“Just an amateur,” I said.

He said he found it impossible to take pictures in Taipei. “The haze, the light just don’t work.”

“I’ve gotten a couple that turned out alright,” I said. He nodded noncommittally. The a/c was off, and the shop was melting hot from all the printing machines venting into the air.

“I know one guy who takes really good pictures here; his name is Wayne.”

“I know Wayne.”

I had dinner at the Sababa around the corner. I’d forgotten how much I like that place as I usually end up at the Yongkang branch these days. Later I walked over to Witchhouse to see Chalaw Passiwali play a show. They were warming up and doing a soundcheck when I arrived, but the hostess told me to get out and wait to buy a ticket like everyone else, so I walked around the area taking pictures for a few minutes before coming back. This time I found my college friend DJ writing at one of the tables. Later we were joined by a friend of his.

The show was very good. Chalaw told me that his album, which David Chen and I played on, was up for a Golden Melody Award this year. The ceremony is in a couple of weeks.

I didn’t get home until after midnight, frustrating yet again my attempts to go to bed earlier so I can get up and get more editing work done in the mornings, but it’s good to get a night out once in a while.

From the Wiki page: “If the entity is ‘almost human’, then the non-human characteristics will be the ones that stand out, leading to a feeling of “strangeness” in the human viewer. In other words, a robot stuck inside the uncanny valley is no longer being judged by the standards of a robot doing a good job at pretending to be human, but is instead being judged by the standards of a human doing a terrible job at acting like a normal person.”

In the Chinese Uncanny Valley, then, at least according to the above theory, the confusion would arise from the native Chinese speaker seeing the other person as either a foreigner doing a good job at pretending to be Chinese (”Oh, your Chinese is so good!”), as opposed to seeing them as a really slow, difficult Chinese person.

I think relatively homogeneous societies where language and ethnicity are closely associated, like many in Asia, are where such a phenomenon would be the most easily spotted. When I’m chatting online or talking on the phone with a native Chinese speaker, there is no hesitation or discomfort, although eventually if we talk long enough it’s likely that I will make a mistake that lets them know I’m not a native speaker, but sometimes while talking face-to-face, I occasionally sense a certain amount of confusion in the other person. Most of my Taiwanese friends don’t have this problem with me, but when I meet someone new, they usually start out in the default “foreigner mode” and then move into this zone of discomfort, and are either so freaked out they can’t deal with me, or they overcome it and things smooth over (my sparkling personality doesn’t really help in this regard either, I admit).

I’m not sure how much of this has to do with reconciling an obviously non-ethnically Chinese person speaking the language, and how much it has to do with the level of Chinese that is being used, but it seems to me that, for many native Chinese speakers, dealing with a foreigner who speaks basic or intermediate Chinese comes across as an easier task than dealing with someone who speaks well enough to almost (but not quite) be taken as a native speaker. Perhaps it has something to do with the way people like to have things (and people) neatly and simply categorized in their minds, which, added to a longstanding association between ethnicity and language, interferes with such categorizations and causes this phenomenon. I’m neither a psychologist nor a language expert, so I really have no idea. It’s an interesting concept, though.

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This is our house in Maitland, Florida, where I lived from 1981 more or less up until I came to Taiwan. I went to Maitland Junior High and Winter Park High School while living here, departed for trips with bands, orchestras and the boy scouts from that driveway. I drove my ‘77 Datsun up it, wobbling from an encounter with a street racer, resulting in a huge fight with my dad. I played with our cat, Henrietta, mowed that lawn and lugged the garbage out to that curb. They planted those trees by the street, part of a neighborhood program, when I was in high school. The window on the far right was my bedroom after my brother left for college. The reason there’s a hedge on one side but not the other is because my dad hacked the other side down and then realized it was a bad idea, so he left the other one up. Originally there was a huge Christmas tree in the middle of the yard that was uglier than the hedge, but for some reason it stayed.

The living room with a pink sofa and blue carpet was home to a grandfather clock but was never really used; we watched TV in the family room. My parents added a sunroom in the back where the porch was. The main reason we bought that house instead of nicer ones in nicer neighborhoods, I think, was the pool that took up most of the back yard, leaving room only for a small patch of grass and a grapefruit tree that provided breakfast on many a Winter morning. I, at least, insisted on a pool, as it is, after all, Florida, and we’d had one at our other Floridian house we’d had before the long, dark years of schoolyard fights and general loneliness that exemplified my time in Texas. But that’s a story for when Street View catches up with El Lago.

UPDATE: I just found out that they’re going to tear down Dommerich Elementary and Maitland Junior High to create a combined new school. So many memories, it makes me a little sad that I won’t ever get to go back there to have a look around the old place.

Finally, we got a place in the van, but when we arrived, we found that Peacefest had become a series of tents pitched in a sea of mud. Most of the hippies, and there were many, were going barefoot. I imagined there were all kinds of dangerous objects, natural and man-made, buried beneath the surface. We found a mud-covered Lynn Miles inside the local temple.

We were on at 4pm, so we had a little practice session on the second-floor stairway of the temple before we went on. I wasn’t quite awake yet, so I had to go grab a quick whisky coke as the rest of the band took the stage.

The show started out great; the audience was dancing and bobbing to our beat, and you never would have guessed we hadn’t had a real rehearsal in months. The sound guys did a great job, and we were hot. We’d only played a few songs, however, when we got the signal to wrap it up. WTF? But apparently there was some kind of scheduling problem, so we played “Riverside” and left the stage.

The aborigine kids’ group played for a while, accompanied by a mostly naked firebreather who happens be the chief of the Dream Community, followed by some foreign bands. Each of these played for what seemed like hours. One song went on longer than our entire set. I was driving back, so I wasn’t having any more drinks. I stood chatting with the guy I have a small crush on, wondering how cool he must be to not be creeped out by that embarrassing fact.

A giant peace sign was lit on fire, and then another. A giant inflatable chicken bobbed around the area. People shot off fireworks, and the Peace Circle began with some chanting. We were still talking off to the side, and got some hostile glares from the Circle for our insolence. There didn’t seem to be any focus to the event.

The rain never really stopped; there was no place to sit down. Everything was covered in mud. We’d done our tiny bit, but as night fell the line for the van going back down the hill was too long to consider. We grabbed some sub-par hamburgers at a stand and extricated ourselves from the situation, hauling our gear back down the mountain on foot in the dark. I wore the tub on my head as a makeshift umbrella. Back at the bottom of the hill, we met some Japanese musicians, one of whom, Syusaku Kanda, was also a washtub bass player. I set up the bass so he could play it, and he seemed impressed. I was sorry I hadn’t heard his group play.

The whole experience, however, was rather disappointing. If I’d known about the no-car policy, even for bands with heavy equipment, as well as our only being allowed to play a handful of songs while other bands went on as long as they liked, I’d have rather just skipped the whole mess.

The drive back was uneventful, and I ended up at Darrell’s and Judy’s for his 40th birthday party. There were many people there I knew vaguely, and I’m afraid I spent a bit too much time talking shop with Paul and Darrell instead of chatting with other guests. But it was fun, and the food was good. Judy insisted on offering me a huge slab of birthday cake to take home, which I found a little embarrassing (but too good to refuse).

Sunday was spent editing and coughing, mostly at the same time. This morning I went to see the doctor, who said I had acute bronchitis and tonsilitis, so now I’m on the loopy pills for a few days. The rain hasn’t let up, either. Every time I think full-on summer is here, I’m wrong.

We got what we thought were reasonably good seats, but in addition to the chairs on stage was a large whiteboard. It turned out that this was going to be a classical music concert with lectures. Many people in the audience had brought notebooks. The short woman in glasses sitting next to me was all ready with a multicolored pen.

Ever since the debut of Taipei Philharmonic Radio in the mid-90’s, it seems that many people here have become interested in “understanding” classical music. There are programs dedicated to “explaining” all kinds of classical pieces, and game shows where you guess the piece and its composer. You can even buy expensive CD series to listen to in accompaniment to your favorite classical tunes, telling you just what it is you’re listening to. Other CD series are aimed at younger listeners.

The musicians walked out to take their seats and tune, and then conductor Yin-fang Zhang, a young woman, came on stage followed by a man in a white suit. This was professor Chu-wey Liu, and he began to explain the piece. The orchestra would play a bit, and just when I was getting into it, they’d stop, and the professor would talk a bit about phrasing, themes and motifs. I found it incredibly annoying. All of the emotion of the piece was lost. As if that weren’t enough, the woman next to was letting off silent farts every few minutes. Actually, I’m not sure it was her, but the wind was from that direction, and she just seemed guilty. Her pen clicked on and off as she took different-colored notes on the music, and she clapped between movements.

The full orchestra came on stage for the next piece, and I was relieved by the appearance of some very nice eye candy in the second violin section. During the intermission a concert hall employee came over to tell Chumble’s Canadian friend to stop moving his head during the show as it was apparently distracting the people behind him. I turned around to see who could be so easily distracted, but nobody met my gaze.

The final piece, Brahms’ Variations on a Theme by Joseph Haydn, was picked apart once more, but I love Brahms and managed to enjoy the last part when the orchestra played through it in its entirety despite the waves of noxious odors coming from my left. The conductor didn’t seem to have a very firm hand on the orchestra, which was loose and often out of tune, especially the woodwinds, but the sound was quite nice and made me want to upgrade my stereo. It’s been forever since I played in a classical group; I played in high school with the local youth orchestra and once with the Florida Symphony Orchestra, and in college with the Central Taiwan Orchestra, both excellent groups, but I haven’t done anything like that since. I kind of miss it.

This morning on my way to work I saw some people spreading a net across the underpass on Zhongxiao West Road, underneath the pedestrian overpass. There was an ambulance and some policemen walking around, so I went up to have a look. I couldn’t see anyone in trouble and thought for a minute that a baby had inexplicably gotten caught underneath the overpass somehow, but it turned out that they were shooting scene for a made-for-TV movie. I asked one of the crew if it was difficult to apply for that particular intersection, but he said it had to be there, as the movie was based on true events, and someone had apparently done something of note while perched on the outside of the overpass. So it had to be that one, and they had to get the shot then, because they weren’t going to get a second chance. I took some pictures and left, wishing them luck.

When I did get around to visiting the hospital, however, the exhibit was long gone. I asked the people at the help desk what happened to the photos, and they put me in contact with the photographer, Huang Jin-fa of Alpha Photography. I called him up and arranged to meet him at his studio in Xindian a few days later.

Huang used to work for a newspaper as a photojournalist until the paper shut down. Alpha is basically his garage, converted into a studio, the walls covered with huge prints of his photos, including the one Sandman had mentioned seeing. Many are taken from helicopters, a testament to Huang’s standing as a photographer, and the stages of Bitan’s development as seen from the air are fascinating. The picture Sandman saw was taken from the expressway bridge before it was open to traffic, so reproducing it would be difficult without a car. Many other photos he’s taken and collected over the years show views of Bitan I hadn’t seen before. One shows his daughter in front of the old Xindian Bus Station, the site of the present MRT station. Others show the various suspension bridges throughout the Japanese period and since. Besides the bridge, the Bi-ting pavilion is another constant throughout the pictures; that little place is ancient.

The riverfront was just rocks up until relatively recently, forcing people interesting in taking a spin in one of the huge-wheeled paddle boats of the time to pick their way down from the top of the riverbed across rocks of all sizes. “US servicemen on leave from Vietnam used to come down here to swim all the time,” Huang said. The catchment under the traffic bridge was originally much more fragile, being swept away with every strong storm and drastically lowering the water levels. The original bridge, built by the Japanese, was a single-lane plank construction, with heavy cement planks that could take the weight of vehicles and animals. The second bridge was divided into two lanes and was of a lighter construction. I remember the second bridge from my early days in Taiwan. The current version is again one lane, with a lighter construction method.

The road on which I live now was apparently a tiny alley before they widened it, bordered by what looked like a wooden shantytown on both sides. In fact, a plan has been on the books for years to tear down the ugly 70’s-era tile buildings that now fill the triangle between my building and the shore, as it is government land, in order to build a park. The people who live and work there have fought to keep things the way they are, however, and the plans stay languishing on the books. In a way, it’s good, as I could never have afforded my place if they had improved that space. Property values would be double what they are today.

I noticed a collection of old lenses on a shelf in Huang’s office where he was showing me the old pictures, along with a Canon 20D. I asked him about these, and he said that it was very easy to plop on an adapter ring to use any old lens on the 20D body. He demonstrated with an old Leica lens. I took a few test shots and was impressed with the effect.  You have to focus manually, and the viewfinder is too dark, especially if you close the aperture too much. With good old lenses going for dirt cheap at camera stores as people rush to more modern offerings, however, I might just go see what I can find on Camera Street in the old downtown area. “Young people aren’t interested in these old lenses,” he said. “They want immediate gratification; it used to be that you composed a shot. Now you take a million and hope for some accidental goodness from the camera’s AI.”

I told Huang that he should set up a Flickr account, but he waved his hand, saying, “I don’t understand these Internet things.” His son and son-in-law were more savvy and set up the company website, but they don’t seem to see photography in quite the same way as their father. When I told Huang about the feeling of regret I get when I pass up potential shots, his eyes lit up. “That’s just the way I was when I was younger,” he said.

After the bar closed, we walked around the area in search of other hangouts, all of us (except possibly Wayne) reluctant to let the night end so soon, though it was well past midnight by the time we left. “Hey, friends, where are you going?” one guy yelled to us, in Spanish for some reason, as we walked past. We ended up sitting outside a place on Xinsheng South Road across from the park, where we had kebabs, sanbei chicken and veggies, chatting for a few more hours. The restaurant was also closing, so we walked down Xinsheng to Heping East Road, where Wayne turned west and home. Mark, PR and I walked the other way, all the way to PR’s empty house, where we bade him farewell and found cabs home in the rain.

As I watched the lights across the river flow by from the big wet expressway, I tried to imagine what it must feel like to pick up everything and leave Taiwan for a life in another country. It was difficult. In a way, it’s an exciting idea, but I’m so content with my life here as it is that it would freak me out more than a little bit. Eventually I settled on imagining leaving on an extended trip, with the idea of roaming the world for a while before eventually returning here. A bit more comfortable thought. By the time I got to bed the sky was already light.

The departure from our fair island of Prince Roy and Spicy Girl marks the end of an era, especially accompanied as it is by our new administration, the possibility of a new US administration on the way, the Olympics, three links, and a host of other developments. Things are afoot. Someone asked me the other day how many cycles of friends I’d gone through here. It’s a fair question, I suppose. Many foreign friends have come and gone. Some came back. Taiwanese friends have gone and come, as it were. In any case, none of us are the same person we were or will be; I heard once that all of our cells are replaced over a period of seven years, so that you’re literally not the person you once were. So things change, people change….alright, I’ll stop trying to be all Deep here and let you figure out what all of this means, if anything.

I walked over from the subway, found the place and was directed down to the basement level, where I found an empty reception desk, an empty help desk, and a generally dark, empty room. I peeked into the offices on either side and failed to arouse anyone’s interest. A single fellow in a tie chatted on the phone, leaning on the unmanned reception desk. “Wonderful service here,” I muttered. The guy on the phone glanced at me and continued chatting. I took out my phone and called Ms. Chen. “Are you here?” she asked.

“I’m downstairs,” I said.

“Ok, just go into the office on your right when you come in,” she said. I did so, and a woman approached me, while the other workers stared.

“I’m looking for Ms. Chen Xin-yue,” I said, and the woman burst out in giggles. She looked over at her co-workers and managed to point at Ms. Chen, who had stood up at the mention of her name. She looked at me, uncomprehending. “I’m here,” I said. “Me. I’m…uh, we had an appointment? I talked to you not five seconds ago?”

More giggles. “Oh!” Ms. Chen said, looking shocked and pointing me to a nearby desk, where I sat down and waited. As I did so, the entire section of office I’d just turned away from burst out into laughter.

Eventually the giggles died down and Ms. Chen came over. “Ok…” she said hesitantly, apparently unsure how to proceed. “Do you….do you have an ID card?”

You know I do, I thought. “Yes,” I said, and handed it over. She looked at it, then consulted her computer a while.

“You know, we could offer you a much better rate if you transferred all of your investments, funds and the like to us,” she said, saying “rate” in English. I declined, and she shrugged. After a while she asked me to sign a form. “Sign here to promise that you won’t pay off the loan within a year, and we’ll see if we can come up with a better rate.”

That’s it? I thought. “Could you at least give me a ballpark range?” I’d been led to believe on the phone that I could reduce my interest rate substantially and would be given several plans to choose from, but the figures she gave me were unimpressive at best, and would only last a year, after which the rate would go back up.

I mentioned the troubles I’d had at the bank previously, such as last month when the clerk asked me if I was positive I’d paid the payment the month before. I mentioned that many other banks have been calling me about switching my loan to them and giving quite attractive rates. Ms. Chen seemed at once skeptical and apologetic about these stories. “I’ll see what I can do, and we’ll get back to you with a solid figure,” she repeated, and then added. “Oh, and will you be staying in Taiwan long?”

I blinked, stared.

“Because you might leave, you see,” she went on. You must really, really not want my business, I thought as I walked out the door, up the stairs, in search of lunch.

No deep revelations here, though. This account continues to be about trivial minutiae (and I’m sure there’s a blog out there with exactly that name; if there’s not, there should be), and I will prove it by telling you that I saw Speed Racer last night. I was a bit apprehensive, not only about the idea of making a feature-length movie about a 70’s cartoon that I remember enjoying as a child (my model Mach V was a favorite toy), but the potentially headache-inducing colors, especially in the LUX theater’s digital projection format. I needn’t have worried, however; Speed Racer is a fun, well-paced romp. Sure, it’s a long cartoon, but I’d rather the Wachowskis stick with this level of storytelling than venture back into the pseudo-deep-thought morass of the Matrix trilogy. This is a much simpler thing, a return to a long Saturday morning, stretched out on the big rope rug in the family room gazing up at the huge, dusty Zenith, reveling in the power of its three clunky channels.

A few hours later, we were approaching the Chungkang Rd. Exit, which led up towards Tunghai University, where PR and I first met while studying there some two decades ago. The time of day, the angle of the light, and most of the view reminded me of the first time I approached the area, on a bus full of foreigners after a week or two in Taipei after my first arrival here. Looking back, I wish I’d taken the train on that trip, as I never got to leave from the old Taipei Train Station.

We drove up to the Utopia subdivision, where Daniel had already met up with our hosts, Reinhard and Xiao Mao, at their cafe just off Art Street. They were waiting for us at a sandwich shop, so we had lunch on the veranda. The area’s become quite nice over the years, with tree-lined lanes, interesting shops and restaurants. After the meal, we walked over to the Tunghai Campus, entering from the side gate by the auditorium and walking down through the campus.

The trees were the biggest difference, followed by all the new structures. The square where students erected a sympathetic Goddess of Liberty to copy the one in Tienanmen Square at the time is now shaded by a canopy of large trees that hadn’t even been planted when we were there. We walked down the slope between the oldest parts of the campus, flanked by the old Tang Dynasty-style buildings. I felt it was odd that, in 1955, people would be interested in building what appeared to be a Japanese-style university, but there’s probably a lot more to the story than I know. PR found the bell-tower not just incongruous, but downright ugly. I was trying to restrict my picture-taking. It’s just out of hand.

We found the old language center, from which we both fled after a short time to take regular university courses. All but one wing has been completely redone, causing PR to misidentify the location of the old classrooms and offices. Daniel took our picture in front of the non-restored bit, and I reenacted my dramatic exit from the department for my friend’s entertainment. We then purposely avoided the convenient new road to the dorms, choosing instead to cross the “Female Ghost Bridge” that had been the only route to the dorms from the main campus in the old days.

The old dorms that caused me so much dismay when I first laid eyes on them are still there, and only mildly refurbished. They are still all cement-floored, six-student rooms with no a/c and wooden slats for bunk beds. PR was a bit hazy on his experiences, but I immediately found all three of the rooms I’d lived in at the time. Now, of course, much better dorms have been constructed nearby, looking more like luxury hotels than anything else. I wonder how the students choose who gets to live where these days.

As we walked over to the local cafeteria, the site of some of the worst food either of us had encountered, it occurred to me that most of the current students probably hadn’t even been born when we were there. I told PR we should have a reunion; he said that we were. True enough, I guess; I didn’t hang out with many foreigners at the time, just PR sometimes, and Boogie, who was from Washington & Lee as well.

We walked down to the school store to find some Tunghai paraphernalia, but they didn’t have much. It seems that Taiwanese students don’t really get into the whole college paraphernalia thing. PR sees a huge market in this, but I think maybe they are tired of being forced to wear school insignia throughout their childhood and don’t want anything to do with such things after they can start choosing their own clothes.

A Farming-themed expo was being held by the gymnasium, and above the doors a banner had been hung that read: “Dances With Farmers”. We walked by the tennis courts, where PR spent a lot of time playing with the women’s team. He was taking short videos of various things and introducing the sights to his camera. I find it difficult to do that when I’m with other people.

We walked down towards the farming part of the campus, stopping at a store that used to be tiny and is now a Wellcome Market. I used to walk around that area quite a bit as a student, listening to Zhao Chuan songs on my Walkman and eating O’Smile peanut cookies from the tiny store.

PR wanted to catch the sunset from Taichung Harbor, so we walked back up the campus, pausing by the still-barbed-wire-encircled Women’s Dorms, the music department where I took many classes, and Luce Chapel, which is looking rather run-down these days. We then climbed the steps in front of the library, where I, PR and another students named Mitch used to park our motorcycles before class at the night school department in the morning. “Let’s go to Bieshu for dinner,” I said. We weren’t going to do that, but I just liked to say it, as it was something we were always saying back then. We walked up the broad path by the polluted stream between the campus and the industrial area next door. I was thinking it would be an interesting movie plot to have a portal somewhere on the campus that would take us back to, say, 1989. “I’m not sure I’d like to take that portal,” PR said. I had to agree.

The back gate is just just as magical now as it was then, though, at least to me. The first time I stepped through from the quiet, empty forest into the chaos of that street, I thought it miraculous. It still seems that way. Many of the old restaurants have since been replaced by fashionable clothing shops, but the spirit is the same.

On the way back to the cafe, we passed a curious collection of large plastic fish that looked like they had been used to decorate the ceilings of seafood restaurants throughout the city. The view down the hill was largely unchanged from that viewpoint, though the campus is now surrounded by high-priced apartment buildings.

We piled into PR’s Honda and drove down the mountain towards the sea, racing to catch the setting sun. Providence University, which was bare as a desert twenty years ago, is now covered in trees. The new Highway 3 overpass surprised me. Otherwise, everything seemed the same as when I took my first ride on the new-to-me 135cc Honda motorcycle down to the harbor, where I was warned by soldiers not to take pictures.

The harbor proved elusive, however. We drove and drove, nagged by the annoying woman’s voice issuing from Daniel’s GPS device to slow down. The sun dipped behind impenetrable clouds as we pulled into the parking lot by the fishing port at Wuchi. By the time we had walked to the shore and climbed up and over the wall of sand, it was gone. We sat for a while, taking pictures of each other and ducking to avoid huge, cumbersome flying insects, before walking back to the harbor, where a loudspeaker cranked to full volume blasted the area with frenetically annoying music that gave rise to homicidal urges. Perhaps it was so loud to cover up the high-pitched squealing of the pigs behind the restaurant, but the smell was so obvious I’m pretty sure people couldn’t miss them.

We walked through the unremarkable market, and then drove back up the hill to a restaurant for dinner. The waiter serving us looked about 15 years old, and the service was a bit addled. Still, the food, particularly the soup dumplings that Reinhard recommended, was all quite good. I was eager to try their sesame baozi, but found them not up to the quality of the kind we used to eat in the army. Then again, I’m biased.

After dinner we drove down Chungkang Road into town, a trip I used to make many times on my motorcycle, to meet up with Michael Turton and Sean Reilly at a bar called Bollywood. I ordered a green apple drink that tasted exactly like a gin and tonic. Michael had to leave a bit early, and Sean divvied up some delicious brownies before he, too, had to leave. It seems Taichung closes down a lot earlier than Taipei, or maybe it was just that area.

Back at the cafe, Reinhard and Xiao Mao allocated us three places to sleep. PR got the room upstairs, and Daniel got the old traditional Chinese bed in the shop, and I slept in the back room. The a/c was very loud, but I had to have it on because the room was pretty hot. I ended up sleeping for a couple of hours at a time, waking up, and then sleeping for another couple of hours. Needless to say, I was somewhat less than rested when morning came and the singing from the church next door overpowered even the noise from the a/c. After some delicious egg-cakes Reinhard bought nearby for breakfast, I went upstairs and took a good nap. When I came downstairs, a new visitor had arrived: Carol, a pregnant British woman who lives in Beijing. We chatted for a while, occasionally diving beneath the table to take pictures of Suancai (sauerkraut), Reinhard’s and Xiao Mao’s flat-faced cat.

It was another beautiful day up on the hill, but it got a bit hot when we drove down into the city for lunch at a restaurant called Fatty’s. The kitchen smelled wonderful. We sat at a table on the sidewalk in the mugginess. I ordered the Sicily pizza, which the waitress assured me was not at all spicy. Apparently “not at all spicy” is some sort of Sicilian code for “very spicy” as I could only have a couple of slices when it came. Even PR agreed that it was pretty spicy, and he’s no lightweight. I sampled other people’s meals instead. When the waitress came back, I mentioned the level of spiciness in the allegedly non-spicy pizza, she just shrugged, as if it just hadn’t occurred to her, and really didn’t matter anyway.

We considered driving out to Miaoli to some gardens there, but it seems that they stopped allowing people in at 4pm, so instead we walked around the area a bit, looking at the old two-story houses and yards. We ended up in one such place, which has been make into a somewhat modern teahouse. We all sat on the floor upstairs, which was occasionally frequented by cats, talking about the pros and cons of having an online presence, whether we are different IRL from how we appear online, etc. It was very pleasant. Taichung is very pleasant, actually. The pace is slower, and even on a weekend afternoon it seems halfway shut down, but it is nice. The appearance of the city may have changed a lot over the past two decades, but the spirit is much the same, and I like it. It’s too bad that they don’t have an MRT system, though.

But it was time to hit the road, as we were planning on having dinner at a Mexican place in Zhongli, so PR, Daniel and I saddled up and joined the long stream of cars heading towards the highway. As we drove, I began to wish I’d bought one of those gadgets that lets you broadcast your iPod to a nearby radio, as we had the same poor choice of music stations, and every time we found a good song, it was followed by 40 minutes of blather/advertising. Traffic was terrible, and it was after 8pm before we finally reached Zhongli. The restaurant, Sabroso, was packed with students, not surprising as it’s right by Zhongyuan University. At first I was afraid the service would be bad, as it took the woefully undermanned staff, which consisted of a couple of guys, to seat us. Also, I had a migraine coming on, so I wasn’t in the best of moods. I’d spent the past half hour with my eyes closed to avoid the flashing lights in my field of vision.

The meal made things much better. First of all, it came within a reasonable amount of time, but more importantly, it was really good. I ordered beef tacos and chicken tostados. The tacos were real tacos, soft triangles with toppings, not the rigid tacos gringos most people are familiar with. The tostados were even more delicious. PR was happy with the spiciness of his meal as well as the taste. I ate too much, and am still paying for it, but I’m glad I got to sample at least a few of the dishes there.

After dinner we dropped Daniel off and made our way back to the highway, and back to Taipei. This city always seems a little different every time you leave it, so it was good to get away for a bit. Now I’m back at home, amidst the native calls of the local jackhammers. Back to work.