Chilly Weather Is Moving In, What Season Is It?

Happy Thanksgiving from my Taiwanese family.  Our meals may not have consisted of turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, and cranberry sauce, but thats not what is important about the holiday.  What is important is being around the people that are important to you, and knowing what you are thankful for, and that is never difficult for me, I have a lot of great things in my life.

Traditional or not, this was Thanksgiving dinner.

Brr!  I know, the 17 degree (Celius) temperatures I am currently experiencing are nothing compared to the snow covered Midwest I’ve left behind, but it appears I have acclimated to the weather here, and am now relying on my comforter and fuzzy socks for warmth.  There are certainly some logical reasons why the cold would hit me so hard this year, because there are differences in how countries and people cope with the weather.  Let’s look at transportation for instance.  I bet you thought (or will think in the near future) how chilly it is when you are speed walking from your car to the store, but is that because you were blasting the heat inside that little car to make it unnaturally warm? Not only do I not have the option of a heater when driving around, I don’t even have an enclosed vehicle.  I am barreling 60kph down the road with nothing to block the wind but the clothes I am wearing.  Speaking of clothes, what do you wear during winter? Thick jackets, gloves, hats?  My wardrobe isn’t equipped with much in terms of warmth because the timeframe of usefulness is so short, a couple sweatshirts is about all I have.  Lastly, while the poor college students probably know what it is like, how long has it been since you have properly heated your house when the temperature drops?  Air conditioners are far more common than I ever expected here, but heaters aren’t important so most buildings don’t have them.  How do we cope with the cold then? It is a strange cold that seems to reside in the wind more than the temperature, so getting inside helps a lot.  Other than that, most people layer up and wait until the season is over. 

Despite the cold, I’ve become far more outdoorsy since moving to Taiwan, both due to the new environment and the company I now keep.  It is therefore, not strange at all to say that I went trekking up a mountain today.  After waking up early and riding up to Taipei, a few friends and I caught a bus to Yangmingshan National Park (which is located in the north of the city) to hike the trails, visit the peaks and hot springs, and enjoy a day in nature.  Yangmingshan, and particularly Qixing Mountain (known in English as “Seven Star Mountain”, is famous for being the highest dormant volcano in Taiwan (with a peak altitude of 1,120 meters (which we visited today)).   We began our hike in Xiaoyoukeng, trekked up to the Qixing peak, down to Menghuan Lake (which was remarkably uneventful), and further down to Lengshuikeng.  Aside from the height, the scenery, including the volcanically created steam vents called fumaroles are some of the main tourist draws for this region.  This meant that there were a lot of areas ripe with sulfur fumes and discolored by a combination of heat, steam, gases, and sulfur crystals, leaving a burnt-looking affect in sections of the rocks.  The weather was close to perfect, with temperatures low enough to keep us from overheating and clear skies for most of the way up the mountain.  The views of Taipei city below us were remarkable, but unfortunately, when we reached the summit, the mist was too thick to see off the mountain.  At the end of our hike we reached the hot springs of Lengshuikeng (which ironically has 'cold water' in it's name).  These hot springs stay around 40 degrees celsius and are not too hot comparatively.  I've been to a few hot springs in my time in Taiwan, but this was my first time at a nude one.  Outside the springs is a co-ed foot bath, then interested swimmers can separate into male or female bath houses and warm up.  If I'm being honest, we all ended up passing on the baths, while we thought it would be a nice ending to our day, the combination of a small pool of warm sulfuric smelling water, over-crowded with naked people.  That will just have to remain on the list of Taiwanese experiences I haven't experienced.

A view of the mountains of Yangmingshan National Park.

We've made it to the peak of Qixing Mountain!

The steep decent begins...

This is a culture note I've never spent much time contemplating before.  If you live in America (and presumably most western countries), you've undoubtedly seen employees of the food service industry wearing hairnets while preparing your food.  Sure they look silly, sure they annoy most of the people who wear them, but they sure do seem to work.  I couldn't tell you when the last time I found a hair in my food in the states was, it occurs relatively rarely as far as I'm concerned, and they is almost certainly because companies can't afford the compensation tactics they must employ after a situation is reported.  Taiwan does not have these same rules for cooks, and it results in a far more frequent finding of hair in your food.  I would say once every month or two I find, or a friend finds, someone else's hair buried within their meal.  Does it not bother the Taiwanese population?  Are the solutions not worth it?  It seems silly to me.