For my trip to Taiwan, 2003 Jan31 to Feb17, I carried 512MB of flash memory for my Nikon E5700 digital camera, which allowed me to snap over 400 photos (full size JPEGs at NORMAL compression) between visits to a computer. 512MB is more memory than most computers presently have, and is roughly a full CD's worth. I came home with my photos on 2 CD's, having burned them on Richard's computer - they would have fit comfortably on one, had I finished the job of sorting & discarding. Developing being free does have a downside: I tend to snap so many pictures, that going through them becomes an enormous job.
Jan31 Friday:
The date changed to Feb01 while flying over the Pacific, and I never took out my camera until Tokyo.
Feb01 Saturday:
| In the Tokyo airport, enroute: |
A shot of the Northwest part of the air-terminal, showing a semi-circular
arrangement of 747's, one of which brought me to Tokyo.
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Some signs I can read most of.
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Others not at all - like this scary looking Departures screen.
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But if you wait 20 seconds, the Departures screen switches to English, ...
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| In Taiwan: |
Richard & Betty come to meet me at the Kao-hsiung (pronounced Gow-shung) airport, with their Mitsubishi
Varica van.
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We stop at the Night Market in Pin-tung (pronounced Pin-dung).
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And at some street venders.
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And arrive at Richard & Betty's apartment in Pin-tung. Note the large photo on the wall behind Richard
is of him on skis in the Yukon - I wonder what that photo does for one on a hot and muggy
summer day in Taiwan?
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Betty teaches English in their house, mostly to children, which may explain why the wall is labeled "wall",
the bookshelf is labeled "bookshelf", etc. It also explains those charts around the living-room showing
which mouth-parts are used to make each sound in spoken English.
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Some lilies in a vase.
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Notes on Chinese placenames:
The placenames in Taiwan are romanized according to the bastardized version of the Wade-Giles system, which uses P for both P and B,
K for both K and G, T for both T and D, so that:
BayZhing was spelled as Peking,
TieBay is spelled TaiPei,
GowShung is spelled Kaohsiung,
etc.
Wade-Giles was a reasonably sensible system, until it was corrupted by the discarding of the marks it used to distinguish K from K', etc.
Once those marks are lost, we're left with the seriously brain-damaged system, Bastardized Wade-Giles, that was used in China until recently,
and still is in Taiwan. China switched to the Pinyin system of romanization in 1958, although the western world only heard about it in 1982.
Incidentally, Wade-Giles uses hyphens to separate syllables, whereas the Bastardized Wade-Giles that's in common use has discarded those too.
You may wonder how Peking and Kaohsiung ended up with an ending-G? Well, despite despite having freed up almost half of the Roman alphabet,
they chose to use two letters ("ng") for a single phoneme, one of them being an otherwise unused letter.
A quirk that could be defended on the grounds of being English-like, but had that been a design-objective the system would be something altogether
different than it is. My western mind may never be able to comprehend the thinking that led to the Wade-Giles system, but I am charmed by the way
"sh" got reversed.