Saturday, July 08, 2006
Hi: Here is a short journal of my time with Semester at Sea this summer (two weeks, from Honolulu to Taipei). Most of it was created on the ship, in the middle of the Pacific, as we sailed from Hawaii to Taiwan.
With blogs, you must read FROM THE BOTTOM UP (that is, the first postings are at the bottom) in order to read it chronologically.
Comments? Write to me. DTG
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July 6: Last full day in Taipei before my flight home. The morning included the Chinese Opera Company, a training school for the acrobats, actors, singers, and behind-the-scenes people who perform in the Chinese operas; we got a full explanation and tour, visit to the museum, demonstration by the acrobats, and an hour-long performance of one of the classical operas.
Following the opera, I taxied to my hotel to drop my bags, and then accompanied (rather, was accompanied by) two of the professors from S@S, a Chinese-American musicologist and a specialist in Asian art. Jing Jing took us to a first-rate Chinese restaurant for lunch (we passed on the [no kidding] "Chicken testicles with bean curd") then we went over to the National Palace Museum, the largest collection of Chinese art in the world. The museum's contents came out of the Forbidden City (Bejing) in the early 1930s for safekeeping (fleeing the Japanese), and were consequently kept there after the Communists got hold of China. The collection is so large --14,000 crates traveled 5,000 miles, arriving in Taiwan in 1948-- that it could be rotated every six months for 30 years without ever repeating an object.
Nancy's explanations and Jing Jing's native perspective enriched the visit enormously. From there, off to buy some Chinese silks (again, thanks only to Jing Jing's command of the language) and home through the hustle and bustle of modern Taipei to the hotel for a shower.
The students will stay in Taiwan for another two days, then head for Singapore. They were an able mix of students from smaller colleges (Reed, Rowan, Rollins) and major research universities (Hopkins, Yale, La Jolla, UCLA, USC, Colorado, Michigan, Miami, Florida, Duke, Penn State, Oregon, Columbia). Most of them were serious students, eager to combine the academic classroom work with the special "in field" experience that Semester at Sea provides; a few were typical college jerks set on "hanging out" and "having a good time" exclusively. We will eventually weed those types out in order to insure the academic integrity of this program.
Dinner at the Shanghai Café at the hotel included a tasting menu of extraordinary items, many of them unidentifiable or put together in unfamiliar combinations; one was a delicious shark fin soup with enoki and oyster mushrooms with rice noodles.
Looooooooooong trip home (27 hours total), but the whole experience was worth it. I'm very much looking forward to "my" voyage next summer, up and down the Pacific Coast of Central and South America, from Mexico to Chile.
With blogs, you must read FROM THE BOTTOM UP (that is, the first postings are at the bottom) in order to read it chronologically.
Comments? Write to me. DTG
**********************
July 6: Last full day in Taipei before my flight home. The morning included the Chinese Opera Company, a training school for the acrobats, actors, singers, and behind-the-scenes people who perform in the Chinese operas; we got a full explanation and tour, visit to the museum, demonstration by the acrobats, and an hour-long performance of one of the classical operas.
Following the opera, I taxied to my hotel to drop my bags, and then accompanied (rather, was accompanied by) two of the professors from S@S, a Chinese-American musicologist and a specialist in Asian art. Jing Jing took us to a first-rate Chinese restaurant for lunch (we passed on the [no kidding] "Chicken testicles with bean curd") then we went over to the National Palace Museum, the largest collection of Chinese art in the world. The museum's contents came out of the Forbidden City (Bejing) in the early 1930s for safekeeping (fleeing the Japanese), and were consequently kept there after the Communists got hold of China. The collection is so large --14,000 crates traveled 5,000 miles, arriving in Taiwan in 1948-- that it could be rotated every six months for 30 years without ever repeating an object.
Nancy's explanations and Jing Jing's native perspective enriched the visit enormously. From there, off to buy some Chinese silks (again, thanks only to Jing Jing's command of the language) and home through the hustle and bustle of modern Taipei to the hotel for a shower.
The students will stay in Taiwan for another two days, then head for Singapore. They were an able mix of students from smaller colleges (Reed, Rowan, Rollins) and major research universities (Hopkins, Yale, La Jolla, UCLA, USC, Colorado, Michigan, Miami, Florida, Duke, Penn State, Oregon, Columbia). Most of them were serious students, eager to combine the academic classroom work with the special "in field" experience that Semester at Sea provides; a few were typical college jerks set on "hanging out" and "having a good time" exclusively. We will eventually weed those types out in order to insure the academic integrity of this program.
Dinner at the Shanghai Café at the hotel included a tasting menu of extraordinary items, many of them unidentifiable or put together in unfamiliar combinations; one was a delicious shark fin soup with enoki and oyster mushrooms with rice noodles.
Looooooooooong trip home (27 hours total), but the whole experience was worth it. I'm very much looking forward to "my" voyage next summer, up and down the Pacific Coast of Central and South America, from Mexico to Chile.
# posted by Admiral David @ 4:17 AM 
