TheNHBushman.com

Photos by MJ Klein

Hui-chen and I rented a red Dodge Charger in North Carolina and headed to the panhandle area of West Virginia. We had a meeting with a customer and then headed to my favorite destination: Cabela’s!

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Today we are very happy to bring you a guest article by Carrie Marshall, of My Several Worlds. Quite frankly this is a little embarassing for us, but we’re going to run this story as-written because Carrie and John are such good friends. So please join us in welcoming Carrie as one of our guest authors!

Here is Carrie’s article:

The time has come for me to write a guest article for MJ, and I could think of no better time to do so with their next trip looming just around the corner.

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Reader Shan has shared her personal photographs of 921 with us!  You gotta see these to believe them.

Hui-chen and I have been very busy, so the picks and even our feature articles have taken a hit somewhat. The truth is, I am very concerned about my father. My sister called me and told me that I need to come back to the US for a visit “before it’s too late” - the call that we all dread. So, Hui-chen and I will be leaving shortly for the US and we’ve had to do some major planning to get things done before we have to leave. One of those things includes scheduling a 10+ ton shipment of parts to the US. Naturally, we will have some new articles of our travels in the US, so don’t think the blog will just go dead during our absence! On the contrary….

It seems that many blogs are light on material lately. This is probably due to the gorgeous summer weather that is coming to countries in the Northern Hemisphere. That certainly is true for Taiwan. So I’ll get on with some quick picks to give you something to read, and then I’m going back to the grill!

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Photos by MJ Klein

Recently I’ve been hearing people say they are going to “barbecue” something over the weekend. Naturally this is the time of year when people spend time by the grill, enjoying the outdoors.  But, is that really barbecuing?

Here is Taiwan “BBQ” is a common phrase for grilling food. Often I’ll walk into a grill restaurant and the staff will start parroting “bar B Q, bar B Q” trying to communicate what they do (as if having grills on each table isn’t clear enough). Normally I reply by saying “no, this isn’t barbecue” but because of the blank stares, I give up.

So, what’s the difference anyway?

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I just want to remind everyone that the new forum is up and running here at TheNHBushman.com.    It started off with a bang the first day.  You can make it better by contributing to the discussions there.  Feel free to continue blog topics there too.

The direct URL is: http://www.thenhbushman.com/bbs

Photos by MJ Klein

Hui-chen and I were in Nantou and we basically stumbled upon the 921 Memorial Park in Mingjian. Actually it’s not exactly named that, but that is precisely what it is - a park dedicated to the memory of the 921 earthquake. 2,416 lives were lost in the 7.3 magnitude quake that occurred at 01:47 local time. That’s after midnight, folks. I’ve been in quite a few earthquakes, and some of them big enough to be frightening but can you imagine being awakened by a huge earthquake in the middle of the night? Surely the high numbers of people lost were due to the fact that they were home in bed when their building collapsed.

The 921 earthquake has special meaning for me. I first traveled to Taiwan in April of 2000. I visited some sites in Taichung, at the northern end of the fault line and personally saw the destruction and also some of the repair efforts underway. I will never forget looking at a landslide while someone told me that there were several hundred people still unaccounted for, and they were presumed to be buried under the landslide.

This photo is of what is called (in English) the Tilting Electric Tower. It’s a fitting memorial to the earthquake and demonstrates the extend of the damage. This tower is the centerpiece of the park, and I took a short walking tour of the park with the specific goal of reporting on it. So please join me as I take you thorough the park and we get a closer look at it’s features. But first, I want to show you some historical photos I took in 2000.

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Photos by MJ Klein

With this gorgeous weather, I was up on the roof grilling my dinner last night. Of course, I had my Nikon with me.

We see gorgeous sunsets like this all the time, but the view is always ruined by wires.

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Photos by MJ Klein

I was exactly one year ago today that I took this famous photograph:

I think it’s safe for me to say that I do not accept the results of the official investigation: “pilot error.” In every photograph where the position of the rudder is able to be determined, it is in the same position: “left.”

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We’ve all known about Twitter of course, since it first appeared on the scene. I checked it out long ago and decided that I didn’t want people to know what I was doing at any exact second. This is mainly because I’m a privacy freak and Taiwan is a rather small place. It would be fairly simple to deduce where I was at any given moment with some instant notification system. It’s bad enough that I have a blog and make announcements where we’ll be sometimes.

Well, I caved in and signed up for Twitter because, if nothing more, it appears to be a good way to build blog traffic. Twitter is still on a probationary period with me though. It remains to be seen whether or not I use it. Facebook hit the bit bucket for me a few months ago. Let’s see how Twitter fares.

My twitter URL is http://twitter.com/thenhbushman (of course).