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Asia Pants – Living in Linkou
Hello everyone!
I’m going to go a little easier on pictures of food today. Now that I’ve settled back in a bit, I want to talk more about what it’s like to be staying here in Taipei. There is a simple and obvious way to sum it all up: it’s different.
It’s fantastic, and as you can see from my last two posts on poshdeluxe, that’s in no small part thanks to the food. However, it can be a bit trying, and completely exhausting. Sometimes you don’t want to speak Chinese or eat awesome food; you just want something crappy with way more carbohydrates than it needs and a copy of Die Hard in the DVD player. Without Chinese subtitles.
The language is everywhere, and it can be rather suffocating. This isn’t a huge issue for me, as I speak Chinese, but it must be crippling for people who can’t read the language or speak it. Case in point: my father, whose Chinese is limited, has been coming here for years. Whenever he and I are both in Taiwan, our discussions of where to go and what to do are dominated by debates on what places are called. For example, the night market at the nearby town of Jilong is famous for its seafood. My father knows the town as Keelung. We often go to restaurants in the Shinyi area, which I know as Xinyi, or on Chung Hsiao East Road, which I know as Zhongxiao East Road. Similarly, I can jump on the High Speed Rail to go and see some other cities on the Taiwanese west coast such as Taizhong and Gaoxiong, but my father only knows Taichung and Kaohsiung.
We have these handsome fellows to thank. The Wade-Giles system, which my father is accustomed to using, was the standard here for a long time. Pinyin, the system I use and the system used in Mainland China and abroad to teach foreigners Mandarin Chinese, has gradually replaced it over the last couple of years. It might not seem that big a deal, but it’s a constant hassle. Don’t even get me started on how Taiwanese people transliterate their names.
In a way, however, it’s kind of irrelevant. Check out these guys, selling one of my favourite snacks. The menu on top is completely in Chinese characters.
English menus are not really a priority for the food stalls. In fairness, despite the extensive list they really only sell one thing.
Being able to read Chinese, then, is particularly important for me where I’m staying at the moment, in Linkou. Linkou is just outside Taipei city, about thirty minutes by bus from Taipei Main Station. It’s worked out really well for me, not least because I have a nice private little apartment!
With a huge window and daily view of an even larger billboard poster of Taiwanese pop sensation S.H.E.!
The only way to start your day.
I must apologise for the photograph of the room, but in my defence, the apartment is small. I went for something comfortable and affordable, and this is perfect. It’s a pretty good representation of what’s available in Linkou. I could have got a similar apartment in Taipei, but it would have had enough room for a single bed, and the door to open so you could get into the room and then sleep on your single bed. I don’t have a way to cook, but other apartments I looked at had a single electric ring in the counter for preparing food.
I really like Linkou. It’s relaxed compared to Taipei, and there’s a lot of options for food, in restaurants and at food stalls. Additionally, if I need access to fake bread plushies that smell like bread they have me covered.
And if soft toys aren’t your thing, you can pay money to try and win a calculator! I’m not sure if the Taiwanese have a word for nerd.
I’m saving my photographs of food stalls for the inevitable trip to a night market, so I’ll skip that for now. I also wanted to leave enough room in the blog to post a picture of this guy.
I have no idea what his story is, just that he likes to hang out outside one of my local opticians’ storefront. I walk by him most days on the way back from the bus station inside the nearby Changgung (or Changgeng) Hospital, which features a rare thing in this part of Taiwan: an open space.
The water is probably the main reason there isn’t a building there. I’m sure they’re working on it. Yes, Taiwan is very heavily built up, and that’s made getting decent shots of outside places a bit of a challenge, but I’m working on it. It’s a big factor in the occasional periods of stress that seem inevitable in Taipei. It’s not just me either; this kid is getting on the bus to Taipei but I think she’s had enough already.
I’m going to write about shops in Taipei next week so I hope you guys are interested in more than food!! No food this week! I’m skipping it! See you next week! Bye!
Bye!!!
No really, get out of here. Bye!
Well, if you’re going to twist my arm….
Last weekend my dad was in town, which is always an excuse to grab some friends and go to a fancy restaurant. The restaurant in question is famous for making a chicken soup that is particularly tasty because they cook a whole chicken over a period of twenty-four hours. The result is fantastic, and looks like this:
Our very kind serving lady helps us out. Nothing we couldn’t do ourselves, but the little things are what make it really special.
The chicken soup is great, but it’s all about the soup and much less about the meat. My dad grabbed the opportunity to order some pork knuckle to tide us over. It was rather good.
We really stuffed ourselves, but just at the point you’re considering whether to invest in slightly larger pants, they take the soup away and bring it back again with more vegetables! Round Two!!!!
It was great. I’m feeling full again just thinking about it. That does it for me this week, see you next time, posh readers!
Discussion
10 comments for “Asia Pants – Living in Linkou”
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yea! thanks for posting your apartment. and by apartment, you mean it’s just the one room? no kitchen?
how long do you plan to be in taiwan?
and thanks for not skipping a food picture. mandatory for posts.
i’m looking forward to taking formal classes in arabic when i move to kuwait. just like you were showing with the written chinese vs the spoken, i feel that it’ll be as important to be able to read arabic as it will be to speak it. although english is definitely more prevalent in kuwait than it appears to be in taipei.
John,
Can you explain generally the difference between the Wade-Giles and Pinyin system?
Other question I do have for you is the Chinese keyboard. If my history is correct, the key board set up on English typewriters was designed to slow down typists as the first manual typewriters would jam if you typed too fast. Do you have idea on how the Chinese set their keyboards, since they use characters? Do their keyboards have more keys? Can you use one?
When I use to travel I enjoyed looking at the mundane (restaurant setups, building construction, plumbing, furnishing, store set ups, etc.) in different countries compared to what we have in the U.S. I guess that is just part of being and engineer. Sometimes I found that other countries had a better idea. I was away impressed the Far East use of bamboo scaffolding. So I enjoy looking through your photos to for those sorts of things in the background.
Thanks and keep on blogging. Mastering Chinese will definitely open many doors of opportunity in the future as I do believe that China will be a major world power in the future.
Thanks.
Hey Talena, yup, it’s just a room! I have my own bathroom. My Taiwanese friends have really enjoyed teasing me about how expensive it is. It actually isn’t, but it’s a cultural thing. If I told them it was five dollars a month they’d say I was ripped off.
Mr. Pitre, I know what you mean about the mundane; my father is a civil engineer by training and often comments on the same things. He worked on the Metro Rapid Transit system here in Taipei and has an amusing story or two about misunderstandings between the German construction firm for which he worked and Taiwanese subcons.
As for Wade-Giles and Pinyin, the former was designed so that English speaking Westerners could approximate sounds made in Chinese. It doesn’t use diacritical marks for the four tones in Mandarin Chinese. Pinyin does use such marks, but goes a step further, assigning specific letter combinations to specific sounds.
Therefore, the letter combinations ‘xi’ and ’shi’ signify completely different sounds, as do ‘zh’ and ‘ch’, and ‘q’ for that matter. The problem is that although Wade-Giles is severely flawed, it was conceived with Western non-specialist use in mind. Pinyin was conceived as a romanised system to train Chinese children how to speak Chinese and has been used as such in Mainland China since shortly after the end of the civil war. Pinyin is more consistent but if you’ve never taken a Chinese language class, it can be incredibly perplexing. The pronunciations of the words ‘qing’, ‘xiao’ and ‘zhong’ make perfect sense to me but are challenging for my dad, for example.
As for keyboards, there are several ways to approach it. In Taiwan, they use a phonetic system they call ‘bopomofo’ after the four initial sounds of that system. Their keyboards are thus marked with the thirty or so marks. ‘bopomofo’ marks resemble fragments of Chinese characters.
Cangjie, another system, is based on radicals of Chinese characters. Once learned, this is an incredibly fast method of typing in Chinese but I have met very few who learn how to use it properly.
Finally, you can just use Pinyin, or to give it the full title, Hanyu Pinyin. This uses the letters on the keyboard. So, for example, I will type in ‘wo shi’ for ‘I am’; each word brings up a list of possible characters (Chinese is littered with homonyms, particularly if you do not take tone into account, as this typing system does not) and you pick one. A good text entry system offers reasonable options for words, so you don’t have to dally over every single character.
Therefore, the keyboards look like an American keyboard, though the letter keys and number keys have bopomofo symbols and radicals for use in cangjie on each key as well.
Sorry, this went on very long! I hope you don’t mind Sarah!
no apologies needed, silly pants! i feel like i just earned a masters degree from reading that comment! seriously, i had no idea about all of… that.
p.s. PLEASE BRING ME BACK A SMILE FACE BREAD PLUSHIE KTHXBAI.
Bopomofo is a sweet word.
I love the little bread plushies! And that guitar-playing mouse?!
My step-dad is a civil engineer, so every family trip turns into a pipe/bridge/tunnel/foundation exploration.
John! Put up some art in your room, or some photos of friends. Tout de suite. I will mail you something if you e-mail me your address. Too much beige is bad for the soul.
that bread thing is awesome.
i love your posts! it’s like traveling, but way easier.
Hi found your site looking for Linkou apartment or house for rent. I may be taking a job there at the end of the year. Do you know of any English Apartment Rental sites for Linkou?
Thanks
Have you visited the Linkou night market on Wednesday evenings? It’s in the downtown area. Take bus 920 from Changgang, heading towards Wenhua 2nd, and get off just past the pedestrian bridge. You’ll see the night market on the right before then.
It’s one of my favorites here in Taiwan.
For Curt, there’s some nice places around here in Linkou. There’s slowly getting to be more foreigners, but not cramped with them.
It’s possible to find a place with Craigslist. However, I swear those folks are ripoffs most of the time.
If you’ve got some Chinese speaking friends or are brave, check out http://rent.591.com.tw/. You’ll want 台北縣, Taipei county, for the first drop down and 林口鄉, Linkou township, for the second. Oftentimes, you don’t need to press the search button, the list will auto-update.
On the left column is a price range, you might as well stick in 0 or 1000元 to 10000元 if you’re poor or 20000元 if you want to have the newest modern Western apartment.
The lower-end places are still quite nice and basic living. Once you get here and easily make friends, you’ll not be staying home much except to shower and sleep.
Oh on food, it’s possible to live without a kitchen. My friends who do so report it costing about 10,000元 a month for dining out well for one or moderately for two. In comparison, my grocery budget for two is 8,000元 and we both eat very well.