March 16th, 2015

Hiya...

Have a few minutes this morning, so let's see what's in the notebook these days.  Am working hard on my top 10 things Taiwan does better than anywhere else (am at 7 so far).  You will remember I took issue with this CNN list last time and thought I could do better.  I submit stuff like that to the local English language papers the Taipei Times and the China Post..  I wonder if they ever publish them as have never heard back nor do I really dig very deep into the editorial sections.  They are both about a day behind the regular news, but are a decent source of info on the local scandals at times. 

My favorite of which in the last few months has been the cooking oil scandal.  It went down when we were having issues with this website so probably didn't relay it to you.  Basically, everyone uses cooking oil to make food here...more so than in Western cooking.  The largest supplier here, run by some of the wealthiest and most powerful people in the country was found to be cutting the oil with other substances.  Oil is pretty nasty to begin with, but when you combine it with things like used oil and leather cleaner (!) and then sell it to the entire population for a generation, that is a huge deal.  A lot of shame to be doled out (too bad the Chinese don't do the hari kari thing) and the perpetrators connection to the ruling government was a significant factor in that party being routed at the polls in November.  That and the facts that Taiwanese more and more fear the mainland government and despise their mainland counterparts culturally, make themwant nothing to do with reunification. 

I really need to get to China for a visit.  you'd think we would have gone, but Betty has zero interest as she is all over that place for many weeks (months) each year.  She used to try to convince me that it was worth visiting, but she has given up on that and thinks it is a horrible place.  No one I talk to here (that includes tourists and ex-pats that have served time there) ever says anything nice about it and they actively caution us against going. I feel I need to go to validate the disdain I have for them. 

Not sure how it got in my FB profile, but I get posts from That's China magazine.  If I lived there, I would like it as they give a lot of restaurant and cultural info in English about the major cities in China, but they also call out some of the locals bad behavior.  I received this link to an article about some moms shaking cherry blossom branches to get better pictures of their kids.  People were pissed that they were ruining the beauty of the trees for the next people and confronted the moms, but they said that the petals were just going to fall anyway and wouldn't stop.  They then let their kids shake the branches and they ended up busting them off of the trunk of the tree (which you can see in the photos).  I totally understand that this shit goes on everywhere, but the mainlanders are called out most as they have the most people and now have the cash to get out and export their "cultural" norms to other societies.  They do seem the most egregious and there wouldn't be so much hatred of the Chinese desecration of nature if there wasn't some truth behind it.  As my mother likes to say, I like to make my "little comments", but always try to make them from a position of knowledge, which is why I need to visit China so I can see if it is true that at their zoos, they not only have descriptions of the animals by the cages, but recipes too.

Is anyone else as disgusted by the current state of the Republican party as I am.  I am still registered as a Republican and do my best to route the discussion towards a party that holds Eisenhower as the model leader, but these guys are not only not even close, but seem to have been collectively sniffing bat guano.  I don't want to get into the long list of topics where they disgust, but these 47 Senators (Senators for chrissakes!) that wrote a letter to Iran gave me a bad case of weltschmerz.  I get it, you hate Obama.  However, he happens to be our President, who is in the middle of negotiations with one of our biggest foes, working alongside and in conjunction with not only the biggest powers on the planet, but some that are also our biggest foes, and you send that?  Party leaders and prospective presidential candidates (am looking at you McConnell, Graham, McCain, Ernst, Cruz, Rubio) all signed the letter that was crafted by a freshman Senator?  From Arkansas no less?   And that they all think that warmonger Netanyahu is some savior or savant, when his record of predicting the future has not only been shown to be the opposite of correct, but has positioned Israel in an us against the world fight, proves that they are all bought off by the MIC (Military Industrial Complex) and are simply itching to use our weapons so they can buy some more.  Ugh...can you worry about the people for just a few minutes.  Talk about fixing a road rather than giving Canada a pipeline or voting against health care. 

Sorry. 

I need to clean up one more thing from November-December.  We took a long weekend trip to Malaysia for Thanksgiving and didn't get to document it.  You can skip to the bottom of the post at this point to see if there are any more clever jokes (like the recipe at the zoo).

We went to MY (Malaysia) with the goal to spend a relaxing weekend at a beach resort.  The resort was fine (and by fine, I always mean that it sucked, but in a way that if I said it sucked, you would think I was a privileged asshole...which I am of course).  It had over water bungalows, but the ocean water was brown as it was at the mouth of a river, so was not pleasant to go in.  The pool was too small and the food on site was not great.  They had a really nice hammock, so I got in a lot of reading, and we watched the T-day Seahawk 19-3 win over the Niners on the balcony,

but other than that,  a poor choice overall.  We did plan a day sightseeing in Kuala Lumpur on the way to the coast, so will share some of those impressions.

We hired a guide for the day, and while he started out slow, we came to like him.  He gave us some of the MY basics that are important to know when understanding the country.

Population is 30 million.  55% Malay/29% Chinese/10% Indian.  There are 26 total ethnic groups but they all coexist in peace, which sounds right as you rarely ever hear anything bad coming out of Malaysia (other than an inability to keep their airplanes in the air).  They are 62% Muslim/20% Buddhist/9% Christian/6% Hindu/2% Other Chinese religions.  I think the Buddhists have the most interesting looking things.

The government is a constitutional monarchy...the parliament is fully elected.  There are 14 states, and 9 of them are governed by Sultans.  The King serves a 5 year term and rotates amongst these 9 Sultans...the current King is 94 years old and this is his second term as such. 

The Chinese came to Malaysia 150 years ago to mine tin.  I had no idea, but tin is a key component in pewter and Malaysia has been the largest producer of pewter for generations.  I saw the Royal Selangor Pewter Museum on the itinerary and thought it was going to be a tourist trap, but was arguably the best thing we saw.  Learning about the chemistry of what it takes to make pewter was interesting to some.

 

We got to see the factory processing close-up, with even a little hands-on training.

 And of course, the largest pewter tankard in the world.



Great tour.  We also learned about the rubber industry.  They produce a lot there, but rubber was not native to the area.  The whole industry arose from two seeds that were smuggled out of Brazil in the 1700's.  Brazil kept tight tabs on their product so as to not allow their monopoly to be lost, but the Brits managed to start up an industry there when they ruled the place, and brought in workers from India (hence your 10% of the population) to work the fields.  Our guide gave us a side of the road demo as to how you extract rubber from a tree.

 I am always fascinated by the lonely person taking multiple selfies.

Popped into a very nice temple (Thean Ho), that was built for the Chinese community by Taiwanese.  It was very nice, but I have a hard time differentiating between the temples.  Maybe he stopped here cause we came from Taiwan?  Whatever...the turtle pond alone was worth the stop.

 And prompted a discussion of Yertle and turtle stacking in general.

And I am dying to know what kind of nutty pictures were taken to have caused them to add # 4 to the list of do's and don'ts.

Had a stop at the War Memorial...it commemorates not only the struggle of the Malaysians and British against Japan, but also the Malaysian Civil War between the Communists and Nationalists from 1948 to 1960.  And as with every place you visit, there has to be something that is the _____est.  This is the world's tallest bronze freestanding sculpture grouping.

I remember being kinda pissed at Taipei when we were driving around as there were a ton of interesting buildings with unusual architecture.  I get bored with the Neo-classical bomb shelter look of the majority of buildings here, but found the contemporary take on traditional middle eastern styles around Kuala Lumpur fun to look at.

 The last couple are from the King's Palace.  Love the yellow.  And from all parts of the city, you get glimpses of the Petronas Towers.

They were the tallest buildings in the world from 1998 to 2004, but remain the tallest twin towers in the world.  I crumb on the Taiwanese "architecture" quite a bit, but will say that Taipei 101 is much nicer aesthetically than these (and is my favorite from that perspective of all the buildings in this class).  The Petronas Towers are very unusual...but the stainless steel look made them feel a bit cold and sterile.

 The views, especially with the thunderstorms rolling through, were sublime.

We didn't get to sample much local food, but were previously impressed by Malaysian cuisine when visiting Singapore, and you could see the other cuisines (Indian/Chinese/Western) in abundance when touring, so I am giving MY my thumbs-up gastronomically.  Its proximity to the equator keeps it a bit too hot year round for my taste, but I could see how one would find living here a pleasure.

I promised another joke...How do you get a clown to stop smiling? 

Shoot him in the face.