Traffic last night after work was incredibly conge…
Traffic last night after work was incredibly congested, even for Taipei. I just hit that one point where the entire city is gridlocked, apparently, right after everyone has just gotten off of work, and for some reason roughly half of the cars on the road are double- or tripled-parked.
I arrived at Cafe Odeon at a little after 6:30 to find Cranky Laowai, of Oriented fame, browsing the considerable selection of imported beers. Then I got a call from Dean, who was in a taxi. Dean had told me how to get there, and now he wanted to know how to get there himself. Not long after that he and Brian, his co-worker from the ROC Department of Propaganda, where Cranky Laowai works as well, had me surrounded at a table in the back and taunted me by intimating that our beef lasagna was, in fact, fresh out of a Chef Boy-ar-dee can.
Richard, another News alum, showed up, and we walked over to Peso, whose staff is surely used to my presence by now as well as my preference for cheese nachos and Bailey’s Irish Cream. No sooner had we settled at a table in the loft than they began playing a horrid, Taiwanese-shopping-mall version of non-stop Christmas tunes. I was chosen to go inform the staff the impropriety of this musical choice, but my entreaties were apparently ignored, so I went to the empty DJ booth and turned the cacophony down. The staff then got a clue as to my intentions and put on some more appropriate music.
Soon enough we were joined by Graham, another News escapee, and then who should show up but another Oriented frequenter, codename: Alien, along with two of her friends. I think that the girls must have been doing some drinking of ther own before they got there, or else their brews were inordinately potent. Or maybe alcoholic fumes tend to gather at the top of the building where we were sitting, hastening the process of getting drunk. I don’t know. Whatever it was, it worked. I wasn’t drunk enough to get into the real spirit of things, i.e. being able to actually appreciate the atrociously bad jokes that only too much drink can produce, but just drunk enough to think that the guys who worked there were kind of cute. I didn’t, however, feel like a repeat of last Saturday morning, especially since I had to be at work this morning.
Alien wants Dean and I to play Kirk and Spock respectively in a Star Trek episode she is thinking of producing some time next year. You laugh, but it could happen! You never know!
At some point after midnight the lights came up and the music stopped. We could see cops entering downstairs, checking everyone’s ID’s. They progressed up until they were on the level just below ours. Graham and Dean have both just recently been legalized and were eager to show off their newfound status to the police, but they never got the chance. The police didn’t even bother coming up to check us and just started tallying up their quota sheets, getting ready to move on to their next bar.
We all agreed that this was preposterous. We wanted to be carded, dammit! It wasn’t long before we realized just how lame our indignation was, though, so we just slunk away dejectedly in the abject knowlege that we’d all have to be at work in a few hours. Graham and I approached the police about being carded, plaintively holding out our respective ID card to be checked, but the police just looked at us sadly and shook their heads. Sorry, son, we can’t help you.
Actually, a few years back during one of my periods of sporadic unemployment, some of my friends said I should apply to the police academy here. After all, they said, who would suspect a foreigner of working for the Taiwanese police force! It was genius! The only flaw to such a brilliant plan was that I didn’t particularly relish the idea of being shot at. What a silly youth I was. My loss, I guess.
