Biking and hiking around Fulong

So. It’s been almost a year since my last post. And we’ve only got a little under three months left here before we go back to the U.S. But I’ve finally been inspired to post again.

A couple of weeks ago, while my parents were visiting from the U.S., Serge and I took our first-ever vacation without the kids since Mateo was born. We didn’t go far, just to the town of Fulong (福隆), about an hour and a half by train from Taipei, on the northeast coast of Taiwan. We’d been to Fulong a bunch of times before on day trips to the beach:

But I’d been reading about the bike paths around there and really wanted to check out one in partciular, without kids in tow. This path started with a 2km ride through the Old Coaling Tunnel (舊草嶺隧道), which was the longest railway tunnel in use during the Japanese era. (It’s also the subject of an old Taiwanese song I grew up hearing, 丟丟銅仔). The tunnel first opened in 1924, closed in 1979, and opened again as a bikeway in 2007. As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve been pleasantly surprised at the examples of preservation/redevelopment of industrial structures here, and this one also did not disappoint.

Here’s where we entered:

Here’s the interior:

And here’s what we came out to on the other side (that’s Turtle Island (龜山島) barely visible in the distance):

From there we turned left and onto a cordoned-off bike lane following Hwy 2 along a rocky coast.

 

Occasionally we passed through a fishing/seaweed harvesting village, the most interesting of which was Mao’ao ( 卯澳).

A fishing boat:

Parts of fishing boats and other fishing gear used to make a playground structure:

Some old stone houses from back in the day:

And lots of seaweed (or red algae? some sort of sea plant) drying in the sun in the middle of the road:

The ride was fairly easy — mostly flat and mostly on either a cordoned-off bike lane or on nearly deserted roads. It was about a 20K loop back to Fulong town, and even with me being a slowpoke, it took us less than 2 hours. We were there on a weekday, and once we got through the Old Coaling Tunnel at the beginning, we only saw a handful of other riders. But I imagine it gets pretty crowded on weekends.

Anyway, it is beautiful and fun and easy to get to from Taipei, and I highly, highly recommend it. (Also, if you want a longer ride, you can continue up or down the coast instead of circling around back to Fulong.)

The next day, we decided to try the Caoling Historic Trail, which is the only remnant left of a trail that was built 130 years ago to connect Tamsui/Danshui (淡水) on the northwest coast to Yilan (宜蘭) on the northeast coast. This was definitely more grueling on a warm day than our bike ride the day before. From our hotel in Fulong through the mountains down to the town of Dali (大里)on the coast, it was about 10K, which took us about 3 hours. (You can cut down on the time required by about 40 minutes if you take a cab directly to the trailhead at Yuanwangkeng Riverside Park (遠望坑親水公園) instead of walking there from Fulong.)

The walk to the trailhead was mostly pretty boring, but we did get up to some hillside rice paddies:

(There is actually a water buffalo in the center of this photo, but my phone camera sucks so you can’t make it out. There was also one of those white birds — egret maybe? — sitting near it. We waited around hoping that the bird would hop onto the buffalo — something Serge has dreamed of seeing — but it did not cooperate.)

Yuanwangkeng Riverside Park (by the trailhead) was lovely:

The trail was steep in a lot of sections but largely paved, with a few rest points with bathrooms along the way. One rest point had several of these beautiful guys:

The trail went through lots of different kinds of terrain/foliage:

eventually reaching this high grassy area:

that opened out onto the coast (that’s Turtle Island again in the distance on the left):

Way up above behind us, we actually saw water buffalo grazing. Had not realized that water buffalo would/could hang out in that kind of terrain. Again, my phone camera was not up to the task of capturing that:

From there, we made the descent down to Dali on the coast, but you can also continue on through these highlands into the Taoyuan Valley.

Our trail ended at the Dali Temple:

From there we walked to the Dali train station to catch the train back to Fulong and then continued home to Taipei.

If you go:

From Taipei, you can take the train from Taipei Main Station, Songshan Station, or Nangang Station (see http://twtraffic.tra.gov.tw/twrail/English/e_index.aspx). Express trains (which get you there about 10 minutes faster) allow reserved seating; local trains do not. Trains get very crowded on weekends when the weather is good, so if you’re on a local, you might have to stand.

It’s easy to do a day trip from Taipei, but if you’re looking for a nice place to spend the night, we stayed at the Fullon Fulong Bellevue Resort, which is comprised of a bunch of detached and semi-detached villas set in gardens within walking distance of the beach. It was lovely and quiet. This was our villa:

Hotspringing it

Taiwan is located in a tectonic collision zone, which means that earthquakes are a frequent occurrence, but it also means that there are a ton of hot springs all over the place. Their mineral content varies by region (and there are even some naturally carbonated ones), with the various types each having their reputed health benefits. The Japanese first developed Taiwan’s hot springs for leisure/tourism back in the early 1900s, and today hot springing is still very popular.

At first, I didn’t think I’d get really into hot springing, since I’m not a bath person. But then I remembered that even though I never take baths at home, I am sort of into public bathing (while clad in a swimsuit, that is) — some of you know that I was definitely a fan of the Russian and Korean bathhouses in New York. So in the midst of our first typically damply chilly Taipei winter, when we had a holiday weekend to get through, I figured we should try a hot spring hotel for a quick getaway.

We ended up north of Taipei in the Yangmingshan/Jinshan area, stopping first on the way at Yeliu on the coast to walk among these mushroom-like rock formations:

Another manifestation of Taiwan’s unique geology

From there, we drove up into the mountains near Jinshan Village to a small hot spring inn called Calla Young Garden Resort, which I had found through another expat’s blog. One reason we chose it was because of its odorless springs (many of the others in the Yangmingshan area are sulfuric and smell like rotten eggs), but the main reason was the setting. The rain was coming down pretty hard and would continue to do so for the rest of our stay, but it made the view of the mountains gorgeously misty.

That’s Asha under the broken pink umbrella

The cold pool

I had been a little worried that all the pools would be too hot for the kids, but it turned out that there was one cold pool and one warm one (made lukewarm by the continual rain).  There were several hot pools protected by canopies outside as well. Mateo and Asha were very happy in the warm pool, rain and all.

The lukewarm pool (behind which, under the canopy, are a few of the extremely hot pools)

Most of our fellow bathers were day-trippers who just pay for use of the pools and perhaps have a meal in the restaurant, and the hotel itself only has nine guest rooms. Ours had a windowed hot spring tub, and we spent most of the evening and the following morning in it.

Asha here hasn’t quite figured out how to do the Asian “V” sign for pictures.

The only other major activity there was eating, and the food was fine, but the views were what made the meals.

So we had a great time, despite constant rain. And a few months later, when we wanted to take a quick trip somewhere again, I thought about going to the beach, but since it was the Plum Rain month of May, a hot spring hotel seemed like a safer bet. So we decided to check out one recommended by a friend, in the small town of Jiaoxi, about an hour’s bus ride away from Taipei.

Jiaoxi, like most small towns I’ve seen in Taiwan, isn’t much to look at:

But as we were walking from the bus station to our hotel, we came across this little public hot spring park:

Platform specially designed for socializing while having a foot soak

Our hotel, the Evergreen, was nothing like the small and isolated Calla Young Garden. It was a high-rise concrete block set among apartment buildings and parking lots, and it was packed with amenities like a gym, game room, indoor playground, and reading area:

That’s Taiwan Tatler on the bottom rack

The pool tables were a hit with the kids:

And of course they appropriated our bathrobes again. These seemed to inspire Mateo to practice some of his taekwondo moves:

And I guess the pools were fun too.

Swimcaps were required

Not quite the views we had at the Calla Young Garden, but it was still nice to see the mountains:

When the inevitable rain came, we occasionally retreated to the covered but still open-air area, where there were all sorts of small pools, including a foot soaking pool with fish that nibble at your dead skin:

I was swarmed with them, moreso than my fellow foot-bathers. And clearly my right foot has some serious calluses.

Part of the time it tickled, part of the time it was like pins-and-needles, and part of the time I could feel the suction. It didn’t seem to do much for my skin though. After we returned home I learned that these fish, Garra rufa, are actually native to Turkey (where they were first used for exfoliation), Syria, Iraq, and Iran, and in Turkey they are now a protected species due to overharvesting for spa use.

The other small pools were flavored: chinese herbs, kumquat, and orchid, for example. These were too hot for the kids, and even I couldn’t take them for more than a few minutes. So mostly we hung out in the warm pools, which were also the perfect height for small children.

Now that we’re hot spring converts, I’m eyeing this saltwater hot spring for a future trip:

photo credit: 王尹俊 (http://www.eastcoast-nsa.gov.tw/Portal/Content.aspx?lang=2&p=203040001&sid=122&area=3&u=PhotoDetail&index=1&photo=923#ctop)

Anyone have any other recommendations?

Hey, they’ve got artsy converted factories here too!

I guess it goes without saying that one of the great things about living here instead of just visiting is that I’ve seen so many aspects of Taipei that I hadn’t realized existed. For example, not long after we arrived, my uncle took us to Huashan 1914, a converted wine factory in the heart of Taipei that now houses galleries and shops displaying the works of local artists and designers.

I think my thing for old industrial buildings started when I had a job in college that required me to tour a bunch of 19th-century red-brick textile factory buildings. After seeing the interiors of those buildings (which were actually still being used for manufacturing), I started fantasizing about living in the newly converted factory near campus that I’d never paid any attention to before (this was back in the 90s, when loft living was still a rare thing in places like Providence, Rhode Island.)

I know that repurposed industrial spaces are a dime a dozen in places like NYC and London, and they even have a significant presence in small U.S. cities like Louisville, but somehow my preconception about Taiwan had been that those kinds of spaces wouldn’t exist here. I guess my Western bias was that Taiwanese people wouldn’t be into that kind of thing, since it seemed like pretty much all of the buildings in Taipei had been built since the 1950s and looked like these:                              or these:

With most of the picturesque little traditional houses like these having been torn down to make way for the above, I figured there was no way that any obsolete industrial spaces would have been preserved.

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So Huashan was  a bit of a revelation:

Inside one of the restaurants within the complex:

These bar stools in front of the restaurant are takes on the typical short plastic stools used at Taiwanese street food stalls:

A teahouse across from the restaurant:

The backstory of this place is that it was built by the Japanese in 1914 when they ruled the country (1895-1945). Not sure when the factory ceased operations, but it had been completely abandoned for almost a decade by the time a thespian group came across it in 1997 and started using the space for its own productions. Artists began taking notice and started setting up studios, while other performance groups also staged events in the space. In 1999, an NGO took over the management of the property, and restoration officially began in 2005. Now the space hosts a variety of exhibits, film festivals, and cultural events, as well as serving as the permanent home of a few small eateries and shops.

The day after we first went to Huashan, we decided to check out an international design expo that was taking place in Taipei. Little did we know that we’d be going to our second repurposed industrial building in two days, this one having formerly been a tobacco factory. (Wonder if it’s at all significant that the two preserved factories we’ve found in central Taipei produced alcohol and tobacco products.)

The expo was so crowded that we didn’t get to see much of it, and even when Serge and I came back on a weekday, it was still mobbed. Another thing I hadn’t expected: that a design expo in Taiwan would be so incredibly popular.

A couple of months later, Asha and I came back on a weekday to meet up with some friends and check out a dinosaur exhibit. This time, we got to get a much better look at the space:

Songshan Tobacco Factory was built in 1937, also by the Japanese. It remained in operation until 1998, and in 2001 it was declared a municipal historic site. Besides hosting events as diverse as design expos and dinosaur exhibits, it’s the permanent home of the Taiwan Design Museum. It appears to have a lot more raw space with no permanent use than does Huashan, and it is surrounded by a lot of vacant land and construction sites. Probably due to my lack of Chinese literacy, I haven’t been able to figure out what exactly is going to be arising on the surrounding land, but it seems that there were originally plans for a large commercial complex including an indoor stadium, a hotel, a shopping center, and office buildings, but there are also more recent reports of a different developer coming in and building a more culturally-oriented commercial development that will include a theater. Both plans, however, seem to include hotel, office, and retail space, and I wonder how much of the current feel of the place will remain once all the new development takes over. Meanwhile, protesters have been calling for preserving the remaining green space around the factory as a public park or at least scaling down the scope of the proposed development. I’m guessing those protests won’t have much impact, though.

Anyway, to those of you who know Taipei better than I do: are there any other repurposed industrial spaces I should check out?

我們的中文不好 (Wǒmen de zhōngwén bù hǎo)

Translation: Our Mandarin is not good.

First, a little music:

(For those of you who couldn’t understand the unsubtitled dialogue before the song starts, basically, the food vendor is calling out “Hey American” to the white dude, who says he’s not an American but a Brit. The Brit then tries to say that he wants some dumplings, but the vendor thinks he’s saying he wants to sleep, because the word for dumplings (shuǐ jiǎo) and the word for sleep (shuì jiào) differ only in their tones. It’s not the cleverest dialogue in the word, but I don’t have high standards, so I laughed out loud.)

We first came across this because Serge’s Mandarin tutor also tutors one of the bandmembers.  Serge’s tutor says the song got a lot of play last summer, and the band got a lot of media attention, but because they didn’t have an album ready at the time, they weren’t able to capitalize on their breakaway hit.  Now they’re basically just famous amongst all of us Mandarin-as-a-Foreign-Language students because the video gets played in all of our classes.

So, yeah, our Mandarin is as yet not so good either. I’ve had to fall back on Taiwanese a lot, so much so that Asha has taken to mocking me for it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xpIcTaT6dmQ&list=UUV1UwMrpJQmHuETR7Lo14BA&index=5&feature=plcp

Rough translation:

Asha:  Speak Taiwanese.  I don’t understand. SPEAK TAIWANESE! I DON’T UNDERSTAND!

Serge: What about Mandarin?

Asha: I don’t understand Mandarin. Speak Taiwanese. I don’t understand!

Asha claims she is just imitating me on the phone.  I like to think I’m not quite that rude, however.

Anyway, we’re all working on our Mandarin.  The kids are just acquiring it slowly and naturally by being in a primarily Mandarin-speaking environment at their preschool.  Serge has a private tutor that he meets with 3 hours a week, plus he watches Dora the Explorer and the occasional Korean-dubbed-into-Mandarin soap opera on TV.  I, on the other hand, have been compulsively trying lots of different methods: taking a class at a university, studying with four different private tutors (including one in the U.S. via Skype), listening to various Mandarin podcasts, doing language exchange with a Taiwanese friend, trying to get the kids to talk to me, and watching Dora and soaps on TV.

What’s been unexpectedly fun about this whole language project is doing it as a family — either learning together or just watching each other learn. Serge will learn something from his tutor or pick up a useful phrase from a conversation he witnessed and then tell me about it and vice versa. He and I have also had a bunch of tutoring sessions together, which have been surprisingly fun. And, of course, we’ll watch those Korean soaps together and try to figure out why that woman waking up in the hospital is so shocked at the sight of the woman sleeping in the adjacent bed (our guess: they had somehow switched bodies, a la Freaky Friday).

As for the kids, they’re still not speaking much Mandarin, at least not to us, but occasionally we’ll get glimpses of what they’ve acquired. At dinner sometimes, Serge will bring out his flashcards from his tutor, and the kids love telling us what the words are (although they were stumped by the one showing an iron, since they’ve never seen one in real life and don’t even know the English word for it).  Occasionally, we’ll try to actually  speak to them in Mandarin (e.g.: “Have you had enough to eat?”, a very important question in Taiwan), and they just might respond in Mandarin. Sometimes even when we’re speaking English, Asha will respond to one of us in Mandarin, or she’ll speak a mix of English and Mandarin in the same sentence. Mateo’s more reticent with the Mandarin, but he supposedly understands everything his teachers say, and when he does speak, he speaks more correctly than Asha does. (Sometimes it seems that Mateo feels compelled to speak just so that he can correct Asha’s grammar.) However, they both still definitely prefer English when they’re with us — if I try to go beyond “Do you want to eat this?” and the like in Mandarin, both of them will more often than not respond with “Speak English!” (On the other hand, maybe that’s just because they can’t bear to listen to my horrible Mandarin.)

I’m hoping that in the next few months I can make faster progress so that one day the kids will deign to speak Mandarin with me. So far, my listening comprehension is a lot better than my speaking ability, but my comprehension isn’t even that great — I still regularly struggle to understand what store clerks are saying to me once we get beyond how much I need to pay and whether I need a bag. (And now, some of the clerks in my neighborhood know me as Taiwanese-Speaking Lady anyway — one of them recently told me, after I’d tried to make my request in what I thought was perfectly serviceable Mandarin, that I should just speak to him in Taiwanese. Alas.)

I’d thought Mandarin would be pretty easy for me since I (mostly) understand Taiwanese (sort of like how learning French is a lot easier if you already know Spanish), and I’m sure I’m picking up Mandarin much faster than I would if I didn’t know Taiwanese already, but I’ve still got a ways to go. I’d be thrilled if I could at least get to the point where I understand what people are saying, minus a complex word or two, without having to think about it. Which is how Taiwanese is for me — I’m not great at speaking it, but I can at least automatically, without concentrating on it, understand what people say in everyday conversations. And even when there are random words that I don’t know, I can easily pinpoint that word and ask what it means. If I get to that point with Mandarin, I’ll feel like I can really use the language.

Anyway, this whole project has caused me to think a lot about language learning, but I’ll save those thoughts for another post.

Living in Stuypei

So I know it’s not really a blog when you never post anything. Sorry, folks.   (You can blame Serge.)

But we’re going to try again to actually do this thing. So, as promised in last quarter’s post, this is going to be about our apartment complex, which was originally officially called Jilong River Public Housing II.  We have gathered that it may now have a new, more market-friendly name, but our lack of literacy has prevented us from figuring out what that name is and whether it has been officially assumed. (From the notice we saw, we managed to glean that the new or proposed name contains the word “garden” and does not contain the words “public housing”.) In any case, in conversation, everyone still calls it the public housing complex.

Our friend Peter says it reminds him of the public housing complexes in Singapore. I seem to feel the need to relate everything to New York, so I think of ourselves as living in the equivalent of Stuyvesant Town. (Serge gets credit for coining “Stuypei”.)   It’s huge, it’s gentrified, and it has its version of the Stuyvesant Oval:

It’s a lot newer than Stuy Town (it was built about 12 years ago), though you certainly wouldn’t know it to look at it. Like too many buildings in Taiwan, ours is covered with pastel-colored ceramic tiles and grout, which do not age well in a humid climate. So we definitely stand out among all the shiny new condos and hotels in our neighborhood.

There are over 2,000 units in the complex, spread out over 55 buildings. Each building has between 8 and 12 floors, and nearly all of the units are the same size (just under 1000 square feet) and layout (3 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms, a living room, and a galley kitchen).  The exceptions are some of the first floor units, some of which seem to be larger and to have private yards.

There are several blocks of commercial activity on the side of the complex that sits on the main road:

And inside the complex, some of the ground-floor apartments are being used for businesses like this barbershop:

There’s even a church:

On rainy days, the giant snails come out:

And on sunny days, people’s bedding comes out:

While everybody calls it public housing, it’s actually privately owned. It’s a bunch of condos that were built with government funds to be sold at below-market prices to buyers who met certain qualifications. It turns out that most publicly financed housing in Taiwan is built for sale rather than rental. I’m not sure what the buyer qualifications were for our particular project, but public housing projects overall have been variously targeted at members of the armed forces, other government employees, other workers in designated trades, families earning below certain income thresholds, disabled individuals, individuals/families fleeing domestic violence, senior citizens, and aborigines.

However, since the time of the original sales, many units in these projects have probably been resold.  The projects initially had resale restrictions, but those restrictions were loosened about a decade ago in response to the softening of the country’s real estate market at that time. The new rules allowed owners to sell their units after only one year of residence (versus 5 or more) to any buyer, not just those who met the same qualifications as the original buyers, and there were no restrictions on price.  While public housing in Taiwan (which represents less than 5% of all units in the market), does carry a bit of a stigma (unlike Singapore, where 82% of the population lives in public housing), I’m guessing that given the overall rise in Taipei real estate prices over time, many units (many of which are located in high-priced neighborhoods) have been sold or rented out.  I have no idea what the numbers are, however.  (By the way, if any of you know anything about anything that I’ve been rambling on about, please do comment below.)

We are currently renting our unit from a secondary or possibly tertiary buyer. I’ve met some folks here who are original owners, so they do exist, but I’d guess that our project is one of those that has experienced a lot of turnover in recent years, due to the recent gentrification of Dazhi and the affordability of units here when compared with the surrounding luxury condos.

As for us, well, we really like it here. Sure, in a vacuum, I’d much rather live downtown in an older, livelier neighborhood, or in the old part of Dazhi by the university that I wrote about in my last post, but our complex really works for us. Yes, it’s ugly and institutional, but in a city where most streets are just sidewalk-less alleys where cars and scooters rule the road, here we can let our kids run out the front door and almost all the way to school without holding our hands.   There’s lots of car-free space for them to ride their bikes, kick soccer balls, and play Mateo’s version of baseball, and to do all of that with random neighborhood kids who happen to be outside, some of whom roam freely within the complex, no adult guardian in sight, until dinnertime.

And sometimes, despite all the pink tile, it can be kinda pretty here:

Three months and change

We’ve been here for over three months now, so I figured it was about time we started a blog.

I’ll start with our neighborhood.  We’re living in an area of Taipei City called Dazhi.  Dazhi isn’t in the city center, and some Taipei denizens would call it the suburbs, but it’s still way more urban than any American suburb.  The New Yorker in me likens it to Long Island City/Astoria/Sunnyside: it’s just across the river from central Taipei, it’s got a brand-new riverside park, and it’s overbuilt with shiny new luxury condos, but it’s also got an older, denser section that has lots of mom-and-pop shops, old 5-story apartment buildings, and leafy streets.  We chose the neighborhood primarily because it’s home to a school that seemed like a good place to send the kids, and it’s on the same subway line as Serge’s office.

We live in the new part of Dazhi, which is where the kids’ school is, near the new riverside park.  Ten years ago, the river was horribly polluted, and our immediate neighborhood was a wasteland of vacant lots.   Our apartment complex, which was originally a public housing project, existed, but there wasn’t much else around.    Then the city cleaned up the river and built a tunnel that provided easier access to central Taipei.  That led to the first wave of development.  Two years ago, the subway system was extended into the area.  Now we’ve got a weird mix of hypermarkets, luxury condos, cheesy hotels, and construction sites.  There’s also a driving range and a fancy mall with a huge ferris wheel on top that has become a Taipei landmark.  Prices have gone way up, and speculative building continues.

Here are some photos:

Subway pulling out of our station (Jiannan Road on the brown line of the MRT, for those of you who care)

Our neighborhood mall, the Miramar (or Meilihua in local parlance)

We like to spend our Friday nights at the mall, riding the merry-go-round and looking up at the ferris wheel.

Shiny condos amidst construction sites and vacant lots

Riverside park just across the road from our apartment complex. Lots of bike paths and ball fields. On the other side of the river is central Taipei, and that’s Taipei 101 (tallest building in Taiwan) sticking up in the distance.

While New Dazhi is somewhat sterile and feels a bit like it could be almost anywhere, Old Dazhi (a 15-minute walk away) feels much more like the Taiwan I’m familiar with: narrow alleys without sidewalks, mildew-stained 5-story walkup apartment buildings, eateries of all sizes and shapes overflowing into the streets, scooters galore.  Old Dazhi is also home to a university, one that specializes in architecture and design, so there are lots of eateries and cafes catering to those students.  It’s the sort of neighborhood we’d live in if we didn’t have kids.

Lunch hour on one of the main drags in Old Dazhi

One of the many residential alleys

Sub-alley running between the backs of apartment buildings

Some sort of eating or drinking establishment that looked inviting

Another place I’d like to check out

That’s it for now.  Next up: life in Taiwanese “public housing”