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We got the VIP tour at my wife's elementary school up the mountain from Chiai. She related that it was quite different, and a little sad; the numbers had gone way down and at least half of the classrooms were empty.
Nevertheless they proudly showed us the teacher's workroom, the classrooms that were in use, and the outside facilities. This was a display of works the kids had done with plaster, affixed to one of the outside hallway walls.
At the pool table my nephew tries for a shot...
We were on a walk to my wife's elementary school when the rain forced us to seek shelter in a community center, where they had a pool table and other things for kids to do. This sign was on the wall, and taken for art's sake; it was only after returning home that I discovered what it said...
Along with the theme of taking pictures of things through things...
There was a place in the middle where the highlights were blown out a bit, so cloned from nearby trees.
This is a building situated a few yards down from the house...
Might be a tad difficult to see in this size, but there is a little hut nestled among the trees. I like to tell people that this is where we will be retiring to live out our days.
I'm not much of a writer, but that's not so far from the truth of what I have drempt since childhood...to have such a place as a sanctuary in which to record my thoughts.
We took walks daily up and down the roads and trails, where scenes such as this are common...
Taiwan is so wet and rainy that a huge population of crabs can thrive in the terrain even at the higher altitudes. We were blessed in having rain every day while at my father-in-law's, and when it wasn't raining it remained overcast, protecting us from the brutal heat.
It still amazes me that my wife has to treat her skin daily due to the dryness of Houston, relative to her homeland. Trips to places such as West Texas must be brief.
This is the same guy close up. Kids will tie a line to its horn to keep him from getting away. I'm supposing also that it will fly in circles, acting as a substitute for a model airplane...
We saw this the first day we hit my father-in-law's neighborhood. Since generally the kids don't have anything to play with - no board games, no toys to speak of - they look to natural resources for entertainment. These critters are handy for such purposes...
These huge spiders were everywhere! This one happened to be strung across our path, but they can be seen even when high up between trees.
Fortunately they don't bite people. In all the years that my father-in-law did his doctoring, not a single patient came to him as a result of an encounter with one of these...
We circled around the island until finally reaching my father-in-law's place near Chiai, halfway up a mountainside where my wife grew up. This is really the proverbial tropical paradise, the jungles of Formosa.
My father-in-law, at 80+ years of age, is the picture of health, and you are looking at the reason. He was the village doctor (trained in both western and eastern medicine) and did house calls, traipsing up and down steep paths and roadways all of his adult life to get to his patients. We were on one of these trails when I spied this temple tucked in a nook off the beaten path.
He still wakes up and does 100 push ups before doing anything else. And there's the story told in family lore when, in 2001, he decided to forgo the bus to walk to my brother-in-law's house in Taipei from downtown. Five miles later he was spry and bouncy as ever, leaving us younger folks huffing and puffing two blocks behind...
The man will forever be my hero. Youngest of 12, the only boy in the bunch, he was routinely belittled by his sisters and other relations. But life does balance out: after growing up during the occupation he learned Japanese on his own and apprenticed under a western-trained doctor. Finding his niche in small-town Taiwan, he scraped a living in service to the poor and down-trodden in forgotten pockets of humanity away from civilization...hiking miles to make his calls. When patients came his way, he welcomed them into his living/waiting room, going upstairs to the compound pharmacy next to the family kitchen to blend medicines as needed (if a western remedy was not available). On occasion the man even did surgery on the premises, banishing his children to a neighbor's house during the procedure. Of course, all of his six children were delivered at home and now are doing well, with three here in Texas and three still on the island.
The greatest part of this story is a conversation that I had with my mother when I was seven years old. She was giving me a lesson about how there is someone for everyone...even me. Upon reflection I asked, "Is there really someone out there, right now, that I am going to marry?" She responded, "Yes, she could be anywhere...even on the other side of the world!" At the time Chenjean was four years old, on the brink of death from a lung disease. I would like to think that an angel carried our conversation to God, who decided to do something about it...
This girl's boyfriend was off to the right taking her picture...the vendor was asleep the entire time we were there.
This is the launching site, mere yards from where the previous posting was taken. Another ten feet or so and these folks would find a whole new use for those umbrellas...
This is the kind of photo that screams for the use of a filter, as the terrain beyond suffers loss in the bluish tint of haze. Not having the capability to use one on the 7000, I relied on the midtone contrast slider in the light levels dialogue box, which improved the background significantly without making it too "busy".
Love the earth tones in this one. Across the way from this tea house was a launching site for hang gliders, something resembling a putting green that went right over the edge of a cliff...
These flowers really blew me away. I thought, "What bizarre and strange flowers they do have in this exotic land." Then I came home and found them all over the place in Houston...
I initially wanted to post this as part of a collage in my cubicle, but it proved too phallic...
This is in Taidong - shutter speed was one second. No tripod, so kept at it until got lucky...
This postcard-style picture was taken up in the mountains next to a dry riverbed...
One of the more interesting aspects of our stay in Hualien was our accommodations. My brother-in-law graduated from the police/fire academy (in Taiwan they are one and the same) in the early '80's. His classmates now populate the ranks of law enforcement in many parts of Taiwan, and arrangements were made for us to spend a couple of nights in an old abandoned police station. In the room where we ate breakfast, these cuffs were a reminder of days gone by...
This is in Hualien, taken on a morning walk.
Hualien is known for its indigenous population...the equivalent of, say, an Apache reservation in the U.S. And - like the Indians here - they subsist almost solely on government aid and tourism for their survival. It was on this walk that, at seven in the morning, I saw several sitting on the sidewalk sucking on liquor bottles. Very sad sight.
But the setting is beautiful, high up in the mountains where photo opportunities abound. This firetruck had its overheads on, but didn't appear to be in much of a hurry. I learned later that police and fire vehicles routinely keep their overheads on so that they will be noticed, functioning as a deterrent wherever they happen to be.
We were on our way back to the car when I looked up and saw this man - reflexively the camera was raised, and here we are...
Naturally, this being the world-wide headquarters of Daoism, the smell of incense was everywhere.
Interesting also was the gamut of pilgrims that came from all parts of the Asian world. Some were in street clothes, some in the monk-like garb that Westerners associate with Buddhism, the close cousin of Daoism. There was one, trailed discreetly by family and sect members, that was going through a moving contortion exercise akin to the Pentacostals in the Protestant world...only he didn't stay in one place, but had a mission to make it from point A to point B within the compound. Seeing that he was on such a personal journey, I took photos from a discreet distance. Some would argue that I should have abstained altogether...
On the way up into the mountains we stopped at a major Daoist headquarters, a mecca of sorts that brought in pilgrims from all over the Far East. Tourism was minimal here, so there was lots of culture without the fluff of commercialism...as you can see from this and the next few postings.
After desaturating the reds a bit this one became acceptable. Was zoomed all the way in from the same location as the previous posting, pointed the other way...
This is one in which I freely used creative license to tidy up a bit.
First, the boat swan had a number of scratches and marks that had to be removed.
Next, the real swan was originally further in the distance and a bit smaller. In Elements 7 it was selected out, copied, enlarged, and pasted to look as if it were closer. The selection ran about 15 pixels beyond the perimeter of bird itself (plus the smudge of reflection), with the soft-edged brush so that the water would blend when pasted. Finally, the void in the original location was cloned in with surrounding water.
It was fortuitous that the swan was captured in the background, and even more fortuitous that the enhancement described was made easy with today's technology.
