Guess I haven't had a Major Outing since the museum visit of the 11th. Keep dithering and getting out late, or having an online social event in the morning, or (yesterday) actually waking up after noon because I guess my body needed it. I've been out, but it's been small things like reading in the nice park, or going out for sushi... actually, I guess the 16th did add up to an Outing; I went to the Sushiro east of me, then walked north through a wet market, then a not-yet-open night market, to the river. ( Read more... )

Have I mentioned that I'm around the corner (and across an intersection) from a Taoist temple here? Yesterday (Saturday) at 6 AM I'd heard some music, and later fireworks, but hadn't gone out. Tonight around 8:40 PM I heard it again, and quickly went out. Album

I don't know if a procession had actually marched around some distance, but what I saw when I got there was like the end of a small parade, with people in giant costumes, the portable tabernacle or whatever, a barrel of fire (did not photograph well, there's just a glow). Also a brief attack of fireworks, some line of things on the ground that were set off, loud bright and smokey.

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Happy Saturday!

I'm going to be doing a little maintenance today. It will likely cause a tiny interruption of service (specifically for www.dreamwidth.org) on the order of 2-3 minutes while some settings propagate. If you're on a journal page, that should still work throughout!

If it doesn't work, the rollback plan is pretty quick, I'm just toggling a setting on how traffic gets to the site. I'll update this post if something goes wrong, but don't anticipate any interruption to be longer than 10 minutes even in a rollback situation.

I looked at more bicycles today, and saw some with Japan's over-wheel center kickstands. At first I thought they had O-locks too, but I didn't see any more, and now I wonder if I mistook rim/caliper brakes for an O-lock. I saw two bikes that were locked to something, but most are freestanding; maybe half have a cable lock through a wheel, so someone can't trivially ride off with it; the rest have no visible lock, maybe just counting on low crime and looking like rusty pieces of shit.

I went to a pho stall and pointed at a photo that looked nice. It turned out to have "duck blood tofu", blood coagulated into big cubes with a consistency like that of tofu. I ate one cube and part of the other. It was not deeply repulsive; if I hadn't known it was blood I might have eaten it without blinking. Knowing... I decided to stop and see if my stomach would revolt from new food or a surplus of iron.

I forget if I've talked about it in the travel series, but a distinctive feature of Japanese housing is balconies. I think basically every unit above ground level has one, even if it's shallow, a space (1) to hang your laundry outside and (2) so someone can install and maintain your heat pump compressor without risk of death or needing special safety equipment.

I haven't been looking up much, distracted by traffic and shops, or blocked by covered walkways, but today I did look up (starting from a park.) Album. And no, balconies are not ubiquitous here, and compressors are often just extruded from walls, with no obvious access.

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Japan drives on the left, so in streams of people, they tend to walk on the left. Unless they're walking on the right to face oncoming traffic, or are standing on the escalator in Osaka (which for some reason went to the right), or randomly ended up on the right. But mostly they're on the left.

Taiwan drives on the right, so people walk on the right, and after 3 months of doing things the Japanese way, it takes effort to adhere to local custom, and I still find myself going on the left "to be polite."

You might wonder why I just don't fall back to US habits. But the US rarely has pedestrians dense enough to need stream efficiency, outside of some escalators and airport slidewalks. Even where sidewalks are congestion, like in Manhattan, my impression is mostly of interleaved chaos.

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Discussion on Youtube opened my eyes to something: the US, tofu is largely considered an alternative to meat, something used by vegetarians and vegans. But in Asia, according to the comments, it's often complementary to meat. Most famous example in the US might be ma po tofu, recipes for which are often "2 parts tofu, 1 part ground pork." At Philly's SE Asian market, one of the skewers I bought was a mix of fish cake and tofu. And just now, I had some miso noodle soup, that was pork slices, meatball, fried egg, and tofu (not much tofu, less than anything else).

Whether Asian cooks are motivated more by "meat is expensive, stretch with tofu" or "tofu is good for you", I don't know. Today's tofu didn't seem abundant enough to count as stretching...

Went to the Taiwan National Museum. I failed my research, I thought it was going to be a big art museum. It's a natural history and anthropology museum. Big hall on Taiwanese butterflies and moths, one on fossils especially rhinos. I went to skim-mode after that: 2nd floor has an indigenous peoples hall, and more fossils + geology. 3rd floor is "Discovering Taiwan", the history of local natural history studies, with a lot of Japanese role there. Basement is children's section, which might have stuff worth checking out; also has the normal toilets, vs. the squat toilets above.

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