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IN THIS ISSUE

• Kate Brookfield concludes her comparison of Taiwan with Canada
• Richard Ross begins the story of his latest travels
• Don Henderson sends the story of a talented maid
• Another blonde joke ...
• From Lew´s News, universal maxims
• Websites are suggested by Bruce Galway and Tom Telfer

Kate Brookfield concludes her article on

LIVING IN TAIWAN COMPARED WITH LIFE IN CANADA

One big difference between Canada and Taiwan is the garbage collection. Because this is a small island with a dense population and high consumerism, they have strict recycling rules. Everything is sorted, but the big difference is the sorting is done by the householder, and people in apartments are not excluded as in Canada. It annoys me that in Guelph I have to sort my garbage into three different coloured bags, but people in apartments just throw everything into a black plastic bag that our garbage collectors will not accept.

Here, every night except Sunday and Wednesday, a garbage truck comes to the main road at a set time and stays for six minutes. Everybody in that neighbourhood comes out to the truck with their garbage, so it is a real community gathering. As there are many high-rise apartments, it is quite a sight to see all the people walking down the lanes to the main road with bags in their hands, plus pails or plastic bags with food waste.

The truck arrives playing a merry tune - the kind of tune we get from the ice cream man. When it stops, two huge bins, one red and one blue, swing down to ground level and people empty their food waste into these. I haven´t discovered yet the difference between blue and red, but last week, I put eggshells into the red and a guy took them out and put them in the blue bin....

On the sides of the truck are large sacks for bottles, cardboard, plastics, and paper. There are plenty of men with the truck and they are all very courteous and helpful. In the grocery store we have to buy government plastic bags for trash that cannot be recycled. These bags come in different sizes and have a big stamp on them which represents the tax on trash. No other bag will be accepted. These bags are thrown into the main part of the truck. It is all very efficient and the truck is on its way to the next stop. Because we live at the junction of two major roads we have two pick-up times a night, one at 7:19 to 7:25 and another at the other main road from9:15 to 9:21. I read in the newspaper that they are going to reduce the number of trucks because garbage in Taipei is a third of what it was.

Weather is another main difference. Hot and humid in summer, bone- chilling cold and wet in winter ... but NO SNOW, except perhaps in the high mountains. Taiwan is in the tropics - the tropic of cancer passes through the island - so we get high temperatures in the summer and a lot of rain at all seasons. The best and most common description is "muggy". There is also a pollution problem in the cities because of all the traffic, but they are very concerned about it and making efforts to reduce it. Apparently, it is a lot better than it was just five years ago. Many people, especially the scooter drivers, wear mouth and nose masks. All hospital workers, people serving food, street cleaners, and the garbage collection staff are all masked. (I think Taipei suffered a lot during the SARS outbreak and this increased the use of masks.)

After muggy, the next word is "wet". It rains a lot because this is the rain forest region. Nobody goes out without an umbrella. I have gone through about seven umbrellas since I came here. One walking umbrella I left on the bus; the rest have just broken with blowing inside out. When the sun is out, you must walk with an umbrella up, preferably a solar one that has a "silver lining" to protect the skin from ultra rays and to give some shade from the intense sun. Mind you, the cost of an umbrella is only the equivalent of $3.00 ... the kind we buy in Canada for a $1.00 at the dollar stores!

Food is very different than in Canada, although the North American fast food chains are all here and busy. Taiwan was once ruled by the Japanese and they still retain a lot of Japanese culture, particularly regarding food, and there are many Japanese restaurants. Apart from cappuccino stalls, coffee is not a drink of choice. Green tea is the most common drink and specialist tea stores abound where you can partake in the tea drinking ceremonies and cultivate a taste for the many different types. A bit like wine tasting rituals!. And you can get "tea drunk" if you have too much from the high caffeine, I guess.

The melanine milk scare has had a big impact here, with lots of stuff getting cleared off the shelves. It is amazing how many products contain dried milk, even international names like Maxwell, Nestles, and now Cadbury. I was buying a three-in-one coffee mix from Maxwell, but when I went to get more at the local store, there was nothing on the coffee shelves. It was all cleared. Even Pizza Hut is affected.

It seems to me that the Taiwanese are always eating. There are food stalls and restaurants everywhere you go. Not all the delicacies look tempting to me. I have no wish to eat snake, squid, or unidentifiable dried substances. There is not room here to discuss all the different foods. There are loads of books and websites for those interested in knowing more. I should mention the steamed dumplings that can be found in all neighbourhood stalls. They make a kind of pastry which is rolled out and cut into circles, and a sausage-type mixture is put into each circle and the pastry is wrapped around the filling. These dumplings are then put on trays in a revolving steamer and when cooked, put into bamboo containers for taking home. They are served either dry, and you add your own spicy sauces, or in a kind of soup ... in fact, what we call wonton soup in Canada. But they don´t know what wonton soup is here!

Noodles of all shapes and sizes are also a common food, but there are always a lot of other additions: sauces, spices, hot peppers, etc. Of course, everything is bite size as all eating is done with chopsticks or large thick spoons. No knives or forks, except in Western-style restaurants, and they are the plastic ones they give out at McDonalds, KFC, and Burger King!

The local restaurants have take-out food and many people buy their lunch and take it outside to eat. There are many pictures outside the restaurant showing what you get in the box. There is always tofu in some form or another, with slivers of chicken or pork or beef on a bed or rice, and always some boiled greens. The boxed meal usually has a boiled egg. For a long time, I avoided eating these eggs as I thought they were the famous "thousand-year-old eggs" and I didn´t fancy trying them. I have since learned that these are an expensive luxury and are actually duck eggs wrapped in straw and buried for four months, not a thousand years! The eggs in the lunch boxes are brown instead of white around the yolk, because they are boiled in tea water, supposed to make them more tasty. A set of throw-away wooden chopsticks comes with each boxed meal.

Of course, there are many good restaurants in Taipei serving any type of food from any country, so nobody need go hungry in this city!

I was surprised to see so many fancy bakery shops with exotic cakes and desserts. In the bakery you pick up a tray and a set of tongs as you enter and place your selection on the tray. At the counter the cakes and bread are individually wrapped in cellophane or put into plastic boxes. If you buy a large cake, they automatically give you a plastic server for cutting it, and if you buy custard tarts, you get a small spoon for each tart. Although the cakes look attractive, they tend to be a bit dry and not very sweet.

Fresh produce is also sold almost anywhere in small stores that are really people´s homes. But there are larger markets, mainly in the mornings. Many of the vegetables and fruits are unknown to me but of a great variety. I am trying to do a photo collection of the different fruit and vegetables and when I get it organized I will put it on my Picasa website.

A big store is the French chain Carrefour. This store is a bit like our Costco, but you do not have to pay to shop there. There is a Costco in Taipei. In Carrefour, I can buy almost anything I buy in Loblaws in Canada, except apple sauce! We tend to eat almost the same as we do in Canada, though cooking is very different as I have no microwave or oven, so I do no baking - only surface cooking.

A furnished apartment does not include any cooking utensils. The first apartment we had did not even have anything to cook on, so we had to buy an electric hotplate and a toaster oven. This new apartment has a two-ringed gas burner. When we were looking for a new apartment, I was amazed at the tiny space some of them had for a kitchen. In one apartment we looked at the kitchen was a small triangle, and you couldn´t stand upright in it, let alone swing a cat!

Finally, there is the language barrier. I am going to Chinese lessons once a week, but I usually forget all I learned the last week. I have bought some books and have CDs, which I have put onto my MP3 player. Chinese is not like other languages in that it is all characters, not phonetic. These characters are ancient, dating way back to BC, when the symbols were carved on bones. The characters do not represent sounds, but concepts.

There is no easy way to learn to recognize the thousands of characters. A high school student is expected to know at least 2,000 characters on graduation, but most people do not use more than about 500. To make it easier for foreigners, they have developed a system know as Pinyin. This uses the Roman alphabet to help in the pronunciation of the character. But you have to learn the difference between sounds like the "ds" at the end of the word "kids" and the "ts" at the end of the word "pest". Only the word starts with these sounds! They all sound like "s" in "snow" to me! On top of all this are the five tones for vowel sounds. So the word "ma" is pronounced in five different ways, to indicate a question, a horse, a mother, or to ride. The tone is either flat, high, high to low, low to high, or high to low to high. The same for all vowel sounds. Go figure!

I am spending more time now learning the characters because they are interesting and fun. "Fire" looks like a fire, and "family" is a house with a child and mother inside. Last week our teacher taught us the character for "watch," meaning to look out for something. Within the character were eight other characters for eye, hand, left, right, listen ... oh, I forget all of them!

To add to the complication, mainland China simplified its characters in the 1950s to encourage literacy in the population, but Taiwan has retained the traditional characters which have a lot more strokes.

At least in Canada, we only have two languages and I don´t have to go to lessons before I can open my mouth.

Barbara Wear forwarded the first of this new series from Richard Ross, who wrote the Paris Chronicles that appeared in the Spinner. This year Richard is off on another junket, and writes first from India:

THE TRAVELLING CHRONICLES RETURN

In what may have been a long two years of fruitless junk and just downright drab in your inbox, you´d be glad to know another new suitcase has been opened and a series of Chronicles awaits to be unpacked in that rotting inbox of yours.

For those who do not remember the Paris Chronicles, let me speedily update you. In my semester abroad, my one true travel experience up until now, I garnered a few impressions, observations and incidents and tried to construct a travel log worthy of reading and less worthy of southern scrolling. I documented my stay in Paris, my wanderings around France, and my run-ins with other European countries and cultures. As clash-prone as the French and Americans are, I used my chronicles to map out an accurate cross-cultural crash course - but in such effort, I crossed over to a literary terrain well explored by Americans.

Tonight, I can honestly say, the second volume of my chronicles introduces an area of the world less travelled by the average American, let alone the average individual. I am rapidly beginning to believe the praise and the criticism of this place. So early into my understanding of this foreign land, these people, and their way of life, I impart only nascent impression in this e-mail.

My time here remains undetermined but most of all, uninhibited. I hope to seek occupation and I hope to cover cosmic ground - and in the process, keep all of you suffocating in suspense. So without a moment of further delay, I want to welcome the old, the new, the interested, and the not-so-interested to the India Chronicles 2008....

Dorothy has just arrived in Oz, looking around and awed at the beauty and splendour: "Toto, I´ve a feeling we´re not in Kansas any more. [After a pause] We must be over the rainbow!"

A bubble appears in the sky and gets closer and closer. It finally lands, then turns into Glinda, the Good Witch, wearing a spectacular white dress and crown, holding a wand.

Dorothy: [to Toto] "Now I ... I know we´re not in Kansas!"

My toto is named Jean Claude, and he is a Bichon Frise. He is one of my three roommates and he has been with me since I first arrived. He, who has followed my sister from Geneva to Delhi, has made the Euro- Indo transition seemingly smoothly, but he certainly takes time to show a little empathy for a lost American like myself. His patience, loyalty, and soft fur have provided me the reassuring comfort that Toto once provided Dorothy when she realized she had landed in a different world.

Indeed, I had arrived into this new world with a thundering bang - five bangs to be exact. In my first hour in Delhi, news struck that a series of five bombs had rattled the busy marketplaces, killing 30 and injuring 100-plus. Voyaging to a new land like India, where culture-shock would paralyze the spine of a chameleon, the imposing threat of terrorism, I suppose, is an added bonus. We´ve been advised to avoid the crowded areas until after the festival season, ending towards late October, but I and the other 14 million don´t do such a good job of that.

As the second most populated city in India, New Delhi appears to be the marvellous bedlam I had imagined. From the moment we pulled out of the airport parking lot, our driver fused into the whizzing traffic without fret. I was in disbelief and I still am with the approach to driving. Rickshaws, cars, SUV´s, motorcycles, motor scooters, bicycles, pedestrians, and cows all share the same road - moving forward like schools of salmon upstream. The sound of horns is one flowing sound that echoes across the city. Honking one´s horn is much more thoughtful than any groan of frustration. In America, where beeeeeep is so often complemented with a middle finger, you´d be amazed to see such a static facial expression when an Indian man squashes down his horn. I´ve seen families of four squeeze together on small, rusting motor-scooters; I´ve seen little boys pedal bicycles bursting in the back with concrete bricks; but most extraordinarily, I see 5,000 recipes for disaster a day, but not one accident. The point of contact between two cars is so close, yet somehow, so far.

I am also fascinated how the more reckless and dangerous the driving is here, the less concern there is for safety belts or helmets. Just as the hotter the climate, the more Indians see reason to wear as much clothing as possible. (As soon as my sister saw my suitcase piled high with shorts, she alerted me that men do not wear shorts in India. I have respected the custom so far, but I´ve seen a half dozen Indians in the last few days who too are trying to show off some more leg, and I may soon join them.)

Many of the poor beggars engage in a practice of roadside vending. When you brake at a stop light, malnourished, dirt-covered children approach your window, selling either knotted balloons, oversized cowboy hats, or an issue of Maxim magazine. However, a few days back, a little bare-foot boy knocked on the back door window holding a brand new ball-point pen. I thought, here is a young fellow who has the idea of what the average consumer might want. Rolling down my window, I handed him ten rupees and he handed me the pen. I still use the pen and with it, I´ve brainstormed a list of more useful items a hungry child could display while he asks for money. In fact, I´ve recently purchased a few packages of pens and sterile wipes to distribute to the panhandlers. Begging is not going away anytime soon, so why not empower the desperate with items that hold a bit more utility and practicality. I´ll be sure to keep all of you updated on how my first social entrepreneurial project pans out.

While we´re on the topic of the lower class, I want to cite a passage in the India Times the morning after the terrorist attacks that struck me with unfamiliar bluntness. As you will see, these same children that I discuss above as impoverished and misguided receive what I consider to be brutal treatment in the Indian media:

"Located at the bottom of the urban social pyramid, rag pickers are the smelly boys in tattered clothes whom everyone quickly passes by. Even street dogs, subconsciously aware of their lowly status and often confusing them for thieves, chase them in shabby by-lanes."

This article goes on to say how one of these "rag-pickers" notified the police about the location of a bomb and emerged as a hero, but can you imagine the New York Times describing one of America´s unprivileged as so depraved that he or she would be subject to the discrimination of a stray dog?

While disparity, malnourishment, and overpopulation throttle a roaring engine, Delhites make every effort to modernize (at least in what Western standards consider to be modernized). The citizens incorporate a wide range of Westernized products, pastimes, and procedures into their daily life. The gimmies are like McDonalds, Subway, Western Union, but I´ve seen baseball games, (not cricket, I am sure!) multicolored iPods, fitness centers (I belong to one), night clubs, lustrous lingerie boutiques, wireless internet cafes, and advertisements with half-naked Indian women.

To be continued.

Don Henderson forwards the story of

THE MAID

The maid asked for a pay increase. The wife was very upset about this and asked: "Now, Maria, why do you want a pay increase?"

Maria: "Well, Senora, there are three reasons why I want an increase. The first is that I iron better than you...."

Wife: "Who said you iron better than me?"

Maria: "Your husband said so."

Wife: "Oh."

Maria: "The second reason is that I am a better cook than you."

Wife: "Nonsense. Who said you were a better cook than me?"

Maria: "Your husband did."

Wife: "Oh."

Maria: "My third reason is that I am a better lover than you."

Wife (really furious now): "Did my husband say that as well?"

Maria: "No, Senora, the gardener did."

She got the raise.

POCKETS FULL OF GOLF BALLS

A man entered a bus with both of his front pockets full of golf balls and sat down next to a beautiful (you guessed it) blonde.

The puzzled blonde kept looking at him and his bulging pockets. Finally, after many such glances from her, he said, "It´s golf balls."

Nevertheless, the blonde continued to look at him for a very long time, deeply thinking about what he had said.

After several minutes, not being able to contain her curiosity any longer, she asked: "Does it hurt as much as tennis elbow?"

From Lew Carter´s News:

A FEW UNIVERSAL MAXIMS

If you change lines (or traffic lanes) the one you were in will always move faster than the one you´re now in.

The probability of being watched is directly proportional to the stupidity of your act.

The probability of meeting someone you know increases dramatically when you´re with someone you don´t want to be seen with.

At any event, the people whose seats are farthest from the aisle will arrive last.

If you don´t feel well, make an appointment to see a doctor. By the time you get there you´ll feel better.

The better something tastes, the greater the probability that it´s bad for you.

The severity of the itch is inversely proportional to the reach.

If you call a wrong number, you never get a busy signal. Someone always answers.

Anything is possible if you don´t know what you´re talking about.

THIS WEEK´S SUGGESTED SITES

Bruce Galway sends this challenging site:

See if your brain is as old as your body - or - (perish the thought) OLDER!

Procedure of Flash Fabrica Game:

1. Touch ´start´.
2. Wait for 3, 2, 1.
3. Memorize the number´s position on the screen, then click the circles from the smallest number to the biggest number.
4. At the end of game, the computer will tell you how old your brain is.

http://flashfabrica.com/f_learning/brain/brain.html

Tom Telfer sends the URL for the long-awated Do Not Call list:

http://207.236.117.76/index-eng.html

If you are concerned about the concentration of news services and internet connections into a few hands, see the story at http://arunaurl.com/2jj6

We´ve all heard about new sources of energy. Here is one that may actually work:

http://www.permaculture.com/

It will be a great day when our schools get all the money they need and our air force has to hold a bake sale to buy a bomber. - Anonymous quote