Taiwan Blog Feed

If you’re still reading this blog, I’ll have to count you among my true friends. Or I should be thankful you haven’t cleaned out your RSS reader.

A few weeks after I returned to L.A., for the purpose of applying to an internship I furnished When in Roam as proof that I have a blog, but I qualified the attachment as languishing — the “plight of travel blogs whose authors return home.”

That’s what I did, and that’s what explains the silence. I returned home.

I’ll be honest. You missed out on quite a bit — an entire city or two, in fact. Blame it on burnout.

Beijing-bound
After several weeks bumming around in Shanghai, I realized with a start one characteristically lazy afternoon in Leslie’s apartment that I had less than a week remaining in China. With that, I grabbed my bags (and dutiful friend Karen) and hopped the fast train to Beijing. The fast train taking 10 hours and the slow train taking 12.

Little did Karen and I know, our farewell Papa John’s the night before in Leslie’s living room left us all with a little parting gift: some throat bug that spent a day or two sprouting tentacles in our systems.

After reaching Beijing, I touched base with Leslie, who with an appropriate amount of misery complained of a sore throat. What a coincidence; I had one too. Oh, and for that matter, so did Karen.

And so I spent my last few days in China trying to make the best of Beijing, a city I had never before been to. I had a choice: party hardy, or sleep well and get myself right. Turns out I mostly chose the latter. In fact, I was mostly better by the time I spent a day climbing the steep inclines of the Great Wall at Mutianyu — but that’s what did me in, again. I spent another day bedridden after that, swilling Gatorade and popping Tylenol capsules like Flintstone’s chewables.

Was it worth it? I’ll be PC and say yes. The truth was, the Great Wall was exactly as I had imagined it, and not particularly breathtaking for it. Nothing like the Grand Canyon, at least.

If anything, Beijing played the role of foil to Shanghai. Where Shanghai sometimes seemed overly concerned with how cosmopolitan it was — and by that I mean how many Japanese department stores it had — Beijing was the city with actual culture on the streets. I had heard the word “culture” bandied about before in association with Beijing, but I assumed people meant “history.”

It’s not just that. It’s young people. Young people. Who seem to enjoy dressing well, and hanging out, and doing things young people do. It’s old people too, with their pet birds (they take them for leisurely strolls in their cages) and the Chinese instruments they strum streetside on muggy afternoons. There was an unmistakable charm in some of Beijing’s neighborhoods — which makes it that much sadder that the government is so hell-bent on leveling these old places.

But that’s China’s story, and most of us know it chapter and verse by now.

On our last day in Beijing, Karen and I checked out of our hutong hostel and embarked on our respective journeys home: for her, a 10-hour train ride back to Shanghai, and for me, an 11-hour flight back to Los Angeles. I traversed the Pacific Ocean in the time it took Karen to get from Beijing to Shanghai.

Reflections from a moving train
And then I was home.

There was an appropriate but surreal parallelism to the way I arrived home, via bus and Metrolink, because everyone in my family was working and evidently couldn’t spare a day to pick up the one delinquent family member from LAX.

So, backpack strapped firmly to torso, I found myself riding a train again — in Los Angeles, of all places.

No cow-spotted landscapes outside or snow-covered woods. Look out the window of a Metrolink train bound for San Bernardino, and all you get is the rush of the 10 Freeway. There were no backpackers among the passengers, only weary commuters. They were going home from eight hours at work. I was going home from six months abroad. I shoved my way through them to get off the train, and after bravely bearing the burden of my things uphill to my mom’s new workplace at Cal State L.A., I put down my bags for the last time.

Until a month later, when I picked them up again to move to San Francisco.

From the window of the high-speed rail I saw the wind flow through the rice paddies, which rolled a bit like waves on water.

A dragonfly that just posed there on top of a tree, twisting its wings this way and that way to test the breeze.

A waterlily in our pond.

Puppy therapy: this one decided Momma’s bone was his too.  Of course, all the other puppies felt they deserved a share too.

There’s much more to post, but I’m a bit overdue for things like sleep and finishing projects and figuring out plans for the summer and beyond…  gah.  At least there isn’t a hairy black dust coat sitting on the fan vent inside my laptop now thanks to my awesome cousin.  Since we opened up Fawkes-Buckbeak, there have been no spontaneous shut downs!!  (fingers crossed that it will stay that way)

My mix tape for Taiwan these past couple of years would include these songs that I ran into in my head from things like karaoke, the internet, retail music, cousins, car-music, wedding receptions, dance class, the persistent past, and accidentally bumping into outdoor pop concerts.  I need a radio.  Notably missing is one song that I have no idea how to find because I hadn’t the slightest clue what it’s called or its English equivalent, but my former suitemate played it lots…  I don’t necessarily love everything on this, but some if it can be persistent and may loop in my head when I’m supposed to be serious about doing something else, like grading or writing that thing I should get back to now, if I am not going to sleep anyway.  You have been warned.

So, I started this weekend in the search for A Plan. This is something of a recurrent theme in my life. I’m in need of several, so if you have any good ones to spare, I’m open to suggestion.

However, relevant to this post, I was trying to make plans with my cousin for the weekend. After being informed of the need to pay felicitations to Shao Bai (the female, large, black, short-haired Taiwan dog equivalent to Shao Hei, the male, long-haired, white little dog who has already made his appearance on the blog) for having nine puppies, I decided that since a visit to Kyoto for the cherry blossom festival would be impossible due to the lack of being able to get time off and tickets, I would go back to have some puppy therapy to cheer myself up a bit.

I called up my cousin to invite him along, and he suggested that he could try rounding up the wagons and figuring out plans. So I waited… and waited… and the day before it was time to go, I called him up, got no answer, and decided to get myself a train ticket while there still might be one left to take advantage of the long weekend.

He called me right afterwards and I told him of my setup. The gist of the conversation went something like this:

“You’re going to Tainan… ALONE?”

“Yeah, soooo? I am NOT a baby.”

“Well, yes, but you’re a baby to US.” (Just because he’s ten+ years older than I am, he gets to put on airs…)

“I am ** years old, have traveled Korea, lived on my own in New York, and am perfectly capable of going to Tainan on my own.” (Consider this said in my most teacher-y voice, the one with the steely-eyed look that only seems to make most of my students laugh.)

He conceded that perhaps I was right and would be okay.

The next day I had that return to the feeling of exhilaration and adventure which one only gets when hopping off on one’s own, and which lasted until my aunt rolled up to my rescue after the kindly intervention of the security guard at the bus stop.

Then I visited babies this weekend, nine of them, eyes barely open, rolling, and sliding themselves along the ground, sleeping, eating, and yipping (well, sometimes it sounded like a cross between a clucking chicken and a chattering monkey).

(My apologies for the following photos– I prefer cuddling them to photographing them. Here are my few shots on the not-so-blurry side…)

Holding a puppy in one hand, its little pink tongue out as it yawned, I did realize something over again… Though molly-coddling may be slightly stifling every now and then, there are benefits to being somebody’s baby. Even though all they may do is yip, creep, sleep, eat, and poop, they’re still seen as adorable. Babies are loved.

And sometimes it’s nice to not have to be the grown up in charge of cleaning up the mess, feeding yourself, and figuring out where the best ice cream is… But only sometimes.

So the big crowd-pleaser at Alishan is the sunrise. We all crashed in this hostel where there were three double-bed bunkbeds crammed in a room with two bathrooms. It was perfectly pleasant and reminded me of my backpacking month in France. My little cell phone alarm woke us up at 4 AM and we headed up for the ridiculously long line to take the mountain train up to see the sunset. The mountain train was very narrow with benches on either side and room for about two people in the aisle clinging to the hand grips for dear life as the train swayed back and forth chugging upwards. The Taiwanese capacity for crowding was as usual rather impressive (though I’ve been in worse). I think the crazily crammed train might have accounted for the odd sensation of a grain of sand lodged in my throat that became a full-on bout of thready voice/sore throat and a cold for the week and a half afterwards. (My last experience with a crazy-crammed train was coming back to Tainan from Hualien, and that one resulted in half the party getting a vile tummy-thrasher for the new year.)

This is the station after most of the passengers had poured out and up the stairs to the viewing platform where there were breakfast shops and at least one guide with an obnoxious bull-horn…

The zoomed shot past all the people…

We didn’t stay here. Instead we followed this path up…

To a mostly abandoned higher platform that afforded views of the mountains all around us.

The sea of clouds completely obscured the valley, and the mountains were only shadows that echoed the clouds. Sometimes I wasn’t quite sure whether the shadow I was looking at was a mountain ridge or a cloud bank.

Sunrise is different from sunsets of my experience (Being a mao toe ing–owl, or yeh mao tze–cat, or any other beings with nocturnal tendencies, I so rarely see the sun, and morning light tends to be outside my span of wakefulness…) The horizon does have that orange glow before the sun rises, but the sun rises brightly, blindingly instead of that slow, easy-on-the eyes large orange ball of a sunset. If I could just get cool sunglasses that I wouldn’t forget in my bag where they get scratched up by my keys…. I just fiddled with the ISO in my camera and looked through the viewfinder to take a break from the sun, but here were the other methods to see the sun.

The other sunrise photographs are here.

Oh, and excuse my nerdiness for quoting Homer’s Odyssey and Gilbert and Sullivan’s Mikado in the subject line…

When you first arrive in a new place, you may have some preconceived notions about it. Paris is the most romantic city in the world, or Tokyo is brimming with bowing businessmen. Or you might not know a thing about it. In both cases, the truth is really closer to the latter; the city, for all your ideas about it, or lack thereof, is an unknown quantity.

You don’t know how or how long it takes to get from Gare du Nord to Port de la Chapelle. You don’t know how much help you’ll get from kind strangers (it turns out, usually, a lot). You don’t know what it smells like on the street or just how that belfry in the market square looks when the sun rises behind it at 8 in the morning.

All these things you begin to know the second you step off the train or leave the airport. All these things, the contours of a city, are part of the landscape of your memories by the time you board the train or plane to leave.

The surprising part of it, considering your sheer ignorance of the place days or weeks before, is how loathe you are sometimes to leave. Even when you’re eager to move on, even when you’re homesick. It’s like leaving a new friend, or a new home.

On Dec. 28 of last year, in that hollow space between Christmas and New Year, Eric (of Anticompass, see right), said it best when he wrote about moving on:

… And so I continued on my way with creaking legs and an aching heart. It seems that everywhere I go I meet so many wonderful people, and each place I stay for a few days, I could stay all my life. The hardest part of traveling isn’t the riding nor the uncertainty of where I shall sleep or what I shall eat. It is the certainty that leaving will break my heart and will be an abandonment of home.