Brady Perkins's blog

View from the bottom

Sat, 06 Jun 2026 00:00:00 Z

The Mid-Lake Pavilion in Taichung Park.

Now that I’m back in Taiwan, not only do I have some more free time, I also think I have a lot more to say.

Yesterday and today, my friends and I have finished moving out of the apartment in Taichung that I had thought was a bad lease agreement a few weeks ago. In hindsight, I don’t think it was necessarily a scam, I think it was more the inexperience of the landlords that became more and more evident the longer we were living there.

Thursday of last week, our professor (my guarantor on the lease) came with us to meet with the landlords and sign an amendment to the lease that would let us move out with half of our security deposit returned (one month’s rent) before June 15th. That didn’t seem too bad, especially because it took the landlords no convincing at all.

We thought that would be the end of it, but conveniently enough, later the same day we come back to the apartment from work to see that the walls-leaking-water issue had somehow gotten a lot worse over the course of just that day — what had previously just been some puddles on the ground had become an entire hallway covered in standing water and the inside of my friend’s room almost the same. Unfortunately, I couldn’t really ask for the entire deposit back by that point because we had already signed the amendment to the lease.

That night, they made me mop it (which was not very pleasant) and told us not to use the running water in our double room (the main room of the two). I took a shower in the other room after all of the mopping, but the next day we went back to using the water. I mean, it’s Taichung, I need to take showers at least once a day.

And at the end of the same day, the landlords let us know that they’d found that the issue was a broken drainage pipe under our main room. It had a hole in it, and so the water was coming up from a massive standing puddle under our floor. Not only that, but as the issue continued to get worse, water would keep coming up from new places around the wall, and sometimes just from the floor itself, making it look like the floor was starting to sink.

There’s even a massive water stain directly above the front door of the apartment now. And this building is all-new, so this is an issue that they missed and… still haven’t fixed yet. Across our entire time here, they won’t get around to it. I guess it’s convenient that we moved out because of price when we did, but we had a pretty good livability case to make with all this water everywhere, too.

Regardless, we’re out. A reminder not to rent brand-new apartments, then, for reasons of high price (because new is supposed to be desirable) and rooms that have never been lived in before and so have not been tested for major livability concerns, like broken pipes below the floor. I’m not sure how an electrical fire hasn’t started in that building yet.

So now that we’re out of that apartment, we’re back in the university dorms. Since it’s me and two other friends, and all of the dorms are four-person, we almost fill the room, but in our room there’s a singular other bed to be occupied. Fortunately, we moved in yesterday to an empty room with no occupants in the fourth bed. And, since the open rooms were quads with a low bed (which are usually reserved for people who are too tall to fit safely in the high bunks, or people with disabilities who can’t climb the ladders, neither of which are qualifiers that I can make use of), and the low bed is empty, I set my mattress and sheets up on the low bed (I just don’t like sleeping up high). I had talked about wanting one before. Now I technically have one. Nice!

And, our new dorm actually has a door that leads out on to the balcony instead of me having to jump through the window (again, it’s because our room is an accessible room). Although these accessible rooms really are nicer than the regular ones, I don’t feel like having a door that leads me on to the laundry-hanging balcony is really too much of an ask and something that should be reserved for disabled people. Jumping out the window to get to your clothes is kind of dangerous anyway.

For $2250 NTD/month, we’re doing well, then. I will say I think the dorms at this university are much nicer than the dorms were my freshman year in Rochester.

It seems like this experience with my lease and the downtown Taichung apartment are a good example of an expensive lesson (although not as expensive as if this lesson had been learned back at home): read the lease, have more open communication with landlords, look for experienced landlords who aren’t so friendly you suspect they’re hiding something (whether it’s their lack of experience or a hole in the drainage pipe below your floor), and preferably, ask friends who know things about housing in the area you’re trying to move to.

During our new apartment search, I was steered clear of a relatively nice room because I asked a friend from the lab who had a friend who’d lived in it before. Although the landlord is nice enough on first interaction, apparently she’s kind of rude at random, changes the lease halfway through the term (big tech style), charges “variable rates” for electrical and hot water usage (doesn’t have a meter and charges on vibes), and whose grandchild apparently has no manners and loves to bother tenants (he even went through his grandmother’s phone history this morning and called me a few times. I answered, and all I heard was distant and broken Mandopop and no human voices).

Cianjhen and the skyline.

So even though it seems like the Wufeng and Dali housing markets leave a lot to be desired, I can couple my personal housing dreams in with the personal career dreams I was already thinking about.

Although I love Taichung, I do think it’s objectively the least-inviting city in Taiwan for foreigners and really doesn’t have a lot of nice tourist attractions, famous landmarks or people, good public transit, or a lot of other things that make me like a city. Which is why, writing this right now, it’s a Saturday and I’m sitting on the seventh floor of the Kaohsiung Public Library looking out a window toward part of a Ya-Wan construction site (this view will probably be better in about ten years, but Taichung’s Blue Line also won’t be done until then anyway, so pick your poison).

The people in Kaohsiung are nicer, the weather and environment are nicer, Taichung is a little bit too much to handle sometimes.

Because my professor is from here and has taken us down more than a few times before, my dad stayed here when he came last year, and this was where I was at midnight on January 1st of this year, I do have a little bit of a sentimental attachment to K-town, too. It definitely punches above its weight as far as second cities go (maybe second by name recognition only: it’s not as large or industrial as Taichung, it’s not as politically or financially influential as Taipei, it’s not as much of a tourist landmark as Tainan, but it is a beautiful city with a cool-looking empty skyscraper and Taiwan’s best tram system).

And, it’s the only city in the south of the island where the mountains run directly to the beach. I was in Keelung last weekend, and Kaohsiung now, and I do really like the atmosphere of mountains-meet-beach with all of the narrow streets (at least, in Gushan and Yancheng) and nice views.

My professor and his wife own properties in almost every city in Taiwan. I’ve always been impressed by that. I don’t know how, since I never wanted to be one of those billionaire rich types, but I kind of aspire to that someday, too. It seems nice to never need to pay for hotels (although Taiwan’s hotel scene is admittedly excellent these days).

Since, at least at the moment, I can definitely not afford to do that, I can dream of coming back to Taiwan for schooling or work or grad school in another city. And right now, Keelung and Kaohsiung are the two cities that I love the most. I can aspire to come back for a photovoltaics or optical engineering program at NTOU, NSYSU, even NTU if I get very lucky.

My new project is to design a device that can do optical coherence tomography imaging. Last time, I made an accessory for the lab’s OCT device, this time, I’ve been told to make an OCT device – this seems like a little bit of a jump, but apparently, it is possible to do this relatively cheaply and in a way that is understandable. The theory isn’t actually that bad, it’s just that the implementation is prohibitively expensive for most people.

I have found this article that seems to provide a way to do this without too much expense, though, so I got very lucky. Maybe I can make this work. My friend and I who are working on this together have access to an optical table in one of the biomedical sensing labs now, and to a budget potentially large enough to cover the costs of the components, so I’m hopeful.

I also think optics are pretty interesting. I have a barebones knowledge of how these kinds of things work, but seeing as my first internship in Rochester was with solar cells, my major is microelectronics, I’ve taken Modern Physics I (even if it was a couple of years ago), and my last project here was related, I feel like I have just barely enough background not to lose hope. And, if I’m successful, it could do some very nice things for my resume and my graduate school goals. So I’m appreciative.

A Kaohsiung LRT station.

Finally, my last recent goal has been getting an actual language certification by taking the TOCFL. This is both for my self confidence and for those all-important graduate school applications. This past week, the Chinese language center at our university held a mock-test session using the MoE’s 華測快篩 “Speedy Screening” feature – you can go online and get a quick, 25-minute assessment of your current level so that you know what to study.

This is for both listening and reading, and although the classroom was a little bit noisy (even during the listening section) because it wasn’t quite moderated like an actual test, I got scores that I’m happy with. I got a 508 (I’m not sure out of what) on the listening, which apparently translates to CEFR B1 level, and a 525 on the reading, which translates to the same CEFR level. B1 is good; my goal was to get a B2 with study. If I can get a B1 without study, I don’t feel too bad, but some preparation will be necessary.

I signed up for the TOCFL test session at the end of this month (on the last Sunday of June, in the early afternoon). I’m looking forward to it, but definitely haven’t really prepared that much yet. I’m just going to need to get some good sleep and maybe have a coffee or two and a lot of water (I do think that dehydration doesn’t get enough credit for the number of points it can take off of an exam score).

If I get CEFR B2 on that, I’ll be over the moon. We’ll see.

Waves rolling in.

So, overall, other than embarrassing myself a little bit over the course of the beginning of this, from (for people that have read posts from a few months ago) getting our visas in the wrong city, to renting an expensive apartment with a water-leakage problem, I’ve been having a good time. And I feel pretty comfortable here.

Hopefully you can bear all of this talking about myself! Thank you for the free therapy, once again!

Signing out from back in the Central City after a very nice afternoon around 打狗.

As it happens

Thu, 12 Mar 2026 00:00:00 Z

A bridge into the abyss (Brooklyn).

I’ve gotten a little bit lost on the blogging lately.

I’d like to write more, but I’ve definitely been working more this semester than in past ones. I’ve also had more free time with others, which is nice. Regardless, I have less time to write on the Internet, which is sad. I enjoy it, but a lot of the time I’m too tired or too brain-fogged to get something good out.

This week is our spring break week, so I’ve found time mid-day on a Thursday to sit down at a coffee shop downtown and settle this a little bit. The campus-city connection buses aren’t running this week, though, so I had to walk off-campus to a bus stop and then walk from the transit center to the neighborhood with the coffee shop. The friend I usually do this with is also away, but at least that means I have some alone time to blog again.

I visited him (the friend I usually walk around Rochester with) near where he lives over the weekend. I actually got a lot of good pictures (in Manhattan, where living’s pretty convenient). I did lots of train videography, but can’t fit the videos on my blog. Images of scenery will have to do.

The Block House in Central Park.

Manhattan from the other side of the Brooklyn Bridge.

Whenever I visit somewhere else, I get a lot of ideas about my future. I do know that I’m more of a city-lifestyle person than not, so I wanted to tour some inspirational college campuses while I was there. I saw both a dream school (SIT, in Hoboken) and a less-inspirational backup (City College, which I don’t know much about and probably won’t actually apply to, but I was close to the campus so I might as well have seen it) although City College could easily be a stand-in for the number of other public universities in the New York area (there seem to be a number of options).

I did hear from my friend’s sister, who’d gone to Hunter College, that Hunter College has rats in the library and City College has raccoons. Maybe we can all learn to coexist (or stay out of the library after 10 PM). Funny or not, Hunter College seems like a decent contender for somewhere to consider in the future. While I say SIT is a dream school, walking around the campus did give me a lot of “stuck-up private school” atmosphere, and I’m a fan of public colleges by principle. Besides, my friend’s sister who went to Hunter College seems pretty successful, so the education is probably not bad.

Any way it goes, I plan on casting a broad net with those graduate-school applications I’m already excited to start filling out. I’m in a pretty different place in life than when I did my undergraduate applications, so it will be a different experience. I could even throw in some applications to other degree programs, ones that might interest me more viscerally than electrical engineering does (but ones that might be related at least a little bit).

I could also turn in some applications at places like NCCU, NSYSU, aspirational universities on an island much warmer than New York, and for tuitions so low it would be much less of a concern. But I won’t hold out too much hope.

I do have two years remaining in my undergrad, but I have other things going on now, too. I’m going to go soon to apply for the visa I need to return to the lab in Taichung that I was working in last fall. I’m also planning on bringing two other people that I know from Rochester, although none of us have our visas or housing yet.

So far, I’ve been tasked with most of the administrative work to do with the process, because I’m the contact and the whole exchange plan was my idea. I’ll be impressed if everything goes smoothly from here on out. This is experience that I think builds my resume well. Helpful for graduate school applications.

Over the past three days, it’s been summer temperatures outside, a lot warmer that it has been for most of the past semester. After walking around with no jacket on in New York and Boston, I’m back to watching snow outside through the window.

The temperature was high and the sun was strong (in Hoboken).

It’s putting me back in the mid-semester mood a little bit. At least it’s nice that the warm weather perfectly coincided with the days I chose to do nothing at the beginning of spring break week. I got to travel in warm weather without going too far. Whenever I see snow, I know that it means it’s time to get out Microsoft Word and finish some lab reports.

At least, that’s what I wanted to do today, but I’m a little tired still from an adjusted travel sleep schedule and I might want an extra day to recover. I’ll be okay with myself if I don’t do that today. I’ll see.

Speaking of summer in March, it seems like most of my family are considering moving south. It came as a little bit of a surprise to me earlier this year, but my dad was the first to start planning, and said that my grandparents and aunt are also thinking about it. I guess that’ll make returning home a little bit nicer.

They’re also moving to a town with a good bicycle path network, and my dad’s even considering buying an e-bike. This is what I think I can call a “Greta Thunberg moment” (at least, the part where my dad plans on using an electric bike for his everyday transportation).

It also makes me feel a little bit nicer that he’s planning on cleaning out the house and selling or giving away a lot of our things so that we can move out with a fresh start. It seems like a pretty good try at spring cleaning. The only downside is that the train ride from Rochester to Orlando is 31.5 hours long. But, hey, I’m sure there are stops and some nice views. The ride back from Boston yesterday was 10.5 hours long, so I’m getting more used to it.

This goose is still up north (also in Hoboken).

Considering all the change over the past few months, whether it’s been internships, friends made, lifestyle changes, or my dad moving south, I feel like a lot of the change I could feel coming sort of happened all at once. At least the future’s getting a little bit clearer so that I can handle it (something that I’d argue most people these days can’t say, especially about politics).

Now that my dad is talking about electric bicycles, maybe I’ll try to get one sometime, too. Especially a foldable one that I can take on the bus. The city buses are much more frequent (coming every half hour) than the campus connection buses (coming once an hour), so it’d be much more convenient to have a foldable electric bicycle that I can take onto the city buses to go downtown than it has been to rely on campus connection shuttles. Especially for times during break weeks, when the campus connections don’t run, and for the future if I move to an off-campus apartment. I guess I have the rest of break to think about it (but probably not act, because all of my money is still held in New Taiwan Dollars).

We’ll see where I end up in a few more months, maybe. For now, I think I need to get back to work.

I still appreciate the read!

中文版的未來

Wed, 29 Oct 2025 00:00:00 Z

我和西子灣的海邊。

我以前寫的中文版博客文章沒有那麼深度，我的中文能力不太高。有點難，但我決定了減我以前寫的中文文章。

我知道現在我的中文能力還沒那麼好，但我知道我的能力有什麼範圍。

現在，我覺得這樣最好的好處就是練習用注音鍵盤打字。其實，今天一個同事對我有點驚喜，因為看到我用注音寫中文字。

他可能以前不知道我什麼中文會說，他也是台南人，我就對最近的中文學有點滿足。

我一些天一前去了高雄，老師請研究生跟實習生看他的家鄉城市。我當然拍一些照片，可以給你看：

美麗島車站。

85大樓！很有空間......

最新的高好特色：輕軌。

在去旗津島。

佛光山。

高雄一定有未來的感覺！高雄怎麼把很大的大道，好熱的天氣，真大的大樓成爲可愛城市？

在國三往南車裡面我的頭裡當然只有宇宙人寫的那首歌「要去高雄」，非常朗朗上口了。

然後，我應該開始掛我的衣服，洗衣機洗完了。

我要更少寫博客文章：我覺得少寫就給每個文章更多質量。

謝謝！

Central City

Mon, 06 Oct 2025 00:00:00 Z

My new desktop wallpaper.

I’ve gotten most of the urban exploration out of my system over the past weekend and am now beginning to really appreciate the city that I was destined to discover.

The image comes from here.

Maybe that’s a somewhat dramatic way to put it, but as a new resident of the largest city in Taiwan that isn’t Taipei and, specifically, the district that is apparently home to the National Taiwan Symphony Orchestra (?) (!), I feel good.

I’ve toured a decent bit around with the help of the buses and a little bit of Internet guidance. I probably didn’t go the exact “tourist route”, but I did try to make sure that I could understand the city from the perspective of someone who is staying here (at least, who is here for three months or so).

I’ve also taken a lot of pictures, which I might as well use to describe what I think about the whole area. I could try to do one of those Internet urbanist-style city reviews, which I think I may have done enough photography to do!

Not until I was at a dinner on Friday did I get out into the city (since I came in the middle of the week and started working right away). The place that we went was in Dali, which is fairly dense but right on the edge of Taichung’s urban sprawl network.

A bike in the... bus lane! 差不多吧。

The morning after, I went to the Wufeng First Market, which is in Wufeng but out on Zhongzheng Road and fairly far from where I am. It’s also not bad, and I forgot how dense Taiwan gets given the smallest possible number of people living close by. The market was packed, and this really isn’t something that you see outside of a big city in the US. Impressive!

Zhongzheng Road in Wufeng.

Later on that day, I was too obsessed not to try to make my way downtown for the sole purpose of visiting the Green Line MRT. Some people say that public transit can’t be a tourist attraction, but clearly, those people have never seen an elevated traincar with cutesy eyes painted on it and a vending machine full of merchandise just out front.

The views from the TMRT are actually very nice because the whole system is elevated, but you can’t see it in this photo because it was nighttime when I shot it (being that the train is packed during the day and I wanted to avoid being insensitive with my phone camera out in the crowd).

Pastel colors and good views!

But, then, most of Taichung is still built on the bones of the relatively old structure that you see in most major Taiwanese cities — dense neighborhoods connected by enormously wide roads built during the early KMT years and cars and scooters whipping down at breakneck-and-end-your-life speed.

The sprawliest parts of the city are further north and west, where there’s more going on but less density to build on top of. It’s mostly Beitun, Xitun around Taichung Central Park (ironically placed way out at the edge of the city), and some parts of Wuri away from the HSR station.

Other than around Taichung Central Park, the worst part about Taichung’s car-centricity is that it tends to hit all at once: as soon as you get far enough from the urban core, even if the density stays, the sidewalks and tree cover will abruptly end and you’ll be plunged into a giant, wide road putting your life on the line walking directly next to traffic that doesn’t seem to mind getting right up to your shoulder and having nowhere to hide from the blazing sun and suffocating humidity.

Taichung’s weather is a little more stable than in the north, and seemingly more manageable than in the south, but it’s definitely best when you get some help. Being stuck in a pavement island in Taichung, even in October (still firmly “summer” in Taiwan), is pretty uncomfortable.

Kind of like Florida. Hot, and big wide roads.

Image above credit: WC-QHS, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

At the very least, Taichung’s bus system is pretty world-class and unlike anything I’ve ever seen or used. Chains of buses line the streets throughout the whole city, and a lot of the routes are fully electrified, too. Routes like 台中客運 Taichung Bus 200 and 304 make the TMRT’s lack of extensivity and 2034 completion timeline for the Blue Line easier to handle, provided you’re okay with fitting a metro’s worth of people onto a single-car-sized bus at rush hour (around 10 PM if going south. Just a warning).

It’s difficult to tell if the city knows what it’s doing and is building out urbanism in the same way that most American cities are slowly starting to do, or if they’re still stuck in the past’s version of the future. A strange thing to note is that the Green Line MRT, which runs along Wenxin Road, goes mostly through parts of the city that aren’t really pleasant otherwise. Either they want to ride over the heat and pavement of Beitun in an air-conditioned train as a victory lap or they’re trying to make up the difference by throwing these communities a bone. The center of the line is at a wealthy area and Taichung City Hall, but a lot of the outskirts don’t have much going on around the stops.

There are certainly a lot of places on the entirely other end of the spectrum, though. Xitun is really two-sided because of that contrast between Central Park and its other main attraction up in the northwest corner of the city, the Feng Chia Night Market.

Feng Chia at night has just about everything to see: music, stalls everywhere for food, drinks, clothing, anything else you’d find at a market, and it’s really huge and really dense.

What they mean when they say 「熱鬧」!

I stayed there for a long time, and the air conditioners over the crowds actually helped me get a little bit more comfortable after walking across a large chunk of Taichung Central Park (really a combination of the air conditioners, the cooling down as it got darker, and the massive apple milk that I bought from one of the vendors).

It was a lot to take in, but everything I was taking in was good. Night markets are like that. An easier-to-access one is the Yizhong Street night market, which has a good sweet potato ball vendor but otherwise isn’t as big or impressive. It is definitely functional, though, and certainly a good time.

Toward the east end of Yizhong Street is also a little neighborhood with a “Box Design Hotel” and some brick streets with colorfully-lit hot-air balloon sculptures. That would definitely be on my list of considerations if I were looking for a hotel to stay in in the future. For now, though, I have my dorm.

In the morning, there are also a good number of more centrally-located places to relax. I wanted to get some work done and found this really neat little cafe with good online reviews called the Fleet Street Cafe. If you’re in Taichung and you want to go to a Western-style cafe that doesn’t charge Western-style prices and where you can sit in a little miniature bookstore looking over the narrow streets of 中區, this is your place. I stayed for over two hours and actually got things done! It’s a good slow-grind environment.

Like being in an Internet chill-cafe-study video.

And into the evening, there’s another relaxing place not far away with a strange English name: “Audit Village”. It is, though, just a direct translation of the name “審計新村 ShěnJì XīnCún”/ShenJi New Village (I guess maybe it just sounds nicer in Mandarin).

When I was in Taipei I talked about how much I thought the Songshan Cultural and Creative Park / Songyan was cool, and this was kind of like that, except it was an old dormitory complex used by employees of the provincial auditing office. It actually converts into a little market-park really well, too, like those kinds of things seem to do, except without the intense tobacco smell that might either repel or draw you in in the case of the Taipei version.

Chill study music, too, but live!

Speaking of Taipei, if you miss the feeling of money and skyscrapers blowing out of the ground and ringing the bells of the cash registers and consumerism all around you while watching sports cars with “XXX 8888” license plates drag-race down the business district, Taichung’s 7th Redevelopment Zone has you covered (Qi Qi! 七期). Never before have I seen a city government do too good a job at reinvigorating the local economy.

Qi Qi!

Image above credit: Victor Liu, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

It’s this kind of place that serves to remind you that you do have it all right here. Or, at least, that those ones up in the towers have it all right here.

But, actually, not far from Qiqi is the 春水堂 Chun Shui Tang restaurant, apparently the originator of bubble tea (and, somehow, Taichung remains out of the imaginations of pop culture worldwide? Where are my anime-inspired Wenxin Road metro dark-mode Wallpaper Engine backgrounds?).

Most of the city, though, within the sprawly edges and in between the highlights, is fairly normal and honestly pretty nice. Especially around Central District just above and below the train station and a little into Nantun, West District and southern Xitun. A few more pictures for good measure:

A little greenway near Luguang Village.

Luguang Village isn’t quite the most notable neighborhood on Taichung’s map, but notably interesting to me is the fact that their FamilyMart still has the old doorbell tune (the one that plays in Japan and elsewhere but not anymore in most parts of Taiwan). Actually, it plays both (they just Band-Aided the new tone on over the old one, which I found way too amusing when I first walked in).

Nantun has some nice neighborhoods with the greenery and narrow streets that you see in some nicer parts of Taipei, but without exactly the same level of density:

Lots of plants and scooters!

And in some places, even when there are cars, at least they’re old, small, and brightly-colored (I actually saw a decent amount of this, and not one oversized pickup truck outside of the Toyota dealership near the Wenxin Yinghua MRT station!).

Green and orange for contrast!

For the busier parts of the city, Taichung Park (the park that is actually located in the center of town) and the canal along Zhongming South Road make for some decent urban environments.

Taichung Park.

Zhongming South Road isn’t around anything that I really needed to visit, but I did find myself walking around West District and, for the lack of sidewalks and tree cover in that area, especially, it was a good thing to see.

Zhongming South Road.

So, after all, I feel like I’ve explored Taichung enough to feel comfortable that I’ve seen it, and secure knowing that I have places to go on the weekends (whether it be to get work done or to buy sweet potato balls). And I can feel pretty proud to live what I choose to believe is both the world’s next great city and the home of the future Taiwanese president (當然是盧市長吧！). It’s not even a hot take, I’m pretty sure it’s just all political analysts’ prediction.

I’m writing this in my dorm with some roommates who I’m gradually getting to know. I’m living in the “international student housing”, which they keep separate (I guess maybe that’s worth doing).

I’ve been here almost a week. I’m grateful and I’m going to try to make the most out of the rest of this year.

I appreciate the read again.

來台中吧！

“bonus bopomoment”:

che ku!

And an addendum from the future: South District is nice too. The sidewalks not only exist, but they’re wide and there are trees everywhere. It feels like what I imagine one of those old New York City expensive neighborhoods feels like.

And there’s a big hardware store by Taichung Rd., the 大台中五金百貨, which is the only reason I ever go down there. There are closer hardware stores to my university, I just like having an excuse to walk through South District.

多謝大家！

A slow month

Thu, 04 Sep 2025 00:00:00 Z

Toronto's skyline from Ward's Island.

After a month off, I think I need to come back here and talk things out on my blog again. I ended up back in Toronto lately and took a nice skyline photo, though.

I’m back at home now, and I’m sitting in the new Starbucks that just opened last year within scootering distance of my house. I’m lucky enough to live near the downtown center with the highest walk score of anywhere in my entire state (96! Rivals New York City, but definitely not as big).

I would’ve gone to one of the other infinitely better coffee shops around here, but I’ve wanted to sit down at the Starbucks and do the blogging here like I do in Rochester, and besides, all of those other coffee shops close at 3 PM anyway (as I write this sentence, it’s 2:54 PM. Not really a chance to get in there for any significant time).

The past month or so has been a little bit much. I got torn away from Rochester at the beginning of August, just as I was starting to have fun and get to know the area with the help of friends who have more of a life than I do and have the courtesy to show me how to exist a little bit more actively than I have in the past.

Since leaving my internship in Rochester, I’ve gone back there twice: one to help a friend move and then once to help me and my roommates move in to my new apartment on-campus.

While I was staying in my Airbnb for the few days before I left, I couldn’t help but notice what a neat little neighborhood it was in and how charming the house was (I was on the third floor, in the attic, and the stairs creaked but in a sort of endearing way, something that other guests had commented on in the guestbook left on the desk in the room).

Rochester has some nice historic scenes. The house I was staying in was built a little over a hundred years ago, and aside from the possibility of asbestos insulation, that kind of three-story home in a small city downtown is, personally, my ideal living environment. Especially for how well-decorated the Airbnb studio loft was.

And besides that, when I came back for the weekend about two weeks later to help the other friend move, that friend had done the math out about the potential money-savings of living off-campus: a 1-bed, 1-bath apartment in downtown Rochester seems to be about ~$1,000-1,200 per month on average. Split it with a roommate (even if they’re sleeping on the futon in the living room) and that’s only $500-$600 a month: a lot better than the cheapest student housing, which averages out to $625/month for all the time you’re allowed to live there as a student (so the full year minus the three summer months).

Besides, those downtown apartments (or the ones in neighborhoods near downtown) are all pretty walkable, and Rochester has a slew of interesting places that are well-established and thoroughly charming (South Wedge, 19th Ward, North Winton Village, Pearl-Meigs-Monroe, and the east end are all pretty dense).

So I’m a big fan of Rochester now. Me and one of my new roommates walked around downtown a while ago taking pictures of buildings and scenes:

The world-famous abandoned subway of legend.

Bus & bike: I can't tell if this is better or worse than bikes with the cars.

A vintage postcard-esque view of Rochester's Powers Building.

Rochester's complete skyline.

Every Rochester urbanist’s favorite topic of conversation is, of course, the subway. There’s even a whole dedicated website, rochestersubway.com, complete with a subway map replicating what the system might look like today if it had been let to continue development instead of being decommissioned in the mid-1950s (one of which, of course, I ordered).

The Rochester community wiki, too, rocwiki.org, is fairly out-of-date on a lot of the pages but serves as a great source of patriotism for the citizens of Smugtown nonetheless.

After doing more exploration, both in-person and on the Internet, I’m much more in love with the city than I had ever been when the only parts of the region that I’d seen had been RIT and Henrietta. The thought entered my mind to try to renew my driver’s license in Rochester after it expires next year, so that I could register to vote in the city and become a little bit more involved in local politics and that sort of thing (being an active citizen, the should-be and would-be favorite pastime of every American).

Even if I don’t, I’m still beginning to browse Zillow across ZIP codes 14604, 14607, and 14609 pretty religiously and thinking about my future helps me feel better after a past month that hasn’t been great.

Besides, a New York driver’s license is portable to anywhere in New York City, and if I ever become too ambitious in the future, that might be a nice bit of leeway to provide myself. As a Google Street View hobbyist, images of upscale Park Slope neighborhoods are promising.

Until then, though, I still have my October-December Taichung City internship to work toward. That’s an exciting travel destination, for sure, but now that I’m starting to make friends in Rochester and that I have roommates who I really get along with, I’m a little sad to be leaving it all behind to venture 8,000 miles away so soon. I guess I’ll have to tell myself I’ve learned how to make friends. I’ll have to prove it to myself by seeing how active I get to be with my coworkers around the great second-largest city in Taiwan and the homeland of the KMT’s next presidential candidate, Lu Shiow-yen (I’d say I called it, but actually, I read the prediction in a Taipei Times column).

Not that any of that matters, because if registering to vote in Rochester was a stretch goal, it’d take an entire lifestyle shift to meet the goal of registering to vote in Taiwan.

It would seem like my sphere of influence is growing every day. It now stretches from Portland, Maine to Toronto, down to Boston, and with exclaves in the Sea-Tac airport and across northern and central Taiwan. I can at least say that I’m going places physically, even if my life feels like it’s at a little bit of a standstill.

But if there’s one thing I’ve learned over the course of the summer, it’s that ambitions are a little bit meaningless, influence is pretty useless, and all the money and resources in the world won’t do anything for you if you don’t have friends. And I can definitely say now that I have friends.

Picture below.

My brother and sister.

I’ve heard that the best way to live a long life, feel the most fulfilled, and even avoid cancer is to stay social, get out, be friendly and meet people. So no matter where I am over the course of the next few months and then the next few years, that’s what I’ll be trying to do.

Thanks for the read. I’ll be back at some point (maybe not soon, but soon enough).

And, of course, I’ll see you then.

Time sails

Sat, 14 Jun 2025 00:00:00 Z

This is a charmingly grainy boat photo.

Like a boat. These ones are from a public domain image I found on Wikimedia Commons, which has that old-time postcard feel. I’m a fan.

As in, when you’re first leaving port, everything happens so fast, when you’re in the middle of the ocean, everything is so monotonous that you can’t really tell time at all anymore, and when you get close to the destination everything slows to a crawl.

That’s a good quality analogy for the day.

There are only six days left until I get my first paycheck, and that’s really the only thing I’m waiting for by now. After that, I’ll have money to go do interesting things and visit places. I might even be able to afford a train ticket somewhere neat. Or a plane ticket — but planes just aren’t that cool.

Since photography is the best way to feel like a tourist in your own city, the other day I went around Rochester trying to find some neat environments and take photos that accurately represented how nice they were. I was more successful than I thought I’d be, and I’ve already posted some of these photos on Wikimedia but I’ve made a few touch-up edits since then (using the built-in photo editor on my iPhone, which is still where I take all my photos).

First, I discovered the nicest place to visit that I’ve seen in Rochester so far — probably its most famous landmark anyway (or one of them) — the area around “High Falls”.

The waterfall itself looks like this:

High Falls with a train passing by.

But, even nicer, there’s a really nice pedestrian bridge over the river in front of the waterfall (which is where I took the photo). Complete with Rochester’s public scooter rentals, there’s a bike & scooter lane in the middle painted green for good vibes.

Rochester is going to achieve Copenhagen soon.

And on the other end of the bridge, there’s a small historic district called the “Genesee Riverway” with some office buildings, restaurants, and some public spaces. As is apparently a good indicator of a quality city, there were even some children playing around by a small park on the side of the road (not visible).

I'm an Internet urbanist now.

So, overall, it doesn’t seem like I have to go that far to find neat places to walk around. I just need my exercise!

I also walked around the East End a little bit and updated my since-deleted collection of photos from the first time I discovered downtown. It still looks nice, and its bike lanes are even green now, too:

I like court buildings for one reason or another.

The nicest downtown neighborhood in Rochester is definitely still around Gibbs St., which is where Eastman and all the downtown performing arts are. There are also two coffee shops, and Java’s is still on my list of places to go sometime (I’ve been holding out because I think it’d be better with a friend).

I should've brought my clarinet.

And, finally, since it was around sunset time I was able to get my best-yet photo of the “I <3 ROC” sign in the city center, now with the lighting just right. This has a few touch-ups as compared to the Wikimedia version that I uploaded, and I might update that one soon.

Truly a city of nonzero note.

With all these photos as of late, I’ve had to move my blog to GitHub to be able to manage the data sizes and be able to post on a Starbucks internet connection reliably!

I’m back at the Mt. Hope Starbucks — as always, since the Five-Star Bank Starbucks (easily punnable but I’ll withhold) — still hasn’t been finished yet. There’s a market going on just outside, which is pretty neat. I’m not sure there’s anything there worth buying, but I’m all for public events in neat neighborhoods.

All of this talk about cities and environments is just myself trying to make myself feel better about being otherwise bored and feeling a little held back. If I could find an internship in a neat place, I’d be happy, and if I could get rid of my car, travel more, that’d be cool. I mean, everyone feels that way, especially at age 20, I’m sure.

There’s an airport so close to my apartment that I see (and often hear) planes come up and touch down every day. If the tickets aren’t too bad and I can get enough free time, I could use some of my summer money to at least go to Boston or somewhere more interesting than here.

I want to live in an interesting place first, and then not backtrack on my 中文學 second. I’ve been listening to exclusively Mandopop for quite a long while now, and occasionally I get a song with simple enough lyrics that I can comprehend the general feel of it without having to use a translator — I often have to use the karaoke feature on Apple Music, though, to see the lyrics in writing, because without the tones it’s kind of hard to tell what singers are trying to say (if you’re like me and don’t have whatever linguistic intuition would come with being a native speaker, I assume).

I don’t know if it says something about my personality, but all the Mandopop that I’ve liked the most have been breakup songs. I’ve never even been in a relationship.

Other than discovering myself through 25-year-old pop songs, I started using Anki, too (and I haven’t done my deck yet today, so I have that to look forward to). Nothing I can come up with here seems to be quite as high-quality as shopping at the Dongmen Market, but determination is the most important thing not to lose.

For now, though, I’m at my research internship learning how to blow up nine-stage oscillators. I really understand how competitive overclocking became a sport, now — especially since I can go to work to “experiment with old wafers”.

So, from now until next Friday, it’s amateur attempts at process improvements, a blazing fast (or maybe lightning fast) 10 MHz oscillator, and some presentation skill development. Then I can decide what to do with my newfound monetary freedom. At least I have a nice job now.

See you all then!

Goals for coming months

Thu, 29 May 2025 00:00:00 Z

哎呀。

I’m still exceptionally sad after having returned from vacation a little sooner than I wanted to.

At least I have more media to remind me of it all — a new episode of the Taiwanology podcast came out this week (a good listen and only once a month as of late) and I still haven’t finished Wu Li-pei’s memoir.

I have the next few months to fill with whatever it is that I can find to do.

I’m a big proponent for traveling as number one mental stimulation — there’s no better way to learn — and the phrase “being a tourist in your own city” keeps ringing through my head, so this summer, since I have a reasonably-paying job and some additional time now, I figured I could start journeying outward and trying to see things.

Plus, that’ll make excellent blog content, and that’s where my priorities lie. Truly, I’ll always do it for the views/reads.

So, I think in the next few months, I’m going to want to see whatever it is that’s within a day-trip distance from where I live in Rochester, NY. I think the most obvious thing to do is to go to Toronto at some point — I mean, that must be an interesting city and it’s only about a three-hour drive from here — so you’ll probably see that at some point.

I also got addicted to riding trains during my eight days abroad (between the 捷運 and the 高鐵) and I think it only remains for me to see how the trodden-down American and Canadian rail systems compare to the ones that are now my benchmark.

It’s clean, it’s fast, the ads are kind of adorable, and the Metro Taipei company licensed Shiba Says to make all of their public service announcements, which is definitely adorable. I mean, don’t you just want to ride that?

快速！

Anyway, in Toronto, I heard there was a 海底撈 on Yonge St., and I need to get some friends to go to there with me so we can get hot pot. Or, even better:

早上吃得飽，上午吃得好，晚上吃得少，身體就能好。

I’m incredibly food-motivated. I’m now going to go insane if I don’t find a solid method for obtaining scallion pancakes and soup dumplings in North America. Even better if I can bring my scallion pancakes and soup dumplings on to a train.

So, if I want to itemize my goals, I can write:

Make friends
Go places
Eat food
When I go places, do it on a train (because trains are cool).

And then maybe

Travel in my mind with the power of reading (using physical books once I have money so I can stop buying region-locked epubs with my Kindle).

I want to be one of those cool kids with a full bookshelf.

Recently, as soon as I got back from Taiwan, I met up with a professor I had started contacting while I was still there (because the professor who was with us in Taiwan gave me her contact). She had also traveled to Taiwan last year and is apparently famous enough to have a Wikipedia page, so I was honored to get some conversational time with her in her office while we shared our love of Kuai Kuai, convenience stores, and people whose nice stereotypes are mostly actually true (Taiwan: the Canada of the East).

And, also, she had a contact with a professor at 國立清華大學 National Tsing Hua University who was looking for a lab assistant from the United States.

Anyway, not only did she have a bag of 乖乖 sitting behind her desk, but she also had stacks and piles of books, with a full bookshelf overhead to boot. Overall, I was impressed. And, we wave to each other walking by in the hallway now. Truly, this is the power of networking.

I’m getting better at keeping track of my connections and potential future career threads, and I’m starting to find the ability to pull more of them over time. I’m still looking for fall employment, but at least I have some better career skills now (although that doesn’t stop today’s job market from being absolutely abysmal).

It's more than just the food that I miss, I promise.

If you haven’t guessed it by now, I still have more than enough pictures from Taiwan to fill any post and guide any discussion. While we were company-shadowing last Wednesday, we went to a public coworking space on Xinyi Rd., and this neat little wood bear was in there. This is the kind of thing that makes me wish I could intern in Taipei — that and that when we toured the Songyan Cultural and Creative Park later that day, they showed a neat compilation of the morning routine of an intern at Songyan.

Sometimes, I just wish I hadn’t chosen engineering as a career path so that I could move to Taipei and intern at an artistic park. I mean, that’s just cool. Songyan was probably one of my favorite places to visit in Taipei, especially because of its lack of touristiness (none of the staff, except for our tour guide, spoke English, but the tour guide was pretty cool and had that funny accent of an old Taiwanese guy who definitely speaks fluent Japanese).

My LinkedIn banner is the unused south tobacco-plant room at Songyan, which still reeks of 菸草 and was more than an aesthetic. Something that surprisingly seems to really belong at an artistic park (unlike all of the anime cutout people that were around in the visiting-artist section of the park, not to mention the entire Windbreaker merchandise store in the back corner of the main building).

Adaptive reuse. You know, secondhand smoke.

That room was neat, but this decorated window just nearby was even more so:

Taiwanese industry pre-semiconductor is pretty inspiring.

I really hope not too many fellow 外國人 figure out that this place exists, because neat historical and creative landmarks like this are what I travel for.

I know that these cultural, historical, and artistic parks are something that Taiwan is somewhat well-known for, because I know that there’s another one in Chiayi — I heard of it just before visiting — and I even saw the building during the taxi ride back to the 高鐵 station.

I didn’t go, though, and I’ve heard Chiayi’s is pretty underwhelming — I know there must be more in other major cities, though, like Taichung and Kaohsiung, both of which I plan to visit beyond by couple of brief stops in the 台中高鐵站 on our ways between Taipei and Chiayi last week.

And, there have got to be some similar landmarks around here, too. I’d love to assemble a list of landmarks to visit in Toronto, so that once I get there (potentially during an upcoming long weekend) I can stay for a few days and have time to ride the train to and from there. The tickets (and traveling overall) are kind of pricey, though (not any more so than the gas it would take to drive, there, though) so I’m going to have to wait a few more paydays so that I can be prepared for that kind of thing. I’d definitely love to report back on my findings.

So, anyway, these are the thoughts that have been floating around in my lonely nugget for the past many jet-lagged days of severe allergies and slight confusion as to what my new job entails. I’m still not officially cleared to work yet, but I’ve been hanging out with the team during their work days and trying to help just to get a feel for what’s going on.

I’ll be back soon with a little bit more to say, I hope. Time is what you make it, right?

I’ll send a picture of my epic bookshelf once it’s full.

拜拜！

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.

Touching concrete

Sun, 30 Mar 2025 00:00:00 Z

The city at work.

I’m back at Starbucks, which is where I do all my blogging now. I’m like a diplomat, but instead of being surrounded by the law of my home country, I’m surrounded by 2012.

Although, I didn’t want to just take a picture out the Starbucks window again like I did last week — it looks the same now as it did then. It’s been springtime lately, for sure — raining and everything — but not too bad, just enough to make you grateful it isn’t snowing (which it did this past Wednesday out of spite).

I always like to remind myself not to complain too much, because I feel like I’ve got it pretty well — I have fun in school, learning things I enjoy, I know neat people, I have hobbies, you know. But, lately, I’ve just felt the need to express that it’s nearing the end of the semester and keeping up with the coursework is getting a little difficult (the thing that electrical engineering students the world over will tirelessly remind you of).

Now, a lot of this classwork is in courses that I took voluntarily — absolutely didn’t have to — because I thought the idea was cool, chief among these being the language special-topic business class I’ve been taking where we communicate with some Taiwanese classmates to present business suggestions and give presentations in Mandarin (they do it in English). I’m terrible at Mandarin, they’re great at English, we’re all learning together. I love it.

Every two or so weeks, though, we’ve got reports to write, and I do enjoy writing, but I didn’t realize that sometimes even coursework I enjoy can be stressful — this seems to just be the nature of the human mind (“oh, no! I’ve given up a minute amount of control, the world is ending!”).

That and a couple of very nice, appealing-looking job openings were made known to me over the course of the past week and I’m more than looking forward to hearing back as to how my applications are going in those — one of them was my first successful connection with someone on LinkedIn for a real purpose — I got someone to verbally confirm to me that a job opening was real and send my resume manually to the hiring manager! That made me feel somewhat more productive than I have in the past.

You know, if you haven’t connected with me on LinkedIn and you know who I am and what my face looks like, feel free to plug in — I need a network, for sure, because I need employers to know I’m legit (or something along those lines). I had a friend tell me in my 4-connections-on-LinkedIn days that I wasn’t distinguishable from a bot, which is something I’ve heard more times than is optimal…

So, if all goes well, I’ll have a career at some point. Seems like a necessary development to be putting so much time and effort into — I just thought there were more jobs out there. The world is hard.

Career aside, hobbies are also going well. I got a few fun & interesting parts on pieces in orchestra this concert cycle, so I’ll get to have my short sound-effect solo-length-of-time of fame the day after my birthday when the next concert is this coming April. I was listening back to our recordings from the last concert, too, and one of them sounded real good — the one with my other co-clarinetist making the whole of our venerable two-man operation. While we’re as quiet as you’d expect two people with tiny sound sticks to be in front of a full-sized orchestra, his solo was sounding real good & the post-performance fist-bump got caught clearly on camera. We’re going places.

Although, I’m running into some music now with A clarinet parts (the bane of the existence of anybody who likes nice things) — transposing is hard & sounds pretty bad because my poor Bb clarinet was just not built to play these scales, so I went scavenging on eBay for the potentially-usable remains of whatever 90-year-old instrument I could find, and I was somewhat successful — I didn’t get the listing, but I had found a good one at one point (it was a little expensive and didn’t have much time left on it, but it proves that I guess I might be able to get one for a decent price in the future if I’m diligent enough). Maybe I’ll just rent one, although it’s unclear whether even that’s possible, since most people don’t seem to care about the half-step disparity between “clarinet” and “slightly larger clarinet”. The single model they stocked at the Music & Arts near where I live was out of inventory (A Buffet E11, so pretty nice, but expensive & they didn’t have it in there anyway).

I might have to run to the Music & Arts near here where I go to school & see what they’ve got — I certainly can’t afford to buy a brand-new Buffet E11, but I could try to rent one for the month, which might be the way to go. I just got my tax refund, so if that’s enough to cover it, maybe I’ll be set.

Meanwhile, my attempts at artistic expression are extending a little further outward, because I’ve been traveling a little more lately being that the weather is venturing above the freezing point — the thumbnail photo is one that I hope to shoot after I’m done writing this and doing some more of my assignments due tomorrow. I accidentally stumbled upon a nice-looking part of town the other day when I took a wrong turn coming home from Target. Maybe I could plug in a few spots near there into Apple Maps and see if I can’t get a nice view to capture on my phone camera — it was foggy yesterday, which made the city look a little bit more epic, but springtime rainy-city photos are neat, too.

It’s 35 degrees, raining, and I’m in a city that I’ve lived in for a year and a half but never really seen. What a time to be alive!

I’ve got one more month to bear before I get to do a little bit of traveling to an even more epic city, of which you’ll definitely see some (probably even more rainy) photos.

Thanks to all those cool people who’ve followed me on Neocities and/or left a comment in the guestbook. 我聽說有的人喜歡我用中文的句子。我剛剛開始用「ㄅㄆㄇㄈ」鍵盤打字，所以正好需要練習。我一定應該繼續。謝謝評論！

Hope to be back with more neat photos, a neater duality of clarinets, and well-written 中文句子。

下個星期回來！

Thanks again.

…

After writing the post, I decided I was serious about trying to find photogenic spots downtown. The particular downtown is Rochester, NY, where I’ve lived for a little while and never really seen, so hopefully you’ll appreciate this little downtown walking-tour summary of what I saw after I was done at Starbucks.

A row of scooters — truly the future of mobility.

I had to walk to my car on the way out of Starbucks, and couldn’t help but notice the public scooters. I was making a presentation for that business class lately about scooters being introduced to American cities, so that we have something to use on the streets that’s a little more environmentally-conscious than a car. I know scooters — and increasingly electric scooters — have already taken over Taiwanese streets, so for an assignment where we had to pitch an expansion plan for a Taiwanese startup into the US, I suggested Gogoro and said that they should start by introducing their battery-share plan and a special store in New York City. I hadn’t even realized then that the city where I already live was already sprouting a public scooter-share system of its own. Congratulations to the Rochester city government for being a few steps ahead of an optimistic youth and most other American cities!

A big clock, in case you lose track of time on the job.

I had to drive to a parking garage downtown, since the part of the city I was in before was a little detached from the rest. Rochester has a big urban highway system called the “Inner Loop” which seems to be in the progress of being dismantled, although I still had to get on it to get into the actual city (although I think I now know a route I could take without doing that, since I left using normal roads). I’m not sure what it is being built around this clock, but this was the first thing I saw after leaving the parking garage. This is a very nice-looking clock, and I’m sure the area around it will be even nicer some time in the future!

Downtown proper.

After a little bit more walking, I found a nice area in the center of town with this big light net and some open space. There were maybe too many cars, but there was still some neat scenery to be enjoyed. There were some restaurants and an art gallery here. Pretty upscale, seems nice.

Some open space with a big

This sign in the middle of town is pretty neat, especially since they show off the city logo in the middle of the big “O” — far better than the grainy image & some words that my original hometown calls its seal. This kind of reminds me of the big “TORONTO” sign in downtown Toronto, which doesn’t help Rochester’s somewhat strong “like Toronto, but worse” atmosphere — I mean, “worse” is in the eye of the beholder, and this is where I live now, so I choose to enjoy.

Old buildings, a fire staircase, and an old church.

This church was a pretty neat sight, but I couldn’t get a good view. It’s behind a few older apartment buildings, but that green oxidized-copper accent style looks pretty good. I can imagine people who live in these apartments get a nice view.

A Starbucks,

It seems like they’re building a downtown Starbucks for me to do more blogging at soon. You’ll know when this is done.

"...until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream", dr. martin luther king, jr.".

For a place covered in concrete and fencing, this little park has some nice graffiti and demonstrates a clear attempt at making the downtown area more lively, although the city was pretty empty when I was walking around because it was gray and drizzling.

Another row of scooters.

I can’t get over all these scooters. Some time soon, I’ll have to come back and figure out how to rent one of these out. They all have a QR code posted on them, so I think there may be an app or website that I’d have to use to pay. I’m not sure how charging is managed — they might just have city staff running around to docking stations and replacing batteries whenever it’s necessary. Not sure if each scooter has a reporting system for battery charge. If it is this way, they’re already winning against Gogoro — this is the future I’m rooting for.

A grass square in the middle of downtown.

Cities need greenspace, but I’m always appreciative of designers riding the lines between an urban environment and something natural. I love big, built-up urban regions covered in vines and plants, and this little patch of incredibly well-cared-for, bright-green lawn inside of the part of town called “Innovation Square” seemed like a neat shot.

A curvy walkway into a big college building.

Another thing that adds interest to cities in my eyes are walkways connecting buildings, which seem to be pretty common in cities where the weather’s never great. Rochester still gets pretty consistent, pretty rough snow and ice storms for a long chunk of the year, so there were plenty of these for me to spot across town. This one had a little curve to it — very retro-modern?

A stray scooter in an outdoor seating area.

This was another upscale part of town with some restaurants and outdoor seating. It was a nice place to be, for sure, and somebody left their loaner scooter just sitting here — I’d say that the number of stray scooters I was spotting while just passively walking around added a whole lot of character. More cities need city-wide scooter-share. During the summer, maybe I’ll end up at one of these restaurants at some point — today was mostly a sightseeing day, the city overall never got busy.

A Hilton Garden Inn and an empty alley road.

I’m not sure why this little alley stood out to me. It was surprisingly empty, but there was a pretty large operation going on at this Hilton Garden Inn — it had two of its own parking garages, although one was hotel guest-exclusive and the other was a public one intended for overflow customers, which was the one where I was parked. I spotted this on my way back to the car. I think the little bend at the end of the road is what gives this boring alley a little bit of personality.

A circular shape on top of a building, which is clearly a UFO.

In case you hadn’t figured it out already, Rochester was built using SimCity 2000 (and without “disasters” disabled) — we’re late-game enough for the UFO invasions to start. A good enough reason for me to leave while there’s still time — this picture was only about a two-minute walk from the car, anyway, pretty convenient. I was narrowly able to avoid abduction.

I’ll definitely be back here when the weather is a little nicer, although rainy cities are sometimes neat for exploration when it’s not too bad. The rain picked up once I started driving home, so I really did happen to leave just in time — I’ll have to track the progress of that Starbucks online if I can find any info, since that seems like a prime spot for relocation of my blogging activities.

I hope you appreciated my photographic tour, I’d never been here until today. This is a neat place, for sure.

More words will come your way next week!