Dorm trouble and museum joy

The week following the Kant conference was busy with two presentations, one of which being on the interesting topic of ecology and animal rights in the Third Reich. It was hard for me to believe that the Nazis had more comprehensive and advanced animal rights than many people today. I don’t want to propagate Nazi ideology but instead shed some light on an issue that I personally found hard to believe. For more information check out the following link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_welfare_in_Nazi_Germany. ‘Göring prohibited vivisection and said that those who "still think they can continue to treat animals as inanimate property" will be sent to concentration camps’ (Göring was a Nazi after all). And of course these animal rights were passed in a nationalist and racist context, according to which the German people had it in their blood to love German nature…

From Wednesday, May 25 to Saturday, May 28 a gigantic typhoon was coming our way missing Taiwan by only a few hundred kilometers. This was the reason I got soaked three times in one day from head to toe despite my umbrella.

Songda heading towards Taiwan (upper left corner).

In that very week I watched a movie which I just have to share with you! ‘Lisbon Story’ by Wim Wenders is a German-Portugese co-production and captures some of the most beautiful scenery and atmosphere of Lisbon. It also portraits the role of film in general and gives some insight into the ways Europe is slowly growing into one. The movie is apparently not for everyone, though: Abhilash thought that it was quite boring but this could have to do with differences in our socialization.

During the last two weeks the situation in my dorm worsened tremendously. The floor I lived on has been stinking like sewage and mold from the beginning. It was also run-down, dirty and small. Accordingly, I lovingly gave my room the nickname ‘prison cell’. None of this had to this point been enough of a reason for me to move out. But then the dorm managers decided that it would be a good idea to renovate it (I agree!) and to start on the second floor which I live on. From that day forward my days at the dorm were accompanied by the sound of jackhammers, from 8 in the morning until 6 at night. The dust-filled air in the corridor was hard to breathe. And as a courtesy, all residents of the second floor were asked to use the bathroom in the 6th, not only for showering but also to go pee. There were several quite picturesque moments of me standing in the (public) elevator, dressed in my bathrobe, right next to a construction worker, external student or professor, toothbrush in my left, shampoo and towel in my right hand. The term ‘awkward silence’ got a whole new meaning. Now at that point I seriously had left my comfort zone and I started to complain to the management who was quite sympathetic. They took things in their hands and within less than a week they transferred me to a fancy renovated dorm on the other side of campus.

Old dorm

New dorm.

On Wednesday 25 May, Iri and I took Abhilash to his first night in a club. Quite intriguingly we went to the same club as the one I ranted about at the very beginning of this blog. This time all of us took full advantage of the open bar and danced until the early morning. It was Abhilash’s first time to drink alcohol ever, adding some irony to ‘full advantage’. He deeply regretted having tried it out the next morning. Still, I believe that ‘All non Asian Foreigners with foreign ID’ sounds pretty racist and that charging 350NTD for guys and 100NTD for girls pretty sexist. At this point I am really wondering where cultural learning and tolerance reaches its limits. Can anything be accepted as being ‘part of their culture’? Do I have less of a right to remark and complain about these things because I am an outsider?

Friday 27, I went to two museums. The first was the museum of contemporary art (MOCA). There was some pretty cool 3-D art, which can be best communicated by the pictures I took.

Having some pizza at the best pizza place in town.

Chung Wei

MOCA laser art

3-D art

My arm in the laser door.

Small picture exhibit, showing some of Taiwan. Here: population density…

In the Taipei museum of fine arts I had a striking experience. There was a Claude Monet exhibit with 31 of his paintings. I really liked him and was pleased with the simplicity of his water lilies. I found that the interesting thing about impressionist paintings is that when you are really close you see only a bunch of blotches, when you are quite far away the painting becomes one single blotch, only when you are at the right distance to the painting you get the truth behind the painting. This applies for all paintings, I guess, but it just became most apparent to me with Monet’s water lilies.

On the upper floor of this museum there were pictures of the last 100+ years on display. One thing to note was that the Japanese rule in Taiwan was very gruesome. One of the photographs showed Japanese policemen ‘civilizing the barbarians’, meaning that they posed with the chopped-off heads of some native villagers, including babies and children. This is only one part of the story of course, since the Japanese also built the university that I am at right now. The other thing that I became aware of again was that Taiwan is so incredibly, unbelievably, insanely densely populated. When you look at the official density figure multiply this by five and you get somewhere close to the reality of this country. Most of the island is mountainous, leaving only about 20-30% of the land inhabitable. The photographs showed the tight maze of streets that stretch from the mountains right to the seashore. I wish I could have taken a picture of that to show you.

At night I went to Chung Wei’s flat for a balcony hookah party. All the westernized and alternative folks of Taipei came assembled there. The police came at some point asking us to be quiet but being so awfully nice that it was hard to take them seriously.

Saturday I said good-bye to Irene whom I will see again soon in Berlin. Both of us were a little bit sick, so instead of going ice-skating we just wandered around Taipei at night, telling each other stories about the grossest food we ever had.