January 22, 2009: Kaohsiung, Taiwan

Trains go fast-ish. Bullet trains go faster than I want to think about riding in. We went to the train station to catch a train to Kaohsiung, which is about mid-way down on the West coast. The whole ride only took us about an hour and a half. The trip was informative as Tram began my Asian boy band education via her iPod. It’s like watching the Backstreet Boys all over again. Only with strangely painted eye makeup and matching hairstyles.

This trip is the vacation within the vacation. We’re taking a bus tour all the way around the island back to Taipei and stopping at certain points to see scenery and various sites. It should be pretty neat. Few people live on the West and Southern Coasts and more of them are aboriginal peoples.

In Kaohsiung we stayed at National Sun Yatsen University, another breathtaking campus. Seriously, if I wanted to go to school to enjoy the area around me, I might move to Taiwan. They’ve got a beach <2>

We had two lectures while we were there, one on econ and one on Taiwan’s political history (which is just messed up and confused). The econ lecture was fascinating to me, which is frightening, and I want to take an economics class next semester. I think it might come in useful eventually.

Time for the thirty second Taiwanese history lesson!!! Taiwan (population: 23 million & second most densely populated country) was found by Portuguese in the mid-16^th century. They called it Formosa (the beautiful island. Very original of them). The Dutch bullied the Portuguese off the island and made it a colony from 1622 to 1662 when the Ming Dynasty took the Island for the burgeoning Chinese empire. In 1895 Taiwan become the spoils of the Japanese when they won the Sino-Japanese war. In 1945, after the end of WWII, Taiwan was returned to the Republic of China and in 1949, the Nationalist Party limped over the Strait of Taiwan after being beaten by the Communists. In 1951, Taiwan was a major base for the United States during the Korean war. The icing on the cake is that the aboriginals of Taiwan have been jipped throughout the entire story, what with the murdering and the uprooting (the major theme of the world it seems).

Is it obvious as to why this country/area has identity issues?

Political system is fun too. They have five branches of government compared to our three. There’s the standard Executive, Judicial, and Legislative, but also Examination and Control branches. The Examination branch recruits civil servants and is in charge of determining public servant’s benefits and responsibilities. The Control branch assesses government officials and offices and ensures no fraud. I’m sure it’s somewhat effective since the Taiwanese seem to love talking about how their previous President is now in jail for fraud and money laundering.

There are two main political camps (even though there’s over 100 officially), the Pan-Blue camp and Pan-Green camp. Tram wanted to know why they were called blue and green, a valid question. Apparently, it’s the color they choose for their representative flags XD. Pan-Blue is dominated by the KMT and is rather pro-China. Pan-Green is all about Taiwanese specialness and is run by the DPP, Democratic Progressive Party.

Taiwan is unfortunate to only have 21-23 countries officially recognize it as a country and most of those are poor Central and South American countries. Officially doesn’t mean that there isn’t ways to bend the rules (which most countries seem to do on a regular basis) so Taiwan has a pretty good handle on exporting goods. Some people think that Taiwan and China have a strained relationship, which has been true in the past but currently the relationship is doing quite well. For example, direct flights from Taiwan to Chinese cities have begun in this last year for the first time. Some reasons for this change include the fact that America has become rather friendly/reliant on China and is also the main purchaser of Taiwanese goods. Hence, it’s a good idea to also be friends with China. Secondly, the new president is from the Pan-Blue camp and is working to tie the mainland and the island together. So far so good.

For the rest of the evening we took a brief trip to the (black sand!) beach and had dinner. I stayed in and went directly to bed, but apparently some of my classmates had an adventure to the 7-11. Taiwan has the highest density of convenience stores anywhere (as stated by Wikipedia) and we literally pass one or its Asian variant every 100 meters or so. This might be why the biggest disease problem in the country happens to be diabetes.