Sunday was a fine day, at first, beautiful weather, cicadas and squirrels and birds under the canopy of green leaves at the park. NL Guy was throwing a skinny foreign guy around on the ground, while The Dentist arrived apologizing for his purple polka-dotted shorts.

Teacher X reiterated the fact that being able to “collapse” in compartments of one’s body is useful in tuishou. I also found while practicing with him that I often expose a weakness by turning my back more or less towards my opponent. So far, only Teacher X has really taken advantage of this; none of the other students have, and thus it’s become somewhat of a bad habit.

I practiced with NL Guy for a bit. He was surprisingly mild this time, though any attempt to push him resulted as always with a flurry of activity that he didn’t seem to want to cease until I was on the ground (not that I gave him that satisfaction). He managed to pull me in such a way to give him a head-butting as well as a couple of blows dangerously close to his genitals; not the safest practice, but we don’t call him No Lose Guy for nothing (well, I don’t, anyway).

It was HOT, and I sweating buckets. But Teacher X wanted me to practice with the skinny foreigner, who turned out to be French. He’d arrived in Taiwan a mere two days before, didn’t really speak much Chinese or even English. He said he’d studied tai-chi and tuishou for three years back in Paris. He wore a white T-shirt with a small red Yinyang symbol on it that he’d bought at a martial arts supply store nearby.

We started out slowly; often I’d have to make a move to provoke a response. He seemed quite wary and tense, understandable after being thrown around by NL Guy, who left scratches on the Frenchman’s arms. It wasn’t too bad, though; he eventually regained a little confidence and put some effort into it. I then practiced with Little X, who is getting a bit chunky to be honest. He remains very easy to push for some reason. I can’t quite figure out how relative tuishou prowess works; there must be a logic to it somehow, but I don’t know what it is.

Mr. You, whom we haven’t seen at practice in years, showed up, surprising everyone. He was visiting his mother at NTU hospital and came over to say hi. By now the sky was dark, and the wind was picking up. It had been a long, hot practice, and people began to leave, so I did as well.

Besides the usual dates that stand out each year, like birthdays and holidays, a few have personal significance for me and hardly anyone else, and on such days I usually just think a bit more about what they mean and let it go without mentioning it to anyone. February 26th, the day I was drafted into the army, is one such date. Another is June 24th, which is the day I stepped off the airplane at Chiang Kai-shek International Airport for the first time, in 1989. 20 years ago.

I wasn’t alone. My friend and classmate Boogie was on the same flight, but he’s back in the States now. Our Chinese professor, Dr. Hill, passed away a few years ago. I’ve lost touch with most of the other students in our class. Returning to the place where I stepped off the airport bus isn’t anything particularly special, as I work a block away and pass by it on a daily basis, though of course things have changed a great deal in the time since (the hot, muggy weather at this time of year, however, is the same). In any case, I’ve been wondering just how I should commemorate this anniversary. Back then, the prospect of spending a whole year in Taiwan seemed incredible; now it’s been 20. Somehow, having dinner somewhere unusual doesn’t really do much for me. I was thinking of going out to the airport and taking the bus back in again, checking into the same YMCA (though it has since been redecorated) where we stayed for the first week before traveling down to Taichung. Maybe I could even bring my suitcase (I still have the same one, incidentally) packed with heavy things to drag across the awful sidewalks…but the sidewalks are much better now, and there’s no obstacle course of slimy pedestrian overpasses over Zhongxiao West Road to traverse any more. I might at least try to get the same room. Something seems a bit desperate about doing all of that, though I don’t have any better ideas at the moment. What do you think?

Last night I went to see my friend Matzka play at the Riverside behind the Red House Theater. I’ve always liked his music, and although the speakers were a bit tinny and harsh at times, it was a great show. The audience seemed to be leftovers from the last show, but it must be hard to get a lot of people out on a rainy weeknight. At one point everyone on stage traded instruments, with Matzka switching with the skinny little drummer. That…well, didn’t really work, but it was funny and reminded me of Band class back in school when we all switched instruments for the benefit of some clueless substitute teacher.

I got up at 5 a.m. this morning to go shoot my barber. Why is he worth shooting? Hard to say; he’s a barber because it’s the family business and his parents handed over the reigns of the shop to him, and he has a wife and kids to take care of. In the mornings, however, he works for the EPA spraying disinfectant around various parts of Guandu and Beitou. It seemed like an interesting combination, so I decided to do a little video of him, a mini documentary. I’d been thinking of trying something like that, and I happened to be getting a haircut at the time, so it just followed.

The people at the little office underneath the highway bridge, however, weren’t too happy to see me. They instantly went into full paranoid mode and told me I could shoot the little garbage huts. My barber, however, waved all of these warnings aside. I interviewed him in front of the spraying truck, and then we went out to a series of places, where I got footage of him doing his job. It was interesting. People would come up to the sprayers on the street and ask them to do their basements or alleys, and the sprayers would always comply. Maybe it was because I was there with my camera.

Eventually the crew got used to me and relaxed a bit. I don’t plan to make anything big out of this; it’s more of an exercise than anything else. I borrowed a friend’s Sony handycan, which worked ok, especially as I didn’t have a tripod. The next and final shoot will be at the barbershop itself one evening when I can find some time, and then I’ll glue it together and see what, if anything, I’ve got.

After we wrapped up this morning, though, I got a feeling that I haven’t had in a good while, though, the feeling that I’d actually done something. Maybe it’s not a big huge project, but it’s something. It felt good.

I didn’t want to go home immediately when I arrived back in Taipei from Tainan; it was too nice a day, so Chenbl and I walked up Dihua Street, which was much less crowded than I recall it being before Chinese New Year, and over to the Dadaocheng Wharf to see what was going on with the “Blue Highway” service that began a few years ago. There we boarded a small boat that was headed up the Danshui River to Guandu. Down below a guide was talking to a group about Dadaocheng’s history, but I preferred to stand up on top of the vessel, just behind the pilot, enjoying the wind and scenery. Fish jumped out of the water occasionally, one actually hitting the side of the boat before falling back into the water, which was muddy but did not smell as I was expecting.

We passed under bridge after bridge, the banks and people riding bicycles on the riverside paths sliding past; it was very pleasant and relaxing, and I wondered if boating activities would ever make a comeback on the Danshui, which had for so long in the past been crisscrossed by residents in their small vessels from Taipei to places like Sanchong, Xinzhuang, Banqiao and Yonghe. As if in answer, a few residents of Shezi Island dumped garbage into the river as we passed by.

We crossed the Keelung River entrance and docked at Guandu, next to the steamboat used for weddings and other big occasions. In addition to fishing boats, I saw some private speedboats flitting about under the Guandu Bridge. Once on shore, the guide told us that back in the 60’s after a huge typhoon flooded most of the Taipei basin, the army blew up a promontory that had jutted out into the river on the Bali side, effectively freeing up the floodwater from the bottleneck there. After that, however, saltwater from the ocean was now free to flow up the river, changing the entire nature of the environment.

Rather than take the boat back downtown, we caught the subway. I was meeting Ray and Gordon later for a concert; Ennio Morricone, the man who composed and directed the music for some of my favorite films, was directing a concert of his own work at the Little Giant Egg on Dunhua North Road. Though Morricone is over 80 years old now, he moves like someone decades younger, though it was hard to see too clearly from our seats in the stadium. From that vantagepoint, however, the orchestra and choir appeared as some giant organism on the stage, manhandled, wrangled, poked and caressed by Morricone’s baton to do his bidding. Some of the pieces I didn’t recognize, but many I did. Tingles went up my spine when the orchestra played the theme from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, but for me the highlight was when Morricone brought out a soloist who sang the unearthly tones of the music played during the scene when Tuco is running around the graveyard towards the end of the movie. I was on the edge of my seat, imagining the scene over 40 years ago when Morricone was recording the music for the first time.

The audience was ecstatic, though there were large empty patches in part of the stands. People yelled out their appreciation in Italian every time Morricone appeared on stage. Three or four encores later it was apparent that no new pieces were forthcoming; the theme from Cinema Paradiso was the only encore he had prepared. The rest were repeats, but the audience was in love with the old Italian, and it was amazing to see him in action now, after all these years, directing music for movies that were made well before I was born.

The first thing I did on Saturday morning was take pictures of the curtains. The air outside was smoggy, but the sun was out. We walked from the hotel back downtown, passing a construction site. I took some shots from the sidewalk as a guard walked over and told us that we couldn’t take pictures. “We actually can,” I said, wincing internally at the tone of my voice. “We’re on the sidewalk.” The guard didn’t press the point, but I felt that, especially in a place like Tainan, being friendly and sociable will get you a lot further in such situations than quoting the law. We walked a scooter store that featured a big red retro model I would love to ride, and then through a school campus to the park, which reminds me of the Taichung Park in it’s style as well as its relation to the city center. Men were fishing in the lake. “I once caught one THIS BIG!” a fisherman told us, holding out his hands. I was pretty sure that the fish he had caught was an ornamental koi fish.

Leaving the park, we walked down Gongyuan Road, dipping into alleys occasionally when we saw something interesting. Chenbl pointed at something as I was snapping pictures of an old man’s knobby sandaled feet. I rounded the corner to see a heartbreaking sight: a sick kitten lay gasping on the ground as two of its siblings looked on. One of the kittens retreated when I approached, but the other stayed. As I watched, the sick kitten lay down and became very still. I was sure it had died. I couldn’t see any movement or breathing. The other kitten bent over it and nudged it a little, then looked up at me with startling blue eyes.

We continued on, passing The Armory where I once played with Tarrybush years ago. I found people in Tainan to be generally better about having their pictures taken. Where I would get suspicious glares from people in Taipei, Tainan residents are more open and friendly about the prospect of being photographed. It was both refreshing and confidence-inspiring.

We had lunch at a Japanese restaurant whose design featured lots of wood. The sashimi was fresh and delicious, and it was relief to get out of the sun and lay the huge camera and lens on the window sill, where I took a picture of it for Facebook.

After lunch we kept walking through the older parts of the city, which is saying something in Tainan, a very old city. We stopped by ancient houses, neglected by the government despite their obvious cultural value, and were given impromptu tours by the residents. One man took us upstairs to see the ingenious upper story of his neglected Qing Dynasty structure; he opened a door, surprising his two sons, who were playing video games inside the air-conditioned room.

The tourism department has set up little maps here and there with local attractions on them. One of the descriptions puzzled me; it read “Well of Black Africans” in English, while the Chinese meant something more akin to “Well of the Evil Ghosts”. A translation error, most likely, but really something they should have caught. Some men at a small temple tried to draw me into a political discussion, but I bowed out. We passed a large Western-style building that looked in good condition, but a group of elderly ladies chatting nearby said that it was abandoned since the children of the deceased owner all lived in Taipei and weren’t interested in the house. A shame; it would be a very nice bed and breakfast or restaurant with a little work.

Not far away was a warren of wooden-partitioned dwellings, all a story and a half high, taking up a small city block. It was originally meant to be a market, but over the years it has become a dilapidated slum, the narrow alleys covered with a variety of plastics that results in all kinds of colors and shapes shining down into the mostly empty hallways. Only a few people wandered about, listless and shirtless in the heat. A man tethered a dog in its cage as we approached, apparently fearing it would attack us.

The skies turned dark in the mid afternoon as we walked down street after street, each older than the next. I was getting tired and cranky, but the Chikan Complex was a good enough place to stop and sit for a while, and nearby temple complex, a series of several temples next to each other, is always interesting to walk through. We walked back towards the train station, through the more trendy, modern areas, full of young people, loud rock bands and puffy hairstyles, having dinner at a “My Home Steak”-kind of establishment. I find that when you avoid the sizzling plate and just ask for the steak on a regular plate, it tastes much better. Sadly, the “mushroom sauce” was just ketchup, and I wondered how badly they had to hate admitting they were out of mushroom sauce to pull such a stunt.

We walked back to the train station to catch the bus back to the HSR depot, but we had to wait, so I walked into a nearby building’s lobby to take some pictures. When I came out, I found Chenbl talking with an older man on the bus stop bench. I snapped a few pictures before the shuttle arrived. Once we were on board, Chenbl told me that the man was his long-lost uncle, whom the family had not seen nor heard from in 20 years. It was fortunate that I got some pictures of him, he said, as he wasn’t able to wrangle an address or phone number from his uncle, who apparently had a huge gambling problem and multiple children from various wives.

I was tired, dirty, covered in sweat and looking forward to getting home at that point, but it was not to be. When we finally arrived at the HSR station, we found to our dismay that there were simply no tickets left; the trains were sold out. I know I shouldn’t have been surprised; it was a holiday, after all. Rather than risking an eight-hour wild chicken bus ride, we found another hotel, closer to the station, and got tickets for Sunday morning instead. The only problem with the ride back was a child kicking the back of my seat and yelling; other than that, it was dreamy.

I took the high-speed rail down to Tainan on Friday after meeting Chenbl at the Taipei station. The Tainan station is far away from the city, of course; all of the HSR stations, apart from those in Kaohsiung and Taipei, are seemingly out in the middle of nowhere. Street grids have been laid out, and in some cases neighborhoods have developed around the stations, but getting people to move out there requires more intertia than the simple attraction of a train station can provide, it seems. Although I’m sure that shady dealings had their effect on the location choices, I’m also positive that the main reasons they couldn’t get the stations closer to the metropolitan areas they supposedly serve are prevailing NIMBY attitudes and confusing conflaguration of zoning near the cities.

We took a free shuttle bus into town, passing forlorn parks with propped-up trees, huge empty malls, unused gas stations and rows of new housing plastered with For Sale or Rent signs. It’s the American suburbian boom without the boom. Go ahead and build it, and maybe, someday, they will come. Such a plan might have worked in the north, but people down south are more entrenched in their ways. When the MRT opened in Taipei, it was an instant hit and cut down on pollution as well as traffic congestion, basically remaking the city into a much nicer, cleaner and more convenient place to live, while the Kaohsiung MRT is still hardly used, most people there preferring to stay with their trusty scooters and cars.

There were no scooters to be had at the rental places by the train station in downtown Tainan, however, so we took a cab out to the Anping area, the site of the old fort and trading houses by the sea, and borrowed some bicycles from the local police station. The massive harbor was silted in and built over long ago, but many of the old buildings remain. We got a gruding tour of an old Japanese-era house that was being restored by an ancestor of the original owners; sliding paper doors, tatami mats and high wooden ceilings. The tree house was interesting, if full of mosquitos and annoying kids trying to pull the hanging branches off. We walked around the neighborhoods I had only seen at night before, when they were ghostily empty. Possibly due to the holiday, however, they were bustling in the afternoon. We talked with one old woman sitting outside of an ancient two-sided house, which was cheaper and more space-efficient than the traditional three- or four-sided enclosures. It turned out that she and her son lived next door in a similarly old dwelling. Ancient portraits of their ancestors hung on the incense-stained walls, relatives who had been made officials, making these people a kind of royalty on the rocks. My Taiwanese was getting a workout; although everyone under 70 can speak Mandarin (and many young people speak only Mandarin, even in Tainan, which surprised me), Taiwanese feels more intimate and affectionate, especially when chatting with older people.

We rode down to the harbor to take pictures of the sunset. I’d brought Thumper’s huge-ass lens with me, just in case, but I found that I actually miss having a telephoto in my collection. Time to start saving up for another purchase, I suppose. I don’t know if I’d get such a huge, glaringly white lens, though; something like the 135mm f2 or the 200mm might be more portable.

The flat areas around the harbor are host to new developments of attractive, affordable housing. We ventured into a shipmaking factory, picking our way through the nails and broken fiberglass to the water’s edge, where a fishingboat had just pulled up to unload its traps in the twilight. Then it was over to the old street, chatting with people sitting outside their houses along dark alleys about which god they had on display just inside their doorways while I tried to get clear shots in the night of former beauty queens in wheelchairs. We were walking down the night market when I heard a woman’s voice calling, in English, “Sorry! Sorry! Sorry!” Of course I suspected that this was directed at me, but I kept walking, hoping it wasn’t. The young woman persisted, running up and asking me to take pictures of her soap. When I asked her why, she said her camera was broken, and she apparently didn’t know anyone else with a camera. It was a little strange, and I declined politely.

We had dinner at a place by the riverside with very ordinary food that people lined up for hours to eat for some reason, followed by some pudding and lemon tea. This was a mistake; the resulting fight for dominance of my stomach was not pleasant.

The streets were rather empty by that point, and we returned the bicycles and caught a cab to the cheesy hotel Chenbl had found in a coupon pamplet. It was a run-down place, but it had (rock-hard) beds and what could be described as air conditioning, so it was a welcome enough ending for the day.

When the dragonboat festival came around in years past, I would always take advantage of my location to simply stroll down to Bitan to watch, but this year some photography friends were going to the big official races at Dazhi, so I decided to have a look at how the other half paddles. I met Chenbl at the Zhongshan Middle School MRT stop, and we took a taxi to the riverside, though it is easily walkable if you know where you are going. The river, looking rather manufactured, lay underneath somber grey skies and the large Dazhi bridge. Tents lined the bare banks, with few trees in sight.

The Dazhi races seemed to be mostly populated by foreigners from all kinds of places, all wearing life vests and towing lines of small, blonde children who kept getting lost, resulting in loudspeaker announcements. We found the photo group huddled by the starting point, all taking pictures of the boats with large zoom lenses. I’d borrowed a 70-200 f2.8IS from Thumper for the occasion; a huge, ungainly gray lens that came in handy capturing the faraway boats and paddlers, it’s known as “Little White” in Chinese.

It didn’t take me long to come to the conclusion that Bitan is a far better place for dragonboat photography, for many reasons. First of all, you can get much closer to the racers from either bank or on the suspension bridge. Also, the background is much nicer, with dark green foliage instead of dull concrete walls festered with advertisements. The color of the water at Bitan is a nice shade of green, unlike the muddy Keelung River’s odiferous sludge that looks and smells like something straight out of a factory’s sewage gate. The Bitan races don’t require the racers to wear lifevests, letting them show off their tanned, muscled physiques and a plethora of tattoos.

We took some pictures of the finishing line, practicing getting the timing right until the morning’s races were over. The others were going up to the Shilin Villa to take pictures of birds, but we decided to cross the bridge and walk over to the Martyr’s Shrine, which I haven’t been to in ages. We watched the changing of the guard amidst a crowd of tourists from Japan and China, all snapping pictures of the guards’ shiny helmets and goose-stepping gait.

It was afternoon by the time we caught up with the photo group at the Shilin Villa. They’d been there all afternoon, all set up by a particular nest where a “Five Color Bird” was flitting about, bringing food to its young. I took some practice shots of it flying into and out of its nest with the telephoto, but it got pretty boring. Some of the photographers there were really into taking pictures of birds; they had huge, expensive lens setups and tripods, and were themselves decked out in camos and safari hats. They sell the pictures to magazines.

We walked around Shilin for a bit, having a bite of mutton rice by the night market temple, before parting ways. The subway took me back to Bitan, where I feasted on zongzi with Ray, Gordon, Jojo and Sandy Wee at the Sandcastle. We chatted until quite late.

I’d planned on going down to Tainan the next morning, but I couldn’t miss taking at least some dragonboat pictures at Bitan, so I decided to postpone the trip and spend the morning by the river. As I’d guessed, the experience was much better; a more comfortable, lively scene without the fussy international officialdom of Dazhi. Kids splashed each other on the pebbly outcrop and cheered on their parents paddling by in the boats, while loud stage performances, including a tai-chi group, failed to distract anyone from the races. The suspension bridge would tilt from one dangerous angle to another as the boats passed by underneath and everyone ran from one side to the other. At one point a boat overturned, the spectators on the bridge yelling and cursing the rescue boats for not responding fast enough. “They’re tired, they can’t just wait for your slow-ass rescues!” They shouted. “There might be people trapped under the boat! Come ON!” It was ok, though; three rescue crafts pulled all of the bobbing paddlers to safety. They huddled together on the shore afterwards, looking rather abashed.

I took a lot of pictures, of course, but it will take me a while to wade through the pile. It’s strange; I didn’t used to need so much time to get photos up, but these days the backlog just keeps getting deeper and deeper. I suppose I just need to be pickier about what I put up instead of just throwing everything into the mix.