Saturday morning 6:30 am I was awaken from my peaceful slumber by the buzz of my phone alarm. After showering and collecting a few things in my shubao (backpack) I popped down to a local breakfast shop for some Congdanbing (scallion and egg flat cake), a truly tasty treat. After enjoying my meal I headed to the MRT station to meet up with the others who were taking the trip to Yilan. Our trip to Yilan, which is located on Taiwan's North East coast about 2.5 hours from Taipei, was just a day trip with a 9:00 A.M. departure time and a 6:00 P.M. return.
The trip was put on by NTU (National Taiwan University) for the Japanese exchange group who was in Taipei for 7 days to take some Chinese language and culture classes. Most of them could not really speak chinese all that well so English was the mode of communication between the Riben ren (Japanese people) and the Zhongguo ren (chinese people); and of course me. It is really strange to think that two countries with so much culture and history both together and separate speak English when they want to communicate, that will always boggle my mind.
When we arrived in Yilan I was excited to experience a new part of Taiwan. I couldn't wait to see a more traditional side of this beautiful country. I was hoping that no-one could speak English, and that the town would be small and not crowded with mopeds and taxies. My thoughts could not have been more wrong. We arrived at the National Center for Traditional Arts, the area was filled with cars and tour buses. This was not a traditional arts center, this was a tourist trap. This area reminded of my two trips to mexico when on the way to our final destinations (one was the Mayan ruins, the other was snorkeling in the reefs) we made stops at a Jewelry Store/ Gift shop to, take a break and look around.
As we walked around in Yilan, I didn't really see anything that caught my fancy, the shops were over priced and the "traditional items" were frankly not practical in the smallest sense. When I think of my anthropology classes that I took, we spent the most time studying how the simplest tools could be used effectively, how fires were built, how animals were skinned, how houses were built, and how art was expressed. I didn't really feel like any of these things were covered at this center. Granted there were some arts, but without an explanation of how and why these were more "traditional" than the shop's same art down the road I had a hard time really falling in line mental on this trip.
We walked around for about 3 hours and saw just about every shop there was and then made our way back to the buses. Our next destination was Luodong Sport-Park, about a half hour away from Yilan. It was a pretty cool place and would have been great if we could have spent more than a half hour there in the rain. I think that next time I will take the trip planning into my own hands. I know that a lot of people really enjoyed themselves on this trip, but it just wasn't for me. Next time I want to get away from the west and a bigger city I should do so with much less people, and certainly not a 3 giant buses filled with travelers.
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2 comments:
Someday in the future, a tour guide speaks...."My friends,here are the ruins of civilization as we once thought we knew it, shopping malls, trinkets, replicas of genuine items, the frosting but not the cake, the sizzle but not the steak...after quasi-culture collapsed we resorted to the old ways and made useful things which we used to make our lives easier -tools- and - better -arts- so welcome to the future's past, also known as the present...but sorry my friends, you cannot buy this present, you can only stop and ask yourself, 'is this who we really are?' and if the answer is yes then preserve it, don't package it.' Thank you my friends and your bus is ready to take you back to your own version of reality."
Feliz Navidad
Hi Jake,
Hope your holiday celebrations went well.
Mexico was okay, but yes, there were those tourist traps that were more expensive than the hotel gift shops!
The comment that Paco made about the regression to the necessary comes at an interesting time for me because one of the authors I am currently reading, Jayne Castle - yeah a romance novel author, has a line of books dealing with a possible future about 250 years after earth humans have colonized on another planet. An interesting twist to the plot is that all of the original earth materials started to degrade and all of the "how to" books on farming, making alcohol and such were considered to be the most necessary and were the first to be transferred to indigenous reed paper and ink. There are many neat aspects that make these particular romance novels more science fiction, but they aren't really hard core sci-fi, but they are worth a read.
What I like about these books is that the stories make you think. You wind up thinking not just about topics dealt with in the books, but how you'd react and other possible outcomes of earth colonizing elsewhere. You tend to find yourself asking, "Are we really so similar that we react similarly to even when separated by galaxies?" The answer?
I don't know for sure, but I'd like to think that even if we were forced to regress that we'd keep some of our intelligence and pass it on and as a society make better choices than we have in the past.
Take Care!
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