An early Christmas

This year, we had an early Christmas, as the biggest gift of all came already on December 12th, when our little daughter Anna was born!


After a few days in the hospital, we could take our little one home and celebrate Christmas together with Micha's parents, who came to Taipei to help us during the first time as a new family.


A very proud daddy Kamil is, indeed! And Micha is happy to hand over the carrying of the baby after the nine months she was in charge with this:


Happy daddy is already joking around with little Anna:


We are enjoying our new life as parents and are grateful for each day we can spend with our daughter - she is such a special gift to us!

And, as we are celebrating New Year's Eve today, we are wishing everyone a Happy New Year and all the best for 2009!!!

Double Advent

December started and with it comes advent time. But the weather here in Taipei with more than 20 degrees Celcius does not put us into Christmas mood... As we might have to wait very long for snow in Taipei (probably until the next Ice Age) we embellished our apartment with some Christmas decoration in order to create some wintery feelings.


But anyway, this year, we are having TWO advents to wait for!!!

We wish you all a peaceful and quiet advent time!

Toad Mountain and fabulous view of Taipei

Last Saturday greeted us with a wonderful and clear weather. After finishing our weekly duties in our apartment (cleaning, laundry,...) we decided to take advantage of this bright and warm (25 degrees Celsius) day and went for a walk in the hills next to where we live. The highest point there is rightly called Toad Mountain (Chan2 Chu2 Shan1 蟾 蜍 山), as thousands of toads are crossing the hill's hiking paths after sunset. The exceptionally clear day offered a magnificent view to the North onto Taipei, here you can see a panorama of the city with Yangmingshan in the background.


Blooming grass:


November flowers in Taiwan:


Catching Taipei 101:



An old man full of Confucian wisdom (...):


Lost in Garden Eden (with Taipei 101 in the background):


Confucian meditation:


An old Confucian wisdom says: Sitting cross-legged becomes more and more difficult in the 9th month...

Fieldwork along the Central Cross Island Highway

Four days of fieldwork in the mountains and thus escaping the heat and smog in Taipei sounded promising enough to attract not only ourselves and Kamil's brother Michi, who is currently visiting us, but also three others of our colleagues, Maryline, Vicky and Cha-Yi. So we set out last Sunday from Taipei and drove down to Tai Zhong. From there, we drove to the east into the mountians to Puli and further to Ren Ai, where we started looking at outcrops and studying the geology. Our first night, we spent in the area of Ching Jing (清境) at an altitude of about 1500 m. The clean and fresh air and the cool temperatures were very invigorating!!! What a change to Taipei! A bright and wonderful sunrise was greeting us on Monday morning:


We stayed in a very special hostel, the Villa Relax. The owners love their white Pyrenees dogs and - obviously - a lot of kitsch :-) . The whole area is very touristic, and developed around a sheep farm, which was started by a New Zealand couple. It is actually the only place in Taiwan, where you can see sheep. Funnily enough, all the hotels and hostels they built up there try to imitate an European style - littel castles, Schwarzwald houses and Dutch windmills are common sujets up here.


The view down is breathtaking - the steep topography covered in dense forest, agriculturally used terraces where only possible, beautiful mountain ridges, a bright clear sky and again - fresh air!!!


Kamil and Michi had a lot of fun fooling around and posing for photos:


Here is our whole group in front of He Huan Shan Dong Fen (3421m), one of the hundred mountain peaks in Taiwan, which are over 3000m.


And of course, we had to climb it!!!

After passing by the small town of Lishan, we drove down westward to the Deji reservoir and dam for some geologic investigations. The following panorama shows the steep topography to the north of the Central Cross Island Highway, just downstream of the Deji reservoir.


From the Deji Dam, we continued our journey by driving across Tayuling, Kuanyuan and down into the Taroko Gorge.

The absolutely fantastic scenery of the Taroko Gorge is enhanced by the great geology it has to offer and which we studied closely. Here you can see Kamil and Maryline engrossed in geologic discussions:


Again, fooling around in front of a camera:


On the last day, we arrived at the East Coast of Taiwan, which also greeted us with bright sunshine.




Temperatures there were much higher again and we honestly were thinking about fleeing back into the high mountains to escape the heat.

But Kamil's fieldwork plans included also some geologic stops at the coast, so we had to continue northwards. Advantage and drawback of being at lower elevations is the abundance of butterflies and spiders, respectively. Huge spiders, to be more precise...


Here is some more evidence, that we were really doing fieldwork, with Kamil showing some structural transport directions in the pre-Cenozoic Tananao Schist complex.

Maryline, of course, was rather reminded of Danse Tectonique, a new dance style in France! (This is a dance style performed initially by young French street performers in France and Belgium. It is usually done to electronic music such as techno or electro.)

Anyway, we had a great trip passing through wonderful landscape, which we luckily could combine with our work - privileged geologists as we are!

Discovering Taiwan with friends

Two of our friends, Heike and Matthias, have decided to spend their holiday this year in Taiwan in order to visit us and grab the chance to get to know this exotic island. (Or maybe they only wanted to escape the cold and rain of a Norwegian late autumn...)

Anyway, we are delighted that they came by and we tried to show them around a bit. So we went to Jioufen and invaded the nice tea-house we had lately discovered (see post of September 30th). This time, we were sitting (or better kneeling) on a traditional elevated platform and enjoyed our High Mountain Oolong Tea while nibbling pumpkin seeds and tea-flavored glutenous cookies.



Kamil - being by now experienced to prepare tea in the traditional way by - poured skillfully and highly concentrated our tea:


Afterward we went to Keelung to visit the Ershawan Fort, also called Haimen Tiansian (海門天險). This old fortress was build in the 19th century by the Qing-Dynasty to defend the local trading port. They successfully did so against the English troops who tried to invade the North of Taiwan just two years after they finished building this fortress (lucky Chinese!).


Matthias is showing the harbor emphasizing the strategically ideal position of the fortress.


A few canons here and there (plus some fearless soldiers) and the harbor was well protected.


The next day, we went out to Jeliou Geopark just a few km north of Keelung. Jeliou is a long cape formed by Datun Mountain reaching into the sea. The rock strata at Jeliou is full of sea-water eroded holes as well as numerous rocks in the shape of mushrooms, heads, candles, and chessboards.



Kamil found an ideal place for yoga training:


One of the many funny mushroom rocks with four geologists surrounding it.


The most famous rock formation is called "Queen's Head" or "Nefertiti":


Kamil having fun in front of the candle rocks:


So, the four of us were quite impressed by the scenery and, as you can see, we enjoyed this visit to Jelihu Geopark very much:


As our friends are starting their two-weeks trip around Taiwan on their on own, they decided to better get prepared and reduce the amount of stir caused by two foreigners by disguising in local garment... Hmm, very nice!

Houston, Texas

Last week, we went to the GSA Joint Annual Meeting 2008, a large geoscience conference in Houston, Texas. We both presented our projects from Taiwan for the first time in front of an international audience - and were not catcalled or booed! So we enjoyed this conference and had a glimpse of Houston. It has an impressive, almost menacing skyline, as the following pictures demonstrate. Apart from that, Houston's downtown district is the 100% opposite of Taipei downtown. It entirely lacks any shops or restaurants in the streets and the sidewalks are virtually empty. No bustling life, no crowds of young people, no shops that squeeze into the tiniest empty corner, no waves of different smells of food,... nothing! Coming from Taipei, that was an almost eerie sensation!!



Only later we found out that all shops and restaurants are hidden in shopping malls located behind those menacing skyscraper facades, which are connected by sky walks and tunnels. So no one has to expose himself to the mostly hot and humid climate of Houston.


In the northwest of downtown, we found a small park, which belongs to a heritage museum. It displays some old style Texan houses from the 19th and beginning of 20th century, which stand in sharp contrast to the skyline of this quarter.



Houston also offered us the great opportunity to visit Micha's maid of honour and long-time friend Chris, who lives with her family there. Their 1.5 year old lovely daughter Mary was especially enchanting Kamil and twisted him completly around her little finger!


Of course, we visited the Space Center to see "all the sophisticated requisites of the faked moon-landing", as Kamil was pointing out! ;-)
Here you can see him in the very command center, from which all the Apollo missions were commanded - please notice the RED telephone!


Kamil in front of a mock space shuttle, which is used to train the astronauts to life and work in the shuttle and repair it in case.


Mary, Chris and Micha in front of the famous Saturn V rocket that carried the Apollo spacecrafts. These things are quite long!


Here is Kamil in front of the upper part of the Saturn V. Only the tiny charred, brown cone at the frontal tip of the rocket that hosted the astronauts used to return to earth, the rest was sequentially discarded during the flight.


Here are Kamil, Mary and Chris standing next to the Apollo 9 crew who was the first to have made it to the surface of the moon. The poor fellows still didn't manage to take off their spacesuits, because persistent spacecraft fans continuosly ask them to stand for pictures since 1969...


Kamil demonstrates the effects of reduced gravity on the surface of the moon with a clumsy version of Michael Jackson's moonwalk.


Little Mary, who was very fond of pointing at the real moon at Houston's night sky during our visit, had of course particular fun to find this one. She immediately tried to carry it home...