An American Werewolf in Taichung

Now, this wouldn't normally be that big a deal, except the fact that most of us were standing toe-to-toe in the narrow aisle without room to do so much as sneeze, and the windows on the train were sealed shut. Add to that I had been standing since leaving Cathy in Tainan (I got kicked out of my seat by its rightful occupant), roughly an hour before, and had been talked at/to by an older, rather smelly betel nut addict whose one good eye looked like that of a dead fish. He had a mouth full of betel nut and the subsequent saliva, since one cannot spit on the train, and he would start to chew a fresh nut every few minutes. I gathered from both listening to the garbled Chinese coming from behind his blood red teeth and getting a rough translation from the giggling younger guy behind me that he was curious because he'd never seen an American before, and I'd made his day happy, apparently. Also his "secretary" (how did this man have a secretary?) had taught him to count to ten in English . Which he did repeatedly, and I could only smile and say "hen hao!" with my thumbs up so many times.

We stopped in Chiayi for about twenty minutes in the sweltering heat (by this point it the temperature in the cabin had risen from 21 degrees Celsius to 30+ and was still rising), while they attempted to restart the air conditioning, an effort that only resulted in periodic slamming sounds coming from somewhere on the train.

Then, after a tense-sounding message from the crew, people started to exit the train. I was positive I was going to be stranded a hundred or so kilometers from Taichung out in B.F. Nowhere Chiayi. But some of the passengers stayed on, so I decided I would as well. But I piled into the space between the cars where all the other latecomer, no-designated-seat-having passengers were now sulking. The Train Powers That Be continued to try to start the air conditioning, only to have it thump to a halt several seconds later. They tried over and over the whole way from Chiayi to Wulien, as if to tease us.

The train pulled into Taichung Station nearly an hour late, and of course, since it had been sunny and humid in Kaohsiung, naturally it would be cold and drizzly less than two hundred clicks away. I walked back to where my scooter was parked however many blocks away at my school, and made the drive home in record speed.


So scooting to Kaohsiung apparently went against all logic, common sense, and medical advice. I took a train instead. It was a blast. Danny, who was a chef or cook of many years or something in the UK, made a fantastic meal for fourteen of us at the palatial three bedroom apartment he shares with Hanlee, another person from our training group from South Africa.

The following day I rented a scooter for 24 hours for US$6 (and boy howdy, it was worth that and no more), and we went to the beach, which involved driving out to the coast and taking a ferry (scooters and all) across to "Seafood Island", which is, as the name suggests, an island filled with seafood shops and restaurants. It was really interesting, looking at the mix of old Chinese-style junks and flashy new speedboats and yachts and freight ships. Our ferry had to cede right of way to a gigantic freighter from Dubai (Kaohsiung is the world's third largest international container port, by the way). I spotted a pair of R.O.C. Navy destroyers (of which the R.O.C. has four. They're Kidd class destroyers sold to Taiwan by the U.S. over the past couple of years after they'd been decommissioned. The four Kidds were originally commissioned for Iran three decades ago, but that didn't pan out).

The beach was surreal. Cameron, who had been my passenger, and I lost the others while scooting through a crowded market street, and ended up parking on the far side of the beach. We saw several weathered bunkers carved into the rocks jutting out into the Strait, and a machine gun pillbox that someone had placed a little Buddha statue in, and atop the natural entrance to the port stood (what I now know is) Chihou Battery. Which, now that I look it up, is a fort originally built in the 17th Century, but later cannon batteries were added, and the fort was pretty much entirely dissembled by the Japanese. Disappointingly, we didn't poke around in the fort.

The volcanic sand on the beach was gunmetal gray, and the water was about the same color with a little green added. The sun shone weakly through the gray haze of pollution, and tremendous ships loomed on the horizon. But the really odd thing was the pleasant heat and breeze. It was like being in an aged black-and white negative of Malibu. Or as Danny put it, "it looks like a shitty day, like going to the beach in England, except it's nice."

We swam for a few hours. The water was pretty much lifeless, and we encountered only a few bits of seaweed, a bunch of rocks, and I got pinched by a very small crab. We couldn't decide if it was the salt or the pollution that was making our eyes burn.

I unfortunately (or maybe fortunately) left my camera at Danny's apartment that day. So no pictures of the beach.

Later on, we met another crowd of our people who had been in Kenting for some sort of music festival, and we ate at a pretty nice, very American restaurant (I was so happy to eat something that wasn't Taiwanese), and some of us went on to enjoy a few hours of KTV with some of the Chinese Teachers.

Today I helped Andre and Anja (a gorgeous South African couple, also from our training group) get to the bus station, and Cathy and I got on a northbound train at about 2:30pm, and I made it home at quarter-til-7.

And now I have to grade homework and plan two lessons. Bye-bye, fun!

A successful long weekend, no doubt. And it was pleasantly long.