Friday Morning Dumplings

Do you like dumplings? Hope so – I’ve got some big fat ones for you. To cover a wide range of topics, I will serve it all up to you in the form of Friday Dumplings! (Like Mike Fisher’s Donuts over at dallasbasketball.com)  

Read on to hear about some overdue bad luck, another typhoon, some educational field trips, a new way of dealing with mosquitoes, identifying poisonous leaves using water, and more…

With all the good fortune I had been rewarded with recently, some bad luck finally came my way. My Canon G9 camera fell off a table, took a big bounce on the hard tile, and broke. Being one of the few items I really need for this trip and blog, I struggled through some eBay-like websites in Chinese and bought a second hand one (cheaper than fixing). It was almost new, working great for a weekend, and then suddenly it just stopped working entirely! I was keeping well to my budget until this, so I reluctantly took on some work editing an engineering student’s PhD thesis. I found very little interest in it, but he paid well, and appreciated my way of correcting mistakes, explaining English grammar and usage, and knowledge of EE terms. This earned me some even better paying work editing for his classmates, but I turned them down. My time here is better spent volunteering and learning - if I wanted to simply earn money, I would not have come on this trip.
Dumpling 1:

Dumpling 2: I’ve been getting all the water I can handle here in Taiwan – a second typhoon (Megi) just came by, passed below the island, then decided it didn’t like the Philippines as much and has now returned. So what this has meant is nearly two weeks of rain, fantastic waves, and a couple cancelled outings. The trains stopped running, and flooding is serious in Ilan, just to the north of me. I heard a couple tour buses are buried in an avalanche on the mountain road. I pray they are alive and can be saved soon.

Dumpling 3: Speaking of mountain roads, Fish is working on a proposal to improve or replace a mountain road once used by aboriginal people to travel between the fertile valley and the ocean. The road winds dangerously along the mountainside, and a river famous for whitewater rafting rages below. Water is usually the destructive element. For example, sudden torrents of typhoon rain often loosen and wash rocks down onto the road. Also, when too much water has seeped into the hills, there is too much weight to hold back for the retaining walls, which break and cause avalanches. Problems occur from below as well, as river water constantly erodes the cliff-side below. The support can give way, causing the section of road to just drop, sliding into the gorge (like what happened to this unfortunate hotel last year). To address these problems, the first step is to visit the site, and gather as much geographical data as possible. Then different techniques can be applied appropriately, and proper decisions can be made to balance cost and effectiveness, selecting amongst tunneling, reinforcing walls, building bridges, employing stop lights, etc. I went with Fish to survey the road, taking pictures and notes. Since grade school, like most kids, I had always loved field trips, and this certainly felt like one. Getting to be outdoors, taking in stunning views, thinking of solutions to unique problems, it hardly felt like work. 

 

Dumpling 4: At the university, I’ve met one of the foremost experts on panoramic photography: a sixty year old man who is about to publish the book he’s worked on for ten years. I conceived of the lengthy English title, and in my downtime, helped him translate the table of contents. Through our time spent together, we’ve discussed photography, Chinese history, American politics, and his Buddhist beliefs. One of these beliefs is that our body responds to the mind (soul actually) and that with the right mindset, we need not be affected by things such as mosquito bites. Having been tortured by mosquitoes all my life, especially here in Taiwan, he had my full attention. First, he said you’re better off letting it drink its fill, suffering only one bite, rather than swat at it, never allowing it get full, and thereby obtaining several equally itchy bites as it tries and tries again for a full meal. He said that the swelling and itching could be completely avoided by actively deciding that a mosquito’s sting has too little poison (in comparison to the amount of blood running through your body) to do you any harm, like how the vast Pacific ocean is hardly bothered by a single spilled barrel of oil. He demonstrated this at dinner, allowing a mosquito to land on his hand. We watched as it slowly bit, drank, enlarged with blood, and flew lazily away. I checked his hand many times that night - no redness, swelling, or itching at all. Ruth explained this later saying some people aren’t allergic, and clearly he is one of them. But he said he used to suffer just like we do, before he practiced meditation. She said allergies change in people; the timing might just be coincidental.

Dumpling 5: I decided to give it a go. Two nights after the demonstration, I was woken up while sleeping, being terrorized by a relentless mosquito. Half asleep, I tried to resist swatting at him, and the little guy to bit my arm a few times. It itched like crazy! So I thought okay, I better get serious. I turned on the lights and waited patiently, thinking, “Okay little friend, I will not kill you. You are so small, and I so large. Come drink and drink well, for I am the Pacific, and you will not injure me.” At last, twenty minutes later, I felt him land on my hand. He hopped around, and bit me twice before settling on a good spot – so much for getting bit just once... I kept an open mind, and decided to allow him to stay as long as he wanted. 5 minutes passed (ok, probably more like 10 seconds) and still I waited. Then those first two initial bites started to itch. That wasn’t supposed to happen. Still I waited. Then those first two started to itch more and swell up, and the one he was working on got really itchy too. Still I waited. But I am no master! Doubt crept into my mind as I thought about how he would drink his fill, probably leave me alone for a few hours, and then wake me up again with more biting… Should I just sit back and let that happen? Hmmm… SPLAT! Killed him with my other hand, said sorry, gave him a good flick, and went back to sleep in peace.

 

Dumpling 6: When I first arrived in Hualien, a man, who I will call Mr. Yellow, was very generous and gave me a place to stay. For the past eleven years, he has served as a volunteer tour guide at Taroko Gorge National Park. A couple of weeks ago, he took Ruth, me, and a few little ones. For me, water was certainly the highlight of the trip (besides hanging out with the kids). There is a plant with big broad leaves that aboriginal people use to cook food in, but the plant has an evil twin – an identical looking poisonous one. Mr. Yellow showed us how to differentiate between two by pouring water on them. One slightly absorbs the water and turns dark - this one is toxic. On the other leaf water will bead up and roll around as if on wax paper – this one is safe. [warning: don't try this at home, kids - I don't know if it applies to your plants] The river water that carved the gorge was an alluring green/blue color, and during our hike, it was enticing me to jump in. There are many tales of people dying: by heart attack after jumping in (finding the surface warm, but the deep water freezing cold), or by  getting sucked down a swirling vortex, or being held below water by weeds that grab at the legs. It looked safe to me and Mr. Yellow wasn’t wearing his uniform so after our hike Ruth and I went for a refreshing swim. We also investigated some seeds that fell from trees that when cracked open and scrubbed in water, formed bubbles, like soap, and were used by aboriginal people to wash things. Fish bought a plot of land for organic farming, and he plans for these trees to be one of his carefully chosen crops – more on this in a future post.

Dumpling 7: Another field trip I went on was with my Chinese tutor. I have been studying reading and writing diligently, and finally the code is starting to be cracked for me – something that should have happened a long time ago when I was a misbehaving, class-skipping Chinese-school student. I have been learning using a book of 成语故事 (proverb stories) and by writing sentences with the words I’ve learned. The other night my tutor took me to the city to practice reading signs and menus, and we ate a delicious dinner at a dumpling house and had some famous Taiwanese shaved ice for dessert.

Dumpling 8: I went on yet another field trip down to Taitung to meet with people at a new Deep Ocean Water Plant. It is still under construction, but they have successfully laid the piping, which is usually very risky and therefore potentially very expensive. Instead of joining pipes one by one as they are laid, they saved maybe a couple million by pre-assembling the entire length of pipe, protecting each section with a module providing structure and protection, then letting the whole thing sink the bottom. Now they are building greenhouses for coldwater agriculture crops, and some tanks to grow algae using the nutrient rich water, after its cold properties are spent. Since condensation is sure to form on the pipes, fresh drinking water is a free byproduct, with costs coming only from collection and distribution. A DOW project requiring such a high capital expenditure can only be justified and eventually successful by utilizing the water in a multi-stage system like this. The visit allowed for us to ask many questions, and obtain a sample of the water being pulled up. A professor will soon analyze it to determine the exact lithium content, since lithium reserves on land are very low and extracting Li from DOW could be another use for the water. After discussing everything we saw, there are still some concerns:

• Where will the used up water go when it has passed through all the stages? It is saline and cannot just be dumped. Many nutrients would likely remain, and previously, when it was hundreds of meters below the surface, light could not reach it, so there was no photosynthesis, keeping it clean and free of bacteria. There is a fear that if it is returned to the surface, much algae would grow, harming the ecosystem by blocking off light to everything beneath it.
• Is the scale too small? The plant was not big at all, and though we haven’t seen the numbers, it seems like it is too small for such a large investment, and it may take far too long to be paid back.
• If it is determined that there is enough lithium to extract, will the process produce many waste heavy metals? This is one aspect I am looking into.
• Will there be the cooperation needed to make eventual operation actually possible? This is probably the most important question. There are three main interested parties – federal government, local government, and a private engineering firm. Each wants different things and has different ideas, and there is no leader or liaison between them. Despite all the technical challenges, it seems that often dealing with people is usually the biggest obstacle to any project.

Dumpling 9: I was originally planning to travel to Yunnan Province in China at the beginning of November to start another volunteer placement. I am pretty well entrenched in all I am doing and learning here in Taiwan, and felt that it would be too early if I were to leave at the end of this week. So I pushed my ticket to Kunming back by two weeks, and filed for an extension on my 60-day visa. If I overstayed the visa, I would be fined and banned from returning to Taiwan for a long time. The people at the immigration office were not the brightest bunch – one person said I could extend, another said I couldn’t, and after much discussion, asking each other questions, asking me irrelevant questions, and checking a book of regulations, they finally processed my application. Phew!

 Taiwan is beckoning, you should visit [not my photo]