Brady Perkins's blog

Beautiful island

Tue, 27 May 2025 00:00:00 Z

Happy.

I took a lot of photos over the past week and a lot of them have been making good wallpapers on my devices since then.

(Maybe not the thumbnail one, though. That one’s just cute).

In order to share the love with others a little bit, I wanted to post some of those pictures here like a wallpaper collection.

It really is a “beautiful island”. Some of these are repeats from past posts — this is just a compilation.

Downtown Chiayi.

This is downtown Chiayi, a totally underrated city and a decent crossroads between urban environment with landmarks and country town without too many other tourists (at least, not American ones).

Xinyi District.

Some parts of Taiwan really do look like America. This is a pretty colorful photo, though.

CKS Memorial Hall.

中正紀念堂！This is one of those works where you really need to separate the art from the meaning.

Jiufen.

Jiufen is a neat town with a cool old street, and it’s got some nice mountain views. Actually, it seems like most of 新北 New Taipei City looks like this.

Ketagelan Boulevard.

Usually, Taiwanese street names are pretty predictable. One that seems fairly common is 介壽 Jieshou, “long, sturdy life” and a play on Chiang Kai-shek’s name in Mandarin (蔣介石 Jiang Jie-shi). I think today’s 凱達格蘭 Kai-da-ge-lan Boulevard (named for local indigines) is Taipei’s former Jieshou Boulevard. The Japanese architecture at the Presidential office, though, is pretty striking.

Alishan railway.

The Alishan railway is pretty much the most famous tourist attraction around Chiayi, to my knowledge (other than the many turkey rice establishments).

A collage-art wall.

This was inside of an office building for a company we shadowed. Again, very colorful! Looks cool.

Taipei from the Maokong Gondola.

This is a view of lower Taipei from the 貓空 Maokong gondola in Wenshan (technically part of the MRT, apparently). On an Apple laptop, the sun rays line right up with the notch, which is pretty classy (I have a Macbook Air).

The big giant egg.

This is from a conference room in the same office building for the company we shadowed. This is in Xinyi District (the part of Taipei that looks like America in a lot of places). This looks almost like Manhattan. The building in the center is the Taipei Dome (known in Mandarin as the “大巨蛋”, “big giant egg”, which I love).

Yehliu.

This is the same nice shot that I got from 野柳 Yehliu Geopark. I posted it last weekend, but I wanted to put it up again because scenes like this are exactly how Taiwan got the name “Ilha Formosa/Beautiful Island/美麗島”. It really is.

All of these shots came from my iPhone SE 3, not a bad phone, but not one known for its incredible camera. It wasn’t me or the phone that made these look good — it was just the stunning number of epic landscapes. Seriously. It’s a beautiful place.

I hope you enjoy!

Flying free from Formosa

Sun, 25 May 2025 00:00:00 Z

讓我淚流！

After eight days of fantasy vacation-land, I’m back to reality, which is sad.

It was especially nice that we were travelling on a school program and had prepared by talking to group partners (locals) over Whatsapp/LINE/Instagram, because I couldn’t imagine seeing what Taipei has to offer without that kind of help.

It was also especially helpful for myself to have studied up so much before I went, although I think it was more the other way down the cause-and-effect chain: I started seeing neat content about Taiwan online and found an opportunity to go there in this class.

I had ended up finding some podcasts and books that prepared me pretty well for understanding the history, what to see, and what to know.

I listened to:

Laszlo Montgomery’s China History Podcast, History of Taiwan series
Every episode of Formosa Files
Every episode of Formosa Files 中文版
Every episode of Taiwanology (from 天下雜誌)

and I read

A Pail of Oysters by Vern Sneider
Formosa Betrayed by George Kerr
A Taste of Freedom by Peng Ming-min
Fireproof Moth by Milo Thornberry

and I started reading Two Countries: My Taiwanese-American Immigrant Story by Wu Li-pei.

Two blogs I found I liked were also “Pinyin News” (the author seems to be an interesting political figure?) and “Language Log” (not much to do with Taiwan, but there’s someone who writes on there sometimes about 台語 and that person seems cool).

I also found a decent current-events news source in 天下雜誌 Commonwealth Magazine, which has both English and Mandarin editions (although the content is different between the two). The English articles will usually have one turn into a Taiwanology podcast episode per month.

These are all really helpful resources for understanding what to expect before you make it to the 美麗島. But, it took me about a year to make it through all of that. I guess I came prepared. I’ll admit, though, I’m a slow reader.

Even with all that out of the way, I’m still absolutely in the honeymooning-love phase with my affection for this place.

Everything is beautiful, adorable, convenient, cool, and interesting. The mountains are everywhere and always covered in fog, there are delightfully stupid cartoon ads everywhere, there are at least two FamilyMarts per block in Taipei, prices are reasonable, and the food is all fantastic. Especially soymilk and scallion pancakes in the morning — right near our hotel was 天津蔥抓餅 Tianjin Onion Pancake on 永康街 Yongkang St. You can’t get soymilk there, but you can get it for $35 NT a bottle at any of the nearby Seven-Elevens.

And if you want a decent entire breakfast for super cheap, you can go to 永和豆漿 Yonghe Soy Milk near 善導寺 Shandao Temple, right near 阜杭豆漿 Fuhang Soy Milk (the trendy touristy one that’s admittedly really fantastic but always busy). 永和 Yonghe is right next door and pretty good, too. Not a tourist attraction, but better value than you’d ever get in the United States.

Peanut rice milk was new for me.

This was from 永和豆漿. I had never heard of “peanut rice milk”, but I love that this and the soymilk can come out hot if you order it that way. I think it tastes better than cold soymilk, but I just tend to not like cold things anyway.

The peanut rice milk in the photo was pretty great, but I think I still prefer soymilk.

On the other end of the day, there was a place (also on 永康街 Yongkang St, like the 天津蔥抓餅 Tianjin Onion Pancake booth), called 芋頭大王 Taro King, and the mango shaved ice goes pretty hard (as shown below).

Especially good at 11 PM with friends.

So, overall, Taipei is a great place for food.

Other than the capital, I couldn’t resist getting on the HSR, even though I didn’t have a particularly good reason — I convinced a few friends to go with me to 嘉義 Chiayi City, and there, we got some good 嘉義火雞肉飯 Chiayi turkey rice (which they’re apparently very serious about).

Where do they get the turkey?

I swear this restaurant was excellent, and if I remembered the name I’d recommend it. It has fourteen reviews (all five stars) on Google Maps at time of writing, and it’s right nearby Hinoki Village (someone there pointed us to it).

An hour-and-a-half HSR ride to Chiayi, of course, for that turkey rice was well worth it. And we saw Hinoki Village and the Chiayi Art Museum, but those were less important. I thought Chiayi was the greatest place I’d ever been when we stepped out the front door of the train station onto the bus terminal and some dude starts running at us and yelling in Mandarin asking us where we’re trying to go — no conversational strong-arming to try to evacuate the English as would usually be necessary in the 北市.

Food really aside, there were also beautiful landscapes about everywhere. These are mostly the north, but number two is 嘉義 Chiayi. I have other really good photos, but they have people in them (complete strangers who happened to be in line-of-sight of the camera), so maybe not on the Internet. But trust me, Chiayi can be a pretty photogenic city in the right parts.

The most iconic iconic landmark I've ever seen.

It doesn't know it's beautiful.

At the city center.

From above.

Full of interest, full of history, and definitely large.

Some of the activities that we got into while we were there included touring 政大’s campus, going to 新竹 Hsinchu City’s God Temple Market and going to 大山北月 Big Hill North Moon in the mountains of Hsinchu County, which was pretty beautiful. On the way back, we popped out the KTVs and the microphones and started blasting it down the Zhongshan Expressway, an experience that everyone deserves at least once in their lives.

We also saw some of the obligatory landmarks, like the 國立故宮博物院 National Palace Museum, 中正紀念堂 (say it like the MRT announcer) Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall, and I took a morning to ride out to 228 Peace Memorial Park, something I was surprised we didn’t do as a group.

I think having an environment where I could use Mandarin anywhere, instead of just during group meetings and classes, was also extremely helpful. I think I improved by about five miles over the course of the week, and that, in combination with all the KTVing (on the bus, at a KTV bar, at the lunch table, pretty much anywhere) removed about just as much of the insecurity wall around my mind. It was definitely necessary for my learning, I think.

And from a learner’s perspective, it was fun seeing Taiwan’s famous inconsistencies and anachronisms out in the wild. I kept maintaining a photo collection of every instance of 注音符號 Zhuyin Fuhao that I spotted out in the wild. Here are some highlights:

By the road.

In the bathroom.

At the park.

On the train.

At the museum.

These aren’t so much anachronisms, but I did also see some of that world-famous 阿扁拼音, with the obligatory amount of postal and Wade-Giles-inspired sequences of letters for names of larger cities that already have their names established (Tamsui? Keelung? Kaohsiung? … I mean, most people know how to pronounce them anyway, and if they don’t, the train announcer will correct them).

And, of course, there’s the bopomofo handbag that I bought at 平溪 Pingxi. At least one graphic designer has their priorities straight.

So, 終於要說：if you have a nice working knowledge of Mandarin, Taiwan is awesome. If you don’t, you have to stay in the touristy parts, and those people who speak English can be kind of stuck-up sometimes. Especially at 大稻埕 Dadaocheng. The temple is nice, but go elsewhere if you want food (the scenery is neat, though).

Also, be prepared for squatty-potties.

If you want a city that’s cool, go to Tokyo. If you want a city that’s different, go to Singapore. If you want to step foot into an adorable island society with fun people, excellent food, history, politics, sometimes-questionable traffic safety but an unquestionably beautiful landscape, go to Taiwan.

I know I plan to go back!

Until then, I have to do working things and live my life here in English-land where my Zhonghua bucks don’t buy even a third of a latte at the local Starbucks (or anything, for that matter).

886!

Formosa fever

Sat, 17 May 2025 00:00:00 Z

The mystical land of legend.

So, this is it. The first day of the rest of my life!

Just kidding. I have to leave in eight days. So sad.

I’ve had a pretty excellent time in the one day since the plane landed (actually, less than that — I didn’t get too much sleep last night and exchanged it for a nice first day full of doing things).

I haven’t had a haircut in a long time, and the humidity is too much for any poor weak American hair product I might’ve packed to be able to handle, so my hairstyle’s already changed. One step toward evolving into my final form of world traveler with zero insecurity.

This isn’t exactly a Taipei city review — that’s something I can do later if I get the opportunity and have the desire — and most of the travel I did today was in New Taipei City / Xinbei anyway, so I haven’t really seen all that life in the great capital has to offer.

The first thing that I did today was go to 阜杭豆漿 Fuhang Soy Milk, which I had never heard of but realized their status when I found that Seven-Eleven apparently sells and brands their flagship product. Seems like I was the only one who had never heard of it!

As was to be expected, they were running a very efficient business. The person sitting across from me was a vlogger, which was an interesting thing to see. She had a microphone out and a camera pointed at the food and was making a YouTube video right there in front of me.

Not that I’m any better, because I took a picture, too:

Seed bread and bean juice.

It was excellent, I’m not going to lie. It’s the only soy milk restaurant / Taiwanese breakfast joint that I’ve ever seen, so I didn’t have a benchmark in mind, but it was definitely better than any fast-food breakfast I’ve had in the US, and it was only $85 NT (a friend gave me the bit of the 油條 for free).

After that, I went back to the hotel room and made myself a cup of coffee using the complimentary kettle, which got really hot near the wall jack that had the loose connection and certainly didn’t fill me with confidence. It hasn’t started a fire yet, and it’s not too late to alert the hotel staff who’re at the front desk about three steps from my hotel room door…

沒事吧。

One of my professors and our tour group went together on a tour that the professor had scheduled, so in the morning we went to the 野柳地質公園 Yehliu Geography Park, which I had never heard of. I didn’t take the obligatory photo of the queen’s head rock formation because we got that as a group, but I got some nice landscapes:

A great wallpaper.

This was just to the left of the 女王頭. It didn’t have a tourist path right behind it, so I was able to get a legitimately nice-looking photo (the path in the background adds some interest, anyway). This looks like a macOS wallpaper! I expect some Taiwanese beauty in the Apple stock collection soon.

A really nice looking photo in today's weather.

I felt the desperate urge to take this photo after standing outside in the 90 percent humidity for over an hour. It’s a wonder nobody was trying to swim in there…

Really, I got used to it after a while, anyway — it isn’t as bad as somebody who likes to complain would have you believe.

We popped back on to the National Highway No. 1 afterward to get some views in at 九份 Jiufen, which was a nice turn to the other end of the oceanfront-wetness-to-mountain-breeze spectrum. It seems like I wasn’t the only one who felt that way:

Like the MRT mascot, but in real life.

We got lunch there, and there was this neat bird sitting to my right on a pole in front of a pretty excellent mountain view.

I don't know what kind of bird this is.

All of these landscapes are made even more beautiful by the humidity so intense that it’s visible — that’s just the Formosa fog. Apparently, everyone here lives inside a Playstation 1.

We shopped around at stores for a little bit, and then left to 平溪 Pingxi to do the same thing. The center shopping road has train tracks running through the middle, and after messing around with writing on a fire balloon for a while, taking some pictures with it, and then launching it, the train actually came — I hadn’t been expecting that, so it was funny when the person helping us with the fire balloon started wildly waving her hand away from the tracks right after we launched it.

Fortunately, we avoided the rain the whole time we were outside, and it picked up on the way back to Taipei. I think it’s up now, but when I first walked back in to my hotel room I was prepared with my raincoat and the shoulder-strap bag that I had bought at one of the stores covered in the characters of my favorite writing system. Clearly, the people here have excellent taste in both graphic design and phonetics.

I could be a model in that outfit.

My group partners for the project that brought me here in the first place told me raincoats weren’t stylish, but they’ll have to reconsider when they see me in this.

I might need to lay down and prepare for that job interview I still haven’t finished the recording for before we go to eat out tonight. Being that we’re staying on 信義路 Xinyi Rd, that’s at 鼎泰豐 Din Tai Fung (Ding Tai Feng).

It may also be a while before I really come back with a lot more content to share, because I anticipate being pretty busy — that’ll be good because I’ll spend a lot of time collecting neat info and not blogging, and I’ll come back in about a week with a big blog post to share. Now might really be the time to become an Internet city reviewer!

謝謝光臨！

I’m going to pop over to a 小七.

Contact at Sea-Tac

Thu, 15 May 2025 00:00:00 Z

I saw it, but someday I'll ride it.

It’s my second blog post for the day. I had to re-date this morning’s as being from yesterday to get Hugo to put them chronologically in the feed, so I apologize for the bad record-keeping.

I think I should feel jet-lagged, but the six hour flight from Boston barely felt like anything. The day still feels normal.

But it could be worse, and in fact, it soon will. In about three hours, our plane is going to start boarding & I’m going to be strapped to a chair on a fancy winged bus for fourteen hours, which I’m sure won’t be the greatest experience of my coming week.

I’m finally in Seattle, now, though, which means that I can’t say I’ve never been out west before — although aside from the view of the tram that I caught leaving by on some tracks parallel to the international departures terminal and a higher proportion of evergreens to other deciduous flora, it looks pretty much the same as the east.

I’m not sure what gate my flight is leaving from, since the flights to Taipei weren’t shown on the departures board & the ticket doesn’t have that information (just says to look at the departures board). I’ll be able to learn soon enough, because I think the board’s going to update & worst-case scenario, the international departures gate here isn’t very large and I could just scan it over with my feet and eyes. It seems right now like I’m at the right gate, but at the moment it’s got a flight leaving to Seoul (a really cool place that I’ve love to go, I hear, but I don’t know any Korean and I didn’t buy that ticket. Someday).

I got some neat pictures while I was in the sky flying across the US — these are over North Dakota, Washington, and some random part of Seattle — the last one isn’t particularly beautiful as much as it looks strikingly like SimCity 3000.

Boxes on the ground.

This one is the one that people talk about when they mention that 1-square-mile land plots rule that came around sometime about two centuries ago, but that us in New England never quite caught on to.

Big mountains.

I never realized what people were talking about when they discuss the vast expanse of the Rocky Mountains. If they’re epic enough to be as clearly visible from an airplane as they were for me, I guess they live up to the hype. And they’re beautiful to boot.

Does life imitate art?

This isn’t the proper part of Seattle, but seems like quintessential suburban America. Much better-looking from the top-down than from ground level, I think. I’d like to find the part of Seattle with all the good public transit and the Space Needle. Someday, I’ll come back.

I’ll have another post like this tomorrow when I land for the final time, but I’ll be busy on the airport (I’ve never been on an international flight before and have no clue what this entails), so I’ll wait until I get to my hotel room to write that up.

I’m as excited as ever. Just highly caffeinated and impatient as I stare at the gate looking to see if this is the right one. I’m probably going to make an exercise trip back to the departures board after I’m done here anyway.

The world is neat. This is a new experience for me.

Thanks for checking in again, multiple times a day. It keeps me occupied!

I’ll be writing more again soon.

Checkpoint one

Wed, 14 May 2025 00:00:00 Z

Jet setting from Beantown.

For leg number one of the long journey, I’m sitting in the wrong terminal at the airport in Boston waiting for a flight to come that doesn’t leave for another two hours.

I’m at the wrong gate because the gate I’m supposed to be at has a different flight boarding in about half an hour, but it seems to be packed, and there isn’t much space over there. The gate I’m at is a different flight (to Los Angeles), but it seemed a little emptier. I’m within easy viewing distance of the right place, though.

I’m not sure what I’m going to do for the next two hours, but that’s standard airport fare. I’ll just listen to podcasts now so that I can start reading on the first flight.

One exciting note from the past few days is that I managed an interview at another company I’d really like to intern at — ASML — but it’s an “asynchronous, virtual” interview and I have to record myself answering three questions and then write a response to six more. I’m going to spend some of the plane time getting my thoughts down — I’ve already done two practice questions from the video portion — and once I’m in the hotel, I’ll use the single room-time that I have (even if it isn’t much) to try to record the video portion.

Apart from planning for the near future — the upcoming very long two days/day and a half/day (it really depends how you think about it) — I have the upcoming one-week program, the flight back, and then a few months of being a research assistant. I’d like to squeeze as much knowledge and experience out of these nine or ten days as I can, because it’s what I’ll have to keep with myself all summer.

I only took a backpack through airport security. That’s all I have right now — it has my clothes, toiletries, phone, Kindle, and laptop, which is reasonable. It’s a large backpack. I might want to buy a suitcase at some point, but that’s a problem for later the way I see it — I didn’t have a problem getting into the gate with just the backpack, and it took about ten minutes from walking into the airport to getting through security, so I’m hoping to keep it that way.

I’m only blogging now because of all the extra time I built in to my schedule today — it was potentially a bad idea, although I felt good about myself when the usual I-93 exit to the airport was blocked by construction work that there wasn’t any kind of notification of online (it must be new, I guess?). Changing highways to I-90 and getting off there was fine, though. Someday, I’ll just be able to take a train or a bus from home to Boston (you can take a bus now, but I’m still waiting on the Boston-DC high-speed rail, so any train dreams in and around Boston seem feasible to add to the plan. I’d like to propose the extension that cuts through Portland, Maine and Concord, New Hampshire — everybody seems to forget about the cooler places!).

My writing feels a little less-than-coherent to myself at the moment. Just saying hello to my two-person readership, both of who I know are from Boston and probably asleep at the time of writing. Thanks for the inspiration, this is a shout-out.

And for my mom, who I think looks around here on occasion.

I’ll be back in about eight hours, equally bored and ready to judge the facilities at Sea-Tac, my first view of the timeless American West.

有趣吧。

再見！

Image credit 4300streetcar, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

For your reading list

Mon, 12 May 2025 00:00:00 Z

Hitting the books in Hit the Dog.

I know I haven’t posted in a while, but this week has been fairly boring. Last week, too. It’ll get better on Thursday, when I’ll be back in full force.

In the meantime, I’ve been watching more news and feeling more overwhelmed by the world. Feeling overwhelmed by modern society has been happening to people for ages, and it’s why we started studying history (to make sure that we don’t let it repeat itself too many times).

I see people make a lot of contrived analogies between America, with its new that guy at the helm, and however many other fascist societies of the recent past. Donald Trump is the new Hitler, the new Francisco Franco, Mussolini, anything in there.

But I think that there’s a clear analogy to be made here with a bunch of reading material available for the learning that people aren’t making — and it’s probably a more useful analogy, too.

If you’re reading this and you’ve never read Formosa Betrayed by George Kerr, you totally should. The book is $6 on Kindle and about $45 paperback, so it’s kind of expensive, but Donald Trump is the new Chiang Kai-shek, so if you want to know what the future could hold, it’s in there.

The more you pour through the pages, the more you’ll know what I mean.

I was talking to a friend the other day about Trump and his ability to dominate the news headlines and the TV (I mean, being TV famous is his “thing”) and when I asked how much of this he thought we had left, he said, “well, you know, he could always declare martial law and just sit in the Oval Office until he dies”, to which I let out a little too much of an enthusiastic, terribly depressed laugh.

The US legal system is several hundred years old, has seen more than enough of governments rising and falling worldwide, and somehow that’s still a provision that’s allowed. I’ll have to look more into that (?).

Anyway, if you’re a bored and sad anti-fascist, this is one of those good history books. And it’s written really well. If you want more where that came from, you can also read Peng Ming-min’s memoir, A Taste of Freedom, which takes place a few decades after Formosa Betrayed, but is written and formatted similarly to the other one (I would assume that might be because George Kerr was one of the editors).

I’d like to tune out the news and live my life — and I’m pretty sure I can do that if I put enough mental effort in — but before I go, I wanted to mention the quote that one of the people in Formosa Betrayed — I think his name was Mr. Chou (Zhou) — mentioned about overbearing political organizations.

There’s always an element of good. Chiang and Chiang Jr. were trained by the Russians, sure, but there were some other people in the KMT that had good intention, and through all the disorder and corruption, those people would occasionally come to power. The solution for fixing things isn’t to run — I say get in there and become active.

I mean, in the US, I still don’t think it’s nearly as bad as in mid 20th-century Taiwan, so maybe if you live here you can just let your local officials know how you feel or vote out the bad ones. It’ll start working after a while. Maybe even occasionally vote some lower, trustworthy-looking officials from the other party into office to let them prove themselves.

You might end up liking them and voting them for mayor or something even more important. You need to reward the good in the political system, rather than just hating on the bad (the bad will always be there).

Or, just turn off the news, brew a coffee, and read some books about interesting history. Then, when you’re done, throw them to your friends, too.

I’ll be back soon, and maybe even with some pictures to show for all this talk about the Ilha Formosa!

See you then.

Thumbnail image credit: Foxy1219, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons