I’m feeling almost normal these days. Tired, but more-or-less normal. I have to go to an APEC conference tomorrow at the Grand Hotel, which means I will have to wear Ze Zoot again. Actually, I might have lost enough weight to wear Ze Originale Zoot, the one my parents bought me when I graduated from college. But that might be stretching things. I just hope I don’t screw up things too badly for APEC this time around.

The move yesterday went well and swiftly. Stephen only brought one other guy and one van, but it was over within an hour. The new place is smaller than my old one, and it looks even smaller with all my stuff in it. I will need to arrange it properly before I have any space to myself. Last night after handing over the keys to the Chungking Mansions (technically the place I’m living now is a ‘mansions’, but a lot less like the famous dive in Hong Kong) to the new tennant, I went to meet Dean and Kay at the train station. We bought tickets and boarded a train to Keelung, a port city on the northeast coast of Taiwan.

The trip took less than an hour, but it felt good to get out of Taipei for a while. The last time I was in Keelung was when we took the Cruise to Nowhere on the Norwegian Star, which has since been replaced by the Aries Star. I needed to eat something before we embarked on the next leg of our journey, so we went to Rico’s, a new fast-food place on the harbor front just outside the train station. The food was pretty bad, but it was better than nothing. It was as if they had taken the much-degraded food production skills of “Gold In Tex” down another notch, if that’s possible.

Full of greasy chicken, we caught a taxi out to the Ocean University, all the while wondering if the cabbie would charge extra for driving us to an underwater destination. It turns out that the university is merely on the ocean, not in it, but it was still interesting. We were there at that hour of the night to help a friend of ours, Paul Barlow, aka “Norman Szabo” aka “Tall Paul” in the making of a short film. Paul met us at the gate and ushered us to the back of the campus where he had set up a small set in an abandoned earthquake-damaged building. He had a Sony PD150 DV cam that worked fine once the focus was on. My job was holding the boom mike, while Paul filmed and Dean cast shadows and read corny lines into a lime-green 70’s era telephone. It was fun.

On the train back we were talking about getting in touch with someone, and Dean suggested I send an email. “Yeah, right, an email,” I said before realizing that I said the word “email” in the same scathing tone one would have said “letter” in the mid-nineties. In these days of instant communication via web and cellphone, the email now seems like a dinosaur, a formal document one sends to business acquaintences about merger deals. The difference is, of course, I still have letters from people in the 80’s. My sister has letters from me to her when she went off to college in the late 70’s. Who’s going to have a space for all of their emails, much less their IM conversations and phone messages anywhere even a year from now? Even if you do back them up, it’s hard to hold a burned CD in your hand and think of friends past.

Tonight should be my last night at the Chungking Mansions. I am doing double-duty at work for a few days to try and make up the time I lost in the hospital. I also lost about 6 kilos when I was there, but I don’t know when or if I want to get those back. I am feeling a bit better, though; that is to say, I’m actually feeling ok for little bits of time now and then, rather than just feeling sick all the time. It’s a waiting game, waiting until whatever this is is completely out of my system. Tonight will ideally be spent packing, and Steven the Mover should be around tomorrow to whisk me away, Calgon-like, to my new abode.

Last night I went out for a cautious dinner at Din Tai Fong with Maoman. I like DTF because it seems clean and the kitchen is clearly visible behind transparent walls. The prices could cheaper, but the food was good. Afterwards we went to Warner Village to see Red Dragon. The movie seemed incomplete to me, for some reason. Perhaps I didn’t pick up on some vital clue, but the ending left me confused and dissatisfied. It had its scary moments, though. The blind woman was great, and Edward Norton was nicely understated. Anthony Hopkins was excellent as usual. But what was with the “Zhong” character carved in the tree? What, the character for dragon, “Long” was too complicated? They could have at least done their homework on that point.

Some new developments on the book front. I don’t want to say exactly what they are because I don’t want to jinx it. Still, things might be looking up.

It’s Sunday night. I have to go back to work tomorrow, and probably put in extra hours this week to make up for the time I lost last week. I’ve been feeling slightly better each day, but I don’t think I’m fully recovered yet. I really wish it would hurry up.

The weather is cool these days. Various friends have invited me out recently but, most likely due to being still a bit sick, I turned them all down and stay at home eating noodles and watching mindless action movies and cartoons. I did venture out today for lunch at United Mix with Berta, but then I came back home right after. It’s good to talk with people, although I’m not the best of company on the best of days, and lately I’ve been feeling depressed and anti-social, so I keep to myself in order to spare other people the unpleasantness of being around me. However, I suspect that this only works to make my situation worse.

I’ve got to keep records at an important meeting this Friday and Saturday; I also have to pack all of my things, as I am leaving the Chungking Mansions Taipei to go live in a locker at Sogo Department Store. Steven the Mover has arranged to help me move on Wednesday. Just thinking everything I have to do makes me tired. There’s so much. The winter weather isn’t helping, either. My short film, The End, didn’t win anything at the festival in Toronto. Not that I expected it to, but it would have been nice. Oh, and hello 25,000th visitor. Sorry, there’s no prize.

I suppose I’d better describe a bit of what happened earlier this week. Friday night after meeting Steve, Dean, and others at The Shannon for lunch, Gavin, Dean and I met up at the Q-bar. I had Chicken Quesadillas and two rum-and-cokes. Lightning and thunder began to flash, and as the rain began, we all went our seperate ways. I walked home. I was feeling pretty bad. By the time I got home I was ready to throw up, and my stomach felt awful. I went downstairs and threw up on the sidewalk. Nobody walking around seemed to notice. Another drunk foreigner, that’s all. I got some money from an ATM and hailed a cab to Adventist Hospital. The cabbie could tell I was in a pretty bad shape so he got me there quick, or at least before I threw up in his car.

The emergency room people gave me some medicine and put me on an IV drip. I checked in later on Saturday morning. Thanks to Dean, Kay, Mindcrime, Janice, Harry and James for visiting me while I was there. Dean brought me the Dark Knight Returns comic, which I savoured when I was able to. At first I was in too much discomfort. I couldn’t stand the thought of eating. The doctor said that my blood test indicated typhoid, and that meant a 3-day incubation period. In any case, I’m never going to eat at the Shannon, the Q-bar or Amigo again.

I was in a room with five other patients. One was a low-level gangster with very poor aim. The reason I knew this was the cleaning lady was always complaining that he couldn’t hit the toilet. He shuffled around as he walked. Another was an older guy with lots of phlegm the nurses call “Uncle”. He was always saying crazy things like “Open the door!” Another man, an extremely old gentlemen on a respirator, the nurses called “Grandfather” or “Ah-gong”. Ah-gong, who never spoke, was being taken care of by a couple of caretakers, one of whom was a Filipina who had been here for just over five months. I didn’t envy them their job. Ah-gong would start to gurgle and they would have to suck out all of the stuff from him, using several orifices from what I could hear.

Now and then the student nurses would come and try to do things. One time one of them tried to change my IV. She couldn’t get it out so she called her friend. This led to a long succession of progressively larger “friends” to try to winch the IV tube out of my arm. The last one was a burly girl who kept muttering “No! I must do this myself!” when I suggested that maybe they should find a real nurse. Eventually their teacher was found, an old lady who exerted just the right amount of pressure to get the IV out. Unfortunately the attending student nurse wasn’t paying attention and didn’t cover the wound, so that blood came shooting out. Oh, kids these days.

I began to think about eating around Tuesday, and checked out on Wednesday, although I still don’t feel completely recovered. When I returned home I found that I had no electricity, as I hadn’t paid the bill, and as I was in no shape to do it myself, Maoman stopped by the electicity company and paid it for me, which was very nice of him. I took the entire week off from work. If I keep recovering I should be able to go in on Monday. Something like this happened when I was 16, on my 16th birthday, actually. I was in the hospital for about a week then, just before my brother’s first wedding. To this day I don’t know why it happened. I don’t think it was typhoid then, just food poisoning. Whatever it is, I hope it’s a long, long time before it happens again. According to the doctor I should have built up a certain amount of immunity from this bout, but I’m not taking any chances. All this week I’ve only been eating easily digestible food and sleeping a lot. Hopefully it will be completely gone soon. Changes are afoot once again, I’d rather meet them from a somewhat vertical position.

I’ll post more later on the subject of my conspicuous absence later. I’m back home from a stint in the hospital, but still not feeling too well. The doctor said the typhoid was out of my system, but after lying around since Friday night just the climb up to my apartment left me exhausted. Naturally, there’s lots of things going on that need my attention. Hopefully I’ll feel better soon.

I was at the flowershop downstairs a couple of days ago, chatting with the people who work there. An order came in for a dozen roses in a bouquet for a girl in Taipei. “Ooh, that’s nice,” I said. “Is someone getting married?” The shopkeeper shook his head and smiled.

“We get all kinds of orders,” he told me. “After a while you’re able to guess what’s going on behind the scenes. This order came from a career soldier in Kinmen. Looks like she wants out of the relationship. I’d say her chances are pretty good.”

Would-be detectives take note! The flowershop network is more informed than the government. Smells better too.

I would have posted over the past few days but something told me that you wouldn’t be interested in hearing about me doing a lot of walking around. Last night after work I was supposed to meet Berta at Amigo for dinner, but she was late. That was ok; I just sat and read, trying to ignore my growing hunger after a depressingly light vegetarian lunch that afternoon. When the food arrived, though, a feast was had, leaving us both feeling, according to Berta, “disgusting, but in a good way.” Afterwards we went to the Estrogen Mall so that I could introduce her to the Caramelitissimo Caramel ice cream, and I was reminded that I shouldn’t be eating any more of that stuff when we went outside to eat it and my ass wouldn’t fit into the chair. Then again, from the look of most of the customers at the Estrogen Mall, you’d have to have an ass the size of a Kleenex box to be considered average there.

Steve is supposed to be coming up to Taipei today, so we will probably have lunch or something. I keep thinking that I need to get down south again one of these weekends. Ideally it would be at a time when the weather up here sucks and I can feel all superior about being down there in the pleasantly sunny yet not overly hot climate.

Latest Housing Report: I went to look at a rooftop apartment one evening a few days ago. It seemed quite nice. Not large, but big enough, located fairly conveniently. The landlady, a woman in her late 40’s, seemed to want me to leave, though. “Have you seen enough? Can we go now?” she kept saying. She told me that she lived in the apartment downstairs with her husband and children. She also wanted to see my ID card and demanded a lengthy explanation of my job content.

This was all well and good, and I was just about ready to take the place, but my previous experiences with insane landpeople have made me skeptical, so I came back the next day to have another look. Taking my time looking the place over, I discovered cracks running from floor to ceiling in several places. Noise from the MRT and Fuxing South Road seemed louder than it had the night before. Two air conditioners attested to the fact that the tin roof would most certainly be an oven in the summer. The water pumps on the roof made a constant and annoying clicking sound. But the most disturbing thing was that when I asked the guard downstairs what the family renting the place out was like, he told me that the landlady was single and lived alone. And I’d have to share a mailbox with her.

All of this tipped the scales just far enough against the place that I ended up calling the landlady up that night and saying the place was a little on the expensive side for me. “Well, save your money, then,” she told me and hung up.

That was close. A good landlord is an absolute necessity here. I’d rather rent a box on the street from a nice, reasonable landlord than a luxurious downtown apartment from an insane one. In fact, I just saw an ad for a basement locker at Sogo…maybe I’ll check it out. I understand from the IKEA catalogue that even department store lockers can be quite roomy if you just know how to decorate them.

The weather was brilliant on Sunday. I went to United Mix for a late lunch, but just as soon as I found a table I was invited to sit with a friend of Berta’s and another woman, who was both Russian and very pregnant. Then another woman arrived and began talking about the places she’d been and how Chinese was supposed to be pronounced, and then Berta showed up. With so many woman there, and one of them so pregnant I kept looking at my watch, the conversation inevitable dive into baby-related girltalk. I ate my meal quickly and silently, all the time thinking of the Paul Theroux book in my bag and how I could be reading it if it weren’t for the restrictions of polite society. Civilization can be so annoying. Berta, being the nice person that she is, tried to chat with me, but I could see that even she was distracted by all the estrogen at that table.

As a result of the atmosphere and the wonderful weather, I felt a great need to get out, out of the restaurant, out of the city. I got on my motorcycle, which has been no doubt been feeling neglected since I moved so close to the MRT, and rode up past the Grand Hotel, past the Palace Museum, and up into the mountains towards Wanli on the northeast coast. I stopped along the way and took a short nap perched on a boulder in the middle of the small river there, listening to the water rushing through the stones and the wind in the trees. Later I rode up to the peak, so high it was in the clouds, so high you can see both the Taipei basin and the northeast coast, all the way to the sea.

As I watched the sun set over Taipei, I remembered that it was the Shihlin Night Market’s last night before being torn down, so on my way home I stopped by and made my way through the crowded alleys, inching along as if we had all just gotten out of church. It seems everyone else there was also catching a last look at the famous place, one of the biggest night markets around. I took some pictures and video with my camera. Flour-covered chefs posed for me without being asked. “As a souvenir!” they would call out. “The market’s last night!” It’s being rebuilt, of course, as a large indoor market due to be opened in 2004, but it won’t be the same.

Now it is Monday again, and I am at work, although it’s a bit difficult to do anything productive as a young guy in a blue shirt is currently taking apart all of the cubicles in our office. I hope he is supposed to be doing this and wasn’t sent by some rival government office to create havoc under our very noses. That would be irritating.

As I sat at a small table outside the “Black Star Magic Coffee/Teashop” on Changan Road today before work, I watched a couple of guys go through an elaborate show involving one guy trying to give the other guy a large amount of money in checks. Both of them wore sandals, and periodically a wad of chewed betelnut would emit from one or the other’s mouth, landing in a pile on the sidewalk. The man on the receiving side kept loudly refusing the money, standing up and saying “It’s too much money! Oh!”, while the other one would look around and protest, “But I just collected it this morning!” Both were smiling broadly. Although I really like the name, I think the place might as well change its name to something a bit less ambiguous, like the “Gangster Coffee/Teashop”.

After spending all afternoon wrangling in virtual mud with my computer over our difference of opinion concerning the installation of Dreamweaver, it was too late to attend Maoman’s barbeque, so instead I set out for Tequila Sunrise, where I was to meet Dean, Mindcrime and their respective firlgriends Kay and Janice for dinner before the party at Whiskey. The meal was decent, nothing special. I suppose the main attraction at TS is their unique decor, which includes stairs. Afterwards we set out down Xinsheng S. Road in search of an ATM when we passed a restaurant that had been completely trashed. The words “Doesn’t pay debts!” were spraypainted in red all over the facade, and the sign had been removed. “Shameless” had been etched in black on the doorstep, I noticed before being pulled away by Mindcrime, who was nervous that either the debt collectors or the owners might come back, think we were part of it and string us up. Personally, I think that if either party came back and even suspected that it was we who had written the words, their first words would be “Wow, your Chinese is so good!” Then they would kill us.

The party at Whiskey was fun, despite the pretentious nature of the place. The waiters were dismissive, and the room was so ill-lit that the menus were all but unreadable. Periodically one of the sulky waiters would come by and turn up the repetitive techno music, which we would then have to turn down again. Still, lots of familiar faces were there and the wine wasn’t bad, so a good time was had by all, except of course the waiters.

China Declares Independence! “D’Argo and Greg” Premieres! Now that I’ve got Dreamweaver and Smartftp up and working, it’s time for another facinating edition of the News from the Renegade Province!

I thought that most people would be taking Friday off, since Thursday was a holiday, but I had to wait on the MRT platform for several minutes while packed trains swept passed that morning. Not only were the streets full of people on their way to work, everyone seemed to be trying to push through the crowds as roughly as possible. One possible reason for this was the recent and unexpected return of Summer. We had all thought that winter was upon us Thursday, but Friday arrived with hot sun and fresh, rain-cleansed air. No doubt everyone who had decided the weather wasn’t good enough to take the day off was pissed off. It made for a maddening walk from the station to my office.

I got off at noon, though, so my spirits were high. I even walked home instead of taking the MRT, running into a former co-worker from O&M on the way. He told me that my replacement was just about tearing his hair out in frustration, and this after only a couple of months! Amazing.

That afternoon I rode out to the Tianbao Temple, where I usually go for all my Temple needs. It being Friday, no one was around, so I burned some incense for the lonely gods, including the Dragon god etched into the rock face in back, and then rode up the twisty, roller-coaster road to the Bao-an Temple on Four Animal Mountain, where I got off and started up the path to the cliff overlooking the city. One of the old men at the temple saw me and said to another old man in Taiwanese, “People don’t even stop to pray any more. They just go up to see the view.”

The view is impressive, though. Taipei101 is now higher than the mountain itself, an impressive sight, especially accompanied by the rainbow that appeared when the setting sun shone through a small rain squall. It’s truly amazing how much the Xinyi District has changed over the past decade. I should find some old pictures of that area and do a comparison on here sometime. Several health-conscious people were up there exercising as well. One man doing calesthenics took a break to hold his drooling dog up to a tree for a closer look at a lizard.

When I arrived back at the Bao-an Temple, an old man was playing a bamboo flute to the temple mutts, who seemed to appreciate the music. So did I, but I knew from experience that the mountain roads were dangerous and under construction, so I rode back down before the sun set.

The weather is nice again today, and I really should get out and enjoy it before winter comes back. There have been a couple of earthquakes over in Hualian recently as well, and someone mentioned worms and ants congregating in the streets without a permit, so being outside might be safer as well. Maoman is having a barbeque this afternoon at his jaded community apartment in Xizhi, and my friend Mark is having a Going-to-Blighty-to-get-Married Party at Whiskey tonight. Should be interesting.

It’s raining outside. Has been all day. Misty, drizzly, typical winter. It’s refreshing now, but wait until about January and I’ll be moaning about it.

XP is ok so far. Points for stability and general just working, but the lack of a way to get rid of MSN messenger and ‘reminders’ about .net are irking me to no end. I’ve managed to install things with little or no problems, though, so I think I’ll keep on using it, at least until the Microsoft commandos parasail into my living room and force me to make out large checks and a document signing my life over to Bill Gates. Then I might consider switching.

Another of my turtles died. Now there’s only one left, the hardiest of the three. I should probably stick with plants. Pets and me just don’t seem to mix too well.

I keep thinking it’s the weekend because it’s Double-Ten Day and everyone was off. Last night I met up with the usual suspects at Buca Buca where wine was drunk and Chicken Pot Pie derided, after which I made my way over to Watersheds to witness Maoman’s girl Vanessa’s birthday bash, which featured a very drunk Alien and many other interesting characters, mostly from Canada as luck would have it. The quantity as well as the quality of the wine I drank made getting up this morning a bit of a pain, but I still managed to meet Berta and Graham at United Mix where we all complimented each others’ hangovers over eggs and burgers. Then it was off to Eslite to drool over Macs and to Fnac to purchase the Spider-man DVD….

Ah, to hell with it. This blog has become a suppository of grocery lists and dinner dates, and you probably enjoy reading about this kind of thing even less than I enjoy writing it. I’ll let you know when something interesting happens, how’s that?