Ad-veen-ture in Taiwan!

Last Wednesday, I boogeyed down the mountain right after school, did some last-minute packing, and caught the 4:45 bus to the airport. From there I caught my half-hour flight to Fukuoka, and had an adventure with a cab driver who didn't know where my hotel was. When we finally did find the hotel, I watched Japanese TV for about the second time since I've gotten here. They had a pretty nifty English education program, and one for Korean, too.

I woke up bright and early Thursday morning, ducked in for an Egg McMuffin on my way to Hakata station, and took the subway back to the airport. The lady at the check-in counter for my airline--the airline responsible for getting me both to and from Taiwan--asked me if I had my return ticket to Japan with me. I sort of balked at this, thinking that surely she/the airline isn't retarded enough not to see on their screen that I made my reservation online. When I explained this as gently as I could, she ducked away to make a phone call. It all got straightened out (apparently Taiwan requires proof of return passage for tourists), and I got to my gate with no trouble at all.

As I was walking away from the check-in counter, I noticed my boarding pass looked a little funny. Sure enough, it was decorated with Hello Kitty. This didn't surprise me as much as seeing that my airplane was similarly covered in Hello Kitty. After this, I was only mildly surprised that my in-flight meal was similarly themed, including a Hello Kitty placemat and Hello Kitty-shaped Jello mold. It was kind of weird.

As we were boarding, a flight attendant was offering Japanese and Chinese newspapers to passengers. When she saw me, she brandishes a copy of USA Today. I hadn't expected this, and spent half the flight gulping down every word of English I could find, even in the advertisements. Being deprived of mother culture can make you do weird things.

The flight was uneventful, with most of the time taken up by flight attendants giving all the announcements in four languages: Mandarin, English, Cantonese, and Japanese. I found it kind of strange that the English translation was given before the Japanese, considering we had just come from Fukuoka. We had little TV screens in each seat, and I found a Travel Channel episode about Budapest. It was in English, thank goodness, and I recognized about half of the places they went to in the city. It was awesome to hear the parts of the locals' Hungarian that weren't blotted out by the dubbed-over voices. They also had movies, including Knocked Up, Harry Potter 5, and Evan Almighty. I'd spent so much time reading the paper that I knew I wouldn't be able to get into Harry Potter, and I love Steve Carell, so I went with Evan Almighty.

I only got about half an hour into it before we arrived. Customs was fun (the stern look on the customs officer's face almost turned into tears when his stamp crumbled on my passport), and my baggage made it with no trouble. Ju's flight was arriving about an hour and a half after mine, so the plan was for us to meet at the coffee shop in the airport.

Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport, formerly Chiang Kai-shek International Airport, is way too small to have such a long name. I think Springfield-Branson Regional is bigger. The arrival terminal is tiny, at least. There's only one coffee shop, and I found it. As I exited customs and got to the part of the airport where people stand and hold signs for folks to find them, I noticed a huge crowd. I squirmed my way to the coffee shop, sat down with a "German meringue tart" and some water, and just watched.

The crowd was almost entirely girls, none of whom were older than me, and most of whom were about high-school age. After a few minutes I noticed lots of uniformed policemen strolling around. I also noticed signs, most of which were in Chinese, but a large portion of which were not--I recognized one in Korean, and another written in a Romanized alphabet without tone markings. I finally spotted a poster of what looked like a band, and realized that band must be flying into Taiwan right after me. Sure enough, about ten minutes later, the arrival lobby sounded like a Backstreet Boys concert. As it turned out, the band's route to their getaway limo took them right past my seat, so I got a nice little video of them, with the screaming girls trying to break through the line of policemen. I'll try to post them.

Ju arrived right on time, and we sort of walked in circles around the airport, trying to decide what to do while catching up on stuff, since the last time we saw each other was outside Baskin Robbins in Athens a year and a half ago, when she was getting ready to come to Japan for JET. We eventually found the bus station, bought two tickets to the train station in Taipei, and took off. We took a train to T'ai-nan, in the southwest of Taiwan. We had originally planned to meet another student of Dr. Benedek's, but we were never able to get in touch with him. No worries--we found a hotel with no trouble, and spent the first night watching Discovery Channel and Animal Planet in English.

Cities in Taiwan are dirty. Well, to phrase it more fairly, both of the cities I visited in Taiwan were dirty. A large part of it was just big-city dirty, like you find in inner city Atlanta or Budapest. Another part, though, was something bordering on squalor. I guess Japan's a little cleaner than average, which probably made me more critical of trash and grime I found in Taiwan. At any rate, Taipei and T'ainan were both crowded, smelly metropolises.

That being said, the people were great. Ju and I talked about it, and we both find the service industry hospitality in Japan is courteous and accommodating, but in a forced, artificial way. Sure, you always get a smile and a greeting from all the workers when you enter, but you just know that there's no way everyone's that happy to be working. In contrast, the shopkeepers and restaurant workers we met in Taiwan were cordial. Not grinning ear-to-ear, not maniacally happy to see you--just mildly appreciative. We heard a lot of people yelling at each other as we walked around, but there wasn't any scuffling going on. Folks were just sort of yelling, which is something neither one of us have encountered in Japan.

Don't get me wrong--the people weren't brimming with rage everywhere or anything. In fact, almost everyone we walked by would smile warmly back at us. I would've thought I was just being weird, had Ju not echoed my sentiments--it felt so much more genuine than a smile in Japan. That's probably because it was coming from someone we knew had no qualms about yelling at someone, while it seems to take a whole lot of pushing to get a Japanese to raise their voice.

I was expecting to find a nation full of Jeans, which will make sense to those of you who know whom I'm talking about. I was delighted to find this somewhat accurate, at least based on the folks being so honest with their emotions.

Ju and I speak about three words of Mandarin in total. She had brought a phrasebook with her, but neither one of us are good with distinguishing tones, so we were more or less completely helpless when it came to understanding or making ourselves understood in Chinese. The people guarding the essentials--food, hotel, transportation--spoke English, but beyond that, we were lost. This really got to me by the second day. I realized that this was my first time being in a country where neither I nor the other people traveling with me could speak the local language effectively. I never felt threatened or in any way in danger. It was much more passive than that.

We did a lot of walking, saw some awesome parks, a sprawling produce market, a nine-story shopping mall, and several Buddhist temples in T'ainan. It was a lot of fun, but in a very limited, man-I-wish-we-could-ask-them-questions sort of way.

Taiwan uses the dollar sign for their currency, and the exchange rate is about 30 of theirs to 1 USD, so everything in Taiwan looked outlandishly expensive--our "$240" Mos Burger receipt would terrify someone who didn't know the currency.

We noticed on Wednesday that Taiwan was in fact sandwiched between two typhoons, with the southern of the two projected to hit the island that weekend. Nobody was freaking out about it, so we weren't concerned. Ju, however, realized that the typhoon would probably shut down the trains, so we would need to get back to Taipei before it hit, so that we wouldn't be more than a bus ride away from the airport. Ju's a genius--we took what turned out to be the second-to-last train for Taipei before the typhoon hit.

Super Typhoon Krosa hit Taiwan with gusts of about 150mph and sustained winds of 115mph, making it the equivalent of a baby Category 4 hurricane. It was actually making landfall as we were riding the train to Taipei, so we got to watch as the flooding started. It was kind of creepy traveling at 150mph on a track 30 feet in the air in the middle of something like that, but nobody seemed the least bit concerned, so we didn't sweat it. In my experience thus far with typhoons, they seem to be just really windy, rainy hurricanes with no lightning. They're dangerous, especially in tropical lowlands, but I haven't experienced one yet that's felt the same as I remember Erin or Opal being. Oh well.

When we got to Taipei, we hopped on the subway to Taipei Main Station. From there, we scurried around in the station's tunnels, looking for the nearest hotel on the maps. The closest one we could find was the Sheraton. We made a mad dash from the subway tunnel to the hotel, and found the lobby full of people wearing three-piece suits. Preparing for the worst, we squeaked our way across the marble floor to the check-in desk, and asked if they had a room. Miraculously, they did, but the only ones they had were on the Executive Floor, and they ran about $350 a night. Ju and I had a quick huddle, debated, decided we weren't going to be spending any money on sightseeing during a typhoon anyway, and went for it.

The room was ridiculously plush. I'll try to post the video. It was by far the nicest room and hotel Ju and I have ever stayed at. We even had to use our room key in the elevator to get to our floor. When I turned the TV on, a welcome screen popped up that began "Dear Mr. Shirley..." Five minutes after we got to the room, there was a knock at the door. A cute Taiwanese girl greeted us in fine English, gave us her card, and introduced herself as our butler. That's right--our butler. Her card even said it. Ju and I spent the rest of our time at the hotel thinking of bizarre things we could ask her to do for us.

We spent the evening trying to find some of the underground shopping malls we had heard of, only to find labyrinthine hallways full of closed shops. Defeated, we trudged back to the underground food court that was still open, and ducked into the Mos Burger. We each got a fish sandwich, and though mine was tasty, there was something icky in Ju's, so she didn't eat hers. By the time we got back to the hotel, she was still hungry, and I wasn't full, so we went to the "Pizza Pub" restaurant in the basement. We ordered a customized pizza, a couple of drinks, and told dirty jokes while the musical entertainment for the evening, a Taiwanese husband and wife, serenaded the crowd with old American and Japanese songs.

By Sunday, the nastiest part of the typhoon had blown over, so we ventured out, trying to find a more reasonably-priced hotel. We indeed found one not two blocks away that was perfectly fine and half the price. Also, it had a Dunkin Donuts next door. Take that, Sheraton.

Our to-do list for Taipei consisted of a temple, the Chiang Kai-shek memorial, a night market, and Taipei 101. Since it's billed as the tallest building in the world (it's the tallest completed building, but the Burj Dubai will be much taller), we figured it'd be worth stopping by.

The temple was fun, the memorial was closed for renovation, and it was rainy all afternoon. Despite these setbacks, we trudged on to Taipei 101. It's connected to a huge shopping mall, in which you can find a Toys R Us, a McDonald's, and a Cold Stone. The Toys R Us looked identical to the ones you find back home (maybe a bit smaller, but not much), and so did the Cold Stone. They had exactly the same menu with exactly the same flavors and ingredients as you find back home. I hadn't eaten ice cream that good since having Marble Slab with Kristi and Clay back in July.

Neither one of us was too keen on the hordes of people running around, so we made our way over to Taipei 101 itself. The bottom five floors or so are a shopping mall with the most expensive shops I've ever seen. What few luxury brand names I do know--Gucci, Luis Vuitton, Armani, Dior, Prada--all had at least one boutique (I don't think you're allowed to call them "shops" when the cheapest item for sale is $100), and there were plenty of brands I'd never heard of. Lee and Tommy Hilfiger also had shops, and even though I didn't go in, I could tell by looking that jeans in Taipei probably cost more than a suit back home.

Ju wanted to get something nice for her boyfriend in Japan, so we ducked into a few shops. Most of them didn't have price tags out, but a purse Ju peeked at in a fit of daydreaming was priced at $700. They had Luis Vuitton luggage, but we were both scared to look at the price. In a different shop, I couldn't resist browsing one of the t-shirt racks. A long-sleeved, 100%-cotton t-shirt cost $150. That's USD, too.

The 89th floor of Taipei 101 is an observation tower, and you can take the elevator there for about US$10. The building apparently has the fastest elevators in the world: we went from the 5th to the 89th floor in about 39 seconds, which averages out to 37mph. The remnants of the typhoon made visibility pretty poor, and the 91st-floor outdoor observatory was closed, but the view was nonetheless awesome. The building has three tuned mass dampers--a 662-ton and two smaller ones--but you can still feel it swaying in the wind. It's kind of creepy. The building is also lit up in a different color each night of the week, with Monday through Sunday running the visible-light spectrum. Our night was violet, and it looked purdy.

After buying $80 worth of Taipei 101 omiyage for my coworkers, we went to the nearby night market. We discovered cheap designer-label clothing outlets, a positively revolting smell, and stalls selling fried chicken feet, turkey heads, and items we couldn't readily identify.

This atmosphere, combined with the steady drizzle that had been keeping us moist all day, got me ready to call it quits and come home. I got the feeling Ju felt the same way. By the time we got back to the hotel, it was about 10. We talked to token anglophone at the front desk, and discovered that, to make our 8 am flight, we would need to leave the hotel no later than 5:15. Delighted, we set our alarm for 4:15 and, naturally, had trouble getting to sleep. We discovered that CNN International carries the Daily Show, which I haven't seen on a TV screen in three months, so that lightened our mood a little.

At any rate, we got up on time after what can only be described as a nap, slept in the taxi, and made it to the airport right on schedule. We checked in, went through security and customs, and plopped down at a point equidistant from our departure gates. I was too tired to remember what we talked about, but I'm pretty sure we vowed to go on our next adventure in a place where at least one of us speaks the language, and said goodbye.

Being in a country where you speak absolutely none of the language made me feel fluent in Japanese by comparison. That's sad, really, because I can barely fend for myself in daily conversation. Nonetheless, I felt remarkably at home in Fukuoka, and I managed to take an earlier flight back to Tsushima. I thought I'd be coming straight back to my apartment to unwind, but fate--and an inkstone carver--had other plans...

Hah! How's that for a teaser?