Zorana and I just got back from a fun trip to Taiwan.  Zorana was invited to speak at the Psychology of Creativity Conference at Taiwan National Normal University, and they paid her ticket and a honorarium.   We decided to turn it into a vacation as well, so we booked a ticket for me too, and we spent two weeks there.   I will leave it to Zorana to describe the conference, which was a rather interesting cross-cultural experience in its own right.    You can check out our slideshow at http://picasaweb.google.com/zivcevic/Taiwan_jmp/photo#s5211542192009555298 — just click the link labeled slideshow on the right of the page.

The trip was wonderful.   I was not prepared for how interesting Taiwan was — I had really no image of it in my head.  It is fizzing with energy, entrepreneurial and otherwise.   Everybody is very helpful, and tries hard to help you, even if they do not have a word of English.    You are never more than a few blocks from a little street side food shop, in which they serve their specialty on rice or noodles.   They will show you what they have, or mime the animal (fish and chicken are easy to get, but pork is a bit harder).   There are little temples everywhere, and several grand ones in every big town, and many big ones in the big cities.  Each is dedicated to one or two or more deities or deified people (it’s complicated and ecumenical — see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_Taiwan).

In many ways the country combines the best part of traveling in a developing and developed country — the food and lodging are quite reasonable (Dinner in a street side restaurant, about 5$.  Mediocre hotel, but with a bathroom and AC, 30$.  Very nice hotel, 50$ a night).   Every place is well staffed by competent people, even little tea-shops in the mountains, and they are all very flexible with clueless foreigners — often they just guessed what we wanted, and were nearly always correct.   One of the things is that it is a much richer country than I expected.  It is about twice as wealthy as Croatia, and many people have been tourists, so they know what that is like.  We saw very few western tourists, and nearly everything is geared to local tourism.   And of course, the roads, subway, airport and most other infrastructure is brand new and excellent.

The language barrier is real — but much more in the written than the verbal.   Everyone is supposed to have studied English, but it is only the last few years that they have actually practiced any conversation.  English is a BIG thing, so there is often a panic reaction anytime they need to speak it.   Often you will see the entire restaurant staff huddle, and nominate the youngest one to be the designated speaker.   But you can always work it out, and they are good at working with you.  (Every little kid says “Hi” and “bye-bye”, and parents often push their kids to practice English with you, to the kids’ terror).    But not being able to interpret the ideograms quickly can be a chore, especially when driving.   You can memorize the characters for your hotel or road, but that is hard to do quickly.  Many signs have roman transliterations on them, but they are often much smaller then the main text.  Also, there are several different ways to go from Chinese characters to the Roman alphabet, and Taiwan uses all three main ones with wild abandon.   You can usually sort it out if you say them out loud with a fake accent (sounds corny, but it works).   If you look at a map of the Alishan forests, from our mountain trip, you can spot our two routes — 159-flyswatter and 162-flyswatter (http://maps.google.com/maps?q=alishan,+taiwan&ie=UTF8&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-a&ll=23.481826,120.696487&spn=0.167837,0.211143&t=h&z=12).  The written English is often a bit odd — see the examples in our slides.   But it is most often understandable and often a bit entertaining.

We started out with a few days in Taipei, the capital, enjoying the temples and food and the excellent museums — check out the world class National Palace Museum (http://www.npm.gov.tw/en/collection/selections_01.htm).   We then traveled down to Lugang, and old and well preserved port city to enjoy the old style architecture that has mostly been obliterated elsewhere.  After that we went to the mountains, to enjoy the spectacular scenery of rugged mountains and tea plantations (and many nice tea shops and ceremonies).   There we saw abundant fireflies, flowers, squirrels, friendly dogs and a monkey!  The landscape really does look like Chinese landscape painting.  Then we returned to the coastal plane and the old capital of Tainan, where there were many nice temples, including our favorite, the Confucian temple (predictable, that).  We then drove back to Taipei, and took the subway to the mountains, hot springs, night markets, food courts and more museums.  Then we flew back.

We highly recommend Taiwan — a bit off the beaten path, but fun and easy and interesting.

So check it out in our pictures –  http://picasaweb.google.com/zivcevic/Taiwan_jmp/photo#s5211542192009555298

Cheers,
Jamie & Zorana

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