Climate, Housing and Furnishings - Part 1

Les Duffin has been scanning pages from "Taiwan Report," the publication that was mailed to military personnel being assigned to USTDC and other Taipei area organizations. I've really enjoyed seeing these pages again because they're really a snapshot in time. This book was published shortly before I arrived at USTDC in 1973.

Chapter 4 of the publication, as the title suggests, describes things that newcomers should know about the climate of Taiwan, the ins-and-outs of finding housing, and which items should be brought and which could be purchased after arrival.

There are several pages in this chapter, so I'm publishing four pages today and the rest over the next three or four days. Click on any page to expand its size.

...to be continued tomorrow.

Happy Double Ten Day!

These came from Les. The first two are from 1966 and the other two are from 1975.

Merry Christmas

***UPDATE***

Kent Mathieu, over at the Taipei Air Station blog, reminded me that he recently posted an article about a book called "Dragon Hotel." The book was published in 1969 and it talks about the same place that Sarj's Christmas card came from.

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Sarj provided these great images:

Here's a Christmas card I saved from the Dragon Hotel. Manager Johnny Huang was a friend of mine.

Up the Yangtze

Last night my wife and I watched an excellent film on PBS, one of their "P.O.V." series. The film was called "Up the Yangtzee" by filmmaker Yung Chang.

"Up the Yangtze" explores the impact of China's Three Gorges Dam project by following two Chinese teenagers who work on a Yangtze River cruise ship. One is the daughter of an impoverished farmer, the other is a son of China's new middle class.

We thoroughly enjoyed this film and highly recommend it. You can check with your local PBS station to find out when it's being shown again. The website for the film can be found here.

Veterinary Medicine in Taipei

Sarj submitted this a couple of days ago:

Here is a vaccination record for our dog "Lady," a cocker spaniel that is shown in the photo in the blog entry about American Village. [Photo also added below - Don]

There are three reason why I sent this:

1. As a reminder that National Taiwan University was the source for vaccinations.
   
   
2. I used to go there and play basketball with students. I didn't need to speak the language because we spoke basketball! They had nice outdoor courts and it reminded me of back in the States.
   
   
3. The University was the only place you could get an American ice cream cone.

Arms Sale Results In Snit

Back in July, I wrote about the U.S. delay in selling defensive arms to Taiwan.

There were some at the time who suggested the delay was to avoid embarrassing the folks in Beijing during the run-up to their Olympic games. That indeed seems (to me) to have been the case because the sale was announced a few days ago.

Now, as expected, the Peoples' Republic is in a snit over the whole thing. To retaliate, they have officially complained to our State Department and have canceled "senior level visits and humanitarian assistance/disaster relief exchanges" scheduled to occur by the end of November.

Wait a minute. They're backing out of disaster relief talks and our admirals can't talk to their admirals for a month? I don't know about Bush, but I'm sure quaking in my boots. This seems to be another case where they pretend to be upset and we pretend to care. Life goes on.

Anyway, I've always believed that the people of Taiwan should choose their own destiny. Whether they choose to remain independent or be absorbed by the PROC is a choice that only they should be allowed to make. But they'll have no choice at all if they can't continue to defend themselves against a neighbor who still considers them a "renegade province."

It took us a while, but we finally did the right thing.

Chungshan Bridge and The Grand Shrine

Did you know that the Grand Hotel is built on the former site of the Taiwan Grand Shrine?

Did you know that today's Chungshan North Road was originally called Chokushi Road?

Did you know that the road was built as a pathway to the shrine, in preparation for a visit by Japanese Crown Prince Hirohito in 1923?

Frequent contributor George Dean alerted me to this Wikipedia article that provides a brief history of the Taiwan Grand Shrine. Included in the article is this Japanese painting of the shrine. At the bottom of the painting you'll see the bridge that I discussed yesterday.

Chungshan Bridge Postcards

I sometimes poke around eBay for Taipei-related items and often find something interesting. My wife would probably say that I've found way too much interesting stuff over the years!

I found the second postcard of the Chungshan bridge in today's listings. You can see the Grand Hotel in the background in that one. Jim Sartor then tipped me off to the first photo, which was obviously taken many years earlier and there's no Grand Hotel. I think both were probably taken somewhere near where the entrance to USTDC used to be.

By the way, according to this website, the Grand Hotel rates 4-stars on a 5-star scale these days, but it's still a whole lot better than where I stayed when I first arrived in Taipei. There's also a rate table for the Grand and considering its upscale status, they don't appear to be all that unreasonable to me.

According to this article on Wikipedia, the hotel was originally built in 1953, but the version shown in the postcard was completed on 10/10/1973.

Trains and Boats and Planes

Okay, so nobody ever rode the train from the States to Taiwan, but Sarj describes his trip back to the States by ship:

This is the ship , the USS General W. A. Mann (AP-112), that my wife and I returned to the States on. We had quite a trip that took almost a month.

We stopped in Guam and my wife insisted that we go on a tour that the Navy was giving for a small price. I told her there is nothing on Guam to see except Gooney Birds (They caused a lot of problems there and are a story themselves). But as a good husband, I agreed.

The tour was conducted by a young Seaman and we rode on an old Navy bus (no A/C of course). We ended up visiting every bar around the island in order to get relief from the heat by means of a few beers.

The tour included a box lunch. You all know what that is -- an apple and a day-old bologna sandwich. Remember how good they tasted on midwatch? Ugh!

Anyway all the wives got upset and were in revolt and the trip ended sooner than planned. We returned to the EM Club at the base where all the smart people stayed in a nice A/C restaurant and lounge.

The night we left we went through a bad storm and had a fire on board. That was quite an experience.

I sent this thinking that maybe others, especially families traveled by this ship or another one to or from Taiwan. I know there were a lot of families returning on the ship we took.

I believe there were two ships that provided transport to and from Taiwan. Maybe someone knows what the other ship's name was.

It was exciting to travel under the Golden Gate Bridge on that big ship. You felt like you could almost reach up and touch it

Good story, Sarj. What about the rest of you? Did anyone else travel to or from Taiwan by ship? We Air Force guys flew most everywhere, of course, but the rules allowed you to request a ship for overseas travel. I never met anyone who took that option, but I'm sure there were some who did, especially in the 50s and 60s.

Still Here

It's been several days since I've posted anything here so I thought I'd let everyone know that I'm still on the planet.

When I started the blog last year, it wasn't unusual for there to be long periods of silence because I really didn't have much to share at the time -- no pictures at all and just a few fading memories of my 15 months at USTDC.

But as time went on, I started receiving occasional comments and photographs from readers and I posted most of them. During recent months, I was blessed with a real tsunami of great photographs from folks like Sarj, Stev, Les, Kent and many others, and they had some great stories to go along with them. The result was a new post nearly every day.

But things have slowed down again and I'm sort of back where I started. If I think of anything, or if you folks remember something long forgotten or find another box of photos or documents somewhere and email them to me, I'll be happy to get back to work.

In the meantime, if you haven't read some of the earlier posts here, you might consider going back to the first post from 7/17/2007 called "The Watch." When you get to the bottom of that one, just click on Newer Post and go on to the next one. So far there have been 295 posts so feel free to comment on any of them. I am notified whenever anyone comments on anything, as do all those who subscribe to this blog, so you might open a whole new dialogue here.

Hangin' in there,

Don