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.

The First Week - DF to Taipei

I am arrived.

I narrate, before I forget, although I'm sure I've forgotten all the really interesting things.

Saturday 1st Sept


檢視較大的地圖

All night I pack, but mostly I burn mp3 cds (my third generation ipod broke down and is unfixable this day and age) and print out maps, directions, schedules and potentially useful information on hotels and train stations. Finding information on Hualien in english is tough and i find the same information about the same three hostels over and over again. I've emailed a couple of the hostels asking if they have vacancies for monday evening, when I land in Taipei. They haven't answered so I'm thinking I'll stay in a hostel in Taipei and go to Hualien the next morning. I email a third hostel.

I print out some key emails I've received from George who lives in Taipei. He's a friend of a friend of a friend's dad. That's four degrees. There's fifth degree acquaintances in Hualien which I should meet in the future. The world really is quite networked. George is going to pick me up at the Taiwan International Airport in Taoyuan.


Sunday 2nd Sept, early morning.





I am lined up outside the United Airlines desk at the Mexico City International Airport with Vic. I look for asian faces. Soon there's one behind me. I wonder... not really my type though, she's about 10 years too old for my broad and flexible requirements... she's maybe in her late forties...

I have two carry-on bags and two bags for documentation. Of the latter the wheeled one is about three kilos too heavy, the other one about eight too light. We move some stuff over to the lighter bag, it's not me who's gonna carry it now anyway and when we arrive I can move them back.

We have starbucks coffee in the food court. Friends and family arrive at this unbearable hour, don't they have anything better to do? oh well, it makes me happy.

I line up at the idiotically long security check line outside the boarding gates. Two kids scream incessantly and try running away. Do they enjoy the attention? Are they victims of abuse? Are they being kidnapped? Does anybody care? (Yes mr. security guard, speeding up their entrance through the crew-only line is completely fine by the rest of us, thank you)

Finally the line crawls forward and I'm lost already; which of the long corridors should I take? I choose randomly. I choose correctly.

I'm in the airplane sitting by the aisle. A fidgety teenager sits at the window. Luckily no one sits between us and I can ignore the world.

Morning






I wake up in San Francisco. We all line up at immigration.


"Why do you want to study chinese?" the inspector asks.
"mmhh... they say it's the language of the future" I say faux naively -shall I tell him the truth that I have no clue what I'm doing?
"Who's they?" he asks.
"...everyone... (duh)" I say.
"Everyone?"
"Yeah, you know, business magazines and all them."
"Are they learning chinese?" he asks.
"Gee... I don't know... I guess you have a point there" I say, not adding "officer dickwad."

And so he sends me to secondary revision. Great.

"Good luck" he says and I just want to blast that smirk off his face with my bare knuckles.

I wait in secondary revision.
And I wait.

Then I talk to this guy whos asks really open questions and I explain my life story. He doesn't interrogate me any further and lets me through. Nice guy really.

I have about three hours to kill. I buy the New York Times, the last one I'll see in a long time I bet. I buy this book "The World Without Us" and, from the asian bartender at the mexican bar, I buy a Sam Adams I do my best to drink in no fewer than two hours . I fantasize about running into somebody famous. I fantasize further about running into one of those cult figures noone else I know has ever heard of. No such thing happens.



In the paper I read a review of the book I just bought. "I'm so smart" I think, "choosing such a great book based on the cover". But in truth it's Jon Stewart who chose it -Alan Weisman, the author and a gloomy looking man, was just on his show. He says if mankind was to suddenly disengage from this existence our cities and the worlds we've built around us would soon be reclaimed by nature, the new york subway would soon crumble. Lexington avenue would soon be a river again. Cockroaches would perish soon after they finished off all the trash we leave behind for them. So scratch that cockroaches-survive-it-all urban myth.


It's time for the flight to Taipei. I get on the plane. It's big. I'm in the aisle of one of the middle seats. Across the aisle this cute girl smiles at me. Then her mom smiles at me. I focus on my mp3 discman and my reading material.

I get a choice of some chinese newspaper and the Wall Street Journal. I fear I'd expose my stupidity by asking for the chinese one so I ask for the WSJ and through the space between the seats in front of me I ogle the layout, pictures and bizareness of the chinese paper of the guy sitting in front. On my right are about four empty seats and then some western dude with a goatee. He has the same book I have on Taiwan. It's a different edition, with a different cover, but it's the same book. We don't speak.

Almost everyone's chinese and through the speaker system they say way more in chinese than in english. The plane lifts off and I think I've crossed some point of no return. I wonder what would happen if I started freaking out asking to go back home. Then I remind myself I'm actually doing this out of my own free will... then I revisit deterministic arguments against free will...

For lunch, and dinner, we have noodles and they're good. I warm up my chopstick skills. I listen to Boxer from The National, Our Love To Admire from Interpol (I just heard the ridiculous story that they're called Interpol because Paul Banks had the nickname 'Interpol' as a kid) and Crazy Itch Radio from Basement Jaxx.

Monday 3rd, 5pm




The flight is good. We arrive and I'm not even tired as all the naysayers say I would be.

We get off the plane and I reach the immigration area. Immigration is fast, easy and stress-free. It's exactly the same process, fill out a card and line up to see the inspector. The inspector here asks no questions. Then again, he doesn't say welcome either or anything remotely similar so he might not really speak english and he'd rather not tire his vocal chords and try his patience trying to communicate with me.



Evening






George is right outside the arrivals area and I don't have to carry my luggage far to the parking lot.

His car is nice. It has a screen above the audio system that I suppose is standard around here. The highway(s) we take on the way from Taoyuan to Taipei are nice. Nothing special about them except they're not fucked up and we're not used to such professional work in Mexico. As we approach the city I start seeing way more scooters and bicycles. Quality pavement is crucial with this sort of traffic.

George takes me to a Korean restaurant. The food is delicious. Spicy meat and vegetables that I have no idea how to order later. In our table is a charcoal grill where they bbq our meat. It's really good.


Soon I am intoxicated and it's not mainly all the chinese I hear, or the nonstop spiciness of the bbq, or the strangeness of Taipei or some new age awareness that's taking of hold of me or rather the bbq which is really, really spicy, it-s mainly that I've gulped down the pain with generous amounts of the local lager favorite: "Taiwan Beer". That's what it's called. "Taiwan Beer". It's not a very creative name I suppose and the look of it is heineken-bizarro, but the taste is as good as any other and they give you a small glass you have to constantly refill if you don't want to sip it like some fine tequila.



We call a hostel and they have no vacancy. George has insisted all the while that I stay in this hotel he knows where his friend (i.e. my third degree acquaintance en route to George) stays when he's in Taipei. What can I do? I give in.

I need taiwanese currency and we stop by an ATM. It has an option for English and it further motivates me to learn chinese as quickly as possible. You'd think a bank would take translation work a little more seriously than the t-shirt makers.

I withdraw a few thousand NT$ (which stands for New Taiwanese Dollars) and realize that easier than converting the NT$ amounts to US dollars is converting straight to mexican pesos (the ones we stopped calling 'new' -and writing N$- over a decade ago) by dividing by three. So NT$9,000 corresponds to $3,000 pesos. Converting to US dollars was a burocratic algorithm anyway, multiplying by three, or dividing by three, and dividing by ten or a hundred.... or multiplying by 32 which is the same as 2 to the power of 5 so just doubling the amount five times. It was fun math, but not very efficient and just as (im)precise as dividing by three to get the peso amount.

NT$33 is approximately equal to $11 pesos which approximately equals $1 US dollar.


So we go to the hotel where an Indian father and son are trying to check in with the wiry attendant. I don't say much as George does most of the talking and the two Indians seemed intrigued by me. Eventually I take my passport out and stamp it on the desk where they can see it so that they have a conversation starter and they can stop staring like I'm from some other planet.

We get some beverages across the street and say our farewells, next time I call him up I'll speak some chinese we say. I click through the cable channels, there's at least four crappy looking talk shows of the same sort that dominate mornings on public television in Mexico or the US, so unable to decide on the unappealing asian or american porn I end up moving on to CNN or some other newschannel in english with which I promptly fall asleep.

A History of Taiwan in Comics

Yo quiero.


http://www.thirdnature.com.tw/project/books/index.htm?s_id=107