On disgusting habits and spicy girls

If you walk around in Taiwan, you will notice, in certain places, dark red stains on the street.  No, this is not blood.  You may also notice that some men (no women, for some reason) have red-stained teeth, gums, and lips.  No, they are not vampires, and no, it is not blood.  It is, in fact, the same not-blood that is on the ground.  The red stain is betel nut juice, called "bing lang" in Chinese.  It's the local equivalent of chewing tobacco, except it tastes a little better.  Strangely enough, Taiwan has an extraordinarily high rate of oral cancer.  The betel nut itself is a small reddish-brown nut, with a very bitter taste.  It is definitely an acquired taste, and I have decided not to acquire it.  I have enough problems without adding oral cancer to the list.  It's very popular among taxi drivers and highway truckers here, for its mild stimulant effect.

The betel nuts are the seed of the betel palm tree, and are sold from roadside stands staffed exclusively by women.  In Taipei, the women seem to mostly be middle-aged, but out in the country they are almost always young women dressed in as little as possible.  (Apparently, this has something to do with the greater influence of feminists in city government than in the country.)  The stands are always stationed so that as much as possible of the girls' micro-mini-skirt-clad legs are visible to the passing drivers.  In Chinese, a girl that dresses like that is called a "la mei" (spicy girl). You don't have to sell betel nuts to be a spicy girl (plenty of girls in Taipei dress like that anyway), but being a spicy girl certainly helps sell betel nuts.

So, yes, feminism has a long way to go in Taiwan.  (And, of course, as a 25-year-old unmarried male, I am totally against the prominent display of hot legs in public.  Totally.  Absolutely.  100%.)

Ooo! Look at her!

I mean, umm…never mind.

The Beautiful Island

The Portugese called this place "Ilha Formosa", which means "Beautiful Island".  It's hard to see what that really means when you live in Taipei, since most of what I see is buildings, streets, and car exhaust (oh yeah, and Taiwanese people).   Luckily, yesterday I had another opportunity to leave Taipei.  I have a student who's about 50 years old, and he and his wife invited me on a drive around the countryside.  My friend Vivian, who is in town doing a med school rotation at National Taiwan University Hospital, came with us.

First, we drove northeast from Taipei, out to Keelung, which is famous for its local seafood specialties.  On the way, we drove along the coast.  An interesting thing about Taiwan is that most of it is mountainous, and in certain parts the mountains come right down to the ocean.  So while we're driving, we have the Pacific Ocean on the left, and these gorgeous, forest-covered mountains to the right.  Joe (my student) and Judy (his wife) treated us to lunch at a restaurant called Lobster King.  Only 2 of the dishes were actually lobster, but who's counting?  It was all excellently-made seafood.  I was stuffed, and there was still plenty of food left over.

We had left Joe's house at 9:30 that morning, so after lunch we started to drive back.  The key word here is "started".  It took us about 3 hours to get out there, so you'd think it'd take us about the same time to go back.  Unfortunately, since we took the mountain route back to Taipei, instead of the ocean route we took on the way out, and since apparently EVERYONE ELSE in Taiwan wanted to use the same road, it took us 5 hours to get back.  Most of which was spent sitting in the car napping.  But we had plenty of time to admire the scenery.  Always look for the silver lining, eh?