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Kenting Travelogue

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Kenting – a summer paradise for beach-goers and sun-lovers at the southern tip of Taiwan. It has been almost ten years since I last set my eyes on its bustling main street, its numerous inns and shops, and its small beaches. The sun just feels different there, different from the sun in Taipei. More radiant, it shines down from a blue sky flanked by towering white clouds that floats like cotton candy instead of the dark, foreboding rain clouds that seem hang over Taipei perpetually. Perhaps that is just my imagination, fueled by a desire to get out of the trappings that I have come to associate with Taipei.

What makes a place attractive is not what characterizes it. It is just how much we prepared ourselves to find the place attractive (kind of works with people too…hahaha). For me, someone who loves being outdoors in the sun, Kenting is vastly more attractive than Taipei. For others, those who show up on a trip to the beach with brand-name bags, make-up, and high heels, the city is much more attractive.

But you don’t want to expect too much from your experiences either. We went to a pretty well regarded restaurant for dinner there on the first night, and to be honest, we all left wondering what the hype was about. The food wasn’t bad, but I would say to all those tourists and foodies lined up outside, you could do better than this – at least for all the wait you have to endure before being seated. Well, maybe the hype of the good food came from all of the tourists and foodies who got hungrier and hungrier by the minute. It is all about perception.

Traveling is a joy, whether it’s going to a place you have never been or have been before. Kenting is no different. This is my first trip since coming back to Taiwan to fulfill my obligatory military service. This is my first trip to Kenting, a place I loved as a kid, without my parents. It is something else travelling with friends instead of family. You end up doing things you never would do, like water activities my parents were always too hesitant to pay for, or a crazy show with pole dancers and cross dressers in a loud bar with cheap alcohol.

Kenting is small, but its beaches and sights would still be best seen if you rent a car or a bike. There is still quite a bit of distance between places, and the aquarium is a far away off if you wanted to visit. There are numerous accommodations, but if you wanted to go during the summer, you better call a month or two in advance for a reservation. The people there are all genuinely friendly and ready to strike up a conversation, but you could never tell if there’s an agenda – like most tourist destinations, there’s money to be made. At night, the main street is choke full of people and there’s always music coming out of some restaurant or bar and there’s always the noise of people buying and selling, price haggling…but I say, the main attraction is the night market food. Travelling in Taiwan always seems to end up being about food. Live and die by the tummy.

All in all, it was a short weekend getaway. For someone like me, always yearning to be places and to be out in the sun, it can work wonders for one’s psyche. What kind of a trip makes you tick?

MC HotDog Sings…About Society

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MC HotDog is back with a new single called “離開”, which translates to “Depart” or “Leave”. In a departure from his last collaboration with A-yue about Taiwanese chicks, one night stands, and bras, this song is about the spread of social media and online connectivity and how it has affected our interactions with each other and ourselves. Many of us become trapped in our online identities and become disengaged from reality.

A particularly poignant verse in the song goes, “在 Real world 我用真名說假的話 Another world 我用假名說真的話 有點疑惑　我也開始變得有點掙扎 在我的兩個世界裡　分不清真假” which points out how we seem to live different lives in reality and in the virtual world. Translated, it says, “In the real world I speak falsely while using my real name, another world I speak the truth using an alias, it is a little confusing, I am starting to struggle a little in both my world, it difficult to tell what’s real and what’s not”.

This brings me to my point – what is media really doing to us? Are we using it for our own advantages or are we becoming used by it? Being online and connected to the “world” becomes more and more important in our lives as we find ourselves needing to process massive amounts of information in order to “keep up” with the daily news and changing trends. We set up accounts on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and other social media sites to extend our networks, to maintain our networks, and to establish our own individual presence online. Yet where does this lead us, when many of us “expose” ourselves online where privacy is an increasing concern and where much of our image can be carefully constructed and presented? Can you still be you when all you have to present yourself is limited by how many words and pictures you can stuff on a computer screen?

Furthermore, because many of us cannot present ourselves comfortably in reality, the web becomes a platform where we can be who we want to be. This means people are increasingly disengaged in reality with each other, because they aren’t comfortable with their realities. Almost everywhere I look when I walk on the street are people plugged into their iPhones, HTCs, and other smart devices. In restaurants, it is not uncommon to see couples or friends dining with their heads down looking at their devices the entire dinner without as much a word between them. Plugged in and distracted, are we becoming a society where our real, authentic identities are no longer present in reality but as portions polished and published in an online community?

Well, that’s definitely a thinking man’s rap if you ever showed me one.

As for MC HotDog, his new album comes out on July 13th.  For those of you who like his music, enjoy! =)

P.S. This is a different kind of post from what I am used to (more of a thinking aloud stream-of-consciousness style), please give me suggestions on improvements! Thank you!

Image via MC HotDog 

Curious Prometheus

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This is my first, ever blog site. Finally, after all these years, I decided to open my mind up to the wild world of the World Wide Web.

To start off, I will be writing about the new movie, Prometheus. Warning: there will be some spoilers, so don’t read it if knowing will ruin your enjoyment of the movie.

Prometheus, what a movie: incredible mythology, motifs, and imagery. However subtle, it has numerous philosophical views and references to other media cultures such as religious symbolism and self-sacrifice and human conceit.

I would like to introduce another thread of thought. The movie is about the human inclination to be irresistibly drawn to the unknown – that unfettered curiosity that consumes all of us, at one point or another. Humans seem to instinctively thirst for knowledge. Prometheus is a movie about the dangers of unbridled curiosity and the power of knowledge, much like the story of its namesake.

When the first scene opens, you are immediately  drawn to the clear references of Prometheus, the Greek god, self-sacrifice and panspermia, as the robed Space Jockey ritualistically downs a metallic, black liquid and subsequently dissolves into his molecular components. It immediately piques the audience’s curiosity – aren’t we all just a curious bunch, the black liquid obviously looks dangerous after what happens, but I am sure we were all dying to know what it is. Human curiosity.

Though I do realize the urge to drive the action and suspense sells a movie, in Prometheus, the theme of curiosity starts almost from the very beginning, as we see Shaw and Holloway digging at an archeological site, David peering into Dr. Shaw’s dreams and David learning a multitude of languages. The list of acts of curiosity and thirst for knowledge essentially keeps going.

However, in the movie, the dangers of a relentless pursuit for knowledge are front and center. As soon as the crew lands on LV-223, Holloway wants to immediately go investigate the obviously alien mounds despite the warnings of nightfall. Then, when a storm hits Millburn and Fifield don’t get the news and are left in the mound – with obviously dire consequences. Shaw almost gets killed in her insistence on bringing back the severed Engineer head they found – first by taking the precious little time they have to secure the head, leaving them barely enough time to escape the storm in their vehicles, then by jumping back out into the storm to grab the head as it falls off the vehicle. That’s almost three casualties as soon as the crew gets the chance to somehow “satisfy” their curiosity.

Then they try to “re-animate” the severed Engineer head without thinking about the consequences, trying to figure out what the tissue growth on the head is. It spirals out of control as Ford loses control of how much electrical pulse is running through the nerve as the head wakes up almost completely in disgust and started mutating, probably due to exposure to the dark liquid. Sometimes, a leap of faith can discover something; when it works it’s brilliant genius. When it fails, however, it just highlights how absurdly stupid an action can be without careful consideration, and yet, many of us continue to leap without thinking.

Holloway himself becomes a victim of “curiosity” as David clandestinely feeds him some of the dark liquid. As a side note, I am surprised that as a scientific exploration vessel, the Prometheus does NOT have lab animals or some sort of test subjects (not necessarily human obviously, there would be…moral arguments there) on board as a precaution. Instead, we see David using Holloway as an experiment, which ultimately results in his death. Ironic indeed.

At the end, having learned almost nothing about the dangers, Shaw still retains her incessant thirst for knowledge. Instead of returning to Earth, she decides to go pay the Engineer home world a visit to “find out”.

We can only imagine out it turns out. She walks into a death trap, gets eliminated before she finds out anything and reigniting Engineer interest in destroying humanity. Or she could find the Engineers eliminated and discovers what killed them (and those on LV-223). Obviously there is a chance to reconcile with the Engineers, but really what are the chances?

So what are the chances to her not only endangering herself but the entirety of humanity?

This brings me to a question that lingered in my mind after watching Prometheus: When is it enough to say, let’s take a step back and figure out if this route of knowledge is worth pursuing? Being a scientist by training (I was a Bio major), sometimes we are blinded by our pursuit of truth, not realizing the true dangers despite our best intentions. Knowledge, especially science, has always been about uncovering the “truth” about the world around us. Yet, do we really need to know so much? Without modern civilization and our pursuit of “knowledge”, humanity managed to live in harmony with nature for almost 200,000 years. As soon as we began to create science (as we know it), well we know the rest of the story: global warming, weapons of mass destruction, ecological degradation, etc. I bet most scientists want their science to make the world a better place, but sometimes, many times, it becomes increasingly difficult to manage consequences of such knowledge.

Furthermore, as in reality, the pursuit of truth almost always results in even more questions and increasingly complex questions. In this case, “What happened to the Engineers on LV-223? Why did they leave Earth? Why do they want to destroy us?”. Where do we draw the line between opening up a possible can of worms like Pandora opening up her box? To me, Prometheus is a movie that centers on our incessant pursuit of knowledge and belief in “progress”. Though Prometheus is not so much so a thinking man’s movie, as many have commented on and alluded to, it does touch on many themes that you only need to dig in a little to contemplate.

All Images via ProjectPrometheus