Taiwan

by Paul Winter

Green green green, everything in the countryside of Taiwan is green except the water buffalo. They are black. Can you find one in this picture? The entire side-head-neck of the brute is visible. His outline is surrounded by a predominately light background.

Although, I am most drawn to the countryside, my first experiences in Taiwan were in the capital. When I moved to Taiwan in 1974, I spent my first few days in Taipie. This city wasa flood of hand-painted movie billboards.

The downtown of my eventual destination, Taichung was a bit more tame.

I lived a half block from the main road out of town. This is it:

We had a few fields on our neighborhood so things seemed a little country.

It didn't take long to find the real country.

Real country was mostly fields.

Of course you can always find the oriental in little temples and big Buddhas.

I was in Taiwan to advise the Chinese Airforce (ROC) how to care for and use these things:

The Chinese would put them on airplanes and fly around. I loved Taiwan and I had a lot of toys to play with at work.

When I was in jr. high school I developed switch lust. I truly believed that the more switches you had under your control the happier you were. But even better than a lot of switches were knobs. Look at all those knobs. I even had a spectrum analyzer. Even if you don't know what that is, it sounds cool.

Our operation had a high priority so we could get everything we needed. But the best stroke of luck was that my neighbor was in charge of the US Air Force calibration lab that shared the same base with the Chinese. I could get everything under the sun from a calibration lab and did. It was like having the best electronics store in town where everything was free.

That was an interesting base. They flew fighters from F-100 to F-4s. The first night there, I joined the only other man in the US officers club for dinner, an F-4 pilot. We really hit it off and he dropped my jaw as we parted when he told me he was the base commander. He turned out to have some wonderful surprises for me during my two years working on that base.

That would be the longest amount of time I spend in one place during my eight years at Hughes Aircraft. I setteled in and built a coffee table from a beautiful piece of root wood.

The dog is Charlie, the smartest dog I ever had. Charlie knew more words in Chinese than I did and was learning English rapidly. Once I found a tick on her while we stood by the field of tall grass she liked to run through. I said, "if you go in there" I pointed to the field, "you will get these" and held the tick under her nose. She gave me a very angry look meaning as if to say, "why didn't you tell me that a long time ago?" She never went into that field ever again.

Eventually, I traded my home made coffee table for one I designed and let the local furniture company produce. I liked mine better. The rest of the furnishings was my first attempt at decorating. Although the tables I designed came out well, the color scheme was a scream, but the texture of the fabric was fabulous.

The great outdoors in Taiwan were dramatic with steep mountains and monoliths on the coast:

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