Twenty years ago I visited Taipei. I was there because I’d been invited to give a talk at a technical conference.<\/p>\n
While I was in Taipei I visited the national museum, which was breathtaking, and a former student of mine also took me on a tour of street vendors. On the way there, he told me about something called “stinky tofu”, which was considered a delicacy by his countrymen.<\/p>\n
When we got to the place where all the street vendors were, I was overwhelmed by the powerful aroma of the stinky tofu. In particular, it smelled to me as though a thousand people had removed their shoes at the same moment on a particularly hot summer day.<\/p>\n
As politely as I could, I asked if we could leave the area. Fortunately, my former student was very understanding.<\/p>\n
I know for sure that this was twenty years ago, because exactly twenty years ago today, on March 19, 2004, during my visit to Taipei, the President of Taiwan, Chen Shui-bian, was shot — just one day before the presidential election. There was a great uproar, with huge crowds filling the streets, and thousands of people watching the continual TV news updates that seemed to be blaring from every storefront.<\/p>\n
I remember the events of that day very well. But mostly I remember the stinky tofu.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Twenty years ago I visited Taipei. I was there because I’d been invited to give a talk at a technical conference. While I was in Taipei I visited the national museum, which was breathtaking, and a former student of mine also took me on a tour of street vendors. On the way there, he told … Continue reading “Stinky tofu”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26327"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=26327"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26327\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26328,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26327\/revisions\/26328"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=26327"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=26327"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=26327"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}