thduggie’s blog

Although the Kungfu Panda paragraph in the post before last was facetious, it spawned a question that stuck with me: Why do we call the animal “panda,” when the Chinese have an easy-to-transliterate word which could have given us “bearcat” and which doesn’t sound at all like “panda?” (It sounds like “xióngmāo,” whatever that sounds like.) Merriam-Webster’s blames the French: “Etymology: French, perhaps from a language of the southeast Himalayas; Date: 1835.”

I hate this unreliable free wireless.  Now I lose posts *because* I try to save intermediate steps.  Boo Cathay Pacific. 

The loss allows me to restructure and stay on the language theme before switching to greener matters.  Which of the following characters would you peg as the character for “turtle?”
a) 龟
b) 亀
c) 龜

And now for something completely different.  I just finished reading the latest edition of Newsweek, which contained a large section discussing the Environmental Performance Index, an instrument devised to index national environmental performance much like the GDP indexes economic performance.  Switzerland finished first.  I immediately (and perhaps typically of a Swiss) worried that we hade been treated to kindly.  Aren’t we one of the foremost lovers of big cars?  Aren’t we also sprawling around urban centers and building up the landscape?  Aren’t we guilty of investing far too little in slow, manpowered transportation, with the result that fewer and fewer (aren’t you proud, Janet) children now bike to school?  Might not our ranking be due to our lack of fishing grounds to overfish, oil and coal to burn, and minerals to mine? 

The reason I had the time to read Newsweek lies in my being early at the Taoyuan Airport in Taiwan, getting on an earlier Cathay flight to Hong Kong on standby (a first for me, and fun to try out without being under pressure), and getting into the lounge here because my next flight is with Star Alliance (Cathay belongs to OneWorld).  My other options after a morning that consisted of receiving a gift of tea from our partners, of a demonstration that the customer said he loved and I thought was pretty terrible, and of a quick retrieval of my umbrella at the tailor’s would have been to loaf around Taipei for the unattractive time span of a few hours or sit at the Taoyuan Airport Starbucks for six hours… 

But back to the turtles: all three options are correct.  The first is simplified Chinese, the second Japanese, and the third traditional Chinese.  It’s interesting to see how simplification in this case means an increased distance from accurate pictorial representation. 

To all you artistically inclined blog readers I offer an art competition with as of yet unspecified prizes: Draw a picture with the title “Pastafarian.”  Send it to thduggie [at} yahoo {dot] com.  Win crazy stuff. 

Deadline: My next business trip. 

And no, I’m not the first to come up with that portmanteau, but until I just searched the internet I thought I was.  The internet is a depressing thing. 

I slept until 12:30, but got up feeling well enough to drink an orange juice.  Most of my day I frittered away aimlessly, and it wasn’t until around four o’clock that I left the hotel for the Jianguo Jade Market.  I’d seen some beautiful pieces at a store called “Rich Jade” located in the underground shopping center of the Sheraton hotel, right next to the fatal restaurant, but it had looked a little too rich for my blood and the attendant kept repeating “we specialize in jedi,” so I checked the internet for alternatives. 

The first thing I noticed was the heat.  The market is a large collection of stalls located underneath a freeway with nothing but fans and mist-sprayers to keep the atmosphere bearable.  Unfortunately, I forgot to bring my camera, but I think it would have gotten into my way.  I know nothing about jade, but I know whether I instinctively like or dislike a person, so that’s what guides my purchasing decisions.  I couldn’t find anything particularly wrong about the pieces I was shown at the first stand I stopped at, nor was I unimpressed by the vendor’s lightning-quick jewelry design drawing skills, but I took the opportunity to disappear when an Asian couple showed interest in a jade bracelet and distracted him.  I’m sure that the shopophobes among you will understand when I say I prefer shopping at a booth where the salesperson doesn’t speak English… 

I bought two mangoes on my way home and a dove bar with high cocoa content - the dove bar cost twice the price of the mangoes.  When I picked up my key at the reception, the receptionist took a peek at my purchase and handed me a sharp knife to peel the mangoes.  That’s excellent service - and the reason I shouldn’t ever operate in the service industry, because I hadn’t even thought of how I was going to peel the mangoes.  They tasted - oh, I’ll just advise any visitor to Taiwan to try the mangoes.  Juicy, messy, but unfortunately still fibrous.  The dove bar… I’d bought it because high cocoa chocolate has a constipative reputation, but after eating just a bite of it I had had enough.  Later on I would even move it away because I found the smell disgusting. 

At 8pm I made my way to the tailor’s, where I was to pick up my custom suit.  I realized on the way that (a) the mangoes were still inside me and (b) they weren’t enough, so I went to McDonald’s and had a fine meal of Chicken McNuggets and Coke.  I figured that if McDonald’s is bad for you, but failed to affect my gastrointestinal system, that would prove I had regained my health.  (So far, QED.)  I also learned some Chinese: Kungfu Panda is 功夫熊猫 - which literally translates to Artful Bearcat, or character-for-word achievement husband bear cat.  No wonder Eastern Mysticism has so many followers. 

I got my suit, and took a few pictures of the impressive display of name cards on his desk, including the only one I recognized (thanks to Dave Barry) - Tom Tancredo.  There was also the Governor of Tennessee and the Vice President of Nicaragua.  What are all these people doing in Taipei?  I’m here because of business - isn’t theirs to mind business at home? 

As I must too - so I will stop hunting for more links and give Janet a call instead. 

1. It’s just bad food for a big price, not the enterovirus that’s been plaguing Taiwan. 

2. The enteric and parasympathetic nervous system give you advance purge warning. 

3. A book to read. 

4. A bed to lie in. 

5. Rainy weather. 

6. No appointments except for the tailor this evening.  And tomorrow evening. 

7. English-language TV stations. 

8. Being able to keep this secret from the business partner that paid for the dinner. 

9. Feeling better again - even good enough for this short post. 

10. Having a flight home, and having it on Monday - not today.

It looked like Fengshen, the typhoon that tipped a ferry and killed people in the Philippines, was headed my way.  Now it doesn’t anymore.  At one point I prayed I wouldn’t get hit too badly by it - now I’m not sure I like the answer if it involves flooding mainland China instead.  I have a sneaking suspicion Taiwan could handle a typhoon better than China.  (Taiwanese forecast here.)

It seems like whenever I’m proud of making reasonable progress in writing a blog entry, Internet Explorer decides it ought to slow me down by screeching to a halt and painfully reminding me of why I ought to save my post every sentence.  (Saved.) 

Anyway, after Stefan and Masami’s wedding celebration and a shortcut to the Zurich airport I boarded my flight to Taiwan, with a changeover in Hong Kong (save).  I barely made it to my connecting flight to Taiwan (save).  On that flight, I only ate one of my dumplings in order not to break my intended 16-hour fast too egregiously, prompting my seat neighbour to ask if I didn’t like dumplings (save).  Thus began a conversation in which he told me about the PengHu archipelago floating by beneath our window, about the Kenting national park which apparently was threatened with removal from some list of national parks due to overcrowding, but which nevertheless is of extraordinary beauty, and about the eastern side of Taiwan and its steep cliffs (save). 

My heavy suitcase didn’t make the short transfer in Hong Kong, so not only did I not have to pay Cathay for excess baggage, but they had to bring my heavy suitcase to my hotel (save).  I also found myself confirmed in my decision not to use a Carnet this time, which I had decided mainly because Taiwan is not a signatory to the Carnet ATA (perhaps because China is) and I would have had to fill in about ten pages of repetitive information (save).  In this situation it would also have forced me to either wait around for my suitcase (and leave my business partner waiting) or write a valid power of attorney on the fly (save). 

I got to the hotel, checked in, told them to just keep the second suitcase until morning, and went to bed (save).  In the morning my business partner, his colleague, and his daughter picked me up, and we walked a couple hundred meters to a fusion restaurant so modern it came with slouching sullen-faced staff and dishes like seared scallop with orange vinaigrette or asparagus crème brûlée (one could barely taste it, but trust me, I know it contained asparagus) (save).  We combined lunch with business discussions and then departed to visit a customer of ours who wanted to discuss projects present and future and the Phoenix Mars Mission (save). 

For dinner my partner, his daughter and I went to a buffet restaurant in Danshui, a region north of Taipei known for its hot springs and its Fisherman’s wharf, where we went to walk off our excess food intake in the sweltering darkness (save).  After dark not much was going on except for the young couples taking pictures of themselves on the Valentine’s Bridge, so we soon headed back for Taipei, where I soon turned in (save). 

Today we left the hotel at 8:00 and drove to the train station, where we boarded the Taiwan High-Speed Rail to Zuoying, the stop nearest Kaohsiung, and took a taxi to a local university, where we met with a potential customer (save).  I’m not sure how much of a potential is there, as he expects to receive this year a budget of about a quarter of what he wants to purchase, but perhaps we can find a solution (save).  We took the train back to Taipei and the car down to Hsinchu to meet with another customer, whose guaranteed funding is less but who might have the ability to get a bigger chunk somehow - it seems like selling in Taiwan comes down to fiddling with budgets (save).  And a little country like this where there aren’t any decent budgets around manages to build - and privately finance - something as useful and cool as the Taiwan High-Speed Rail (save)?  Where’s the Swissmetro (save)?  And where’s a real bullet train in the DC-Boston corridor - is it really on the way (save)? 

Be that as it may, I finished the day doing laundry and writing this blog after another buffet dinner, this time in the hotel restaurant with a 6oz fillet mignon steak (save).  It’s teaching me that not only is the road to hell paved with good intentions, but also lined with all-you-can-eat buffets (save). 

I’m not tired yet, but my eyes want to be closed.  I did go to the pool and swam 50 laps of breaststroke - the fifty laps started out as 24, then 40, then became 50.  I knew it wasn’t a 25-meter pool, so after I was done (and pretty exhausted, although my eyes hurt more than my muscles) I walked the length of the pool in 16 steps.  I’d secretly hoped it was a 20-meter pool, which would have meant I’d swum a kilometer, but now my hopes were down to 800 meters.  Still, not bad. 

I walked back to my towels and suddenly realized I had not worn the bath cap they’d given me.  I’m so not used to it that even carrying it along in my hand hadn’t reminded me to wear it.  To make up for it, and to at least get it wet, I pulled it on my head and swam two slow backstroke laps, then headed to the jacuzzi.  I’d been alone for all my laps, but just as I finished, an Asian guy walked in, spent a few seconds in the jacuzzi, and then liberated it just in time for me. 

After the jacuzzi I dried off, wrung out my swimsuit, and got in the ofuro, the Japanese hot tub.  There were two other Asians in that room, and by their language I figured they were Chinese.  After a short hyperventilation-inducing dip in the cold tub I entered the sauna, where I sat along with two of the Chinese.  One left after the hourglass ran out, but the other turned it around and held up his hand with his thumb and pinky sticking out.  “Six minutes,” he said.  (He said that in English, obviously - I would not have understood it otherwise.)  I held up my hand the same way, and he gave a short, surprised laugh, then proceeded to show me how to count with one hand in Chinese:
one: index raised
two: index and middle finger raised
three: index, middle finger, and ringfinger raised
four: all fingers raised except the thumb
five: all fingers raised
six: thumb and pinky raised
seven: thumb touching index and middle finger, the others folded into the palm of the hand
eight: thumb and index raised
nine: fist with a hooked index raised
ten: fist
These can also be combined to form two-digit numbers, but apparently it’s only used for small numbers.  Nobody motions 99 that way. 

This same guy kept knocking the hourglass whenever he suspected it was stuck, not realizing that the knocking was what made it look stuck: knocking would even the sand out, which would then run out starting in the middle and creating a crater in the middle without hardly moving the outside edges.  This would make it look like the sand wasn’t moving, which led him to knock and generate an apparent jump in the sand drainage. 

There was a notice on the sauna door asking guests not to throw water on the heating system, because it was an electrical heating system.  I suppose somebody once shorted out the sauna, ideally also shorting out the lights in the sauna and the ofuro - I can only imagine the mayhem.  “Holy heater, Batman - I can’t see a thing. and it smells like seared meat and cracked skulls in here!” 

After I got back out I noticed that the hotel supplied a swing dryer for the swimsuits.  The instructions noted that the machine might move a little, and asked to therefore not put it near the wall.  I stuck my trunks in and flipped the lever, and the machine started dancing the mad fandango - I had to hold it down to stabilize it and get a chance at flipping the lever off again.  So I rearranged my trunks with Swiss precision, the waistband encircling the legs and the pockets facing inward, closed the lid and flipped the lever again, and this time it quickly achieved a balanced high-speed rotation and started to drip water out the bottom.  I’m pretty thankful I don’t have to pack wet trunks tomorrow. 

I confessed the bath cap transgression to those in charge, who only laughed.  I guess they don’t take hygiene quite as seriously as they say, or at least not when no Japanese bathers are around who might be bothered at the sight of an uncovered swimmer.  I also asked about the length of the pool, and was told it was 15 by 8 meters.  So I’d swum even less, only 750 meters, and not only that, but my steps are only 93 centimeters instead of a manly meter. 

I consoled myself with the thought that I couldn’t have swum a kilometer anyway, because who’s gonna stop two-thirds of the way across the pool…

I visited a company that makes equipment for defect detection today, equipment that can do a number of things we can’t, especially inspect large surfaces quickly.  It was interesting to see what they do and how they do it; they essentially mimic the eye’s neurological processes with an array of parallel processors and use a higher resolution to one-up the eye.  I showed them our equipment and very briefly demonstrated what it can do, which required lugging the suitcase through Tokyo trains and subways that are oriented toward commuters and not travelers.  Having the Suica on me helps, but the fact remains that there are several stations like Yoyogi where there are no escalators to the tracks and the ticket gate is not wide enough for me to get my suitcase through without standing it up.  And don’t get me started on how embarrassed I feel taking up the space of three people even in not very crowded trains. 

I did notice something funny when I mistakenly boarded the Namboku subway line at Meguro station.  For two stops it shares the track with the Mita line; I got off on the first one, realizing I’d made a mistake.  When I got on the Mita line, it was pretty crowded, but over half the train emptied out at the next stop in order to change onto the Namboku line.  What I don’t understand is why they get on when they have to wait for the same train they’d wait for at Meguro, except if they stayed in Meguro they might get a better seat because the car’s emptier due to everyone’s waiting in Shirokanetakanawa two stops down the line.  They must have some information I don’t. 

Done at about noon, I returned to my hotel, deposited my luggage, ate curry rice for lunch, went out to buy an envelope, came back to stuff a lot of documents into said envelope, and left again to mail it.  On the way back an American smiled at me: “How are ya?” 
“Fine, thanks, and you?” 
“Doing great!”
“See ya!” 
The vision passed, and I thought to myself that he mustn’t have been in Japan very long yet.  Most foreigners get used to avoiding other people’s eye contact like most Japanese do, or at least avoiding eye contact with foreigners who might be of the weird sort that expect instant camaraderie because they share your pointy nose. 

I took off and boarded the Narita Express for the airport.  Again I noticed the odd slowing down and strange bridge into nowhere that sits a few kilometers outside of Narita and wondered if they once had planned to build a shinkansen out to the airport.  At the airport I boarded the bus to the Holiday Inn Tobu Narita, where I undid all my calorie reducing efforts by going for the dinner buffet.  It was western food, centered around little strips of peppercorn steak that the chef cooked right in front of the customer, and offering a good mixture of different surf and turf options.  I did eat a bit of salad and some fruits, but they weren’t what was going to make the 4000-yen bill worth it. 

And here’s why one should never eat only to get one’s money’s worth: When I paid, I was told that because today was a weekday and there was therefore no crab in the buffet, the total would only come to 2700 yen. 

So either I rationalize my intake with all the heavy lifting or else I go for a few laps in the pool, which would also justify having brought along my swim trunks.  I think I better hurry: it’s only open for another hour. 

I didn’t plan to post, but I’m listening to my new Spitz CD and loath to stop, so I’ll blog while I’m hooked to the computer. 

Monday saw me waking several times in the early morning because my fear of oversleeping kept me from a restful sleep.  So after six regularly interrupted hours of sleep I got up at 4:40 and ready for a long trip to Osaka.  I visited an SME manufacturing support setup and two of the member companies there in what was more of a scouting trip than an actual sales visit, but it turned out well.  I was exhausted by the time I returned and battling a little cold which I believe a good dose of sleep should quickly cure, but sleep’s hard to come by right now.  So it was this exhaustion that drove me to turn in before Janet showed up on skype, and I’m glad for the nine hours of sleep I got, even though the cold’s not quite gone. 

Today’s workload was less intense, comprising two meetings in Tokyo to gather economic information on Japan.  I tried to keep my calorie intake down, inspired by my extra padding and by the Jonathan’s menu that shows the calories for every meal, but I think I had better wait until my cold is gone. 

I had a good talk with Janet despite some skype issues and should now be getting busy with packing, because tomorrow I check out.  It’ll be a day of heavy lifting, especially with one of the four suitcase wheels knocked out of whack to where it blocks when it’s leading and causes the suitcase to tip.  Add to that Japan’s June humidity and it’ll be a fun day - I’m on my last song, so I better get ready to turn in…

I meant to include this picture in the last post.  Instead, I now dignify it with its own, a dignity I doubt it deserves.  Who can guess what this ad is for?