Dawn in 大安

Writing this, I have arrived at the island of Formosa, the adopted home of the Republic of China (中華民國) as well as the Taiwanese people. I intent to stay here during the fall term, as I complete part of my studies abroad.

This journey (as planned) will be the longest time I have been away from home, amounting to a rough 2% of my then-lived lifetime. I have always been a part of a very internationalized family, with Oslo and Berlin holding especially fond places in my heart. But thinking of being away from Stockholm, I am nonetheless filled with a sense of yearning in my heart:

Of cities I know in the world

Thou are the city that has it all

Through the Malar’s love to the sea

A mixture of salty and sweet.

Last year, while I was visiting the prc, I was tasked to photograph everything I ate while I was away. This was a wonderful idea, and one that I wish to adapt to my longer stay away. For this aim I have created a sub-blog, generated with similar tooling as that of the main blog. It can be found at https://joarvarndt.se/food/, with the landing page showing one meal for every (Gregorian) calendar day. This is automatically generated by a small Emacs lisp program building on my use of my own fork of org-static-blog. This means that each entry is itself a full post, that I could theoretically fill with entire essays if I wished it. Head on over and check out if anything looks tasty, right now there are

(message "%s posts (last updated %s)"
         (length (directory-files
                  "~/Documents/blog/food/posts/"
                  nil
                  directory-files-no-dot-files-regexp))
         (format-time-string "%B %d, %Y"))

3 posts (last updated August 12, 2026)

for you to look through! If you want to subscribe to these (short) posts, I have created a dedicated rss feed for that.

It is developed as a subproject to the main blog using git, and so the two are heavily interwoven with each other. The css stylesheet of the “sub-blog” even @import-s the main blog stylesheet, only changing the few parts that need custom tweaking. That way the small, incremental improvements and opinionated changes I make to the main blog’s design will automatically carry over into this project.

I have some expectations written down privately that I plan to go through once I return, an inspiration from a friend who recently returned from a time in the orient. Hopefully these will be interesting to cover once I finish my time here. My initial impression is that it is quite similar to the mainland¹ but still distinctly different. How to describe these differences I do not yet know.

One wonderful surprise is how every receipt is a lottery ticket as part of a scheme to incentivise people to demand them, and thus make it harder for businesses to avoid taxes. It is interesting to see how one can use the otherwise destructive tendencies exploited by gambling for a noble cause.

So far I have been very warmly welcomed, and I look forward to a great time familiarising myself with this foreign country and its people.