My apartment is usually nice and quiet. Once or twice the people downstairs cranked up their 60-million-watt Karaoke system, apparently to attract aliens from far-flung planets, but after I had a word with them they stopped.

Recently, however, I’ve been hearing a piano. Playing the same melody over and over again, it sounds nearby. Yet when I went around to all my neighbors, nobody admitted to having a piano. Some people had heard it, but nobody knew who the culprit was. I crept along with my ear to the hallway walls, listening for some clue. Was the building haunted?

On a whim, I went up two floors, but no piano. Then I went down two floors from my place. Ah-ha! It turned out to be the apartment two floors below me, though the people in the apartment below me, the alien-hunters, claimed to have never heard the piano. I can only assume that they’re actually deaf from all of the karaoke…either that or some strange construction fluke transmits sound around some apartments and into others.

It’s a student, I’m guessing. The parent or husband (I’m guessing, as I never actually saw the piano player) said they would stop playing in the mornings and waking me up. The problem is that they play during reasonable hours, when I can’t really raise any objections. But the constant sound of piano practice in my apartment is really, really distracting. I can’t have cover-up music on all the time. The torturing soul plays all weekend, when I’m home trying to edit. The same tune, over and over. The next time someone tries to impress me with their piano-playing skills, I’ll wonder how many of their neighbors went insane so that they could play “Imagine” whilst looking wistful for their friends.

DV8, the musty, wood-covered site of many late nights after work at the newspaper as well as a scene in the movie, is closing its doors for good after Chinese New Year’s, so David, Thumper and I met up there on Friday night to see it once more. A fair share of people were there, including Gavin, Bob from Carnegies and Matthew Lian. We did the traditional DV8 thing, that is we drank, hunted through the music collection, argued about politics and played some pool downstairs.

Our old co-worker Ronnie, who is now at the Taipei Times, wrote a story on the old place’s imminent demise. It was good, but one part made me laugh:

Kenbo Liao remembers one such hazy moment in 1996, when China was launching missiles over Taiwan. Lots of people had left Taiwan, but he was here with a few regulars. “The missiles were probably shooting over our heads,” he said. Around 2am they got together and pledged to defend Taiwan against China. “We were comrades,” Liao said.

Ah, Kenbo. What a character. It’s hard for me to get all weepy about his selfless act of heroism in drinking in a bar, however, as at the time my military unit in Hsinchu was on high alert, so with all the snap drills I didn’t have the chance to express my patriotism in such an eloquent fashion.

David was roaring drunk by the time we hit the street in the wee hours of the morning. He had a flight the next day to Australia, the lucky sod. After we had walked about 50 feet from the door, I turned him around to face the bar, from which music was still emanating, and said, “There it is. You can see it, and you can hear it.”

The next day was Chinese New Year’s Eve, and I spent the evening at a friends house in Nangang eating good food and playing with their new Wii. They only sell the Japanese version here, so we spent a bit of time squinting at the squiggles on the screen, trying to guess what they meant. It was a lot of fun, though. The tennis was probably my favorite, though I didn’t get to play the pingpong. The bowling was ok, as was the baseball. The boxing was just frustrating, as the punches seemed to bear no relation to one’s hand motions.

I got back to Bitan, exhausted from the food and the Wii-related activities, at about 2am, and the fireworks were going strong. I longed for sleep, but the constant barrage outside my window made it impossible. I tried going downstairs to the common room, but it was just as loud there. Then I tried my bathtub, which was even worse as it cut off my circulation and made me dizzy. In the end I just laid on my bed waiting for it to die down, and took a nap the next morning.

When I went down to the lobby, I saw a newspaper article posted on the bulletin board, about the strict anti-fireworks measures being undertaken by the Bitan Police. Patrols every hour, on the hour! The residents are suffering! More news from bizarro-land, ’cause it ain’t happening here.

Tonight looks to be more of the same, colorful explosions-wise. In fact, it will probably continue for several nights, and as I’m a bit short on money this month, I can’t afford to go stay at the Love Hotel just up the road for a night or two. I wonder if I have any old all-night sauna coupons left…

As I was filming a scene for the movie in the old abandoned police station just off Bitan Road a few weeks ago, I noticed among the old mysteriously abandoned photo albums and other paperwork stacks of what looked like money on the sagging shelves inside. It turned out to be stacks of old brochures for the old Xingfu Amusement Park that was located on top of the hill. Indeed, the complex had replaced the top of the hill, carving it completely into terraces to support the rides, the monorail and the giant ferris wheel that was visible from anywhere in Taipei.

The park’s heyday was back in the 80’s as far as I can tell. I remember seeing the ferris wheel on my first trip to Bitan, back when the suspension bridge was still the two-lane version. But the place was shut down in the 90’s. Sandman tells me that he and Thumper witnessed the workers breaking it down, and one crane operator was killed when the ferris wheel fell on him. Since then, the place has acquired a reputation as being haunted (????). Young men apparently like to take their easily-scared girlfriends to the old place and watch them get all weak in the knees, if you know what I mean.

There’s not much left of the place to haunt these days, though. They tore down the pavilions about a year ago, and the only building left is the one on which the ferris wheel stood, plus a monorail tunnel just above it. I have no recollection of what the place was like at the time, so the brochures, seemingly brand-new and heavily adorned in Disneyesque characters, were a real find. I decided to take my camera up there along with a brochure and see if I could figure out just where the brochure pictures were taken and then take present-day versions, if possible.

The gate looks pretty much like it did in the brochure, though a tree has grown in front of the park sign, which is pretty dilapidated. Trees have grown up in front of the temple in the background as well.

The brochure included a bird’s-eye view of the park, obviously taken from the ferris wheel. I tried to replicate it by climbing up the mountain beyond the old site. From this photo it was a lot easier to see where things were, originally.

This was the building on which the ferris wheel was based. The outer rooms are gone, and the interior is full of graffiti. Trash is piled in front, including the remains of a few old go-karts and whirling teacups from the old rides.

The go-kart track is still traceable. From the picture, I needed to find a section of the track where it looped around on itself and was surrounded on both sides by tires. There was only one such section, so it wasn’t hard too hard to find.

The terminal of the go-kart track was just underneath the monorail, and I located it using the cupid statue I could just make out in the brochure. The cupid statue, though now legless and bent, still presides over a mosquito-ridden pool.

The rocket and helicopter rides are long gone, but I was able to triangulate where the brochure picture was taken, and superimpose it on the present-day site. Note the spaceships read “Apllo”.

The merry-go-round is also gone, but I managed to pull parts of the old horses from the thick grass. An older man in a farmer’s hat was cutting the grass in the area as I poked around, and when I showed him the brochure he was delighted. I gave it to him, as I’d run out of pictures to find, and in any case there were thousands more lying in the old police station.

While I find it fascinating to see the history of the park, I’m glad it’s not here today. The jungle has pretty much reclaimed the mountaintop, and it’s much more pleasant now. I’m also happy that we don’t have to deal with throngs of customers streaming through Bitan every weekend; I’m positive that the place was intolerably noisy as well. I much prefer the peace and quiet the abandonment has left us.