Saturday was nice and warm, and I wanted to go for…
Saturday was nice and warm, and I wanted to go for a bicycle ride, but unfortunately I’d already sold my bike in preparation for getting a new one, so I’m between bikes at the moment. So instead I took Gendouyun out for a jaunt through Ankeng, on the road to Sanxia, looking for metalworking factories that could make large air vents, the kind spies are always climbing through in movies. No such luck, however. We may have to use spray-painted cardboard boxes instead.
Afterwards, not wanting to sit around at home, I took the MRT up to Danshui again, looking for pictures, but for the life of me I couldn’t find anything. I felt completely uninspired. Danshui’s all pictured-out for me, I guess. For now. I ended up putting up some mediocre shots up on Flickr, but that was it.
I had an public TV interview on Sunday morning. They came to my place and asked all the usual questions so-called foreigners get asked here, plus some other, hard-to-answer ones like “Could you sum up Taiwan in one sentence?” They wanted some shots of me out of the house, so I invited them to visit a promo the Muddy Basin Ramblers were doing for the Taipei 101 climb-a-thon that afternoon. We gathered at The Tavern, huddled in the middle of the place surrounded by glaring TV screens, and shouted over the din at each other. Not the most pleasant dining experience, but nice if you’re into rugby I guess.
Lunch over, we spent the next hour or so on the steps of the adjacent pedestrian bridge playing an MBR version of the Rocky theme. Taipei 101 itself was flitting into and out of the low-flying clouds in the background as we climbed the steps for multiple takes. When we were done, some of us went back to the Tavern for some drinks, and met up later with the rest on the balcony of Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall for some more music. There was a short, older guy there with kung-fu shoes who looked really antsy, as if we were taking over his usual spot, which I suppose we very well might have been. He kept leaving and coming back, possibly expecting us to be gone when he did so.
The day felt oppressive. I thought it was just me, but the others assured me they were feeling it too. We played through the evening, and my attempts to play Sandman’s sax proved beyond a doubt that I am crap when it comes to playing woodwinds. I took a taxi with him and Slim back to Bitan for homemade curry chicken at our friend Chris’ place, where we spent the rest of the evening eating, drinking, and playing with Rusty the Now Full Fledged Cat. By the time I got home I knew I was coming down with something, though, and by Monday my throat had knives inside, sawing away whenever I swallowed.
