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.