Day before yesterday my neighbor Dave Ding invited me to go with his wife and daughter to the art exhibition in Chiayi city where his latest prize-winning wood carving is on display. Mr. Ding and the other artists were interviewed by the reporters, and next Saturday a ceremony will be held.
Long ago when I was in junior high school, l remember riding in the van on the way to Fairy Stone, Virginia with my brothers and sisters and my mom when she swerved to miss a box turtle…. accidentally driving straight over it instead. :-(
Turtles are not an uncommon sight when driving in America, but I was surprised the other night while driving on a country road in the rain when I thought I saw one on the side of the road here on the western plain of southcentral Taiwan. I turned around, and sure enough, there it was. This “flower turtle” （花龜） is slightly smaller than my hand.
Having a friend who likes turtles to the degree I like to raise birds (well, maybe not quite that much), I scooped it up and delivered it to him last night.
In other nature-related news, 3 weeks ago at dusk my neighbor and I watched as a small bird (we thought it was a sparrow) flew in to my open door. I looked and looked the next day, but never found it, thinking that in a few weeks the stench would give the position of its corpse away. But yesterday morning, after having kept the steel doors shut for the better part of a week while I was out of town, I found a tiny bat by the bottom of the door… still living, but barely. I released it in the field across the street. So I guess if it was the same creature, bats can survive a long time without feeding…
I bought Guava about 2 years ago when still a baby Indian Ring Neck. About a year ago, our relationship moved from a love to a hate relationship, perhaps as a result of sitting it out on a 3rd floor window balcony all day for a few days, perhaps simply as a result of entering into adolescence. Anyway, soon after everytime I let Guava out of the cage it had the immediate instinctive reaction to begin biting me! Things haven’t changed.
At first I assumed Guava was perhaps a girl….
But in the last month these dark rings developed, 
leading to the certain knowledge that Guava is a handsome mature male!
Yesterday I attended the graduation ceremony at the local elementary school.
Back when I was a young boy in America, there was no such thing as a graduation ceremony for elementary school students. Nor for middle school/junior high. And if there was, it probably would not have been meaningful for me as we moved around quite frequently.
Yesterday near the end of the 2 hour ceremony, tears were flowing from many of the young boys and girls whom we knew and taught last year in the school’s English Club. I thought about taking
pictures of some of them, but settled for “happy pics” with some of our young friends.
One aspect of the ceremony that struck me was that the students both performed and gave speeches in Taiwanese – the mother tongue we are encouraging our workers to learn – and NOT the Mandarin language. A coworker in the next township said the principals gave their speeches in Taiwanese in several of the ceremonies he and his wife attended.
This past week the local news television stations have been buzzing about a story in which at least 9 policemen were recorded on camera to be associating with gangsters in a private nightclub in Taichung city.
The story breaking two weeks before the election isn’t a coincidence, and is influencing public opinion. But there’s no new insight here for locals as to their being strong links between known criminal elements and the police force and/or government.
Four or five years ago while entertaining some friends from Mansfield, Ohio, one them asked to be taken around to a local police station in Taichung. He just happened to be the chief of police in his town back in Ohio and wanted nothing more than to introduce himself to his counterpart in the local police station and maybe drink a cup of tea with them. When I introduced this gentleman the officers present wanted nothing to do with him. Don’t know if they were just embarrassed with associating with foreigners, or if there might have been a fear of being exposed of something else. We met with similar responses in two places.
A few days later on that particular trip we were escorting our guests back to the airport and had to spend the night in a motel a half hour from the airport to accommodate everyone’s early morning departure.
That night I went back down to the kiosk outside the motel rooms to get an internet cable for my computer. I was shocked to see 3 or 4 police cars come screaming over, put a sign on the kiosk and rope it off in what was evidently a raid.
A while later I went back down again because I still needed my internet cable. I assumed the police had left as I didn't see their squad cars. Knocking on the door, I opened it and went it only to see a couple of cops standing over the attendant, who had taken a big wad of money out of the cash register/drawer and was in the process of counting it. I received my cable and quickly and quietly made my exit….
May God somehow help some of the most honest and upright politicians to win this Saturday. Please pray for Taiwan’s election.
