The First Week - Taipei to Hualien

Tuesday morning

I wake up early, with plenty of time to catch the train or bus to Hualien. The hotel will begin serving the complimentary breakfast till about an hour later though, so I clean up and go out for a walk with my whatever-you-do-don't-lose-these documents. I reckon I have time to visit the Mexican embassy (or as mainland China would want you to believe and as most countries that defer to their nomenclature call their diplomatic outposts, shoulders shrugged: the Mexican 'commercial liaison office' or 'trade and investment office' or some such nonsense).

The hotel is on the north of the city, just a few blocks north of the main road crossing east-west so I start walking towards the sun and like johnny walker just keep going east, away from the river and the main railway station, and towards Taipei 101, the tallest building in the world -these days, although there's plenty of taller buildings in the works, including several in, of course, the United Arab Emirates.

The city is clean. It's also empty when I first leave the hotel and over the next hour or so that I walk into the livelier part of the morning it fills up as the crowds start flushing out of their buildings, getting ready for work or school, dodging the drizzle that comes and goes, threatening to materialize into something heavier.

When I get to Taipei 101 I'm told at the information booth on the ground floor that the building I'm looking for is not in fact the Taipei 101, and thta my building is only a couple blocks away. There's scores of school kids in the lobby, crammed into asphixiating rows in the otherwise deserted lobby. I wonder if such massive school trips occur the torre latinoamericana in df or at the empire state building in nyc. They probably do, but what for? are geography classes being imparted? it's sort of ludicrous I think. I suppose though that as a part of those herds any excuse is good to get out of school. Were these kids even heading to the observation deck?

I consider going up myself, but I don't have all day and I gotta keep walking. When I get to the right building, the right floor and the right door I ring the buzzer. A female voice answers in chinese (or swahili or hopi... I cannot be certain) and I answer "Buenos dias" and something like "are y'all open for business?"

She groans "No, we're closed. we open at 11" (or whatever the office hours printed on the glass door behind me were).

"Oh. OK... Bye". I look at the guy next to me. He doesn't look Mexican. The door opposite of the Mexico office is for the Argentina office. The guy still isn't looking any more latin.

Back on the first floor I line up at the coffeeshop. I ask for 'kafei' and point at a sausage-in-a-croissant. She asks me something I don't understand so I point at the picture of a coffee & sausage-in-a-croissant meal on the colorful counter menu. It works.

A third of an hour later I return to the Mexico office and the asian dude is inside, speaking in foreign to the asian looking woman on the other side of the glass pane. When they're finished I approach her in spanish and she unexpectedly lights up and tells me that the consul hasn't arrived yet but I can fill out some of my contact information for them.

Later, the deputy director of this enterprise arrives and leads me into his office a few feet inside, past two desks with cheery asian women. The woman from the counter walks by to the cubicle next to this one and as she sifts through paperwork on the desk her complete attention, from the shoulders up, is on our conversation. I feel like an emissary from La Nueva España, taking a detour on the nao de china -the Manila Galleon- to bring good news of peace at home and booming trade between our lands.

The guy is from Acapulco and has been here for two years. He tells me about a recent film festival they didn't submit any mexican films for, not in time for the festival people to do the subtitling. I tell him I could help him out with that, get him some films or contact info of filmmakers or film distributors through my peeps in df.

He tells me they'll be hosting a cocktail party to celebrate the mexican independence on some coming wednesday.

The consul might be a while, he says, I'll tell him about you, he says, you might wanna get going. I say 'okay, buh-bye' and I move on.

It's almost noon and if I want my free breakfast I should take a cab back to the hotel. If I walk for an hour before getting on the subway again I won't make it. So I look for the 'Taipei City Hall' station I got off at.



There's basically two main subway lines. I think of them as the x and the y, or the horizontal and the vertical, or the red one and the blue one. They both intersect at Taipei Main Station, which is just south of my hotel and close, although not the closest of all the stations. There's a few more lines but they seem shorter. The fare minimum is NT$20 and goes up in increments of NT$5 with distance. The ticket machine gives you a chip, blue poker-style chip, that's loaded with your payment information -I suppose they're RFIDs. To get in at the turnstiles you tap the single-use chip on the RFID reader (or your card for multiple trips if you have one).

On the edge of the subway platforms are long translucent walls preventing absent-minded strollers, or really lazy potential suicides, from falling in. The trains slow down carefully when they arrive, matching the position of their doors with the sliding gates on the platform walls.

The cars, like the stations and the city streets, are clean. Taiwanese subway drivers are smooth.


I arrive at the hotel about two minutes too late for the complimentary breakfast.

I check-out, hail a cab and show the driver the symbols for Taipei Main Station in my pocket-sized notebook.

The train time-tables have just enough english for me. There's several kinds of trains going to Hualien, some faster and more expensive, some slower and cheaper, some sooner, some later. I line up to buy my ticket. I ask for 'Hualien'. They ask for money. It works and they give me a ticket for the next train which leaves in about an hour.


I go down two floors to the platforms to wait for the train. I leave my luggage and go back up one floor to 7-eleven and ask for a hotdog. They don't understand me so I point at the sausage on the 24 hour electric grill thing they have at every 7-eleven. She smiles, comprehending and gives me a sausage. Uh, how do you say buns in chinese? ugh, forget it, I'll take it.

Back on the platform I pick up a forgotten newspaper and dread someone making conversation with me while I'm holding the chinese newspaper so I soon go back to my book (a thought provoking but ultimately unsatisfying pop psychology book on east-west cultural-cognitive differences).



Trains and passengers come and go. An older woman sits next to me and makes intermittent conversation and I feel as if I should stop reading my book and try to raise the bandwidth on our conversation. I decide against it; I still have a long time wait ahead of me and if she's leaving on the same train I am it could become a long and excruciatingly boring wait as closing my book would make it all the more awkward later to cut short our frustrating conversation to get back to reading and I'd be forced to sit there blank-faced.

She leaves on an earlier train and through her mangled english she tells me as she's leaving that she lived seven years in New Jersey.

Fuck. Seven Years. And english is 'easy'.

A train arrives just at the time my train is supposed to leave and I get on hoping for the best.

The ride is about three and half hours long since the train makes about ten stops. It's a scenic ride. The first leg of the trip the train heads northeast, to Keelung on the coast, and then it just follows the coast, through Yilan and a bunch of other smaller places.





Tuesday Afternoon

The last half hour of the trip I'm freaking out at every station cause I can't be sure that I've recognized the 'Next station: Hualien' announcement on the speakers and I'm not sure I can drag my luggage a full car length to exit the train in the minute-long stops the train makes. Then, as the time on my cell phone becomes the ETA on my ticket I hear through the speakers, in perfect english: "We are now arriving in Hualien. This is the last stop."

Outside the station I hop on a cab telling him I want to go to Tzu Chi University, once again mispronouncing Tzu Chi because I don't actually know what the correct pronunciation is. I show him a doodle on my notebook and he takes me to Tzu Chi Hospital. Luckily he understands me when exasperated I reprimand him, waving my hands dramatically, screaming 'No, no, no, no', pointing at the Tzu Chi Buddhist Temple I see a few hundred feet down the road and tearing my hair out to get my point across. What I'll do when I get to the temple I don't know, but it's the one landmark I recognize from a picture on the school website.



We drive up.