A Day in the life of an Ogre

I skipped school today. A club near my school decided that Wednesdays would be a good night for no cover and 4 free drinks, and David, Nathaniel and I decided we would look pretty foolish to turn down free beer. Sorry Professor Tao, if you're reading this you can blame Roxy 99 for me missing class today.

So David, Nate and I used our unexpected free day to try a breakfast place that serves waffles called Grandma Nitty's, which had tiny glasses of orange juice, runny eggs, and surprisingly good waffles.

David still had to work in the afternoon, but Nate and I decided to go hiking, although it has turned out to be really difficult to find trails despite Taipei being completely encircled by jungled mountains worthy of Livingstone. We found a pretty good mountain anyway, but it was practically dark by the time we got there. Fortunately the trail was marked by an evenly dispersed collection of eerily lit Buddhist temples. The temples primarily served to scared me out of my mind however, because they all appeared to be completely abandoned, despite chanting emanating from unseen sources. There might have been a CD player, I suppose.

On the way back I managed to get a seat on the subway, because my feet were really sore. As we approached Taipei Main Station the train became increasingly crowded. Two women got on and stood right next the the bench I was sitting on. They both hesitated for a minute, then seemed to decide it was better to stand than sit next to me. For some reason I decided it would be best if I just got up and relinquished my seat to them. After that one of them sat down, but the other declined. At this point Nathan started pointing out that I had just been sent to the back of the bus, and that I lacked the spinal fortitude of a 50 year-old black woman, although I have known this for some time.

But seriously, what could have possibly motivated this woman to decline an open seat just because a male foreigner was occupying the seat next to it? Sometimes Taiwanese people make me feel like an ogre. And sometimes I want to crush their skulls and eat their babies.

Wealth and the People That Love It

Sometimes I think that Taiwan is a very wealthy place. I remember driving my scooter and getting cut off by a gang of cyclists, complete with lycra one-pieces and overly expensive aerodynamic helmets, and thinking that cycling is exactly the kind of vanity hobby that could only exist in a country with a little too much pocket change. The same goes for the car club I caught meeting in a parking lot near Taipei 101. A bunch of hyper-fashionable Taiwanese dudes were squatting around expensive Japanese import cars and jabbering about whatever superfluous engine modification they had made. It was kind of like watching Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift but there were no hot girls and the plot wasn't as good.

Sometimes I remember that for every Taiwanese yuppy in a cyclist uniform there is one old guy eating rice from a bowl on the ground in front of my apartment and another guy carrying his family of five on his scooter, with a kid strapped to each knee and the mom carrying the groceries.

Anyway, the number of sport cyclists and street urchins is irrelevant, because I devised a new rubric for wealth calculation - completely useless businesses. I had flowers delivered to friend in America for their birthday, and I realized that I had just transferred money over the internet so that some person could create a bouquet and another person could get on their bike or segway or whatever and deliver it to my friend's office. This is crazy. Online floristry and professional dogwalking are crazy ideas made possible by America's unique and perplexing combination of money and foolishness.

As I sat in my aparment and thought about how nice it would be to have my pets washed for me by a professional I realized that this kind of frivolity would never succeed in Taipei and I was filled with a mixture of admiration and pity.

Do I Speak English?

My Korean, Japanese, and Indonesian classmates speak a strange breed of English which is completely unintelligible to me, the only native English speaker in the room. The problem is that they aren't speaking English, but merely sprinkling "English" words into Chinese sentences. For instance, a Korean girl said "在韩国我们最近再有sauce。" Which means, "In Korea, we just got sauce again."

After about 10 seconds I realized she was talking about a recent SARS outbreak in Korea. To be fair, I should have understood what she was talking about based on context, because I came into class coughing and weezing, but she said SARS exactly like an American would say "sauce," so I was naturally distracted by what sounded like proper English, regardless of the context.

The worst part is, I sometimes have to intentionally mispronounce words to make myself understood. One of my students is named Neil, but whenever I call his name all the kids start cracking up and saying "Not Neil, NAIL." Neil sounds kind of like the Chinese word for cow, so I have to call this poor, misguided kid Nail all the time.

Other curiosities:
Cecil = seesaw
Bitch = beach

Big Fire

I heard there was some kind of natural disaster going on in San Diego, but I thought my mom had just burned another roast and my dad was making the whole thing up to save face. Then in class this morning, my teacher asked if I had heard about the "Da Huo." For a second I was really intrigued by the idea of an enormous pot, hiding in Taipei, waiting for me to hear about it, but I realized that she was talking about the big fire, which is the literal translation "Da Huo," or Chinese for "enormous, uncontrollable fire which drives humans before it like so many recently homeless squirrels." At least, that is what my dictionary said. Big fire seems descriptive enough to me.

The Japanese girls in my class seemed genuinely concerned when I accidentally implied that the fire was inside my house, instead of my hometown.

Things I Learned on my Scooter

1. Scooter-riding girls in converses and stockings are distractingly attractive. When I die, I will probably go out crushed under a bus, craning my neck for one last look at the classy girl in the Mondrian Chucks.

2. I have started to dream about dodging buses, and having nightmares about bus drivers gone postal, fed up with dodging the insect-like hordes of scooters that prevent him from driving anywhere.

3. I get extremely jealous when I see a couple riding a scooter.

4. Those surgical masks Chinese people wear to block carcinogens from entering their lungs are about as effective as a lump of coal tied to your face with asbestos.

Dump Trucks

Taiwanese people tend to be very well educated. There are various subtle reminders of this, like the language that is used in advertisements, street signs, and other things designed to be read by common people. Essentially, Taiwanese ads and road signs have some really obscure words on them. Imagine if street signs in America said "Maximum Velocity" instead of "Speed Limit," or ads promised to improve your ocular ability and rejuvenate your epidermis. In China, the vocabulary set was much more limited, presumably because the government and media outlets assumed the peasants wouldn't be able to read otherwise.

Another reminder is the sheer number of people who can speak English. My uncle, who just visited, assured me that it still seems like there aren't enough English speakers to comfortably get around the city, but I feel like I'm in an English speaking country. In China, English was very much a status symbol, and the only time I was ever served by someone who could speak English was when I was paying $30 bucks a meal. Here, I've been in cabs where the driver spoke better English than Abdikarim in San Diego. (Abdikarim being, in this case, a stereotypical Somali name I found at http://www.babynamesworld.com/category-somali-names.html)

Finally, The garbage trucks play classical music. When I first heard the 2 bit Mozart being played, I thought there was an upscale ice cream truck selling gelatos to the children of people with too much disposable income. I was kind of disappointed when it was just a malnourished-looking guy asking me if I had any trash or recyclables. In Taiwan, people have to take their own trash to the garbage truck, which means that being a garbage man means riding on the back of the truck and making sure people don't miss, and that hearing Mozart being played on a xylaphone means it is either 2 in the afternoon or 10 at night and I better get my ass downstairs or I'm going to be chasing a garbage truck down the alley.

Taiphoon Troubles

Today was a typhoon day, which is kind of like a snow day in the Northeast, but you make ramen instead of hot cocoa. Or so I'm told. In elementary I never got to miss school due to inclement weather, and was left envy all those Michiganites at home shoveling snow while I languished in San Diego's partly cloudiness.

Anyway, on typhoon day all school is cancelled, and the only businesses left open are the internet cafes and restaurants. Unfortunately, the phone companies are closed, and the DSL installation guys chose not to heroically brave the typhoon in order to hook me up with the internet, and typhoons tend to inhibit long-distance travel, so I spent a lot of time at the local internet cafe. Which is where I am right now, talking to the attendant's younger brother, Vic, and watching Taiwanese people play absurd looking Taiwanese computer games.

Where the Wild Things Are

I took a bus today. I ended up in a place called Linkou, which means “Mouth of the Forest,” but it felt a lot more like the middle. One minute I was passing noodle shops and KFCs and the next I was in the heart of a forest primeval, wondering just how far into the jungle a $1.50 bus ticket would take me. My tour guide was a guy named William. William, besides speaking passable English and having more than one thing negative thing to say about America’s environmental record, contracts gullible young English speakers out to large Taiwanese private schools for a living. I’m not sure of the quality or quantity of the cream William is skimming off of the top, but he told me he is only managing 10 teachers right now and still manages to afford a painfully skinny secretary named Theresa. Maybe he just isn’t paying her enough.

Anyway, William told me about a teaching job at a private school in Linkou. Being a relative newcomer to Taipei, I don’t realize that being in Linkou equates to being in Alpine, which is a reference only my San Diego readers will understand, and for which I do not apologize. I left from my school, which is called Taiwan Normal University, to meet William. We headed out together at 2 o’clock, and didn’t make it to the school until 4:30. I don’t know what kind of hurry the previous teacher, Eddie, left in, but the school administrators were desperate, and agreed to hire me without a demonstration of my meager teaching abilities. I was slapped into Eddie’s former desk, still sticky with the residue of his hastily removed name tag, and was left to contemplate how to tell William that I just couldn’t handle a 2-hour commute every Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday.

In my rather limited experience, business in Taiwan has a tendency to work out in this hasty and informal manner. Contracts don’t appear to be very common, and decisions get made very quickly.

Zhonghe City Living

Finally found a place to stay. It is not actually in Taipei, but in Zhonghe City, which is a suburb of Taipei, and the commuter subway into the big city takes about 15 minutes. After getting the place, David, my roommate, and I decided to run to Ikea and Costco to spruce the place up a little and make it habitable. The Ikea was kind of boring, it was exactly like every other Ikea I have been to, except the food court was slightly cheaper. The furniture and sheets were not cheaper, however. I’m not sure how Taiwanese people afford all this stuff, but the sheets, pillows, and assorted room fixings costs me at least 100 bucks.

I got a job, maybe. I’m not entirely sure how I’m getting paid, or what the stipulations for my employment are, but every Wednesday and Friday afternoons I take the Bannan Line subway, get off at City Hall, and take the Blue 5 bus to an afterschool childcare center. I have two classes of 12-year olds, and I’m going to have to find some way of keeping the little rascals in line for 90 minutes. I had to give the administrators a demonstration of my mad child-rearing skills, and after 30 minutes of pleading with little Leo and Bruce to stay in their seats, and little David to stop reading the Chinese translation of Harry Potter while I was teaching them how to spell January, the powers-that-be revealed their absolute desperation and decided to hire me permanently. Permanently is probably a poor choice of words because I signed no contracts, and very well may never see the $17/hour I was promised for my six-hour work-week.

3 Days In

I’ve been in Taiwan for a couple of days now. My initial thoughts are 1) It is very hot. 2) My apartment is very well air-conditioned. 3) Food is really expensive. I spend at least 1.50 every time I go out for dumplings, and I spent 3 dollars on noodles once. Fortunately I am in a forgiving mood because the boba milk tea is on point and the girls dress in something that resembles grown-up clothing.

I have primarily been running various errands as I wait for school to start on the 3^rd. I have had to register for an Alien Registration Card, open a Taiwanese bank account (at the post office, no less!) take a humiliating placement exam for Chinese classes, and deal with all manner of slumlords as I try to find an apartment that satisfactorily balances distance from school with the size of the inevitable cockroach infestation.

How different could it be?

My first day in Taiwan has been extremely long. At LAX I thought I lost my passport minutes before boarding my plane, and I ended up running through the Tom Bradley International Terminal begging various security personnel to “PleasechecklostandfoundformypassportbecauseI’mleavingforTai-wanin5minutesandtheyaren’tgoingtoletmeontheplanewithoutit.” After breaking some kind of land speed record for running in sandals, my friend found my passport in the little used back-pocket of my briefcase. It seems that I can’t leave the country without having an embarrassing luggage-related incident.
After discovering my passport the flight passed uneventfully, especially after I found that the in-flight movies were free and went on to watch Blades of Glory, Wild Hogs, Pathfinder, and Shrek 3, all four of which were greatly improved by my irrational belief that I was putting one over on China Air.
Before I knew it the sun was shining just beyond the wingtips and we were coming in on Taiwan. Something about 747 approaches makes me wax poetic, and I remember having Wordsworthian thoughts as Taiwan manifested below me, but the exact phrasing escapes me, and I can only say that Taiwan is beautiful. It is what San Diego would look like if the suburbs were laced with dense tropical forests instead of bewildered palm trees and tenacious cactii.
Many of the buildings, particularly the low rent apartments, look just like Beijing, but there are much less of them, and the streets are so clean that the overall effect is to create an entirely pleasant place to live, which lays to rest any questions about Taiwan and China being separate entities, culturally speaking.