A new mission?

It's been a long time since I posted anything. Almost 10 years! We are still in Taiwan, although we now live in Hsinchu. Home of the now world famous TSMC. 

My exercise journey has been through quite a slump. Renalda and I both did some yoga for a few years, which was great, I love the mental calm that comes after a good session. I would get super irritated when the instructor interrupted the quiet time after a 90 minute workout. While in Yilan we also continued walking regularly in the early mornings all the way up to Covid. Then we mostly stopped. 

I tried my hand at a PhD which meant we needed to move to Hsinchu in mid 2022. The National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University campus is on a hill, so I got quite a bit of walking in, but not much else. We didn't manage to consistently restart our early morning walking habit, things got busy, I got heavier and less keen. I continued with the PhD for 18 months, but it felt like a further qualification was too far off with me not contributing to our budget, so I went back to teaching 60% of my day, and started studying some AWS and SAP courses and brushing up on my Chinese reading. 

Exercise wise I started feeling worse and worse, it felt like my body was very unhappy. Without going into details there were worrying symptoms that perhaps my circulation wasn't as good as it should be. Along with some inspiration from a church friend, I decided to go to the gym late last year. I've never succeeded in going to the gym regularly. I have paid for at least 2 full year long memberships in SA without going more than 5 times each year. I did much better at Run Walk for Life, but there's nothing like that in Taiwan that I know of, and to be honest, walking outside in the afternoons, in summer is downright unpleasant. So no wonder.

At first I tried going along with what my mate was doing, but he's been lifting for years, and I'm in a body that has never run optimally, so I soon abandoned that idea. I went back to the Primal Blueprint Fitness plan, which I modified to suit me as I've progressed (and to make some use of all the available equipment). It includes 2 full body "Lift Heavy Things" days with three "Move Slow" days and one "Sprint" day. I added swimming as my move slow days, because there is a pool at the gym. Haven't added back a sprints day yet... I'm considering doing that in the pool.

Swimming? Move slow you say? I agree with you, it used to be that swimming=drowning. However, after reading Tim Ferris's "4 Hour Body" I found that I can swim quite easily with breast stroke, interspersed with freestyle. The trick is in the waterline length. Keep your body as long as possible for as long as possible and you will move far, with little effort.

This has been working well, I've been going to gym more than 50% of the week days, and I'm enjoying my lifting days a lot. I'm just worried about the time. I'm not sure I'll always have 1-2 hours to spare most days to spend in the gym... so, here's the mission. I'm going to do the ANCIENT 5BX Royal Canadian Airforce fitness plan. It takes 11 minutes for men, and 12 for women (XBX).

I will continue with my gym plan for now too, as long as my heart and body can stand it, and see where I end up. At my current age, it should take me just 24 weeks to get to the recommended level, A+ of Chart 2. That is if I move up every week. I'm considering taking pics and videos weekly, no guarantees, but it would be nice to see the progression. I do plan to continue my usual workouts at the same time. 5BX is so gradual, that it should be fine, certainly to start with. 

I found an app called "XBX and 5BX" which we are both using to guide our workouts and track our levels.

Yilan International Children’s Folklore & Folkgames Festival - opening ceremony

We were given tickets to attend the opening ceremony of this years festival on July 4th. Not being able to read Chinese we thought it was just access to the water theme park, but we were pleasantly surprised that there were a number of folk dance performances to be held that evening too.

The representatives at this years event

There were performing artists from 6 countries and Taiwan, namely, Bolivia, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Russia and Thailand. We thought it was only for children but a number of adult performers were also present.

The first performance was from the Taiwanese dancers and was very elegant.

Taiwanese Dancers

We took a video of the very elegant Taiwanese dancing, you can watch it below.

Another Taiwanese performance

Next came a performance from Thailand. The costumes were beautiful, but the music wasn't really to my taste.

A Thai dancer in what looked like a hummingbird costume

 

Then some singing and dancing from an Indonesian high school dance group.

Some kind of warrior costumes I think

There was also a performance by dancers from Hungary seen in the video below. 

They were really very good and the music was more kind to my ears.

The Russian dancers know how to smile!

For me they were really the best performance

They really had a lot of flair and energy

This performance was a lot of fun

These girls must be training to be ballet dancers

They even went and fetched members of the audience

Wonderful!

Harvesting rice

It was starting to appear that harvesting rice was an event completed by mice in the middle of the night when no one was watching. Each day as we rode to work or back more fields were harvested, but we hadn't seen a single harvester. Then a few days ago we saw one and then two and then more. The rice is now being harvested furiously, many fields are bare, and what's great is that we managed to get some pictures of this fleeting, shy animal called a rice combine harvester.

One of the harvesters roaming around Luodong at the moment

Why is it called a combine harvester? Because it combines the three traditional stages of grain harvesting, reaping, threshing and winnowing into one step, saving a lot of time, and allowing farmers to spend more time drinking beer or eating stinky tofu at the local night market.

It's such a neat process, it doesn't even hurt too many of the rice plants. It's tracks are narrower than the distance between two rows of rice plants (planted by a rice planting machine).

The only damage it makes to the field is on either end where it turns. It has a limited storage capacity so after two trips up and down the paddy it must stop and offload.

Offloading the rice

It's an amazingly quick little machine. It looked like it took 15 minutes to harvest a really large rice paddy. It was going at an impressive pace.

For my mom

My mom asked for some pictures of the beachfront close to our house. She visited us a few months back, but unfortunately it was winter time and we only went to the beach once or twice with her. The beach itself is a black sand beach made from either shale or some volcanic rock. Unfortunately it's not the most popular beach so it isn't very well kept, meaning it is frequently littered with plastic, vegetables and other trash washed out of a nearby river mouth. It's popular with fishermen and a pack of feral dogs.

Sunrise at this time of year is at 5am, so we had to get up at 4:50, I think Renalda was up before that making me some coffee. I was not really compos mentis, but it was great to be there, Renalda had the camera, otherwise there would have been no photos!

Enjoy!

Fried rice, zhongzi and Taiwanese neighbors

We have some wonderful neighbors. There is an oldish couple who live next door, we say "Ni Hao" to them whenever we see them. Every now and then they will walk into our house and give us something. I say walk in because there is a different sense of privacy here in Taiwan. People knock and walk in, we often lock our door for a different reason now.

We have received fresh vegetables from them often as they have a large allotment close by where they grow all sorts of fresh veggies. In fact a few months back we got so much we couldn't eat it quickly enough and it went bad. We often feel like our thanks and expressions of gratitude, with our very limited Chinese, is just not good enough, but as we learn Chinese we will try to be better at it.

These are our sweet zhongzi, given to us by our neighbors

Last weekend was Dragon Boat festival and the thing to eat around that time is zhongzi (sticky rice pyramids wrapped in bamboo leaves). One day we were minding our business when Ama (grandmother) came and gave us 6 pork zhongzi, yummy! Then I walked outside one day and she was cooking fried rice on her veranda, which I try not to eat, but couldn't resist when she offered me some. So I got a bowl from home, a reasonable sized one and she filled it till it was overflowing. Renalda and I shared the bowl for a tasty breakfast.

 A few days ago she came again to give us some more zhongzi but this time they were of the sweet variety. Well not really sweet, rather mildly flavored, to be dipped in sugar or honey. Also very good. Renalda and her got "talking" and she offered to show Renalda how to make "them". We misunderstood and "them" turned out to be pork fried rice with mushrooms.

It was arranged that Renalda and her would go buy the ingredients on Saturday morning (today)  and we think she waited until 9am before she tried to walk in the door. Renalda was able to say "shi fen" which means 10 minutes from our Chinese lessons... awesome! They went off to a morning market close by which we didn't know existed to "mai" (buy) the ingredients. Then came some more misunderstanding. She had examined out kitchen and noticed our bread maker which looks very similar to a rice cooker. The amount of ingredients she bought was for that size rice cooker, which meant she had to rethink the amounts of ingredients.

Then another disaster struck! Our small rice cooker clearly hadn't been used for ages as the aluminium rice bowl had cooked through. Ama had to go and get one from her kitchen so that we could use our tiny rice cooker.

Finally the rice was cooked all ingredients were ready and she made us a huge bowl of very yummy fried rice in our wok. Now we know how to make Taiwanese fried rice. The secret ingredient? We think it's MSG... heehee.

We suspect it's MSG, if someone can translate, much appreciated!

The rice paddies of Yilan

Growing sticky rice funTastic!!

Being in the Republic of China (Taiwan) you expect to see a lot of rice eaten and grown. In DaJia, where we first lived in Taiwan, there were only a few rice paddies and lots of taro plantations. We worked so hard and our commute was short and through the town centre, so we didn't see much of the rice. Here in Yilan there is rice everywhere and we have enjoyed watching the life cycle, every morning we drive a few kilometres through numerous ever changing paddies.

Through the rainy winter months the rice paddies looked like big square dams of black water. The water levels rose and fell depending on the rain. Sometimes they were just mud patches, other times they were overflowing. Then as spring arrived they planted furiously. Rice is planted in perfectly neat rows with an automatic planter, something like a tractor with a seed sowing attachment. This tractor has special wheels that allow it not to sink in the mud, they look like water wheel paddles.

We then watched the little seedlings grow at light speed into big plants, changing the landscape in a few weeks from a black water world into large fields of green. The farmers often staggered the planting so that the rice ripens a few weeks apart, you can see the result now, as the harvest is coming in. Some fields are still green, others are golden yellow, sagging with heavy sheaths of rice, others have already been harvested.

Almost ready to harvest

This is farmland in Taiwan, with power lines and 5 story buildings far in the background.

You can see fields of short cut rice plant stumps with bales or stacks of rice straw on the dried out paddies. The surface looks like dry caked mud, but the water table isn't far down, here and there, tractors have broken down into the mud below. There seems to be some disagreement about what to do with the straw. There are different methods of baling or stacking it, some farmers burn it, others put it on a huge heap.

This is one method of collecting the rice straw after the harvest

Another way to bale rice straw

Some older paddies already have the second growth of the rice coming up. Rice can be harvested twice in a season, so we will watch the second half of the life cycle from now on. 

I guess this paddy was harvested 2 weeks ago, note the second growth beginning to show

In South Africa agriculture is something that is done on farms far away from the cities. In Taiwan there is so little arable land that it is necessary to use all available space to the max. This means that even in towns and cities land is cultivated and we now live in "rural" Taiwan, so vegetation is everywhere.

Scootering through the fields, note the raised freeway in the background

Toucheng and Waiao - 21 June 2015

Some friends came to visit this weekend from Taipei. I'll include some pics of Derek and Joy in a later post because we didn't take any photos with them today. We got our quite late, about lunch time and took the train to Toucheng, intending to see the Wushi Harbor and perhaps the Lanyang museum and hopefully get in some swimming in too.

We started off walking to the Toucheng Old Street where there were some old Japanese buildings. An interesting mix of old and new and the ever present shrines and temples of course.

They don't build like this here anymore.

A charming little temple/shrine at one end of old street.

I think this used to be the old Toucheng general dealer in prosperous days gone by

Taking in some shade, it was quite a hot day, what summer day isn't ;)

Renalda finally gave me the camera ;)

I think this is to hold your roof down during typhoon season!

The Wushi fishing harbor from the hardworking side

The Lanyang Museum, we will have to go here another day

The not so hardworking side, with the tourist boats, this was the calm before the thunderstorm

Waio surfing beach, we managed to get in a swim, one of the surf companies allowed us to change in their tent

We ended up getting pretty wet in the rain, but it was a good day out. We found later that we could have caught a bus to where we walked, but we needed the exercise anyway :)