happy birthday mr. braille!

I just really liked the Google logo for Louis Braille's birthday today. Check it out. There's also all the old holiday logos, too.

love for sale

I'm not sure if I've commented before about how holidays can really be overdone here, but they can be. Especially Western holidays. And most especially in the commercial sector.

Businesses seem just as willing, if not even more willing (if you can believe it) to prostrate themselves and do what it takes to obtain the mighty customer dollar here. In South Korea, this has gone as far as deeming 21 days in the year to celebrate love (or the lack of it). It all blossomed from Valentine's Day being so successful (where, in a change, women buy men chocolates, to which the men reply a month later on White Day with white candy), and has created a giant industry based on couples feeling they have to buy things for one another.

Diary Day. Red Day. Green Day (where the articles says couples dress in green and drink cheap liquor from green bottles. ???) Black Day, where singles eat black food (noodles with black sauce) to mark themselves as single...and to hopefully find love by eating black food with other singles. Yellow Day-Rose Day. Silver Day, where couples ask friends to give them money to go on a date. And of course, the number of days since they started dating.

Obviously, as the article states, this kind of ruthless capitalism in the name of love is hard on everyone - couples, as no one wants to lose face, so everyone buys buys buys, and singles, who feel the need to have someone, made especially hard by society telling them every month that they should have someone and reminding them they don't.

There is a lot of that pressure here to not be single. Even as a foreigner, I was told many times (before Chris and I started dating) that I should have a girlfriend, it was not good that I didn't. It's even worse for a girl here, in a society that believes that women are the property of the man's family once she marries. She doesn't even get to be in the family tree (although the law just changed on this last month) or see her family (traditionally), except for Chinese New Year's Day. Or maybe the day after. I don't remember which one. One day a year, anyway. The fact that companies have jumped on this only says two things to me: shrewd and disgusting. It's the same thing as the commercialization of Christmas back home (although that is rivaled out here, too. Exceeded, if you count the fact that less than 5% of the population is Christian.)

Love for sale, indeed.

take a closer look

Wonderful, wonderful news - I'm having my own solo photography show this weekend! It came up a little fast, as the gallery was thought to be closed, but then was found to be open. It's kinda neat that one can have an opportunity like this here, which is why I wanted to take advantage of it (even though there was a wee bit of prodding from friends) - almost anywhere else, possibly even in Taipei, I would not have felt that I could have done this. Too much competition, I guess, would be the main obstacle in my mind. However, it looks like it's going to work out.

The material will be my photos from my time here in Taiwan (and trips around). You've probably seen most of them in the galleries, quite honestly. The theme is Take a closer look, as I feel that that tends to be a focus with my photography. As those who have been with me when I'm taking pictures know, I tend to stop a lot and take a lot of pictures of things from a closer point of view than is typically considered, or find that different angle. Occasionally, I even try and take something routine and try and give it a new life. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn't. (Well, often it doesn't, really.) Lana does this too, except better.

So, anyway, wish me luck! Should be an interesting experience, that's for certain.

Update: Looks like I jumped the gun here. We were told (saving face?) on Thursday that it was available, on Monday that it looked like it would happen, and on Tuesday that, well, it couldn't happen. Oh well. Another time. At least I'm basically ready for it now.

yes virginia, asia can be that weird

You may have seen it in the news or in mass emails going around, but today, you get a first-hand account.

I've been to the toilet restaurant.

The toilet restaurant (named Marton, which is phonetically close to matong, which I think is the Taiwanese way of saying toilet. All of the articles say Chinese, but none of the Chinese words for toilet I've heard (all three of them) sound like matong. I could also be very wrong, as they are the ones with the restaurant, not me) is only open in Kaohsiung, but has been pretty successful, having opened a second location since they first opened in May 2004. I happened to stumble upon both within two weeks of each other after not really having known about them. So the girl and I decided we'd have a try.

Yes, it's all true. You do sit on toilet seats (a bit uncomfortable, but not too bad) and eat over tubs and sinks. The menu's all in Chinese, which makes it a bit hard for foreigners (yay for the girlfriend who reads Chinese!), but the food is pretty typical Chinese fare - hotpot (kind of a make-your-own-delicious-broth while you cook the food you eat during the soup-making in the broth. Make sense?), curries, pasta, and other meals. (I had three cups chicken. mmmm)

Note the toilet-seat spoon cover.

All in all, it wasn't bad. Definitely worth the I've-been-there factor. My favourite thing was the ceramic soup cover, in the style of poop. The menu had small pictures of poo on it beside certain dishes (I want to go back and order one of those, I don't know what they mean), and even the frequent customer card had poo stamps. Entertaining, that's for sure.

"quotes"

(from a student) I am not God. And God will be wrong sometimes.

(from a friend) Ahhh. Eight days. I can count them on one hand.

(from a student's writing) Sunny [the monkey] is very exciting too, because his ideology of an animal tell him, some thing lucky will happen.

(from a jacket) Little Bobdog with bob won't go smoothly - they are more than just friend

And finally, a wonderful story from a wonderful friend:

I was teaching a student the word "skill" today. I said, "It means something you can do really well, like playing piano, or being good at math. Do you have anything you can do really well?"

"Pee."

I stared at her. It took some time before I realized she was trying to say, "P.E."