Taiwan

It has been a bit of time since my last trip update. I think after the North Pole, it was difficult to figure out how to make my travels around the world sound interesting, given that much of my time was spent in conference halls, on planes, in hotels, and other such generic spaces. I did manage to traipse about this summer just a bit. I ended up in England for a week to attend the awards ceremony for the North Pole race, but also managed to go pub crawling during the world cup with what were most likely local football hooligans, if I understand that term correctly.

I also managed to get to Rio de Janeiro for a week during the World Cup where the conference I was attending had to be canceled the afternoon Brazil played Chile. Instead some of us ended up watching the event on a giant screen at Copacabana where I asked stupid questions like how many innings there were in a soccer match. Aside from many days in a copyright conference, I was also able to spend a couple days climbing Sugarloaf – one of the granite multi-pitch features located directly in the middle of Rio.

Given these trips happened so close to the North Pole trip, they didn’t seem all that interesting. Taiwan, on the other hand, has been nothing but interesting and as I sit in the executive lounge posing as an important person and waiting for the free cocktail hour (life at the top is very demanding and difficult), I figured I would use my spare time and free Internet connection to ramble on about my trip so far.

Several months ago, I was invited to attend a conference on Traditional Knowledge and digital archiving in Taiwan and of course said yes.

Evidently in Taiwan there is a level of respect for academics that simply does not exist in the U.S. because they flew me here business class, which has completely ruined me for economy air travel. I would like to think of myself as a cosmopolitan international traveler, but in reality I am more what Douglas Coupland has called a poverty jetsetter. It turns out that I am very easily impressed by things like real silverware, cloth napkins, seats that go all the way flat, and my own personal movie screen while sitting on an airplane. I was flying Korean Air and the airline attendants were very concerned when I ordered the bibimbap. However, after assuring themselves I could eat my food without too much help, they let me have my order. Despite being deemed incompetent to eat Korean food, I tried to pretend I fit in up in the elite section of the plane, but aside from the mother with the kid wearing gold Mickey Mouse ears, there were no other women in Business class. Actually, there was hardly anyone in Business class. Needless to say, the flight was so enjoyable, I didn’t really want to get off the plane when we landed – how often can you say that?

Arrival in Taiwan made me aware of an entirely new level of travel support. I cleared customs and headed towards the front gate assuming that my ride to the hotel would be nowhere to be found. In most cases academics are left to fend for themselves upon arrival – when I landed in Brazil, for example, the local organizers had sent us all instructions for how to take the public bus across the city to a different airport where we were to take a cab to the hotel. Here, not only was there someone to meet me, but I was immediately whisked away in a hired car to the hotel, ushered through the doors, taken to the executive floor where I was very quickly checked into my room. I managed to insult the guy helping me with my luggage by giving him a tip. I was given fruit. This all happened before I even had time to register that I had arrived. I then spent the next 30 minutes trying to figure out how to make the toilet work – it is a very sophisticated piece of electronics that seems destined for greatness. Also, as I learned the hard way, it only works if the lights in your room are turned on.

Our host, Professor Chris Huang, had made dinner plans for us and there wasn’t enough time to walk around too much so I stayed in my very luxurious hotel room. Chris took us out to dinner to a restaurant where I was able to try pork intestines for the first time. The dinner was excellent and we also were able to try the local beer – called Taiwan beer – to keep things simple.

The conference itself would only be of interest to those of you who care about intellectual property, which in my circle of friends is no one. So, I’ll skip the conference. My presentation was not that good, certainly not worthy of business class travel. I slaved for months on the presentation and practiced this thing multiple times. However, it turns out that if I slow down so that I can be translated, I loose my rhythm and forget what I want to say. Both the other speakers gave very nice presentations. We also were able to listen to translations of the papers delivered by people working on the issue locally, all of which were really interesting.

Our hosts took us to the banquet facilities on the research site for dinner. Taiwan is interesting politically because of the layers of colonization that have occurred here and the ways in which Taiwanese people are seeking to construct their identities in relation to these different occupying forces. There was an early period of Dutch colonization – and I always thought of the Dutch as such peaceful people. Actually, no one is trying to use the Dutch in their identity politics. Then, Japan controlled the island before China took power. Prior to Chinese political control, generations of Chinese-speaking people had already made the island their home. There are of course aboriginal people here (hence our conference) including 14 recognized ethnic groups, and up to 24 different languages. They have a place called the Taiwan aboriginal park where evidently you can learn about all the different cultures. However, much of this diversity is overshadowed by the presence of China.

Needless to say, I am not providing my novice/wikipedia Taiwanese history lecture for no reason – it relates to our dinner.

I give this background because I actually am not sure how to describe our food – it seemed like Chinese food, but it might be better to call it Taiwanese food. However, in terms of presentation and approach it was quite similar to fancy dinners I have had while visiting China. I am hoping this is not an insult to people from Taiwan. There were somewhere around 12 dishes brought out, no rice was served, and there were all sorts of interesting things to eat. The crispy duck skin that you put into a sort of rice tortilla was very tasty. I can now say I have eaten jellyfish and chicken testicles. I didn’t even really think about chickens having testicles, let alone things that were as big as what we ate, but there you have it. They didn’t really taste like chicken and I will add that none of the men ate the chicken testicles – some sort of statement of solidarity with the male chickens it would seem.

It turned out that the foreign speakers were not invited to attend the conference the next day because they had not ordered translators for that part of the event. This meant that the three of us who had been invited to speak had a day to do something in the city. Actually, our hosts decided we probably should not venture out on our own. Thus, a student was taken from what might have been her otherwise enjoyable Sunday and forced to go to the National Taiwan museum with three western academics. She was very good about it.

The museum was great. It had scores of Chinese art treasures – many of which were brought to Taiwan when Chiang Kai-shek (you should have seen my initial spelling of that one) moved part of the Chinese government to Taiwan, creating an incredibly complex political situation that has resulted in today’s cross cutting issue – independence from China. The museum houses enormous numbers of Chinese paintings, sculptures, bronzes and such. Much like visiting a museum on mainland China, I was struck by how advanced Chinese art is compared to similar periods in European history.

The museum was very crowded. According to our student guide, Emily, (not her real name, just her English name since westerners are hopeless at Chinese pronunciation), everyone at the museum was a tourist from China. The big and most famous piece on display was a jade cabbage. We were not able to see the jade cabbage because the lines were so long and the crowds so big. However, it seemed to be a huge draw – and there were lots of replicas of the cabbage in the gift shop.

Despite our failure to see the jade cabbage, walking around a museum with thousands of tourists was quite tiring. We headed back to the hotel and thanked Emily for her kind hospitality. Then took a brief rest before heading out into the streets on our own. Brad, a law professor from Australia, who had been here a few days prior to us knew the lay of the land and thus walked us through how to use the subway which saved a lot of time looking lost. Our goal, such as there was one, was to go to the Eslite bookstore by Taipei 101.

Taipei 101 used to be the tallest building in the world. It looks all the taller because there are absolutely no other buildings even close to its height anywhere around. It has, sadly, lost its status as the tallest building in the world. However, for a brief moment it helped define Taiwan as the place where the tallest building in the world is. It has also become a center for really fancy shopping.

We were going to a bookstore in the shopping district close to Taipei 101 – a bookstore that really turned out to be a shopping mall. It was the kind of shopping mall where, if I knew even a bit about fashion, I would probably have been impressed by how cheap I could get all the cool designer stuff. However, I know nothing about fashion and everything seemed really expensive. Joanna, the other IP law professor in our group teaches fashion law and knows all about these things. She was having a great time checking out all the different designer labels. Because we are all interested in intellectual property, we cannot go through a space like this without discussing all the trademark related issues. Nerds are nerds, even if they are looking at expensive fashion.

The bookstore ended up being a couple floors above the shopping mall. The other thing nerdy academics do is go to bookstores, even when the books are not printed in the language they read. I was successful in finding a few books by Taiwanese authors printed in English, which I bought for the plane ride home.

Brad unfortunately had to leave for home yesterday. Joanna was taken on a shopping trip in the city and I went to the National Chengchi University (NCCU) to give a lecture to a law school class on intellectual property related issues. The students were all very polite, but asked no questions. The faculty members who attended did ask questions, which was very nice of them. We all went out to lunch at a French steakhouse after the lecture that evidently has served all the important “blue party” officials. As I mentioned before, independence from China is the key issue and members of the blue party are pro-China. We had a good lunch talking politics and comparing university policies. The Taiwanese scholars at lunch, almost all of whom have degrees from elite U.S. universities, are puzzled by Sarah Palin, the tea party, and the current trajectory of American politics and were interested in my opinion about the wikileaks issue.

The lecture, lunch and getting back to the hotel took up the vast majority of the day. As part of the incredible and never ending hospitality of our hosts, another professor and co-investigator for the digital archive project has helped arrange a trip for me tomorrow to the southern part of Taiwan. Thus, I will be getting up early to take a bullet train to Kaohsiung, spending the day there, and then returning by bullet train late in the evening. I am really excited by the entire prospect and I am sure will have much more to write about that trip and my climbing (weather permitting) in the days to come.