My Travel Adventures

When I went to exchange my last batch of physical foreign money about two months ago, I ran into a bit of a problem. The bank I visited refused to accept my two-hundred-euro banknote – apparently too unusual a denomination to safely rule out its possible falsification. Having relied not to an inconsiderable degree on this two-hundred to carry me through the rest of the semester, I was a little put out. My American credit card had just expired and I had forgotten the pin code to my new Czech card; I could, of course, find out what my pin was at any time, but at that point I felt too invested in this new experiment on whether or not I could make my limited funds last me after all.

We left Taipei in a minibus at around ten thirty in the morning. The weather was cold and the dark clouds portended rain. The organisers of our trip had told us to pack an absurd number of items, but I had dismissed many of these as just part of the Taiwanese impulse to take hiking overly seriously. Why should one pack thermal gear for a hike up a subtropical mountain that does not exceed the height of four thousand metres? And why bother with an expensive suit of weatherproof clothes when an umbrella and some spare dry clothes might work just as well? Nevertheless, the coolness of the morning scared me a little, as I already had to put on a second shirt.

This Monday, I attended a lecture by Professor Leonard Blussé, who wrote many of the materials I have been reading through in my studies of Christianity in Taiwan. Perhaps his most monumental work is the four-volume Formosan Encounter, a selection of Dutch East India Company Documents and other resources, along with translations thereof. Nevertheless, this lecture focussed on the historical study of rivers in Southeast Asia, which Blussé punctuated with a number of anecdotes and insights into his life, research methods, and philosophy.

With the anniversary of NTU’s founding this Friday, ICLP has officially entered its autumn break. Of course, as is customary for any institution of higher learning, our program has made sure that we spend a good portion of that time stressing about schoolwork, repeatedly pointing out the proximity of our final exams and handing out practice materials. Thank goodness I am sufficiently disillusioned with ICLP’s archaic teaching practices that I could not care less.

This Saturday, a teacher at ICLP organized a hike along the Caoling Historic Trail. Reaching the trail, which lies at the border of New Taipei and Yilan in the east, is surprisingly easy. I was surprised to find that I could simply use my metro card to pay for the train there.  

After finishing my Verdi binge, I felt in the mood for a little change of atmosphere. I half-retract my antipathy towards Mussorgsky to say that Boris Godunov is quite interesting. Glinka’s A Life for the Tsar is also very much worth listening to. Most of all, though, I have been more than pleasantly surprised by Rimsky-Korsakov’s Mlada. I came across it by accident, having never heard of the opera before, but what a lucky find it was! The soaring instrumental interludes and forceful choruses are without a doubt some of the best in the genre.