Sunday December 4, 2011

(see all photos at bottom of the post)

Haircut Adventures

I did some of the things I planned yesterday and added a couple more. First thing, I stopped by the Spot Taipei Film House to buy tickets for the 2011 Young Stars – New Vision dance performance. Unfortunately, the show was sold out. I could buy tickets at the Spot because the ticket counter there is part of the Arts Ticket system. They can sell tickets to most events in Taipei. It’s very convenient.

Event #2 for me was to get my hair cut. I’ve been going to the same haircutting place for years. It’s a typical neighborhood type of place – a barbershop, I suppose, rather than a hair salon. I went there on the recommendation of someone years ago, and as I approached the place back then, a woman came running outside and greeted me and ushered me in. She practically dragged me inside. I’ve gone back ever since.

It has an odd sort of location in a sunken concrete plaza behind the massive MRT administration building. There is nothing else there of a commercial nature. How they ended up there is a mystery. The only activity in the area is a bunch of kids practicing their dance moves. These kids get coiffed at fancy places, I’m sure, and wouldn’t be caught dead in one of these neighborhood barbershops. These barbershops cater almost exclusively to older men, who come in for a standard older-man haircut and a shave.

I like this place for very logical reasons that having nothing to do with hairstyles: it’s very close, it’s uncomplicated, the women take charge, and it is inexpensive. All these years later, the price is the same as my first cut: NT$170.

I generally am there quite early on a Saturday morning, and the place will be relatively full. Yesterday, I was there a bit later than normal, and it was empty. One woman was sitting in a barber chair and relaxing. Another was eating her lunch, and a third was just standing and chatting. A friendly brown poodle ran up to me when I came in – a bit of poodle love first thing in the day. Nothing wrong with that.

On all of my other visits, the women only asked me one thing – whether I want my hair cut above my ears or still have some hair over my ears. That’s all they need to know to cut my hair to the appropriate length. As for the style, it just doesn’t come up. I just want my hair to look the same as it did when I came in, just shorter. I always wondered, though, if that caused some confusion for the women, and this time I brought along a photograph. It was taken years ago, and I look much younger, but my hair is pretty much the same. In fact, it was taken immediately after having my hair cut at this same barbershop. I’d gone directly from the shop to a photography studio to have pictures taken for a new passport or ARC. My hair was a little bit more styled and coiffed in the picture than it normally is – all blow dried and shaped. However, the length was about what I wanted. I think it looks okay at that length.

With a bit of trepidation, I produced the picture as I sat down in the barber chair. I was a bit worried. I brought the picture because I was trying to be helpful. I was trying to make their job easier. However, who knew what effect the picture would have? Maybe they would think I had never been happy with my haircut, and I was finally driven to bringing in a photo. Maybe now that they had a model to copy, the cut would go all wrong – I’d have made them feel awkward instead of just cutting my hair naturally.

Whatever the women thought of the picture, it certainly made an impression. It practically caused a sensation. All the women rushed over to look at the picture and comment on it. They held it up beside my head and compared the younger version of me with the one sitting in the chair. A lot of amusement. They even showed it to other customers when they came in later on. Apparently, this technique was quite novel.

Bringing in the picture also seemed to change the way they cut my hair. The woman took at least twice as long and seemed to be much more deliberate and careful. I kind of felt bad about that. I had brought in the picture not to get the cut I wanted but really just to help them out. The effect of the picture was to make their job harder and make it take a lot longer. The woman didn’t seem to mind, though. She appeared to be enjoying herself thoroughly, and she looked at the picture often as she cut. Perhaps it was professional pride coming out, and she felt it was a challenge.

In the end, the cut was fine. I don’t think it was much different from the cut I usually get. I thought I looked okay in the mirror. Then, however, came the shampoo and blow dry. That is included in the price of NT$170 (US$6). I don’t generally need the shampoo, since my hair had already been washed that morning. However, it feels good. One thing I LOVE is that the women in Taiwan use their fingernails and scratch your head when they work in the shampoo. It feels so great. In Canada, the few times I’ve gone to a place where they shampoo your hair (MUCH more expensive), they used just their fingers and I hate that. Their fingers make this squeaking noise against wet hair and it makes me shudder – like the noise of a squeaking balloon. I can’t stand it.

After I got my shampoo, the woman blow dried and styled my hair. The result of that was not to my liking at all. I guess it was how my hair looked in the photo, but it isn’t usually what I like. I don’t know how to describe it, but it was brushed completely back in a curl. If it was greased, I’d have looked like a gangster. It’s just too coiffed that way. I knew that this would disappear after the first day, though, and I complimented the woman’s work as much as I could when the cut was finished and it was time to go. I always feel the urge to tip these women. The cut is so cheap and they do such a good job. I did tip them once, and they didn’t know what I was doing. It just caused confusion.

2013 World Is Over? at MOCA

Next on my list of amusements for the day was MOCA (Museum of Contemporary Art). I walked there down the underground pedestrian mall that runs alongside the MRT line. There are often exhibits along this tunnel, including a photography exhibit. The photographs change quite often, and the most recent exhibit was of photos of Taiwan. They seemed to be part of a competition based on the theme of “The Beauty of Taiwan.” Most of them were of sunsets and sunrises, a type of photograph that never does anything for me. I think the world has enough pictures of sunsets. There were a few, however, that I liked, and I wondered where they were taken. Unfortunately, the signs were in Chinese and I couldn’t read them.

It was opening day for the new exhibits at MOCA and entrance was free. There was also an area set up with coffee and snacks. Unfortunately, no one was dishing out the coffee yet. It must have been there for a ceremony of some kind later on. The main floor of MOCA was given over to a solo show by Taiwanese artist Chen, Shun-Chu. Most of it consisted of photography. He had taken old black-and-white photographs – the typical family photos from the sixties and seventies that anyone living in that time would have – isolated one detail and then reproduced that detail on white tile and placed the tile beside the detail on the photo. It was an interesting effect, but it didn’t add much to the photo in my opinion. I liked the photos simply because I like photography, and I love to see photographs of bygone decades. I like them just as a visual record of how things used to be. I suppose he had turned these photos into art with this technique, but I’ll leave that to art experts to decide.

Much more interesting to me was the exhibit on the second floor. It was called 2013 and was put on by the Second Soul Graphic Arts Society. The theme of the exhibit was “World Is Over?”, and it consisted of paintings, sculpture, and digital installations commenting on the coming end of the world in 2012 and the post-apocalyptic world of 2013. It was very lighthearted and colorful and upbeat, perhaps not what you’d expect from art about the end of the world. However, this was the end of the world from a comic book or pop art point of view. There was, in fact, an entire wall covered with what looked like pages from a comic book – some kind of superhero techno-rabbit called “Bounce.” One painting had road signs from the future warning us of dangers – knife-wielding maniacs, ghosts, angels, rats, and poisonous air. The road signs also told us what was forbidden: eating dead bodies, burying corpses, shooting people, and, I believe, drinking blood.

 

Travelling on the Silk Road

After MOCA, I went to 85 degrees for a cup of coffee and to plan my next event. I’ve been amassing literature on things to do in Taipei, and I put the whole bundle on the table in front of me and started leafing through it. I decided to go for something new, and when my coffee was done, I hopped onto the MRT and rode it up to Shilin Station to visit the National Taiwan Science Education Center (NTSEC). There was a display there on The Silk Road. It’s running from October 29^th until January 29^th.

The NTSEC turned out to be quite a large place and it had many exhibits, some of them traveling exhibits and some of them permanent. It was a confusing but every interesting place. I say it was confusing because all the exhibits are on different floors and you have to buy tickets for them individually at kiosks that are set up outside. I didn’t realize there was so much going on there, and I had the idea you’d just buy a ticket for the whole place. I could easily have walked up to the wrong kiosk and bought a ticket for the wrong exhibit. By luck, I had gone up to the Silk Road kiosk and got a ticket for the exhibit I wanted to see. At NT$250, it was a bit pricier than I had expected, but, to be honest, it was still a bargain. How many people would spend more than that to see some crappy movie? For the same price, you get an exhibit like this.

The lobby area of the NTSEC was very interesting. It consisted of a large open courtyard. The ceiling above this courtyard was the roof the building itself, so it was open all the way up eight or nine floors. The entire western wall and ceiling was made of glass, so there were great views and lots of light. I took the escalators up to the seventh floor where The Silk Road was located. From the escalator, I got amazing views of the courtyard. There were a couple hundred people seated there and listening to a presentation about the The Silk Road. Also, there were two steel cables strung across the courtyard four or five floors up. People could strap themselves into a special bicycle and ride across this cable like tight-rope walkers.

The Silk Road, as everyone knows, was not really a road. It’s the name generally given to a series of trade routes that connected Asia with the Mediterranean and European world a thousand years ago. This exhibit was a kind of hands-on exhibit. Walking through it was designed to mimic the experience of traveling along the Silk Road itself starting in Xian, China, going through Turfan and Samarkan, and ending in Baghdad. Right inside the door, you are introduced to your transportation for the journey – two fully-loaded camels. Some of the exhibits centered on the products that were traded along the silk route, such as silk, perfume, and glass. Others focused on the cities you passed through and what you could experience along the way – the food, the music, the terrain, the accommodation, the religions, and the people. As much as possible, the exhibits not only gave you information but also recreated the travel experience. As you looked at a display of products for sale in the market, you heard the sounds of a typical market. At a display of musical instruments, you could push a button to hear the sound of each instrument. Push them all, and you heard them all playing together. Open the tops of the clay urns, and you could smell the various spices and perfumes. Walk through the desert, and you were walking along actual sand and feeling forty-degree hot air blowing on your face.

It was a Saturday afternoon, and so the exhibit was pretty crowded and cramped, but this only added to the experience for me. The crowds felt real – as if I was experiencing the hustle and bustle of the Silk Road itself. I even picked up one of the camel-shaped passports and got stamps at all of the stations along the way. It was quite fun. I have to say it fed my ever-hungry travel bug and gave me thoughts of visiting some of these cities.

Dinosaurs and Sharks in 3D

Across the road from the NTSEC is the Taipei Astronomical Museum. Since I was in the neighborhood, I thought I’d pop in there for a bit of reconnaissance. I ended up staying for two movies in the 3D theater in the basement. I might not have done that except that they had convenient ticket vending machines lined up outside. The next showing of Dinosaurs: Giants of Patagonia was starting in ten minutes. It was a simple matter to push the right buttons, and after feeding in my NT$100, a ticket for the show popped out. The show was less than an hour long, and there was a showing of Sharks in 3D right afterward, so I got a ticket for that as well.

The theater and/or the shows didn’t seem that popular. There were only a few people – all of them new parents with young children – milling around in front of the entrance in the basement. They had IR receivers for anyone that wanted to hear the movies in English and I got one of those. I was pleased about that. The theater was great. It was large and had one of those massive screens – not quite Imax but close enough. The seats were comfortable and though the sound from my IR receiver was not the best, it was clear, and I could hear everything that Donald Sutherland had to say about the dinosaurs. The 3D was pretty pointless, in my opinion. In fact, I found it worse than pointless. It was annoying. Maybe my eyes and brain don’t process the 3D images like they are supposed to. Occasionally, I’d get the sense that something in front of me was in 3D (usually words), but most of the time, all I saw was blurry images. And the glasses were the cardboard kind and they cut into my ears and otherwise were uncomfortable. I found the 3D technology so obtrusive that it interfered with the experience of the film. I’d much rather watch it in nice, sharp normal 2D. Sharks in 3D was much worse. I loved the movie itself. Who doesn’t love a good nature show about sharks? However, the blurry images seemed very inferior to the crisp and sharp images you get in 2D, especially in a modern digital theater. I also got the impression that the filmmakers shot footage for the 3D experience. So one gets a lot more empty time in which the sharks and other sea creatures are just swimming around. The idea is that you’re supposed to be enjoying the wonder of the 3D. If you don’t really get the 3D, you’re just watching extended sequences in which nothing much seems to happen and not a lot of information is coming across.

It was quite a laidback experience at the 3D theater. I don’t think they ever get big crowds, and the people taking tickets were quite casual and friendly – more like your neighbors inviting you over for a movie night than a museum exhibit. I’d go back. I might go back today to see something in the IMAX theater.

Well, I didn’t manage to get tickets to the dance performance, but it turned out to be a pretty good day. A successful haircut, a trip down the silk road, and some 3D dinosaurs and sharks. Oh, and some poodle love. A pretty good day.

[slickr-flickr tag=”Silk Road” type=”galleria” sort=”date” direction=”ascending” items=”50″]

 

Tags: Haircut Adventures, job, MOCA, MRT, NTSEC, Silk Road