Conventional wisdom has it that there’s nothing like out-of-town company to give you a new attitude to your home. We all get stuck in the tedium of our daily lives, and there is nothing like the enthusiasm of a visitor to shake us out of it. As comfortable and as routine as my own turf might be to me (and despite my yearning to be elsewhere), it is a wonderful and exciting place for people from other places. For this reason, and also because many of my readers are overseas, there should be nothing wrong with my writing a travel blog [View Full Entry]

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There have been many changes since my last blog entry. I’m back at work, for one thing. Lao-puo Suzanne’s generous support of a Cambodian orphanage (she pays the rent for a high school) was dipping into my beer money, so I had to do something about that. I don’t begrudge a penny. Were it not for her efforts, the young orphaned girls, and some of the boys, would be hooking, and the rest of the boys would be begging. I’m back in my old job, with the provincial Ministry of Housing and Social Development. Things were better when we were the [View Full Entry]

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I am not a deceitful person, but one of the things I love about language is how it is hypothetically possible to mislead a person by telling the truth. “Next week we will be living on another island that is five thousand kilometres (as the frigate bird flies) from Hawaii, where French is one of the official languages.” Is anyone thinking “Lucky guy! Now he gets to live in French Polynesia!”? Well, it’s a long way to Tipperary, as the old WWI song goes, but it’s even farther from British Columbia to Tahiti than it is from Belgium to Ireland. We [View Full Entry]

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So said a xenophobic old Englishman in a forty-year-old movie about an international airplane race from London to Paris. I could paraphrase the old gaffer by saying “the trouble with 40th high school reunions is that they attract too many old people”. So it was at my reunion, held last weekend in Surrey (a city very near Vancouver). The only trouble is, I was one of them! “Vancouver” sounds so much nicer in Chinese—“Weng Ge Wa”. I don’t know pinyin very well, never having formally studied Mandarin, so there you have it. The relationshi [View Full Entry]

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When we were living in Taiwan, I wrote my blog predominantly for western people who had never been to Taiwan and wanted to see the place, or for those who had lived there and longed to return, or for those who were simply curious about an Asian place to which relatively few had gone. As a bonus, some of the local people found it interesting to see how a foreigner perceived their lives and their routines. Logic tells me that the same thing must be true in reverse. So. Here goes. I'm going to write about Canada, for a predominantly Asian [View Full Entry]

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"I'm tired but not sleepy". My clock is messed up! "It's so cold here!" We even prepared by wearing socks, long pants, and light jackets. "Get out of the way! You're blocking the escalator!" Western people ride an escalator side-by-side, but Asian people stand one behind the other for the benefit of anyone wanting by. It took a moment to remember that people standing beside their companions were not being inconsiderate. "$11.95 for a sandwich? I love a server with a sense of humour!" We can believe neither the sky-high prices in Canada, nor the meekness with which people just pa [View Full Entry]

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The day before we left Hualien to come home, Suzanne and I went to church at Agape House one last time. "Agape" (unconditional love) House is a Christian alcohol and drug residential recovery facility about twenty minutes north of town on Hwy 9. This is my farewell to the men and women living in the place: Journeys Suzanne and I are going home to Canada tomorrow. In other words, we are on a journey. So are you—but your journey is quite a bit different from ours—and very similar to the best-known journey in the Bible. Exodus. The journey from bondage in [View Full Entry]

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Well, I have my world-class Hwy 193, and my picture of a farmer's truck and his sheaves, but leaving this beautiful place that I have come to love is certainly no cause for rejoicing. I tried a video of firing up Esmerelda, but it's in kind of slow motion. I had a choice between filming or having a rear brake, so I took it easy. Using the front brake alone can cause low-speed instability on a motorbike, so I didn't film for long. OK, I admit that comparing being housebound (for a moving sale) to house arrest is a bit of [View Full Entry]

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I added a couple of brief clips about the local scenery. Unless someone thinks I have nice feet, I should apologize for showing them at the end of the vids. Before you even look into the window of a business establishment here—fat lot of good the sign does when I can’t read—you can spot the Internet Cafes a mile away. The giveaway is the disproportionate number of bicycles from kids who should be doing homework instead of “play computer”, and jazzed up scooters from the young pups who should have better things to do than “play computer” as well. [View Full Entry]

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Returning teachers are entitled to select the location of their next assignment in Taiwan and (if we were staying) I would be ready to move on to somewhere else. I had to write on the request form that I would not be returning, and the options read like a travel guide: 1. Taipei (City or County) 2. Taichung (City or County) 3. Tainan (City or County) 4. Taitung (City or County) 5. Yilan (City or County) 6. Kaohsiung (City or County) 7. Taiwan Strait islands (Penghu, Kinmen, Matsu) 8. Nantou County 9. Miaoli County I felt as if I was signing [View Full Entry]

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