spain

Driving through the flatland of northern Spain, we stealthily reached a medieval town that seemed to be in the middle of nowhere and checked into a palace converted hotel in the dusk, and woke up to a stunning, golden lighted farm scene right outside our window.  

From there we visited a modern Human Evolution Museum that hosts remains of the earliest hominids found in West Europe, and a sunny city with a grand 14th-century city gate and a World Heritage cathedral, that was also the headquarters of Generalissimo Franco's proto-government during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). 

Going north, deep in the Basque Country, we visited two coastal cities on the Biscay Bay. 

In Bilbao, we visited the Guggenheim Museum, which is probably more famous for its architectural design than its exhibits, and had a long lunch at a Michelin-starred restaurant right next to it. (The Basque Country is famous for its fine cuisine, there are a total of 33 Michelin stars, distributed across 23 restaurants in the Spanish Basque region alone).

In San Sebastian, we strolled through the posh modern shopping district to the rowdy old-town alleys and had tapas (called "pintxos" here) for dinner while watching people singing and dancing around on a happy Saturday evening.

For more photos and narratives:

https://www.facebook.com/cdwongx/posts/pfbid0E5AiLfjGDJ8StQUvrsnGUxtH6qvp3wFxvNVTexobNmqgWymoJNbEzpWVonHHtXKHl

gym, cafe, and tamsui

Having been staying in Taipei for well over three months, by default or by design, I have become a habitual visitor to a few places that weave the fabric of my life as an "expatriate" in a city I was born and grew up in decades ago.

There are commercial gyms and community sports centers pretty much everywhere in the city, but too crummy and crowded for my liking, so I decided to check on some "VIP Health Club" hosted by some five-star hotels offering their fitness facility to due paying members outside their hotel guests. There is one such hotel nearby where I live, about 10 minutes walk away, presumably perfect for regular visits. So I bought a one-day pass to check it out.

It has everything: workout floor, steam room, sauna, spa, and an outdoor swimming pool, nice and dandy. The show stopper, however, is the pool is on the 20+th floor of the hotel while the rest of the facility is on the basement floor. Imagine going half naked in between these places... Not for me.

Then I checked out this other hotel that we stayed during those pandemic quarantine times whose room and services we were quite happy with. It's got the same whole nine yards: spa, sauna, steam room, exercise equipment, and a two-lane outdoor swimming pool, at a smaller scale than the other one, but more ergonomically laid out and all on one same floor, with a nice service crew. I signed up with them right away.

I have since been going to the place averaging three or four days a week. My routine starts at the workout room, going through seven or eight different machines, morphing into the steam room for a sweaty detox, going to the outdoor pool for lap swimming, heading back in for hot spa, cold dip, hot spa, cold dip, then a long sit in the sauna room, before taking a shower and heading home, for a total of roughly two-hour run.

For its tiny footprint, one thing I was concerned about was it might be easily crowded out, especially for the two-lane-only swimming pool. To my pleasant surprise, that never happens. For all these times I've been using the facility, I have rarely met another swimmer at the pool, nor other users at the steam room or sauna cabin, and no more than two or three people at the same time exercising in the workout room or sitting in the spa. As I splay still in the cold water well, body heat reaching perfect equilibrium with the surrounding chill, all quiet and all alone, I feel more like being in a private meditative chamber than in a public sweathouse!

As for the commute, it's only two subway stations away from where I live. But I can—and prefer to—take the bus too, which comes almost every two minutes and allows open street views that the subway can't. Or on sunny days I'll take the city-run rental bicycle that gets me to the club about the same time as the subway or the bus—kudos to the excellent public transportation systems in Taipei!

There is literally one coffee shop at every street corner in Taipei. One day I strolled into one of these in my neighborhood and saw/heard a young musician playing viola at the corner of the store. I grabbed a table right next to him and started enjoying the music. They were a mixture of classic, folk, and pop scores, and all of a sudden I heard one that sounded mysteriously familiar, then I realized it was one of the songs that my chorus group in SoCal had been practicing for a while. So I chatted with him afterwards, and he said he—along with the City Orchestra—had actually worked with a chorus group from LA recently... He then played that song again just for me so I could record it...

He is actually one member of a string orchestra team the coffee house (a chain of three coffee houses plus one ice cream parlor) had recently organized. Consisting of about a dozen young male musicians, they take turn playing at each of these coffee houses, sometimes single, most of the time twosome or threesome in concerto, in the afternoon or in the evening, usually free (as long as you spend the minimum required consumption at the store), at times charging admission fees.

I took my wife to one of those evening paid performances and she loved it. It was a piano and cello concerto by two young men in their early 20's. The house was packed. We chatted with a middle aged woman who sat across our table, she said she'd been a fanatic follower of this particular cello player for quite some time. A younger couple sitting next to us said they were recent converts to such cafe concerts for its easy atmosphere and flexible hours that provide for an enjoyable evening at the end of a busy work day.

We have since been to all three of these coffee houses for their coffee/cake/meals with concerts, and got to know almost all the team members. They are in general recent graduates from musical schools, each with numerous performance and award records under their belt, and all very handsome (and cute)! Maybe that's why many of their fans are middle aged women and my wife always leaves generous tips to them at the end of their performances, with the excuse of "helping out these starving young musicians"!
 

Tamsui (淡水) is a seaside community a half hour away from Taipei City. It has been a popular go-to place for the townspeople, not only for its easy reach through the train, but also its unique mix of geographical beauty and legendary history.

It's where the river meets the sea, the old British consulate residence and the Spanish fort standing on the hill, overlooking the harbor where Dr. George Leslie Mackay, a Canadian Presbyterian missionary landed and established the first Presbyterian church in northern Taiwan some 150 years ago, and where local militia fought off an invading French naval fleet some 140 years ago.

I have visited the place quite a few times through the years: Strolling along the riverside boardwalks and the old-town district, crossing the harbor on boat and on bridge, visiting the old fort and the consulate residence and Dr. Mackay's dormitory turned modern day art gallery, besides bicycling all the way from Taipei to and around its coasts.

This time around, a friend who lives in the area took me on his sports car for a ride, to scenes I've never seen before: a couple of bucolic country roads hidden between major arteries, a fallowed rice paddy turned scenic pond, and some palace like structures that I wouldn't know are for cremation ashes storage had he not told me so.

We also went across town to have lunch at a beef noodle place whose chef-owner is an erstwhile general who used to run a big chain of beef noodle shops across the strait in mainland China until the pandemic hit and he decided to call it quits, retire and settle down here for good.

Another, contemporary legendary story going on in Tamsui, I suppose.

  

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a little trip

We drove north to the Bay Area to a high school friend of mine Michael's home the week before last, stayed there overnight, then went to visit another high school friend Joseph who was recuperating from a cancer surgery and a couple of chemo treatments since early this year. Joe was my best friend in high school who drew me to Christian faith in Taiwan. He was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer just last August. Shocking news to us all and I'd wanted to visit him but could not until now. He looked even thinner than his usual thin self and was still adjusting his diet trying to gain back weight but seemed very well taken care of by his wife and hired help and in good spirit. We had long, vigorous conversations (wearing masks, at their yard outdoors) for the whole morning, before finally bidding farewell and wishing him a smooth recovery and left. 

We then drove northeast to a little rural town in inland California for a wedding. It was for the son of my best friend from elementary school Sunny who passed away almost three years ago. It was a lodge in the woods with a little pond, volleyball, mini-golf fields, pine trees and lawn, etc., a modest but relaxing environment. We stayed there for two nights, attending the pre-wedding rehearsal dinner the first night, then taking a stroll in the woods, attending the wedding ceremony and the reception dinner party the second day. It was a very happy occasion. We knew the young couple for some time (they'd dated for over seven years), but met the bride's family and friends for the first time. All very nice, folksy people. I was also impressed by the maturity the son had become and how blessed this marriage looked to be, and happy for Sunny who must be looking down in heaven smiling.

We then drove back to Michael's home in the Bay Area again, and had dinner with him and his wife and another college/high school friend in the area, Ching-Cheng. Ching-Cheng was one of the early achievers to the monumental "Grand-Pa" status ("做人成公") among our class, whose cap-headed picture at his grand child's birthday party inspired me to create and make "Come Spring Again" hats (回春帽) for all our classmates a few years ago. His knowledge broad-span and witticism entertained us as usual, but nothing soothed my ears more this time than hearing him say that new studies had found high cholesterol levels do not cause harm to Asian males...

Michael took us to a grand dim-sum restaurant for early lunch before we left town the next day. I so admired this "side-kick" friend of mine since high school and his wife who had hardily and beautifully raised an autistic son and a wonderful daughter Carol whose wedding I just witnessed last year in New York City. Carol and Andrew, their new son-in-law, had planned and booked a joint vacation for them and Andrew's parents for the coming months in Canada...  The start of a rewarding second half of their life they well deserve, I could tell.

Happy Summer!

san francisco–monterey

My friend Brian is a cyclist, who, along with a couple fellow cycling enthusiasts, have been riding up and down Southern California for the past 10+ years, traversing between San Diego and Santa Barbara many times over. Having done that, they set their eyes on the California coastline and decided to extend their bicycle reach all the way to San Francisco, one tour at a time.

They were near reaching that goal after successfully completing two major tours in recent years: one between Santa Barbara and Cambria, the other between Cambria and Monterey.

All that was left was a ride between Monterey and San Francisco.

For such an effort to be successful, they need some logistic help: someone to drive with them (and their bicycles) to the starting point and drop them off, then continue to drive to the destination point to pick them up at the end of their ride, so they won't have to ride the same way back to the starting point which would be too exhausting and time consuming for these weekend warriors who need to report back to work the next day.

They had found their driving help, booked the hotel/motel rooms, done the training, etc., when at the last minute their designated driving help had a family emergency and could not make it. They were disappointed and about to cancel the trip when Brian called me and asked if I could be that driving help instead, and I said yes.

So on the Memorial Weekend last week, all four of us–Brian, his two cyclist friends, I–and three road bikes hopped on a Subaru SUV and drove all the way to a little town a couple miles north of San Francisco and started our two-day, 140-mile coastline tour to Monterey.

The plan was simple: While they rode their bikes on the bike paths, which mostly paralleled Pacific Coast Highway (State Route 1), I drove the car on PCH, might stop by anywhere anytime I wanted, as long as I met them at designated lunch stops (Burger Kings, for lack of In-N-Out Burgers which were our favorite in those areas) and hotel check-in and the final destination of their ride the second day.

So here were what a free roaming soul like myself encountered along a beautiful stretch of Golden State coastline on a sunny Memorial Weekend:

I saw:

cliffy beach

​sandy beach

​tide pools beach

​lost pier beach

​busy beach

​lighthouse

​bridge

​wind/kite surfing

I walked on:

wide berm trail

narrow rocky trail

​marshland trail

​railroad track

​At the city of Santa Cruz, where we stayed for the night, I visited the historical Santa Cruz Mission in the morning, a much humbler version of the world famous San Juan Capistrano Mission in my hometown, but a quieter (I was the single visitor there) and closer setting that allowed me to study the artifacts better.

 
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I also took a bench seat at the little fountain garden outside the Cathedral to have a read of a short story from the book I brought with me.

I met and picked up my three amigo cyclists at a McDonald's outside the Fisherman's Wharf in Monterey as planned and we headed home from there. Mission accomplished, we were all happy and chatty. Brian had been my long time friend, but Jason and Liming were no total strangers either. I had ridden with them a couple times before, and both were from Taiwan and of IT backgrounds. We exchanged our life stories and cracked jokes from time to time. What stood out most about them for me was their enthusiasm for the outdoors: Besides cycling, Jason was a seasoned angler, Liming a camper, and both were training (they purposely slept on the floors of the motel/hotel rooms we stayed) for a multi-day backpacking trip in deep Yosemite mountains they planned to take in the coming summer.

But I would be amiss if I did not mention the athleticism and positivity of my dear friend Brian, who–imagine that–was on a hospital bed due to a stroke he suffered just a little more than a year ago! Through grit and tenacity, regimented diet and exercises, he had regained full health and enjoyed the challenge and fun of this long ride just like Jason and Liming did! What a comeback story, what an awesome inspiration for us all!!

two and a half philosophies

It was one of those rare sunny days in Taipei, I took the subway to a suburban university that I'd been to a few times before for some philosophical topical discussion forum that I signed up a couple weeks ago but now didn't have the faintest idea what it was except for the location and the fact that I was already half an hour late. 

I rushed into the library-classroom where the event was supposed to be, where an old gentleman was talking with a dozen young people listening and found a side chair to settle in. Everyone turned their eyes on me, and the old gentleman stopped his talk, and asked:
 
"What are you doing here?"
"I am just here for listening, may I?" (True, I always start my attendance to any topical discussion with pure listening)
"It's the end of the semester already, isn't it a bit too late for that?"

Now I realized this was not the forum I was going to but a regular classroom session and after some students realized my situation they told me the venue for that discussion forum had been changed to a different location and suggested I find the new one at the department office.

I apologized for the disruption and left the room and started looking for the department office, but then saw a lit room with a young man speaking in, with text projection on the board and a couple people listening. Quite a small crowd, I thought... could it be the one I was after? But after peeking and listening at the door for a couple minutes I decided to move in and participate for whatever it's worth anyway.

It was a study on some German sounding author's book "System of Ethics", and though the writing was a bit dry and drab, the ruminations were elaborate and repetitive I got the gist of it (that human feelings and drive for self-interest are natural and subjective but the will and freedom to act morally are self-determined and objective) and even asked the speaker some question of my own after listening for about half an hour.

Then came the break, the speaker left the room and I chatted with the three young men sitting close to me.

"You guys are students from the Philosophy Department, I suppose?"
"Oh no, we are from the Law Department," one of the young men said,
"I am here because I signed up for some philosophical seminar a couple weeks ago," I kind of explained myself, in case my appearance here seemed odd to them.
"Oh you mean that seminar on Phenomenology? This is not it, it's the one downstairs at the end of the hallway."

Oops, wrong room again! I bid them farewell and went downstairs to the end of the hallway, and there it was, a big easeled poster at the door of a packed room with the title of the discussion forum that I knew was exactly the one I signed up for two weeks ago!

I slipped in after checking my name at the registration table, and was immediately pleased by what I heard: a clear, succinct talk by a young woman (an associate professor from another university, I learned later) of the thoughts of a famous French philosopher (Henri Bergson) on time, movement, intuition, art, etc. A couple of key points I took from her presentation:

"While Intellect provides access to what is already known through symbolic systems like language and mathematics, Intuition is the mode of perception that can directly know what exceeds the current grasp of our language and is more important for creativity and human development in general."

"Reason, reasoning on its powers, will never succeed in extending them. Thousands and thousands of variations on the theme of walking will never yield a rule for swimming: come, enter the water, and when you know how to swim, you will understand how the mechanism of swimming is connected with that of walking."

After the lunch break (yes, free lunch for all who attended), another interesting topic presented by another scholar, titled "vague essence and material essence". To speed you through such "philosophese" wonderland I'll use an example:

Imagine doing carpentry work with a handsaw (or dissecting a cow with a carving knife, like the famous 庖丁解牛 story in Zhuangzi's): your hand movement, along with the saw, and the wood it cuts through, form a "material essence" that flows through a "vector stream" (or call it "force field" if you like) toward an end production that is never to be of "ideal" shape or form, but a "vague essence" that is created by the material essence of this world.

One may then postulate, that all our geometrical theorems come from the doables and imaginables–the material essence–of our perceived world. For example, to prove that the sum of the interior angles of a triangle is 180 degrees, we imagine a line passing the top of the triangle in parallel with the bottom line of the triangle, as below:

We have ∠DBA≅∠A because they are alternate interior angles and alternate interior angles are congruent when lines are parallel. Therefore, m∠DBA=m∠A. Similarly, ∠EBC≅∠C because they are also alternate interior angles, and so m∠EBC=m∠C. m∠DBA+m∠ABC+m∠EBC=180° because these three angles form a straight line. By substitution, m∠A+m∠ABC+m∠C=180°.

Such proof is possible because we can imagine and actually draw the line crossing point B in parallel to line AC, and see the shape and the angles, on a two dimensional paper.

Imagine, then, in a three dimensional world, you start walking from the North Pole of the Earth, straight to the Equator, turn 90 degrees right (west), walk one quarter of the Equator line, turn 90 degrees right (north), going all the way back to the North Pole where you started. You have just created a triangle whose sum of the interior angles is 90+90+90=270 degrees, not 180!

I would like to continue attending the remaining sessions of the day and its final discussion, but decided not to, because there was another discussion forum I had registered and liked to attend somewhere else, so off I left.

-----  to be continued ----- 

sunny

Sunny and I were elementary school classmates from grade three through grade six. He was a typical bouncy perky kid of his age, if a little more on the wild side, with a mother who's a bit on the over-worried side, that a well behaving, good grade earning kid like me became a "role model" she wanted her son to "hang out" with, in today's term, which he did, as he genuinely liked and admired me, even though he later confessed in our adult years that there were times he told his mother that he's with me just so she wouldn't worry when he's actually out somewhere else playing.

We went to different high schools and universities, but stayed in touch as occasions kept us to. One such occasion was when I asked him to be my courtesy door-knocker before I started dating my future wife who happened to go to the same department/university as he. He did it and would be forever claiming credit for the pivotal role he played in the successful union between me and my wife!

He came to the US about the same time I did, went back to Taiwan after finishing his study, then back to the US again a few years later and settled down not too far from where I lived in South Orange County. He told me he was doing well working for one of those up-and-coming furniture companies in Taiwan until he realized there were irreconcilable differences in business thinking between him and his boss/owner of the company that he decided to come to the USA to strike out on his own .

Strike out did he! From a humble home office with phones and fax machines pre internet times, he built a multi-million dollar business empire that owns factories and offices in China and Vietnam, Taiwan and US, in a short couple decades right in front of my eyes!
 
He's not your typical Fortune 500 slick talking CEO, but an old fashioned head-of-the-family boss that took care of his workers and they in return stayed loyal to him. The lady secretary he hired when he started his home office is still with the company, so are managers of the factories he took over decades ago.

Once he overheard a customer talking abusively to one of his employees and he grabbed the phone and told the customer if he continued to talk like that they didn't want their businesses.

He had a trademark sunny smile that lit up the room and charmed the people he met, and a pair of sparkling eyes that seemed to reveal where his artistic furniture design ideas and business smarts came from.

He spent almost half his time overseas, but we managed to stay in touch throughout the years: Winter mountain outing with his wife and kids when they were little, birthday/Christmas parties, golf rounds, country club dinners, or just some happy hour drinks at his office when he had long stay in Southern California.   

He was diagnosed with terminal stage brain cancer about five years ago. Though it came as a shock initially, with the extraordinary care of his super wife and top notch surgeon doctors, and their strong Christian faith, he made it through two major surgeries, various therapies and treatments, and had a miraculous recovery when doctors projected he had only three months to live after his second surgery more than four years ago.

He'd lived a healthy, functional life for the past four years. Even though in a wheelchair, he traveled to his factories in Vietnam for year-end celebration banquets, his son's graduation in San Francisco, and daughter's wedding in Italy.

He donated more money and sponsored more Christian ministries, including setting up summer camps in his factories in China and Vietnam for his employees and their families to spread the Gospel and be its witness.

I got to meet him more often, at the monthly women's ministry his wife organized and my wife helped out at his office in Irvine, and functional/fundraiser meetings for the ministry we both sponsored.

His smile was as sunny as ever, if not warmer and gentler, with an avuncular ring to it.

His cancer relapsed early this year, and he passed away just last week here in Taipei.

Farewell Sunny, my dear childhood friend forever... You've become the role model for many... See you on the other side.