Where?

I’ve been living in Taiwan for two years now (wow, seems just like yesterday when I first arrived), and yet there are so many things of culture and everyday living that still get my attention and spark my curiosity.

One of the many is the love that Taiwanese have for 7-11. This is not some light-top-of-my-head thought, nope, it is a result of observing said relation over these past two years. This past month, that relation has only been reaffirmed.

I had mentioned before the current promotion of 7-11 and what the “prizes” were. Well this week was the last week of said promotion, and the last week to exchange the obtained points.

As I waited patiently for my friend yesterday in front of the Starbucks located in front of my university, I saw it fill up faster than I have ever seen it fill during a semester weekday. The line reached the side walk and kept on for a bit more. It had so many people that the people attending the counters had to devise a manner to get them better organized. After a while or so, they announced that they were out of something which I failed to clearly understand, but that they would offer something else. This did not discourage a single person, and the line kept building up. If you observed closely you could see everyone in that line had a sticker booklet from the 7-11 promotion, some even had two or more.

But Starbucks wasn’t the only one having all the fun, Coldstone in downtown Hsinchu had also a line that kept on outside the establishment, and an employee taking orders outside to speed the process up. Mr. Donut wasn’t left behind either, with dozens of costumers trading in their sticker booklet for donuts.

I imagine the other places that offered some prize had a similar flow of costumers, but I haven’t yet observed those.

The point here is how wide spread and deeply rooted 7-11 has become in the Taiwanese culture in such a (short) period of only 30 years. It is part of so much everyday life in Taiwan. It is possible to find a 7-11 everywhere in Taiwan, from one in just about every street in Taipei, to small rural areas and all way down to the southern parts of the island. A 7-11 store here serves much more than just foodstuffs, it goes so much further to be a place where you can literally pay every single bill, from water to electricity to your university tuition fees. It serves as a mailbox and I have even seen a lady take a package to 7-11 to send it somewhere.

Imagine how entangled it has become, that a national music group even made a song about 7-11.

I think (and this of course is only an educated guess based on observation) that the 7-11 industry can only be comparable in size to that of the Tea Bar industry. This one really awes and amazes me, how popular and addicting it can become, I myself have become a fan of it.

To those of you who don’t know, the term Tea Bar is a bit misleading. They only serve specialty teas, anything from cold teas, flavored teas, milk teas to hot teas of a wide variety and some even coffee (though I think this one is more recent). What makes this more incredible (in some aspects) than 7-11 is how almost 20 tea bars can all have buisness and survive in the same street. Sure, they each have their own specialties and styles, and I think that’s what keeps them afloat. I find that their survival and success if far beyond simple, it is in fact a complex balancing act of prices, quality, size and variety, as well as tradition.

You can find everything from the low end in prices to the high end, but they don’t always reflect quality. Allow me to illustrate. One certain tea shop has and extremely good red tea (or black tea) and yet, for 700cc they’ll just charge you 15nt$ (which is less than $0.50), whereas, they’re are some teashops who’ll charge you more for such a tea and honestly it won’t be worth it.

One of the higher end tea shops, whose prices I find are some of the highest, among the ones I’ve gone to, is 50嵐 (or as I prefer to call it in english “50 mystic clouds of the mountain”) and yet, you’ll find it filled with clients on a weekday around the lunch hour, why? the quality is superb, and their teas are just wonderful. I personally love their ice cream tea.

Tea shops or bars, have become so indispensable, that you’ll find at least one in every university campus (ours has about four). Of course, 7-11 is not left behind, and every campus is also equipped with one.

Nevertheless, I’ve strayed from my point. The thing is, Taiwanese culture never ceases to amaze me, to surprise me, and I honestly think it never will.

Cheers, NM

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They floated there, the ballons, tied down like captive bubbles.

They looked at me, so tempting, so inviting.

Maybe I took one too many…

Maybe not enough.

But if they take me to you, it’s all that matters.

Cheers, NM

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The wind blew strongly from the sea..

yet they all held fast to their ground.

Only their huge arms gave in to the winds’ desire…

only thier arms… and my hair.

Slowly, slowly it dies away

but it does not go with out a fight,

with out speaking its mind,

without leaving it’s mark in the world,

it paints the sky in oranges and gold

it damps the air in breathes of summer’s end

and warm glow.

Cheers, NM

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“An art aims, above all, at producing something beautiful which affects not our feelings but the organ of pure contemplation, our imagination.”
-Eduard Hanslick

I love the serene look of a person contemplating, thinking, lost in their thoughts, and with their eyes lost in their thoughts.

Recently, I drew some small sketches with this idea: a person, a girl, contemplating. I really like how they came out, they had that serene look I really like.

Now, the other day that I was at a bookstore, while browsing the art section, I came upon this curious thing: a paperpen, yes that’s right. And as the name says, it is a pen made of paper. Now, I wondered what it was for, so naturally I bought it

Paperpen

I remember how years ago my mother had taught me to use a piece of paper to blend color from color pencils on paper, so using the same idea, I started experimenting with the paperpen on several pencil drawings. After using the paperpen on pencil, the result was a much smoother image, the shadows blended better, and instead of having obvious divisions of light and dark, using the paperpen helped blend that line and give it a better transition, which is rather nice.

Let me illustrate what I mean:

Here is one before the paperpen:

notice the rough lines and shadows. Now, here is the finished one:

Notice the difference?

Here are others I made the same way:

Hope you enjoy them.

Cheers, NM

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So, here in Taiwan, 7-11 has a tendency of having lots of promotions every few months. Recently, it had it’s 30th anniversary of being in Taiwan, and of course, it made a promotion: for every 30nt$ you spent, it gave you a point, when you collected 30 points, you could exchange it for one of the several things they offered, among them dounuts and starbucks’ drinks.

Now, I have a friend who has always said she likes 7-11, stating it is our BEST friend we took this lightly… until yesterday when talking about collecting points and how many points we each had.

This is my other friend holding up all the points she had collected:

7-11 points

In total, there were 137 points.

so we ended up eating dounuts and drinking a frapiccino in Starbucks’, which was really nice ^_^. I only managed to snap this shot after the dounuts were gone

yum! donuts and frapuccinos

Cheers, NM

p.s.: hopefully, from now on, cellyphone pictures will be less I finally got new bateries for my cam!

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