Saw the winner of the WTC design contest. Great, a bunch of what look like pre-bombed buildings, crater included (your government-funded radicals put it together. Some assembly required).

I suppose this is meant to fool the terrorists?

Terrorist #1: “Hey, those buildings looked bombed already!”

Terrorist #2 “That’s not right.” (checks list) “No, it definitely says Thursday. Damn.”

Terrorist #1: “Well, what do we do, bomb them again?”

Terrorist #2: “Nah, let’s go get ice cream.”

Speaking of very tall buildings, Taipei 101 is getting kinda scary if you ask me. I can see it if I lean out my window. They’re just starting on the last “segment”, and then on top of that they’re going to contrust a spire/antenna that will be about two segments high. At least no-one will be able to say they’re lost in Taipei anymore, ’cause you can see that sucker from any decent-sized street.

Today was the 26th of February. I’ve been measuing time in February 26’s ever since the army, because that was the date I entered service, and every year I ask myself what I’ve done since I got out. It’s been seven years now, and I’m afraid I’m rather behind. Locus is dragging its feet publishing my book for some reason, first missing the book fair, then Chinese New Year, and now February 26th, which I set as a specific date for the book to be out. One of the English-language TV news shows (FTV I think) emailed today wanting to interview me, but I had to tell them I was waiting for news on the book, and even though I’ve emailed Locus, they’ve yet to reply.

I interviewed for another part-time job this morning. As it was another government-related position, they were concerned about my lack of a foreign passport. I tell you, if that happens again, I’m going to start soliciting city councilors or something similarly useless/drastic. The interview was supposed to include an editing/translation test, but all I had to do was look at a piece of Taoist philosophical writings, nod in a knowing fashion and hazard a few guesses as to its meaning. The position is technically “Foreign National Editor/translator”, but hopefully they could get around that, perhaps changing it to “Foreign-language Editor/translator” or something similarly harmless. You’d think someone with a brain would wake up one day and realize that a foreign passport doesn’t automatically guarantee fluent English. That was the only concern, however, as I have more experience and better Chinese than the person I would be replacing. I’m hoping it works out, because it looks like a cool place to work, and I could always use the extra money. I would still have weekends off and some time during the week, and they don’t require a tie.

So I’ve been waiting, waiting for news on the book, waiting for news on both of my jobs, waiting for my landlord to decide if he can fix my windows, waiting for my brain to spit out a decent script idea typed neatly in double-spaced Ariel font. I’m sick of waiting around. And I’ll bet you’re sick of reading about it as well. Well, ok. I’ve got a feeling things are coming together shortly.

Dean’s birthday party is tomorrow, and this means Indian food in what has become an annual tradition just as worldwide gift-giving has become a tradition on mine. Shirzi is also in town; we had lunch with him today. I spent this afternoon working at my almost-job, followed by a nice sword workout. The teacher is working on a new website, which will hopefully feature more content and pictures than the present one.

Yesterday was the last day of the Lantern Festival down at CKS Hall, and I was going down there anyway to see Adaptation on the awful projection screen at The Source. The movie was ok, a lot simpler and less clever than most of the critics had intimated. Nick Cage was impressive. I suppose I should see it at a proper resolution to enjoy it, but as I wasn’t all that impressed with Being John Malkovich, I think I’ll probably come away after this one with a similar feeling of a really good idea done in a mediocre manner.

Sacrilage! You are no doubt crying. This guy puts down such great directors as Spike Jonze and Martin Scorcese when all he can do is Alphadogah? I know, I know. For all of you just tuning in, I’m a hypocritical bastard.

After the movie, Alien and I went over to see the Lanterns, which were nice. Usually they have a big paper representation of the animal on display in the middle of the square, but all we saw was a pair of horns sticking out of a round stage. Either they’re getting more minimalist in their design, or the horns were all that were left after a hungry paper giant had the goat for dinner.

All of the stands were packing up their wares. We passed by one stall that had brass statues, including a beautiful bronze representation of Poagao, The Poagao, Sun Wu-kong hisself, brandishing a stick and standing on his Flying Cloud Gendoyun. The pricetag said NT$7,700, but Alien said I should see if they’d bargain, it being the last day and the statue being exceptionally heavy.

After a little bargaining I got it for just over NT$1,000. I know, I shouldn’t be spending money on stuff like this, but I like it, and it could also come in handy for bashing in the brains of any potential intruders. We continued on to see a puppet busy mixing roasted chestnuts, and I took a small video that is a strong candidate for the next Sight of the Moment in a few days’ time.

Afterwards we walked over to DV8, where Alien treated me to a Bailey’s sans milk. Two Russian guys sat next to us chatting while Alien and the bartender gossiped. Carl’s subsequent arrival wasn’t the coincidence it seemed as he lives nearby, but it was a welcome break from the combination of Russian and gossip.

Finished up the translation job I’d been working on for the past couple of days. I might be taking on a second job, with welcome added income, starting in March.In fact, recent developments in the work situation have caused me to amend my housing-search plans, which might have to be put on hold while I get everything sorted out as far as income goes. Also, my landlord might try to get another guy to install new windows, if it turns out to be cheap enough. I did go see another place today, mainly just to go for a walk and get out of the house after spending all morning and part of the afternoon trying to get the comments for the Chinese blog working. As I was walking back up Fuxing South Road, I hear the screeching of tires up the street, and when I walked over to see what was going on, I saw that there had been either a most peculiar accident or someone who was simultaneously more ambitious and less adept at parking than most people here.

If you like online comics, go read Same Difference by Derek Dirk Kim. Really well-done stuff. Thanks to Ernie for the link.

I looked at a place near Chihshan Station yesterday morning, but it turned out to be right next to Fulin Bridge on the way to Tianmu, and so quite noisy. It was a nice day, though, so to avoid wasting the trip I walked back past Shilin Station and through the old neighborhood to Jiantan Station. There’s a market on Dongda Road there in the morning, and it was fun walking through and looking at all the hawkers selling their goods among the old buildings with crumbling classical facades built in the Japanese colonial period. There’s a really nice park, the Qiangang Park, a couple of blocks east of Jiantan Station, with a pool and courts as well as grassy lawns and mature shade trees.

Later, after doing some translation work at home I decided to go over to Nanjing E. Road for some more househunting. I’d been over there a couple of days ago and seen a few places that were small and expensive, but one building had an ad for a room at a reasonable rate. The guard room was closed, however, by the time I got to it, so I had to go back.

As I walked out the lobby of my building, however, the security guy called me over. Some of the tennants on the 10th floor, two women, needed someone to fill in for a marketing survey at the last minute, and promised to pay the participators. They asked me if I had an ROC ID and a chop and used a Nokia mobile phone, which I did, so a few minutes later off we were off to the golden building on the corner of Jinshan and Zhongxiao East Roads. It was explained to me that this was an event organized by Nokia, and I was actually looking forward to telling them exactly what I thought about my phone.

When the organizers on the 12th floor saw my non-Chinese features, though, they freaked. The woman in charge was one of those individuals who cannot bring herself to speak anything but English to foreigners; to do so would apparently put serious strain on deeply ingrained beliefs. They sat me down to fill out a form for a couple of minutes before telling me that they didn’t need me after all.

In the taxi back, one of the women from the 10th floor told me that they were afraid of “communication problems”. Which is of course complete bullshit, and she knew it. Out of 25 landlords I’ve called to ask about places, 24 expressed surprise when we met in person that I wasn’t a native Chinese speaker. I’m sure that a few others might have noted a bit of an accent, but I never had any problems communicating with any of them, even the ones who spoke in a lot of Taiwanese.

“This is racism, you know,” I said, trying to hold myself back from going into a righteous Hartzellesque table-pounding rant on basic human rights in the back of the cab. “You know there’s no problem with my Chinese; the only thing they could have objected to was my race. You’re just like the people at 7-Elevens, restaurants and banks who hide in the back and refuse to serve me.”

“No, no,” she objected, as I’ve heard many people say before. I knew exactly what was coming. “We all look up to foreigners. We hold them in such awe and admiration we don’t dare speak to them. We all wish we could be white and live such fabulous lives as you do.”

“Look, you may think you’re doing us a favor with this kind of thinking, but it’s still racism,” I was ranting, but I didn’t care. I pissed off at missing out on the money as well as my chance to vent about my phone, so I was venting at her instead. “When you treat someone differently because of their race, it’s racism. You treat western foreigners with kid gloves and “handle” them, but you treat foreigners from southeast Asian nations like shit a lot of the time, right?” She had to nod at this; it’s a common occurrance and many people here practice such triple standards.

“Well, then I’ll tell you what actually happened,” she said. “They rejected you because they already had someone of your age and education level and background.” Yeah, right. So they had the other 34-year-old American guy who emigrated to Taiwan and went to college both here and in the states in there. Lucky them. Of course she was trying to “handle” me by implementing damage control. Whatever. By that time we had reached our building, so I got out and started walking up to Nanjing East Road again, as I had meant to an hour before.

(By the way, since I didn’t get a chance to tell Nokia directly, here’s what I think of my phone, which is a 5210 model: It SUCKS. The reception is horrible, the sound tinny, everyone I talk to thinks I’m calling from the International Space Station, and it eats a battery a day. I got it because my first phone, a 3210, was a good, usable, stylish phone, but I regret getting this one and will get a new one as soon as it becomes financially possible.)

The ad was gone by the time I reached the building. The room had rented. It’s too bad; the building was nice and the rent reasonable. I walked around the area a bit more before stopping in a a family-run barbershop for a haircut by a surprisingly cute barber (who unfortunately is married and has children). He was a bit short and pudgy, and reminded me of a Chinese version of Burt Young in his younger, surly Chinatown days, before his old-and-surly Rocky days. He also did a good job. After walking around in the area, all the way up to my old place of employment at Ogilvy and back home, I decided I wanted to go out.

Thing is, Mindcrime and Dean owe me for dragging me to Hooters so many times, so I decided now would be a good chance to get back at them; I invited them to Fresh. I would have chosen Funky or the Taiwan Bear Club, but I felt that Fresh was a better environment to sit and talk in, and I didn’t want to make them suffer too much. Just a little. Mwaha. We arranged to meet at the nearest intersection, but Dean was a little late. As Mindcrime, Janice and I were standing there on the corner, a bespectackled foreigner in a lacross shirt and holding a Lonely Planet guidebook and a camera walked up and said “Hey, I’m looking for some bars around here; do you know any?” Mindcrime said that we were going to Fresh, and the guy, who looked for all the world like a tourist fresh off the plane, asked what kind of a place it was.

“It’s a gay bar,” Mindcrime replied, earning a strange look from the tourist.

“Ok…” he said. “Anything else around here?” We told him about the slew of bars down on Heping near the intersection with Jinshan and suggested he try there. Eventually he worked up the courage to ask “So, why are you going to a gay bar?”

“Because he’s gay,” Mindcrime said, pointing helpfully at me. “And we owe him for forcing him to go to Hooters.” Leave it to Mindcrime to cut to the quick of any given situation.

The tourist was walking quickly away (in the wrong direction) when Dean finally arrived, and we proceeded up the narrow stairway to the bar of Fresh. It wasn’t too crowded yet, it being around 11:30pm, but it was hard to get seats. We ended up on the top floor sitting by the bar. Janice went dancing while Dean and Mindcrime threw pointed references to their being heterosexual into the conversation. I made some rounds but didn’t see anyone particularly interesting. It seemed that there were a lot of tourists there that night; and when I say tourists, I mean straight people, mostly “I’m-so-hip-I-go-to-gay-bars” straight people. I suppose everyone else was thinking as I was and bringing their straight friends to Fresh as well. Fresh has always been the place where foreigners go, though, and its proximity to Shida makes it a prime target for that sort of thing, especially since The Source moved.

My friends got tired eventually and left, but I stayed, going up to the balcony to enjoy the night air and the stars. A couple of guys talked with me, one very drunk and upset about a previous boyfriend and another who didn’t have much to say. I sat down with a couple of guys named Ah-hai and Xiao-hao when some seats became available and chatted with them for a bit. They too had brought one of their co-workers, a Taiwanese women who had such a hard time bringing herself to speak Chinese to me I thought her brain would explode. I saw Little P there, his skin much improved now that he’s getting towards the end of his military service and has less shit to do. He said he had to go back to base early the next morning. I doubted he would make it on time.

As the evening wore on, more and more of the ‘mos left, while the tourist stayed on. One red-haired woman who claimed to be a lawyer but now teaches English proclaimed “But Chinese is such a loud language! I can never tell when they’re yelling!” with such volume that lights turned on across the street. The Chinese fellow she was talking to just nodded, but I had to laugh out loud. My friends had left, though, and none of the Brad-Pitt-semishaded-sunglass-wearing hipsters paid me any mind. It was after 3, and I was tired, so I began walking home up Jinshan past a group of drunk foreigners who were loudly protesting having been thrown out of Vibe, deliberately taking unfamiliar alleyways. It was almost 5 by the time I got home and into bed. It was a good day, and today looks nice as well, but I need to get this translation work done so I can get paid and get, among other things, a new phone.

Room for Rant, Part XXXVIII

I stayed up until 2 a.m. last night combing through almost 300 entries on a Chinese rental website and writing down a sheetful of possibilies. Then I slept for a few hours, until 5:30, when I got up again and took the first MRT train to the West Gate Station to check out the morning audio environment there. At first it seemed fine except for the sound of buses roaring past on Hengyang Road. But then I spotted a group of elderly women carrying a suspicious object. Sure enough, it was a boombox. They set it up in front of the Chungshan Hall and began doing the dance.

Oh, well. I walked over to a nearby stall and had a large breakfast of egg-cake, turnip paste and bean milk. A group of women from Hong Kong sat next to me. Although my Cantonese is very limited, I could make out that they felt that the bean milk was better here than in Hong Kong. I tried to imagine myself back in Hong Kong while listening to their conversation (it does seem like more and more Cantonese can be heard on the streets of this city lately), but it’s impossible because there’s no harbor. To me, no matter where you are in Hong Kong, there’s always the idea if not the sight and/or smell of the harbor lurking around every corner. Taipei has a severe shortage of good harbors in my opinion.

I spent the rest of the day going down my sheet of possibilites and eliminating them one by one. Every single one was crap. Krep. Krrrrrrrrep! I must have walked several miles by the time I was through. All of the possibilities are just about as exhausted as I am, unless I want to live in Shilin or beyond. I inspected the area around Hou Shan Pi MRT and found it barren and industrial with pockets of niceness around the park. I met my friend James on Hsinsheng S. Road at lunch, and he showed me his wonderful $25k/month apartment on Renai across from his museum (he’s the curator there). Hsinsheng S. Road is all messed up due to the construction of the second stage of the MRT system, so there were a couple of cheap places there. Unfortunately, they all involved living with several other people.

Before I came back home I stopped back at the West Gate Station, and sure enough, a group of older women, another group I’m pretty sure, was doing impressionist dancing to Buddha’s Top Hit “Nanwuahmitofo”. That tears it; tomorrow I’m going to call the landlord and cancel. As much as it would have been nice to live in that area, I’m moving to get away from noise, not get it at a cheaper rate (at the moment, 1:30 a.m., they’re raising giant signs with cranes and affixing them to various structures outside my building). James said I would eventually find something if I just keep at it, and he’s probably right. I had set the 27th as my deadline, but it doesn’t really matter. There are other, more important things to think (and rant) about.

Dean, Mark, Tall Paul, Rowan, Alien and I met up to discuss film projects, but we didn’t get much discussion done. We did end up spending a lot of money, though, so I guess that’s something. It seems everyone is plagued with doubt over their various projects, and nobody’s doing anything at the moment, which is a shame. We all need to get cracking in that respect, me most of all. Tall Paul’s getting ready to begin production of his next film, and I need to go over the locations with him so we can set up all the shots. It will be a good opportunity to use my new camera and get more used to it as well.

In other news, I’ve updated the links page by culling some sites that weren’t being updated, and adding some new ones I’ve found out about recently. I’ve also changed the sight and sound files. The sight is, of course, me at breakfast this morning, and believe me when I say that I am usually a sight at breakfast. The sound is Wu Bai’s “Rushing”, a twangy, westerny song sung in Taiwanese to let you know that it is not, in fact, the theme for a new brand of canned coffee.

Warning! Those who find my whinging about housing-related stuff: you might want to hit the back button on your browser.

So I’ve been looking at places, each seemingly smaller than the last. I saw the converted storeroom/office annex off the stairwell on Fuxing South Road, its balcony enclosed in tin-foil. I saw the large, old-fashioned two-room cave so close to the Chihshan MRT station there was a breeze every time the train roared by. I saw the long hallway-like dungeon on Yanping of course. None of these really work for me, but I have the bad habit of thinking a lot more highly of any place I haven’t seen before than is prudent. I proved this theory with the stairwell place I had actually considered before going back to see it on my own.

Then I went to a newish building in the old city I had seen rental notices up on before. Two or three rooms were for rent, and one was a corner room with a nice view of a square. Another square! you say, no doubt recoiling in horror. But TC, haven’t you learned your lesson about squares?

You’d think so. I’m planning to go over early tomorrow morning to see if the aforementioned square is full of old women practicing Yuanjiwu to the Qing Dynasty’s Greatest Hits over a loudspeaker. Downstairs from my present location this happens every day, so if they do it there, it will probably be going on there too. I’ve been there in the evenings and it seems pretty quiet for the most part. The rent is 3,000 cheaper, but the place comes unfurnished and is no larger than where I am now. In Typical Poagao Style, I told the landlord I wanted to move in and would sign a contract tomorrow, a meeting which I’ve since delayed until Friday evening.

Today I spent walking around the Shilin area. There I found some ok if smallish apartments in another newish building. These rooms come furnished, and the building provides coin laundry services. The downside, in addition to the size, is that the stretch of road between the building and Jiantan Station is often jam-packed with revellers and tourists due to the nearby night market. I do like the area, though, and I will probably do some more looking up there tomorrow, especially if I find the square full of annoying dancing women, in which case I will cancel the contract-signing appointment immediately. I’ll most likely spend tonight trolling the various Taiwanese real estate sites looking for something new I haven’t noticed before. I’ve come to hate looking for new places, and I also hate the fact that for the past six months I haven’t been able to find a decent, reasonable place to live without some fatal flaw. I don’t know why I rush myself, or why any place that’s not immediately familiar seems much nicer than it is on subsequent inspections. Those are all questions for my therapist, or would be if I was willing to pay someone to tell me I’m not really that big an idiot.

I also know that, no matter what I do or what kind of place I eventually find, something much better and cheaper will make itself known before the ink on the contract is dry. It’s just the nature of the market with a dash of Murphy’s Law thrown in for good measure. In any case, I’m off to comb the real estate websites.

I started looking at places again today. I know, “Joy!” you’re all saying. “Poagao is looking at houses again!” Saw one place not far from here that is about the same size as where I’m living now, but quieter and cheaper. Not much water pressure to speak of, however. I’ve told myself I’m not going to compromise this time, as I can always find someplace better. Another place I looked at on Yanping South Road was a nightmare. The advertisement said it was 12 pings, but those 12 pings must have been measured end-to-end. It was more like a long, dark hallway than a room, and only contained a pair of decrepit bunkbeds and some chairs. I will look at some other places in that area, the old city, as well as elsewhere tomorrow. I like the old city, the area within the old city walls, quite a bit. It’s got an air of history to it that most of the other parts of the city lack. Granted though, I’ve never lived in that area, so who knows what kind of disadvantages lie waiting for me in such places? I’ve learned my lesson about living outside the city for the past few weeks, though: I want to stay in the city. It’s ok if you’re living with dogs, cats, roomies and various significant otherly beings, but if you’re alone being out in the middle of nowhere rather sucks.

It seems that Google has purchased Blogger. Hopefully this will allow improvements in both without sacrificing the functionality of either, and Blogger is definitely the more vulnerable party in this respect. I came across the website of a guy travelling around the world with his Panasonic DV camera, chronicalling his various adventures. It’s quite cool what he’s doing, and I think a lot more people will be following in his footsteps before too long.

Dean got the second season of Red Dwarf in, and Mindcrime and I went over to watch it tonight. We got to see Kryton and Queeg, and a dance number with Lister, Rimmer, the Cat and Holly. On the downside though, we’re going to have to wait another full year until we can get any more seasons on DVD. Smeggin’ ‘ell!

Yesterday being my last day up on the mountain, I went walking in the hills one last time. I decided to take another path up Neigou Mountain, one that Mr. Gao had told me was a bit steeper than the others. He wasn’t kidding. After following a small stream up the hillside a ways, the path, indicated by white ribbons, led straight up a cliff so steep I had to haul myself up vines. It was like climbing a huge tree with boulders in its branches. About an hour later I emerged at the peak, my hands cut and bleeding from the rocks and treebark, to find a group of well-to-do holidaymakers discussing the merits of various international educational institutes while their children tortured spiders nearby. I had, apparently, taken the hard way up. A smooth, level path led down the other side. I contemplated going back down the way I had come up just to be perverse, but sanity won out and I took the easy way down. Plus it was getting dark. When I reached the lake at the bottom I came across a family relaxing along the bank. One of the children saw me and ran over to stare at me. “Hey!” she shouted back at her friends or siblings, “Come look at the foreigner!” The whole herd came thundering over, stopping in a line about twenty feet away from me. They just stared, their open mouths prompting various airborn insects to alight inside. I stopped and stared back for a moment, turned around to let them have a good look, and then waited a moment before saying “Well? Are you finished staring yet?”

“Go on, speak English to it!” one of the parents called over. They were rich, of course. Seems like rich people here are almost exclusively the most ill-mannered. The kids didn’t saying anything, so I shrugged and walked on. When I got back to the apartment complex I used my last coupon by swimming in the indoor pool and then luxuriating (and hopefully not bleeding too much) in the hot swirling waters of the jacuzzi for a bit. Felt great.

The friend I was housesitting for came back last night, so this morning I packed up and returned to downtown Taipei, aka The Big Smoke. It sure looked the part today anyway, as the air’s been full of swirling, misty precipitation that’s not quite fog and not quite rain. I made another awful meal today. I think I’ve established that substandard ingredients do actually affect the quality of a meal now. Of course, not knowing how to cook might also be a factor. My place feels a lot smaller after having a whole apartment to myself for three weeks.

I added a link in the menu to the Chinese page, although there’s not much content there. In fact, there probably won’t ever be a whole lot there; it’s just for when I feel like writing in it. It’s still kind of buggy, but I’ll see if I can’t fix it up a bit.

Tomorrow’s Monday, of course, the first real Monday since before Chinese New Year it seems. Hopefully I’ll be getting a call to work soon. It’s a bit depressing knowing that there aren’t any more holidays until the Dragonboat Festival, but after the recent slew of festivity, I think we all need a break from breaks, so to speak. Tall Paul could be getting a little production together, in which case we need to to scope out his locations, and I’m working on a little something myself on the side before we dive into production for the ghost story. I still need to get a mic and a light kit somehow. The former I’ll probably have to buy, but the latter I think I can borrow from friends. Recently I’ve been boning up on production technique, re-reading some of the texts we studied in New York, but there’s no substitute for practice. I need to get my hands dirty.

I had one of the worst meals ever the other night. It was completely my doing, of course. I now fully believe that there should be a license required for cooking, especially dishes involving black bean sauce, unidentified cheese and purple noodles. Meat of questionable quality/origin doesn’t seem to help either; I think I’ll stick with spaghetti sauce from now on. It’s been days and I can still taste the culinary atrocity I visited upon myself.

The Chinese site seems to be working, more or less. There’s no Chinese-language input on the computer where I’m staying, however, so content will be particularly scarce for the moment. I do realize that there are a lot of wrong characters. It’s a blog, and I don’t tend to spend a lot of time editing and looking to make sure everything’s pristine; I just type and hit the “publish” button.

I attended a meeting at my place of 99.99999% chance of further employment down in the city yesterday. Thankfully I was not required to answer any questions or even say anything. I got the distinct feeling I was there for show, so that they could say “Look! We’ve got a foreigner. And next to him, please note our nifty all-in-one copy machine!”

Which is fine with me. The only thing I could have proved had I been allowed to open my mouth would have been how far I can stick my foot in. I just want the job and a little security for the next few months, long enough to get out of debt and purchase a microphone and maybe some lights for my next production. Being around so many government officials still makes me nervous, though. I wonder if I’ll ever completely get over that.

Last night I went over to Maoman’s place and revealed the secrets of setting up a Blogger account on his website. Now that he knows how simple it is I’m sure we can expect great things from him on a daily basis.

The Chinese New Year season is winding down and everyone’s getting back into the swing of things. I will be ending my little mountain sojourn this weekend and probably start work again on Tuesday if all goes well. Just think, in a few more months we’ll have lovely sweltering weather, typhoons, and all kinds of other fun summer stuff going on.

New stuff, though not as much as I originally planned. Things have been picking up this week on several fronts. I recently got a call from my place of dubious employment saying there was a “99.9999% chance” of my continued employment there. All I have to do, aside from a little overtime I took care of last night, is show up on Thursday afternoon at their offices to reassure various government officials that I am not, in fact, a former axe-murderer on the lamb. I think I can pull it off.

Lin Yi-ping, my little brother (from my Taiwanese family) came up to Taipei the other day along with his wife and two kids. I hadn’t seen him in ages. He’s a year younger than I am, works at a company in Hsinchu and lives with my gan-ma in her house. His kids, one boy and one girl, are cute but a real handful (they’re the reason for the Filipina maid they hired, apparently). He makes a good father, though. I should pay them all a visit in Hsinchu sometime. Yi-ping says the city’s gone downhill lately; I guess I missed the high point because it certainly wasn’t anything to shout about when I lived there in the early 90s.

The weather yesterday was fine as fine can be, albeit a bit chilly in the morning, so I rode my motorcycle up the little valley behind my temporary housing in search of a good trail to hike. I stuffed my helmet in my backpack and set out, only to realize about five minutes later that it was quite uncomfortable having a motorcycle helmet hitting my back with every step, so I took it back and hooked it to the side of my bike, hoping that it wouldn’t get stolen while I was away.

I walked past the old ruined buildings and strange-looking holes in the ground I saw last time, past the lake and up into the mountains. I didn’t see a soul after the lake, where a family was sitting at a table watching the turtles dabbling about in the muddy water. The path was very small and rocky; were it not for the little flags left by a mountain service I would have gotten very lost very quickly. The forest was damp and lush, almost a jungle, the air striking in its freshness and full of newly released oxygen. I know, I sound like a bad wine critic when I write things like that.

I reached a crest, on the other side of which were some orange groves. A sign pointed the way up to Eagle Peak, so I followed the trail up, sometimes using some leftover ropes to haul myself up the steep slope. Before long I reached the top, where a little circle of bare ground was surrounded by foliage partially burnt by lightning and cut down by hand. The only sound was that of a wounded butterfly flapping around on the ground. I shot a small video of myself, looking old and haggard after the mere 200-meter ascent, making banal remarks about the scenery.

After successfully resisting the urge to run around nekkid in the foliage (or did I? You’ll never know!), I made my way down to the orange grove, where a couple of hikers were stretching. One of them was doing Chi-gong exercises. I asked him if there was another way down, and he said I could accompany him down the other side and around to Nei-gou Mountain. His name was Gao Ming-he, and he had quit his job after saving up enough money to live on for several years without working. He said he walked around the mountains every day, just for fun, and had been doing do for around five years. He was also working on a form of Chi-gong. “If I told you what it could do, you’d say I was crazy,” he told me as we walked. “We’ll see.”

After a while we came across an abandoned homestead. The house had no roof left and was crumbling inside, but you could tell it was lived in up until the 70s from the old TVs, sofas and LPs still inside. A decrepit vanity’s mirror was surprisingly clean, as if someone was maintaining it. Spooky stuff.

We continued on down the mountain until we came across a small river. Along the way we would occasionally pass other walkers, many of whom were older men walking their dogs. A river project is currently underway upstream, turning the water brown, but the banks and bridges were quite nice. Farmers in their fields were burning rice husks, turning the green landscape hazy and almost dreamlike.

We started up another upward leading road, one I would have assumed was someone’s driveway but turned out to be a public thoroughfare. We climbed up Nei-gou Mountain, which wasn’t nearly as high as Eagle Peak (so named, according to Gao Ming-he, because it was so infested with snakes that eagles went there for frequent snacking), but it was a good workout. Then we went down the other side and reached the ruins I had passed earlier on. Ming-he said it was an old coal mining community and pointed out the columns that had supported the mining cars, and the holes turned out to be the old mines. There’s not much left, but it’s facinating to walk through and wonder what it must have been like back in the Japanese colonial period when the place was full of people. It’s in the middle of nowhere even by today’s standards; imagine what it must have been like back then. Apparently the hills between Taipei and Jilong were full of little mining communities like that, though. All of them were abandoned when it was discovered that it was cheaper and easier to just import the stuff.

The sun was setting and it was getting quite chilly when we got back to the chicken ranch at the end of the road. Thankfully my helmet was still attached to Gendoyun and I could ride back to the apartment without fearing a ticket. I had gotten the call from my employer when I was hiking, and he had sent me some work via email, but I couldn’t get to it until after dinner. Still, work is work, and I’m glad to have the chance to get some overtime in. I’ve still got a lot of debt to pay off.

The new sight and sound of the moment are up. The sight is me cavorting on the mountaintop, of course, and the new sound is Lou Da-you’s “Hometown II”, a Taiwanese song recalling Taiwan’s history in a rather abbreviated form. Another one of my favorite pieces. Enjoy. I’ve also been trying to set up a Chinese-language blog, but I have yet to get it working.

Oh, and here’s a picture of me sneaking around an electronics store. Now what could I be up to, hmmm? More trouble, that’s what.