This week of course we had our midterm speeches! I as usual had a little crisis about not being able to include all of my ideas into a 5 minute speech but in the end I was pretty pleased with it. I ended up writing about a topic I first started thinking about in 何老師’s tutorial CHIN 428: Present Pasts: The Politics of Memory last spring, which is the way that understanding the movements and history of plants (and some animals) can help us better understand and analyze political/social history and our present society. This is especially relevant when considering the effects of colonization and globalization. I ended up seeing a really interesting exhibit at the contemporary art museum that got into this topic a few days after getting out of quarantine, and wanted to discuss both the exhibit and Zhu Tianxin’s novel The Old Capital (which we read in the tutorial) in my essay. You can imagine how that worked out! I had to cut the part about the exhibit haha.
Anyway, we were all pretty nervous about presenting our speeches but everyone’s speech that I watched went very well! There were lots of interesting topics including comparing accessibility in the US and Taiwan, looking at colonial Japanese architecture in Taiwan, and the importance of sleep, among other things. It was great fun to see everyone’s hard work come to fruition.
Afterwards I went with a few others to Din Tai Feng (鼎泰豐）for a celebratory dinner and we feasted on soup dumplings, fried rice, taro buns, and even chocolate 小籠包！
蝦仁燒賣！(Shrimp Shumai)
An aesthetic view of one of the many Din Tai Feng locations in Taipei~~ 😂
Over the weekend I participated in the last ICLP trip to Beipu (北埔）which was about an hour and a half bus ride outside of the city. Beipu is a big Hakka cultural center, so we got a chance to learn more about Hakka history and try some local snacks! The main activity was getting to make leicha (擂茶), a famous Hakka tea made from tea leaves, sesame, peanuts, and some other seeds all ground together into a smooth paste. After taking turns grinding while also snacking on various chips and crackers, we added boiling water, and topped the drink off with some puffed rice. It was delicious and hearty!
Leicha (擂茶）pre-grinding
擂茶 post-grinding
Unfortunately we only had a little bit of time to check out the old street in Beipu but still managed to try 板條, wide fried noodles, and xiancao cha 仙草茶 among other things. I wished we could have just hung around there for the rest of the day as there was a temple and a historic house we could have visited but instead we went to a theme park that was kind of like a zoo and saw many different kinds of animals.
bantiao/板條！
“Sloths have to sleep at minimum 15 hours per day! (look up, there might be a sloth sleeping in a tree)”
There was indeed a sloth in the tree 樹上的確有樹懶 😂
Oh also besides prepping for the midterm speech I was also excited to translate 畫蛇添足 [Draw a snake and add feet] in my Classical Chinese class! Professor Nugent mentioned that story last fall in class and it was fun to actually translate it (and helpful that I already knew what it was about haha).