Love Grows Under my Umbrella

相合傘

I learned a fun Japanese expression the other day. When two people share an umbrella it's called, "ai ai gasa" (see above). The characters basically mean something like, "coming together under an umbrella". We get a lot of rain here. In fact, the entire month of June usually falls under the category of "rainy season".
"Ai ai gasa" isn't limited to shared efforts to stay dry. As one of the teachers at my school informed me, "little girls like to think that when a boy and a girl share the same umbrella it means romance". He told me this after half of our classroom rushed to the window to see a single female teacher sharing an umbrella outside with a man.

In the romantic instance of "ai ai gasa", it's possible to employ a common Japanese word play method and use different characters than normal. Instead of 相合傘 (coming together under an umbrella), we can write 愛合傘 (love meets under an umbrella) . Both are read as, "ai ai gasa".


For the record, the teacher and the man were fixing a fence in front of the school.

台北: Formosa Entry #4

The long overdue updating of my on-line travel journal begins.
The picture atop the page is from Eiheiji, which I visited in January.
For now, let's get back to Taiwan.

Previously, in Formosa entries I was wandering the hills near the city of Hualien on the East Coast. The Hualien portion of the trip was only a couple days out of a full week, but it was the most unique and exciting part of the journey. The rest of the time I spent in Taipei, Taiwan's political, cultural and economic centre.

Taiwan is not a large island. Next to Bangladesh, it's considered one of the most densely populated places on the planet. In spite of its small size, however, Taiwan has one very sexy, sexy global influence: half the laptops in the world are manufactured here.
A large number of computer chips are manufactured as well. Chances are, if you've owned a computer, you've benefited from the Taiwanese technology industry.
Rowrrr...
(that's an imitation of a seductive cat purr, in case if you couldn't tell)

So, how do you cope with such a dense population in Taipei?
Construct the world's tallest building, Taipei 101.*
The entire population of Rhinelander, Wisconsin, could work in this tower and there would still be positions available.

Taipei 101 is not only tall, it also can withstand powerful earthquakes, typhoon-force winds and Japanese tour groups.
It is considered one of the greatest feats of modern engineering.
Here's the view from the cafe on the 89th floor. Notice the mountains in the background. It's possible to take a bus into the mountains to a tea village that I will mention later. Remember that. It'll be important. You may want to have a notebook ready (but not yet - it'll be in a later entry).

Taipei has some great night markets. Meals, souvenirs, clothing, drinks and the ever-important snacks-on-a-stick are all available. Most of my time in Taipei was spent wandering around trying various foods in markets like this one and looking for museums.


*construction should finish this year on a tower in Dubai that will become the tallest building in the world.

Setsubun, Risshin & Formatting Updates

Greetings all!
Sorry I haven't updated in a couple weeks. I've still got some things to share from my experience in Taiwan, and I recently spent the evening at Eiheiji learning zazen (meditation).

In the meantime, I've made some changes to the format of this blog. You'll notice along the left hand side that links to other blogs have changed, and you now can see a list of labels. I added that for easy archiving purposes. Now, if you want to see anything I've written about something like temples or festivals, all you have to do is click on the label for temples or festivals. I also inserted a translation service at the bottom of the page.

While looking through the archives I noticed that some pictures seemed to have disappeared. I checked my storage limit, and I really don't know why this has happened. While looking up the storage limit, however, I found out that all the pictures I post here automatically get sent to an online photo storage service. If I ever organize that, I'll post a link.

Now, on to some updates:

This is a photograph I took in January shortly after returning from my travels. We had a decent amount of snow for probably less than two weeks in Fukui City. Then, it warmed up just enough to change to rain, and all the snow disappeared.

I noticed something with the snowfall this year that I don't recall from last year - THUNDER. Turns out that Western Japan is one of three places in the world where it can thunder while snowing.
February 3rd was setsubun this year. (click here for old post on setsubun). It's the end of winter on the lunar calendar, and people celebrate by tossing beans to ward off demons. I decided to check out events at a local shrine but heard the wrong starting time and showed up just as it ended.The day after setsubun is called risshin. This is the first day of spring on the lunar calendar. I believe it snowed on this day last year.

花蓮: Formosa Entry #3

Continuing with the Formosan photography sessions, here are some shots from the city of 花蓮 (Hualien).
Looks like the Jews were just a little misdirected. Should've fled Egypt a bit a further to the east.

When the Portuguese first spotted the island of Taiwan in the 16th century, they dubbed it "Ilha Formosa" meaning simply, "Beautiful Island". That name, "Formosa" (Beautiful), remained in common use even into the late 20th century. Not quite as epic as "the promised land", but flattering, nevertheless.
Hualien lies on the East Coast and serves as a point of entry into the Taroko National Park. The beaches are too rocky for swimming, but, on the other hand, the naturally occurring variety of colours in the rock and large reserves of marble make for some nice jewelry and statues.

Hualien is the origin point of Tzu Chi, a large international Buddhist missions organization that focuses on medicine, education and disaster relief. Due to its apolitical stance, Tzu Chi has been able to work extensively in mainland China in spite of often bitter political tensions that may prevent businesses and government organizations from venturing across the strait.

This picture was taken just outside of Hualien in the national park. Taiwan, like Japan, is filled with mountains and prone to typhoons. This trail used to lead to a natural hot spring, but rock slides and typhoons about four years ago have caused it to close. At the time of the rock slide, several people were actually in the hot spring and some of them were killed.

Beauty, it seems, is not without its dangers.

Taroko Gorge: Formosa Entry #2

Here are some more pictures from the national park I mentioned in the previous entry.

This is the inside of the pagoda that you can see in the background of the temple picture in the first entry.

And here's the view from the top of the pagoda. A sign at the temple said that the Buddha statue holds a world record for being at the highest altitude of any Buddhist statue of that type.