Taipei 101

This is currently the tallest building in the world, and they have an observation deck on the 91^st floor. You have to pay NT350 to go up in the elevator to the indoor observation floor, then another NT100 to actually climb two flights of stairs to the outdoor deck. We did both. There was a bit of haze in Taipei today, so the views weren’t that great, but still pretty good.

We had a crazy taxi driver on the way, who, once he figured out we were Americans, wanted to talk about the state of world politics. I thought this was going to go one way, and we would have to apologize for our ass-clown of a president, but it went in a completely other direction, when he turned out to be Christian, and started quoting chapter and verse from the book of Revelation. Taiwan traffic is pretty cutthroat, and your first few times in a cab kind of take your breath away with what seem like close brushes with death. Then they guy taking you close to death starts spouting prophecy. Evelyn tried to engage him a little bit, and argue that maybe the Buddhists and the Dalai Lama don’t actually worship the devil, and I just stared out the window, mostly, thinking how this would make a funny story.

The elevator is amazing – it takes 37 seconds to go from the 5^th floor, where you get on, to the 89^th floor. Your ears pop on the way, and they have a display showing you how fast and far you’ve moved. It tops out at over 1km/min. By the time you realize what you’re looking at, the ride is over, and the attendant is ushering you off the elevator.

You also get to see one of the stabilizing weights they have in the building, which shifts position to offset the effect of wind on such a tall structure. This supposedly reduces movement of the building due to wind by 40 percent. There are two other similar structures in the building, which you don’t get to see. This thing weighs something like 660 tons.

From the top, you can see how small Taipei actually is, and how it’s occupying essentially an entire plain between sets of surrounding mountains. These mountains are really more like hills, and in Seattle, I imagine they would be developed, but there are just trees here. No idea if they’re protected, or nobody’s interested, or what. We managed to pick out the park near Ev’s apartment. The only real vertigo inducing moments were looking at structures attached to the outside of the building through the windows. That, and looking up at the spire from the outdoor observation deck, which goes up another several hundred feet, I think.

Vegetarian Beef Noodle Soup in Taipei

Beef noodle soup is something of a national dish in Taiwan. It’s thick noodles (that I probably would have called udon noodles in a Japanese dish – that kind of consistency and size, if you’re familiar with them) with a few vegetables (cabbage, mostly), and a few hunks of beef in a semi-spicy broth, to which you add more chili to spice it up to your taste.

But, there being plenty of Buddhist restaurants in town, it stands to reason that someone makes a vegetarian version. Ev’s roommate Jenn is also vegetarian, and she found the place, and we all three met up there after Ev and I went to Taipei 101. A tiny little hole-in-the-wall restaurant with three tables and a kitchen at the front. A very nice woman cooking, and the soup was excellent. I had a second bowl. Fake meat kind of weirds me out (in more ways than one, I don’t really understand the point, but other people like it, so whatever), so I shared that with my dining companions and just ate the noodles and veggies. We were already sweating from the heat of the weather, but sweated even more from the heat of the chillies.

And, outside at a business down the street, there’s a pig. A big fat actually pig, who lives in a tiny bamboo enclosure on the side of the alley. She looks far too fat to actually stand up, but I am told she’s been seen walking. So, say hi to the pig, and get some veggie beef noodle soup.

How to get there (since I know you’re all on the next flight, after hearing all this):

Take the MRT to the Chiang-Kai Shek Memorial Hall station (or get dropped off by a taxi there). Exit through exit 2 (there are about 8 exits, take the one marked exit 2). Now, on climbing the stairs, turn around 180 degrees, then take the first left onto the road. Take the first left into an alley. Now go down the alley, and take the second right into an even smaller alley. Go down the alley about 2/3 of the way, and it will be on your right. If you see a pig on your left, you’ve gone too far.

It’s a fun place, and then you’re right near the CKS memorial hall, which is probably on your list of sights to see anyway. Go see it, and once you’ve seen the statue, sit on the steps and watch kids play in the giant plaza where there were once no doubt military parades.

The ubiquity of English in the rest of the world

The Taiwanese use English as an unofficial second language, with varying degrees of success. If locals use the English translations on signs to learn English, it explains a lot. They all sound like machine-translations. But, never mind the signs, what interests me are the t-shirts.

A significant proportion of the young population wears some sample of English on their t-shirts. Some of these have simple grammatical errors like subject/verb number agreement, and you can easily see what was intended. Chinese has no agreement between subject and verb, so it’s also easy to understand why this is a common error.

Some, however, just don’t make any sense at all, and you have no idea what was intended. Word salad – with seemingly random words, and sometimes random isolated letters – English can have “a” by itself, why not “k”? Even when something is grammatical or a near miss, though, it often just makes no sense anyway.

Occasionally you see something that is just wildly inappropriate for a t-shirt, and you figure the person has no idea what it actually says. This morning in the park, on a girl who was maybe 12 or 14, I saw this: “Purefuckin Canadian. Born in Canada. Made in Italy.” (Give Google a week or two, and this post will surely be the only hit in the world for the phrase “Purefuckin Canadian”.) (Maybe not – maybe this is the hot trendy new brand.)

And a few days later, a guy on the MRT had on a shirt with sillhouettes of a donkey and an elephant. The elephant's sillhouette was filled in by an american flag motif. The donkey was ... mounting the elephant, from behind. The caption said, "F**cking syndicate". Now, nobody hopes more than I do that this November, the Democrats give it to the Republicans straight up the jacksie, so to speak, but I have no idea if that's what the guy meant. I doubt it, but who knows?

I can’t get pictures of this phenomenon without… well, walking up to someone and taking a picture of their chest, which will certainly have unintended consequences, whether they’re good or bad.

We’re both lucky and unlucky speaking English as a native language. On the one hand, we have no trouble understanding discourse in the common language of commerce and culture, or at least understanding why it’s unintelligible. On the other hand, we never had to learn it. People will say that English is the hardest language in the world to learn, which isn’t true – it’s all a matter of how different it is from your native language. It’s really close to German, and a really long way from Chinese, which has tones, no number agreement (and if I spoke more than about 15 words of it, I could tell you all kinds of other things that are different.) Since we do speak the international language natively, we tend to be (more than) a little lazy about learning another one, with irritating consequences. Imagine how the immigration debate would be different if basic fluency in Spanish, which is our second national language, were required for a high school diploma? I’m not talking ability to write essays, just a basic thousand word vocabulary beyond “¿Donde esta el baño?”

The bright side of trying to learn English here is there’s no end of opportunities for one to practice listening ability, as recorded examples of native speakers speaking it are cleverly disguised as Hollywood movies. (And they all have Chinese subtitles, if you want to see if you were correct.)

It also makes for a great opportunity for work for native English speakers. White ones, that is. Ev's native speaking roomates, who happen to have asian ancestry, couldn't get hired by the English schools. But, the minute you walk in with a white face, you're hired, I'm told. They told me about a German guy, who learned all his English in Taipei, who managed to get hired. Irritating that this bias exists. I assume the schools are catering to the biases of the parents of the students.

Wonderful Town

Typing this in the airport, and will post it when I get to an inet connection in Bangkok. 5 days wasn’t enough. This is a really fun city. Lack of Chinese ability is so much less a problem than one would have thought. A fair portion of the population speak enough English to get by, and many of the signs are translated well enough (but only just). I really envy Ev having had a chance to spend the whole summer here. Now to invent a thesis topic that requires a year of fieldwork, and I can come back! (This isn’t likely with comp ling, but computerized translation services between English and Chinese wouldn’t sell poorly, on either side of the pacific. I’m sure someone is working on this.)

The heat wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. I melt in Seattle when it gets above 85, and figured I’d be miserable in Taipei heat, but you get used to it pretty quickly. You just drink a lot more water, get used to your clothing sticking to you a little bit, and really appreciate being inside with air conditioning.

In the airport, I was stopped by this young woman (who claimed to be a university student, but would have fit in my backpack easily, so might have been 6 years old), and asked to take a survey about Taiwan's English environment, by which she meant "how easy is it for tourists who have no Chinese to get around and spend money here?" I gave them mostly good marks, and she was very excited that she could check the box for "American visiting friends" - I was the first she had found. She gave me a pen for my troubles, which has a pull out map of Taiwan in it - it actually pulls out from the side of the pen.

The flight out was uneventful, and I had an actual window seat this time, so I was able to see things (I flew out in the middle of the day.) I saw some sort of atoll in the south china sea as we flew over, with a small island at one side. I think I could see, from 30,000 feet that it was inhabited, with a harbor. The water was all light blue-ish green around it.

Night Market

Night markets are a big part of life in Taipei. This is when street is kind of blocked off (blocked off, but not to scooters), and shops open, and vendors set up shop in the middle of the street, and a zillion people show up to shop, watch other people, and just wander up and down. Picture a hippy street fair on steroids. This is capitalism at its most unfettered. The vendors in the middle of the street are supposed to have permits, but none of them do, so they travel light, and if and when the cops show up, they pack up and take off quickly. We saw this happen with a bag merchant. Probably enough merchandise to fill a small store was packed up by three people and carted off in a matter of minutes.

So, we went to the biggest one, the Shilin market (there are many scattered throughout town.) People were selling food, clothing, plastic crap, more food, cds, dvds, more clothing, even more food, etc. There is a separate section that is mostly food and games (like carnival style games – shoot the balloons, toss the ring around the bottle, etc. One of these involved catching live crayfish with a hook – maybe then you got to eat what you caught?) I’m told the food isn’t actually very good, but it looked and smelled good in that street fair lots of salt and grease kind of way. We were pretty sure there was nothing vegetarian. After that, you cross a few streets to get to the actual market, which is a very close street and lots of even closer alleys running off to the side. People mill through at a slow pace. People ride their scooters, some to deliver goods, some no doubt just to look cool. I would have had a better time, but I eventually just got really sick of the scooter exhaust. At a market like this in the states, I would have felt like people were constantly trying to take advantage of me (“Carnie” isn’t an insult for nothing), but only rarely did anyone bother us here. They no doubt figured they’d have just as much of a language problem as we do. I don’t know why we weren’t targeted as tourists, and subjected to the usual tourist scams anywhere in Taiwan (perhaps we were, but it was so skillful we didn’t notice, but I doubt it.)

There was one (I’m guessing really intoxicated) gentleman who really wanted to show us his ten words of English, over and over again and loudly. I kind of got the impression he wanted an English teacher, but he had so little English it was hard to tell. He was friendly enough, but awfully insistent on something. I just don’t know what it was.

There was one disturbing moment, which was a beggar on the sidewalk, who was missing at least one hand, and, I would guess from his behavior, part of his mind. He seemed to be violently bowing to everyone over and over again, from a sitting position - I thought he was hitting his head on the pavement. I must have had a stunned look on my face, as Ev turned to me and said, "There are no social services here. None." It wasn't a happy moment. If you can't fend for yourself, and your family can't or isn't willing, you starve to death, it's that simple.

Random Stuff II

Scooters, again.

These are everywhere, like I said earlier, and they all have 2 cycle engines. I suspect they are responsible for much of the haze over the city. They can get stinky when it warms up, and you’re out on the street on a weekday during rush hour. People sometimes wear these little cloth masks over their face while they ride, and they wind up looking like stormtroopers or something. This is almost always women, and you can find masks at lots of stores, often with fun designs on them. At the cat store I mentioned, they had them with a cat design.

Umbrellas Parasols

People carry umbrellas here, and use them against the sun. The problem is, this puts the points right at eye level for me. Ev has picked up this trick as well, and has many times poked me in the side of the head with it, and many more times nearly done so. People are worried about skin cancer, I presume, but I bet they’re even more worried about the color of their skin. Skin whitening creams are advertised heavily here. And the most common cosmetic surgery in the world is apparently “fixing” the eyes so they look more Caucasian.

Escalators

It’s a pretty firm rule in Taiwan that on escalators, if you want to stand, you stand on the right, leaving the left lane open for people who want to walk up. This is important for traffic in the train stations. It’s pretty rare to see a native forget.

Taxis

These are really cheap. A ride across town takes 100 - 200 dollars. The same train ride costs $20, but if the trains aren't going your way, this doesn't work. Taxis patrol the city, and it's really easy to hail one. But, it's best if you have someone write your destination in chinese characters. If I were a business hoping to draw tourists, I would publish prinable cards on my website, that people could print out and pass to the cab driver. Ev's roomate Patty wrote on a card for Ev something like "Hi, my name is Evelyn, and I'm very nice, and I live at xyz street, this district, the third alley back. Can you please take me home?" Drivers read it, look puzzled, then laugh. The official advice is for women to never ride in a cab alone at night (this by the way is essentially the only safety advice for anyone in any guidebook), but if they must, make a show of having a cellphone, and talking on it while riding. Make a show of writing down the cab number as well.

National Palace Museum

This is apparently the finest museum of Chinese art on the planet. I’m amazed the nationalists managed to get this much out when they were fleeing – according to the brochure they gave us, they only got out a small portion of the art collection the government had amassed at the time - this is the collection that the nationalists took over from the Emporer when he left the Forbidden City. The Emporers had been "collecting" (appropriating) art for centuries, and until the revolution, nobody got a chance to see it. They have a collection of 650,000 objects. We messed up and thought the museum was open until 1900, but they tossed us at 1700. We finished the ceramics section, which was often amazing. This is well worth the trip to Taiwan, but save a few days for the whole thing, and maybe don’t go on the weekend. It’s normally $100 to get in, but a friend of Ev’s had two free tickets they gave us. (That’s how cheap the tourist attractions are here. This same museum would be 20 bucks in the states, and you’d be assaulted by requests to become a member, donate extra, etc. - at 1700, they wanted us out, and even chased us from the gift shop. The zoo was $30, roughly one American dollar.) [IMG4424] [IMG4428]

But, there is a garden in front of the museum which is open later. This garden has a giant koi pond in it, and they helpfully will sell you a packet of koi food for $10. This is great fun. If you drop the pellets in one by one, the koi will line up with their mouths wide open, and you can see right down them. If you throw in a handful at once, you get a feeding frenzy which lasts 15 or 20 seconds. They swim on top of each other to get the food. Some of these fish are giants, several feet long and colorful, and some are tiny, dark ones. You can look into a patch of water, and not realize that there are fish there, until you drop food in, and the previously indistinguishable darkness resolves itself into individual fish, and the water seethes. This kid figured it out, though, and brought his own packet, about a thousand times the size of ours. This was hours of entertainment for him, I bet. [IMG4457]

I can’t imagine the oxygen demand in that pond.

Afterwards, we happened to walk past a vegetarian restaurant (get the vegetables and noodle soup – nice, salty noodles and broth. Total bill for both was about $140). After that, we found a store devoted to all things cat. It was called www.meow.com.tw, and it had cats singing the classics (like 40s show tunes), and had horribly cat things in it, and a helpful salesperson who wouldn’t leave us alone. By horribly cat things, I mean backpacks and slippers with cats on them. And so on. No picture of that, but here is a picture of a Body Shop clone called “Skin Food”. [IMG4467]

Then, we could have done the night market, but it was getting close to 2000, and I was starting to fade out again. We barely made it back home, and I feel asleep on the couch. At some point, though, I was awakened for a weekly ritual, garbage day. In Taipei, the garbage truck comes once a week, and waits on one side of a block. He plays a tune that makes Ev’s roommate Patty say “Ice cream, ice cream!” and the whole block brings their trash out to him. Now a block here is many tall (6 – 12 story) apartment buildings, so this can be quite a crowd, and I’m told it can turn into a block party, but it wasn’t much of a party this time. I finally got put to bed, and they all stayed up late packing. I think Ev is ready to head to Thailand, luggage-wise.

Daan park

This is in the middle of Daan district. It’s sometimes written Taan, sometimes Daan. (If you're curious, see the first comment for my explanation of why this is, so I don’t bore the rest of you with linguistics.) Evelyn and her roomies live about a block from this park. Saturday morning, I was jetlagged and up early, so went running in the park, thinking, hey, it’s 630, I’ll have the place to myself (as I would in a Seattle park). I get there, and there are hundreds (and by hundreds, I mean thousands) of people there doing various forms of exercise. Mostly calisthenics, which I assume is Tai Chi. It was often large crowds, sometimes in matching uniforms, performing moves to recorded music from a boombox on the ground. I had always thought of Tai Chi as being a slower, more deliberate set of moves, but some of these people were doing something that I, had it not been a giant group of Chinese people in a Chinese city park, dancing to Chinese music, would have called “Jazzercise”.

There were also lots of people bicycling, walking their dogs, and I even saw a few runners. I now know that in this climate, Chinese people actually do sweat, which made me happy to know. There’s a set of basketball courts (which was being used), an amphitheater, a large jungle gym area, etc. In the interior of the park, in which I haven’t yet been, there’s a “ecological pond”. Not sure what that is, but I may investigate tomorrow morning. I like me some urban parks.

Jerry, these guys were playing a little later (about 8AM). The guy in the grey tank top and his teammates were really good, taking the other team to school. Behind the back, no-look passes, hook shots, jump shots from outside. Ev tells me the courts are in use late into the evening as well. Next time you’re in town, bring your Shaqs, and you can talk six-year-old trash to them.

Taipei City Zoo

Yeah, so we’re dorks. We flew all the way across the Pacific to go to the zoo.

This was at the end of an MRT line, from which we got to see lots of Taipei, which was fun. Zoos always are a little depressing – nobody really wants to see animals in jail. The indoor exhibits were shamefully bad – sad looking owls and mammals either sitting and staring into space, or pacing their enclosure. Surely a city of 8 million can do better than this. My favorite was the raccoon. That’s right, an ordinary raccoon, the kind that knocks over your garbage and gets run over by cars. He actually seemed kind of at home in the bare concrete enclosure. Looked like a carport to him, I’m sure. Context is everything – I’m sure that our zoo in Seattle has plenty of things that people from other parts of the world would scratch their heads at: “Why put that in a zoo? I see that all the time.” (I have the same reaction when people get excited seeing deer, which used to run over the grounds of the filter plant like rats, and I saw every day. I came to see them more as a traffic hazard than as interesting wildlife – if you see one, slow down, ‘cause they always travel in pairs.)

Anyway…the outdoor exhibits were considerably better. The tropical waterfowl exhibit in particular was great. I think they just had a low spot they didn’t feel like spending the money to drain, so they enhanced kept the people out and let the birds go nuts. The birds looked quite happy, from a distance of a quarter mile.

The herd animals, the tropical ones anyway, seemed fine. I wasn’t terribly happy about the penguin exhibit. These were mostly indoors, but there was one lonely, hot penguin in an outdoor enclosure at 27 degrees (I have a very blurry photo to prove this.)

They did have the most extensive exhibit of apes I’ve ever seen, which considering the proximity to their native habitat, maybe isn’t that surprising, even considering the lack of resources. So, counting the people looking, we had all six apes in a several block radius. Not many places in the world can say that. I love siamangs (and I like to think they love me back.) I love the way they swing from branches, and when they want to investigate something on the ground, they still keep one arm on a branch. Even when walking across open ground, they do a swimming motion with their arms. I also like the noise they make, which in the Seattle zoo can be heard a half mile away.

I wasn’t terribly happy about the display of chimps, but what can you do? Zoos have to create interest in conservation essentially by exploiting the animals to a degree. The exhibit was pretty small, but they do have a successful breeding program, and lots of information (accompanied by stereotypically Asian cartoon versions of chimps, explaining their endangered status.) The gorilla exhibit was pretty hard to see, surrounded by a concrete moat.

Also, we saw a pile of hippos. A pile of hippos will make anyone happy. It made Evelyn especially happy. Here is about 50 tons of Hippo.

We tried to hit an Indian restaurant on the way back, but it was closed. Instead, we went to a stand on the way to Ev’s office that served something like donuts that looked like giant pills. Those were quite tasty and cooked in about a minute while we watched. We finally went to a dumpling/potsticker shop that was at the main MRT station. That was really tasty, but I wasn’t enjoying it much, since the jetlag was catching up to me. We made it back to the apartment and I passed out about 2030 local time, and Ev stayed up and packed all night. She and her roommates are vacating the apartment (Ev to Thailand with me, Patty and Jenn back to the states), so everyone is packing boxes to ship back.

Random stuff

7-11:

7-11s are ubiquitous in Taipei. It’s where you go to get another bottle of water (your last one having lasted you an hour), and seaweed flavored potato chips (yummy! You can also get seaweed-sushi, chicken, and pork, among other flavors.)
Anyway, when you buy enough stuff there, they give you a prize. Kind of like cracker-jacks. These prizes are little refrigerator magnets that feature cartoon characters. Anyway, they work quite effectively, since Evelyn is now ga-ga for these things (everyone who’s surprised at this news, raise your hand. No? Nobody? Thought so.) Of course, they made them into a series, so you have to collect them all. The series she’s working on has a cat from the future, and also from outer space. His name is Doraemon, he’s blue, and very happy, and is afraid of mice, since they nibbled off his ears at some point. Sometimes he wears a propeller beanie. He has a little cat friend and also a little boy he’s friends with. Anyway, he likes to visit other countries, so you get a magnet with him in the Netherlands, or Thailand, or whatever, with some local flavor on it. And the competing convenience store chains do the same thing, with different cartoon characters. So far, this and the scooters (see below) are my favorite things.

Money:

Everything is in NT$, or New Taiwan Dollars. There are about 30 of these in an American dollar, and there is no smaller denomination. I don’t know much more, since Ev has all the local money (she gets paid in local currency), and I’m not bothering with trying to get some myself. Which means she has to buy me things! Getting a few bottles of drink and some chips at the store costs 89 dollars, which is about 3 bucks. Getting a plate full of pot-stickers from the pot-sticker restaurant in the train station was something like $50. This also leads to initially shocking notes on the kitchen walls like: “I need 700 dollars back for pasta night!”

Scooters:

There are a lot of scooters here. I mean, this place has scooters like Seattle has Subarus. Intersections will have three or four car lengths’ worth of scooters lined up at red lights. There’s a special painted box on the ground right at the crossing where the scooters can wait. I’ve seen plenty of scooters with two people on them, and one with three – an entire family on one scooter. They are ridden expertly – things I wouldn’t attempt on bike or on foot they seem to handle without noticing. Onto and off of the sidewalk, darting through small gaps between cars, through construction zones, etc. People here must just pay a lot more attention to their driving, since I haven’t seen anything bad happen yet. Just lots of what look like really close calls. One person had a helmet painted like a ladybug. Here’s a picture Ev took of helmets earlier, where we see several of these.

Cars:

A large portion of the cars here (and nearly all the taxis) are Toyota Corollas. There are also several brands I haven’t heard of, including the Delica, which I think is a sub-brand of Mitsubishi (it’s got those little diamonds), some sort of mini/utility van. Almost everything is the familiar Japanese brands, sometimes with a local name. There are a few Fords, mainly these miniature vans that look more like smartcars than Fords. They’re really narrow.

Air quality:

So far, this isn’t so bad. Better than I expected in a city of 8 million people. Not great, but not Beijing, either. Occasionally you walk through a pocket of something that smells horrible, but then it’s gone again. In general, it kind of smells like the Twin Cities: humid. I’m probably fooling myself, and I probably inhale the equivalent of a pack of cigarettes every time I run, but that’s okay, I can quit whenever I want, and all the cool kids are doing it.

People:

Either friendly or ignoring you, which is the best kind of host, in my opinion. I’ve seen a few ass moves on the part of car drivers, but people on the street completely ignore us or smile a little if you catch their eye. Shopkeepers are really friendly, and all speak enough English to get us by. I’ve seen only one acknowledgment by people that we’re different so far, when Evelyn overheard a group of teenagers say something about the white lady, she turned to look at them, and they all got embarrassed, and whipped out their English skills: “Hello! Hello! Hello!” and smiled and waved. I got looked at a few times when I was out running in the mid-day heat, but that happens at home, too. At places where we are supposed to negotiate the price, we may be getting the white price, but it’s hard to tell. One woman who couldn’t speak English numbers just tapped out a price on her calculator and showed it to us.

Peace, two fingers:

Whenever Taiwanese people pose for a picture, they do a thing with their hand which looks a lot like our peace symbol – extending the first two fingers on the hand, while keeping the others in a fist. You’ll see this in lots of pictures. This isn’t the rabbit ears you do behind someone’s back while they’re having the picture taken, or the way we usually do the peace symbol, which is with the bottom of the hand showing forward. The back of the hand is the thing that’s presented. (Update: since writing that, I’ve seen a cartoon frog on a stamp doing this the other way. So, no idea if there’s a right way.)

China Air Flight 21

So, if you’re flying on China Air’s redeye to Taiwan, and you discover that it’s an Airbus A340, make sure you don’t get seated in row 10. This is the only row on the plane without a window. No idea why – some structural thing. Not like there’s an escape hatch or something, just that the wall is blank. Now, it’s the middle of the night, and there’s nothing to see anyway, until you land, but if you aren’t going to be seeing out the window, you might as well get an aisle seat and a little more leg room. Because on this plane, leg room is non-existent. I’m 5’8”, and I usually don’t find planes that cramped – taller people are miserable in coach, but while I’m not comfortable, my legs aren’t scrunched up, either. Not so on the ChinaAir A340. My knees were at less than 90 degrees the whole way. And the flight takes 12 ½ hours.

Now, I would advise you to bring lots of water with you, but that’s not allowed now (I think it will soon be allowed to buy water inside the terminal). I had to ask 3 times for more water, and each time it came in a Dixie cup. I was pretty thirsty by the time I got off the plane. The side effect of this dehydration is that I only got up to use the restroom twice, both times just because I felt like a walk.

They do have quite an entertainment system. It was like having a tivo in your seat, with 30 or 40 movies and 10 or 20 (mostly Taiwanese) television channels. Embarassingly, it took me three full hours to figure out how to control it (about the time I figured it out, I discovered the instructions in the seat pocket). There’s a Nintendo controller type thing, and… just because I quickly figured out how to start and stop the currently playing movie, but not how to change the channel… well, I was forced to watch Mission Impossible 3. Sumner Redstone is right. (Once I figured it out, I watched movies all night instead of sleeping – at some point, I was doing both – Thank You For Smoking is well worth seeing.

One more thing about China Air, then I’ll move on. We took off at 2AM. Immediately on reaching altitude, they turned on really bright overhead lights, and served breakfast. Not sure what the rationale for this was. All anyone wanted to do was sleep. This lasted about an hour, then they finally turned off the lights. And Jerry, I owe you another beer – never once on this international flight was I offered any alcohol. Flights to Europe have it all over flights to Asia in this respect.

Anyway, on (finally) landing, I wandered out from my gate and followed the crowd. I needed to get my automatic visa/stamp/whatever (American citizens are allowed to be here for up to something like 70 days without a visa.) Things were going well until I found immigration, got in line, only to be told after I got to the front that I needed to fill this form out (not available anywhere else, so far as I know - back to the back of the line) then on going through the line again that I was in the wrong terminal. The immigration guy was nice and alert enough to point out that my luggage was in the other terminal, and I should go to immigration there. You can take the SkyTrain to the other terminal. This was very exciting, since I like trains. But, it ended after a few hundred meters. That was the SkyTrain. Connecting two terminals, that already had a long hallway with a moving sidewalk connecting them, together. Anyway, I finally picked up my luggage, the customs guys made a little fun of me for being so late, and I emerged to find a worried Evelyn! Yay! There is a system of private bus companies that will take you into town. We picked out the cheapest one (I think this wound up being a few bucks, but Ev has the local money, so I’m not sure.) So, after getting downtown, watching parts of what I think was “Crash” on the in-bus dvd system, and a few MRT transfers (an actual Sky Train!) we made it back to her apartment, where I met her roommates, Jenn and Patty, who she met teaching at the Princeton review. I had to go running as soon as we got back (this was still only about 9:00). There’s a nice park called Da An park right near their apartment, with nice biking and running trails around and through it. Despite the heat and humidity, this was pleasant, and I saw lots of things:

• A giant ad for Yahoo on the side of a bus which consisted of a smiley face with devil horns.
  
• A bunch of birds that kind of resembled pigeons with really long tails in a tree making a bunch of noise at each other. This sounded like a mix of some bird that has a really whistley-musical call with the caw of a crow. Each bird was making all these noises, and as soon as one started, the others immediately chimed in, and the whole thing was over after a few seconds.
• Something I tried to see, but only succeeded in hearing. In certain trees, something is making a hell of a racket. I thought it was birds, but never could see any, so my theory is that it’s insects. Ev thinks it’s Cicadas.
• A bunch of old men playing croquet on what has to be the toughest croquet course ever – divots, potholes, burned patches on the lawn. The lawn itself is mostly closely cropped weeds.
• A lady selling sun hats on the sidewalk.

Water tastes really good here, and you can easily go through many bottles a day of it. In the afternoon, we went to the zoo. More on that in a future post. I probably only got about 2 hours of sleep on the plane, so by the evening, I’d been up for almost 2 days. I was trying to stretch it, so as to sleep when it’s night here. I finally passed out about 2000 or 2030. And now it’s 3AM, and I’m wide awake typing this.

Leaving in a few days...

...going to join Evelyn in Taipei on 8/25, then we move on to Bangkok on 8/29. We'll see where we wind up from there. We want to see Angkor Wat in Cambodia, and we want to take the train south through Malaysia to Singapore. Other than that, we're open to suggestions (though of course we want to see lots of neat things in Thailand, and I don't fly back until the 17th of September, so there's lots of time.) State department tells us not to go to Indonesia, so that's out (Bali will have to wait until we get along better with the rest of the world). Ev will be staying a week and a half after I come back, and potentially going to Vietnam.

I'm trying to pack ultra-light, figuring if I've forgotten anything absolutely vital, I'll just buy it there. I'm thinking of it as an adventure in minimalism. Last international trip I made (northern Europe), I was easily the lightest-packed person, and I still never touched half the stuff I lugged across the Altantic. That was six or seven years ago, and of course I wrote none of those lessons down.

Evelyn hasn't posted on her blog for awhile, despite our admonitions, but I'll try to keep this one more up-to-date on our adventures.