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Helen's Blog 6

The morning before our final presentation we went to this local tea tasting by a beautiful and quaint Qing dynasty era garden. The inside of the tea ceremony building was so cute and traditonal-style, I immediately loved the atmosphere. For the actual tea tasting we tried both fresh and roasted oolong. I had never actually done a full tea tasting so I was very pleasantly suprised when they brought out complentary tea snacks. They were very beautiful I almost didn’t want to eat them, but my favorite was this taro and pineapple flower-shaped cake. I remember at the tea museum in Pinglin they mentioned which flavors of snacks/cakes go best with what teas, but I forgot. Either way it was a delicious pairing. They also gave us some of the roasted oolong to take home and had us write notes to our future selves to put in the jar. I really wanted to write a poem but I was very indecisive and looking back I already feel like I don’t like what I wrote. Hopefully when I open it again I will feel ...
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Helen's Blog 5

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These last few days in Tainan have been very eventful. On Saturday we did an indigo dying project. I thought it was so cool that the dye started out a muddy green color in the water basin and slowly turned deep blue when exposed to oxygen. I tried make my own design of folding it into triangles and securing it with popsicle sticks and I think it turned out decent although a bit different than I thought. (my design is fourth from the left in the image). We started the next day with a boat tour of a local wetland reservoir by Anping. It was a small lake with mangroves on the banks. There were some locals out fishing on bamboo rafts and we even got to try casting some nets ourselves. We didn’t see much fish but we did catch a surprising amount of jellyfish. Our tour guide even let us touch one. It felt just like jello! In the afternoon after the boat tour we toured the nearby city of Anping, where the original Dutch fort was located. All we saw that was left of it from the original 17th c...
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Helen's Blog post 4

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On our first day in Tainan after storing our luggage in the hotel we walked over to the National Cheng Kung University and got a tour of campus from local students. I found that the campus has a very East-Asian university vibe that I really like. It feels very comforting and nostalgic. I also like the style of the Japanese colonial barracks (sue me!). I still haven’t got the opportunity to ask if Cheng Kung Unversity is named after Zheng Chenggong (郑成功) so I looked it up and it is! I was a bit unsure because 成功 literally translates to “success” and National Success University is not a bad name on its own. Also thinking of the romanization of the name, it makes me think about how I don’t understand the romanization of Taiwanese place names at all. I feel like it is nearly impossible to guess what character or its actual meaning from how it is written in English or sometimes even how to pronounce it all. It was easy for most of Taipei (outside of the city name haha) especially in the met...
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Helen's Blog 3

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On my last day before leaving Taipei I wanted to visit the trendy Zhongshan neighborhood. We first went to this quirky design store called Par Store. I really like this type of place with lots of weird stickers, posters, and t-shirts. I try to go to at least one of this type of store everytime I’m in a new city, its a great place to find unique gifts from local artists. I found that while the Zhongshan area was well maintained, it was not particularly unique and quite similar to other trendy-type neighborhoods in Singapore and Shanghai. I found the trendy clothing stores to be particularly disappointing since they all sold the same boring, cheap and overpriced items. However I did stumble across a store that sold cartoon IP goods and I was surprised to find that their most recent item was a collab with the Alice and Wonderland cartoon and they had decided to highlight the baby oysters from the very beginning of the cartoon. They are basically unknown in the US and I would’ve never seen...
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Helen's Blog 2

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Day 4 in Taiwan started with a bus ride outside Taipei to Pinglin Cultural Landscape. The green mountains interspersed with small tea farms created a stunning view. Seeing the mountains in Asia almost feels like looking at those landscape paintings come to life. I had the same impression outside Beijing visiting the Great Wall and it really makes me wonder what makes the mountains here have such a distinct shape compared to the Americas or Europe. I would love to know the geological reason.  After our short hike we traveled into this small but quaint old town and had some delicious tea and tea-flavored food. After we walked around the town we went to the tea museum. Beyond learning a bit more about the processes of making tea and its place in traditional Chinese culture, the most interesting impression I had was about the use of AI in the exhibition design. While it was immediately apparent that they had used AI to make the mouths of historical paintings come to life in a silly if ...
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Taiwan Blog Post 1

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Arriving in the afternoon sleepy from my morning flight from Shanghai, and stepping off the train in Taipei Main Station my first impression was the palpable "vibe". At first, coming from Shanghai, the Japanese influence was unmistakable to me. Beyond the Japanese restaurants, import stores and gachapons there is a sense in the arrangement of the building that I can only attribute as coming from a Japanese influence. Honestly, I figured Taipei would seem like a bustling metropolis, but instead to me it almost feels cozy, especially visiting the old street DaDaoCheng. The rhythm of the signs, windows and ledges on buildings on the street create a feeling of entering consecutive rooms in a large but lively house. With the near constant rain it only increases the coziness. The two or three story houses with covered walkways past small businesses reminds me of the old Peranakan style houses in Singapore, complete with the “copy-baroque” embellishments. Moving to the cutting ed...
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