Gold Rush and Tea Break in Jioufen 九 份

Last Saturday, shortly before typhoon Jangmi was ushering us back into our homes, Mong-Han, Maryline (a new French Post-Doc in our research group) and us undertook an one-day excursion to the old gold mining town of Jioufen (九 份 - "Nine Parts") on the northeast coast of Taiwan (close to Keelung).
We parked our car near a temple, which looked very new and shiny.


And indeed, the interior was glittering and glistering in gold and bright colors. On the main altar we found a large family of gods displayed, local ones as well as national ones.


Outside the temple, Kamil was trying to imitate a stone dragon, but was immediately intimidated by its fierce hiss.


The old district of Jioufen is well know for its small narrow streets full a little stores, which are well adapted to seduce tourists to buy their goods and consume their local products.

Mong-Han, Maryline and me in Jioufen:

As the weather was not really nice and it started to rain, we sought refuge in the Jioufen Teahouse, where we enjoyed the very nice and traditional atmosphere of drinking tea.


The waitress introduced us into the art of preparing the tea in the right way, Mong-Han was watching closely.


Therefore (and probably also because he was the only one who actually understood, was the lady had said), Mong-Han was given the honour to prepare our tea, which he mastered perfectly!


In the afternoon, we visited the Gold Ecological Park in the nearby village of Jinguashi (金 瓜 石 - "Gold Melon Stone"), where the mining history of the region is nicely explained. As the Japanese controlled the mines during their occupation time, many buildings still showed the Japanese style, like this chalet built for the visit of the Japanese crown prince. The Crown Prince Chalet was built in 1922 in anticipation of a visit by the then crown prince (later Emperor Hirohito). The Crown Prince didn’t actually visit in the end...


At the end of the visit and the running around in the park, Micha was happy to rest for a while on a bench, which offered a great view of the surrounding landscape (even trough the misty clouds)!


This trip was a great getaway from the town and an ideal airing before we had to stay at home for two days due to the typhoon.

Beijing

Last week, I (Micha) was in Beijing to attend a conference on optically stimulated luminescence, a dating method which I learn to use now in Taipei. Although the talks were really sophisticated (and I probably understood only a few percent of what all these clever physicists said), I learned a lot about the method, got to know a few new people and, nevertheless, had the great opportunity to visit Beijing. So, I want to share some of the pictures I took during my visit:

As three former colleagues of Bern, Switzerland, were attending this meeting too, I went out to explore the Summer Palace in their lovely company:
On the first picture, you can see the Tower of Buddhist Incense, which we termed to our better liking "tower of power":


Next to it on the Longevity Hill are several smaller buildings and pagodas, the purpose of which varied from places for preying, for tea ceremonies, birthday parties for the empress,...


Damian found an interesting round entrance to one of the different garden sections of the "Gardens of Nurtured Harmony". Inspired by Leonardo da Vinci, he realised that Chinese humans obviously have different proportions than Swiss ones.

Here are my three "very Chinese" colleagues: Sally, Damian and Dänu!


Funny enough, at the entrance to the summer palace, you do not only get the weather forecast but also the tourist forecast!


Another highlight we visited was the Great Wall. This trip actually was organized by the conference, so four bus-loads of geologists, physicists and archaeologists started the steep ascent!




Yep, I made it!!!

As the conference ended at lunch on the last day, we had the afternoon for exploring the Forbidden City entering it by the Meridian Gate:

Here is the Hall of Supreme Harmony (oh, yes, the Chinese like pathetic names!) in the center of the Forbidden City: (Don't get fooled by this picture, normally it is really crowded. I took this picture shortly before closing time, so most of the visitors had already left!)


That's my Taiwanese colleague Vicky and me in front of the Palace of Heavenly Purity (... if I remember correctly...):

Beijing was very impressive and is completely different from Taipei! Definitely worth a visit!!!

福龍

你們好! 我姓巫, 叫巫福龍. 我跟明雪跟凱密一起住. 我是她們的寵物.



我很喜歡學習中文 ... 可是我 非常,非常喜歡日本啤酒!

Typhoon Sinlaku disturbs the Mid-Autumn Festival

According to Chinese tradition, this weekend is marked by the Mid-Autumn Festival 中秋節 (pinyin: zhong1 qiu1 jie2). There are many different versions of the stories related to the origin of this festival, which is equivalent to Thanksgiving. Anywhere in the Chinese world, however, this festival is a reason for family reunions, which are accompanied by devouring many moon-cakes 月餅 (pinyin: yue4 bing3), small pastries with different stuffings. Ours have a stuffing of sweet red bean paste and salted duck egg yolks.



In Taiwan, the Mid-Autumn Festival is traditionally accompanied by a big barbecue on Sunday. We even received an invitation to a friend's place and are still looking forward to going there tomorrow. Unfortunately, however, we are currently experiencing Typhoon Sinlaku. Its center actually is still east of Taiwan, but torrential rains are already pouring down on much of northern Taiwan since several hours. Sinlaku moves at an awfully slow pace of only about 7 km/h, which means that the island will still be under the typhoon's influence for maybe two to three more days!
The following shows the most recent of the storm, superimposed onto the terrain.


I made this image by using the cloud animation function of Google Earth, which displays the clouds in a semi-transparent fashion. This offers the advantage that the coastline of Taiwan is still visible.
On the most recent actual satellite image (taken from the website of the Central Weather Bureau of Taiwan), the storm clouds of course appear absolutely opaque, so that all of Taiwan is obscured from view.


The word typhoon is actually the phonetic translation of the Chinese words 颱風 (or 台风 in simplified Chinese; in pinyin: tai2 feng1). It roughly translates as 'wind acting on a platform'. The 'platform' stands for the island of Taiwan itself and describes what impression Taiwan must have made on the early settlers and fishermen who approached the island by boat from mainland China.
The Taiwanese authorities have called today an official 'typhoon holiday'. All this of course means that it is highly questionable whether we'll be able to attend our friend's barbecue party tomorrow.

This weekend is also a very stormy one for friends of ours in Houston TX, who are currently experiencing Hurricane Ike.

With estimated diameters of about 600 km, both Ike and Sinlaku are actually of comparable size.

Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes

This Latin proverb came into our minds when we had to deal with a gift brought to us by one of our Taiwanese colleagues: CRABS!!! A real Danaans' gift...

We got 14 of these crabs plus a fish and two large squids!

Our colleague's father-in-law obviously is a passionate fisher and gave his daughter and son-in-law so many seafood that our colleague generously distributed them among his colleagues. Or maybe he just knew, what would follow having a lots of crabs to prepare...

Having boiled the crabs for a short while in a fish soup with onions, bay leaves and thyme, we had the get the meat out of the shell. Coming from a land-locked country with no what-so-ever experience in cooking seafood, we were quite lost at this point...
Thank God that there is internet - so I could find a "manual" how to crack the carapace and extract the meat. Well, it was more a picking and rasping and scraping and breaking than a clean extracting!
After almost two hours of the both of us working hard on the little buggers, we found the following result:
A huge bowl of debris and a tiny bowl of meat... what a misfit!


Anyway, thanks to internet again, I found a recipe for cooking these delicious bastards. We made crab cakes (here is the link to the recipe). They turned out really well and all yummy!

So there is our "conclusio, conclusio!":
The crabs are incredibly delicious, but its really hard work until you can enjoy them!

Nevertheless, I still have these two big squids and the fish in my freezer... Can anyone of you recommend a recipe, thus that the cephalopods do not turn into chewy rubber bands?