense life, unlicensed drinks and foods, polluted ecologic environment, violence and trauma…etc. These problems would progressively become the important factors that threatened the human health.It is settled up the milestone of the concept of the sustained city development in Tainan City to create the 「health, ecology, technology, culture」as the developmental objectives.

In the health aspect, we would promote the healthy life, improve the prophylaxis and health care, strengthen the sanitary education and propagation, and make effort in disease controlling as the objectives to check on the health status of the Tainan citizens."

I think I just found my new favorite public servant. It seemed a good omen to me rename my blog after Mayor Hsu's initiative - if I do nothing else, perhaps I can at least be healthy and safe.

It's been ten days since I've arrived and according to Dad, I've only three more days until my suprachiasmatic nucleus decides to pick up the vibe of these haunts so I can have a proper night's sleep. I suppose that may mark a kind of rite of passage on the long and fateful road to taiwanese immersion. To celebrate, I thought I'd share with you a few comic and surreal things about my experience so far.

Gretchen, whom you all probably know, has a fear of scuba-divers so pronounced that she will not swim if she sees any nearby. I've always been a little bit perplexed by this phobia, but this perplexity was often overrided by the ensuing self-congratulatory dialogue I would have with myself concerning my lack of irrational fears. Self-congratulatory dialogues no longer - upon arriving here, I found I was thorougly afraid of all the people in their funny gas-mask things they wear. The pollution here is not bad, but most people here are very health conscious and do not want to risk exposure to exhaust from adjacent scooters in the open air. Yes, yes, it's all very understandable, until you actually look at these people and realize you can't read their facial expressions or hear what they are saying. Most people don't say anything when they put their masks on, they just become these quiet, withdrawn, vaguely threatening presences all around you while you're just trying to get a snack at the local food stand.

I was troubled by this for a time, but eventually I just decided to let it go and assimilate as I could. My friend recently bought me a face mask and now I quite like it, but I still try not to look at myself in the mirror if I can help it.

A few other random little things: it is the garbage trucks, not the ice cream trucks, that play music on the streets and it's strictly western classical music.

The most popular tea in Taiwan is called Boba Naicha, which means mama's breast milk tea. Apparently the consistency of the black tapioca pearls explains the name.... This is really going to be my most freudian post (as you'll see below) I promise.

The kind of mindless way of greeting someone in Taiwan is chibao le meiyou? It is the "what's up?" equivalent but it literally means have you eaten/are you full? This always trips me up, because I know it's not meant to be meaningful but it just seems like such a specific question, that person must be interested. But it is often perfect strangers who ask me this, so I begin to wonder if they want to go to eat with me and I end up like a stammering fool, or one of those people who tells you their life story when you ask them "how's it goin'?"

Finally, a vaguely serendipitous thing happened to me today while I was secret santa shopping for my friends from our apartment/dormitory this afternoon. As some of you may know, I was, for a while after taking a class called "Darwin, Einstein and Freud," farely fascinated with psychoanalysis. One of my favorite bits of psychoanalysis was Salvador Dali's paranoiac-critical method. This "method" developed by Dali involved taking seemingly mundane situations, images, objects and animating them with the force of your own subjective interpretation. Thus, Dali, perceiving two coffee mugs next to a coffee pot, came to envision the image as a depiction of mother-son cannabilism though the connection is vague and "poetic" as he calls it. His most famous example of the method is in his book The Tragic Myth of Angelus, which is a whole book he wrote about a single impressionist painting called "Angelus" by Jean-Francois Millet which features a farming couple bent in prayer at dusk after a long day's work. Dali took the stillness of the painting to be a "static tension," the manifest content of the woman's subtle dominance over the man. The pitchfork stuck in the ground is taken to be an indicator of violence and the wheelbarrow of sexual brutality. I'm often attracted to inexcusably pedantic writing, and this book is no exception, so imagine my surprise when I went to a poster store looking for presents and in among vanities of Japanese pop stars I find, low and behold, our "Angelus" quietly, or perhaps passive-aggressively, tucked away! You can bet I bought two copies straight off, one for myself and one as a present to I don't know who yet.

As you might be able to guess, "Angelus" is the painting at the top next to yours truly.

As you might be able to see from the cityscape below, Tainan is not a city of high-rises. My friends tell me it is a "comfy" city, though in my red-eyed, world-weary state this is a bit hard to imagine. I think I am, however, beginning to grasp their sentiment.

It is a welcoming place. Yesterday, I happened upon a little tea store near my apartment. The owner invited me in and I inquired after some cheap oolong tea, which is my particular favorite. He said he had just what I was looking for - a variety grown in his very own plantation - and only $7 for two heaping cans of the stuff. I was already reaching for my wallet when he told me I should really try some first, so for the next 30 minutes we sat in his store drinking the tea and speaking about my first few days in the country. He introduced me to his family and told me that should I ever wish to share the ceremony again I should only come by and say hello.

If I had to compare it to a city, I might say Brooklyn. First off, people are about as fashionable as the brooklynites - everyone has those tight, angular haircuts that you see the Japanese youth sport in the U.S. Then, also, walking through the streets at night is a bit like walking through an american apparel ad - formless shirts and leggings, short skirts and plaid t-shirts. I always feel scandalously unfashionable, especially when dawning my much beloved long underwear to brave the 65 degree tainan winter nights. Beyond the fashion likeness, Tainan is also almost all little mom and pops and roadside stands - it has the organic feel of brooklyn. Think of ferns growing out of decomposing trees or birds recycling human hair for their nests: it is like that, life bursting at the seams, discombobulated but peaceful, qi-gong on busy sidewalks, temples in bicycle repair shops. The organismal nature of the city presses you to engage the intuitive and visceral faculties of understanding as much as the analytic. Perhaps this also has to due with my poor language skills, which I am more-and-more painfully aware of, but I suppose those will come.

anyway, I thank you few people for the comments you've posted - it is very rewarding to get feedback and to see your writing. I would also appreciate requests for certain topics and advice, as I am still trying to figure out how to approach this writing. ok, time to study food words so I can stop eating at 7-11 altogether (it's not just me, everyone does it).

"you've landed on your feet,

perhaps that means this is where you're meant to be right now." This from a 20-year old australian girl named Natasha, as she spirited me along to the immigration center in her friend's scooter. It has been a truly auspicious landing - "seemless" as I described it to my parents and very lucky I must remind myself.

With everything falling into place so effortlessly, I've gathered the confidence to peak out from the safe haven of the apartment complex and venture through the surrounding streets by bike and by foot. The warmth of this country allows for everything to occur in the open air - cooking, bathing, worship, etc. My gripe with being a cook was that you had to be inside all day and you never had any commerce with your customers, but here the cooks are really living the dream - open air kitchens right in the front of the restaurant, curbside, receptive to the chatter of pedestrians and the squawking of pidgeons.

The pictures are from the top of my apartment complex and also of a map that my landlord gave me. They are fairly indicative of my experience - this constant casting about for a point of reference, fighting the sensory overload for some semblance of order and balance.

til' next time,