Sunday February 27 2011

8:00 a.m. Neiwan, Taiwan

I’m back at the same little restaurant in Neiwan as yesterday. It’s not a perfect spot, but it has two key things going for it: it’s open and it serves coffee. As far as I can tell, it is the only place open in the entire town. To be honest, I don’t think it is open for business in the strictest sense. The doors at the front are open and I am a foreigner, so they let me sit down and they are kind enough to make me a cup of coffee. I appreciate being able to sit down and type away. The coffee I could do without, I suppose. They make very bad and lukewarm coffee. It is the lukewarm part that bothers me. I don’t really care if coffee is bad, just as long as it is hot. When it is lukewarm, I drink it like it is water and then it is gone in two seconds. It doesn’t have that sitting-over-a-cup-of-coffee feeling. I might as well have a bottle of water.

The man who served me is a very nice older fellow. He was so concerned about me on my first morning that he went into the back rooms and got his teenage granddaughter out of bed to come talk to me. I guess he figures there is no point letting all that English-learning go to waste. His wife is probably just as kind, but it is hard to tell since she spends every minute screaming at the tops of her lungs. I suppose if I were to make a list of the least appealing qualities of the Taiwanese it would have their ability to make and tolerate unbelievable levels of noise at the top of the list. I can see Confucius pondering, “Why close a door when you can slam it? Why start jackhammering at 9:30 on Monday morning when you can start at 6:00 on Sunday morning? Why NOT use all 10 volume levels on your TV or stereo? It goes to 10, let’s use them all!” I think the overall noise level and busy-ness level of Taiwan is helped by the very casual design of buildings and other spaces. Not for the Taiwanese is a back entrance for loading and unloading. In a restaurant like this, everything goes in and out the front door and right through the main eating area. As I drink my coffee, they are getting ready for another big day. Trucks drive up to the front and unload produce and gas cylinders. All of this is brought through the restaurant on metal carts, which slam into the tables and chairs. All the while, the woman yells. There is generally no solid front wall to these establishments either. Most of these places are identical to a Canadian car garage – just a long and narrow rectangle with the entire front being one large opening. Not for the Taiwanese are double doors and double panes of glass to keep out the noise and exhaust. Let all of life in, they say.

Again, it is something that can be seen as somewhat admirable about the Taiwanese. We are careful in the west to avoid all these things, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. The noise is there. It just happens somewhere else. The massive amount of garbage we produce is there. We just don’t see it. The Taiwanese let the garbage pile up on the street in massive stinky piles. Perhaps this pattern is a good thing? It certainly keeps life interesting and keeps you honest. I remember being amazed at the garbage chute in my father’s apartment building when I was back in Canada. It was fantastic in a certain way. I could throw away anything at all I wanted. I just put it down the chute and it disappears. Someone else has to deal with it. I didn’t have to worry about garbage at all. Out of sight and out of mind. Here, you live with your garbage. Perhaps you end up being less casual about it. And perhaps with all the noise and chaos and confusion around you all the time, life is a bit more interesting. It may not be so comfortable, but perhaps it is that little bit more interesting. Of course, I could never live like this for real. I still think of myself as a visitor. If I were in charge, things would change. I can’t help myself. I like systems and order. It would only take one experience with the giant pile of garbage for me to start trying to find a way to deal with it in a more sensible way. The garbage is on my mind because I saw one of the endless piles on the street just outside my hotel this morning. I’m sure this town produces mountains of garbage like that every weekend and has done for decades. And every Sunday morning, there are the piles of garbage from Saturday – huge and stinky and waiting to greet the new visitors. I doubt the pile will be dealt with until Monday or Tuesday at the earliest. So that garbage is a permanent feature of the town for all visitors. The Taiwanese have learned to live with it. It has been around them their whole lives and they accept it as natural. They are quite passive people in that way. They endure the most outrageous things from each other, perhaps because they have no choice. My theory is that they endure the noise, atrocious driving, and pushing and shoving so that they can do those things in their turn. I do not call the police when my neighbor starts jackhammering at 6:00 in the morning (and they do, ALL the time) so that when I decide to renovate, I can start jackhammering at 6:00 in the morning. I don’t get angry when someone does a U-turn through a red light at a busy intersection right through two pedestrian walkways, because that then gives me the freedom to do it myself when I need to.

The traffic and driving is on my mind because I’ve had a couple of run-ins lately. I’ve adjusted to most of the completely insane stunts that people pull here as they drive, but there is one that continues to take me by surprise and if I’m tired, that surprise can and does lead to anger. It happened on my way to work one morning last week. The front of a taxi suddenly appeared right beside the rear wheel of my scooter, the horn blared, and the taxi just slammed over and forced me out of the lane. They do this all the time. The idea is that a scooter doesn’t take up the entire lane, and this seems to drive them crazy. They can’t accept it. They will pull up beside you with half the car in the lane beside you and the other half heading into oncoming traffic. Then once they are beside you, they will simply move over. You can either get hit or get out of the way. When this happened last week, I decided to do something about it. The taxi that nearly killed me had to stop at the next red light about fifty feet ahead of us. I pulled up beside him and slapped the window hard. The driver rolled the window down and I just let him have it. After I’d had my say, I pulled ahead of him into the scooter area. Normally, when I get angry, I end up trembling and exhausted. This time, I was actually happy. I wasn’t angry anymore. The taxi driver didn’t share my happiness, apparently, and he then chased me for several blocks trying over and over again to run me off the road. The whole time, I was just smiling and laughing to myself. It was very bizarre. The taxi actually had a passenger, and he stopped outside of this big stadium to drop him off. Then he picked up the chase again. On a tight corner, he raced around me and then cut in hard with his horn blaring, trying to clip my front wheel. Then he stayed right ahead of me for the final two blocks weaving back and forth, blocking my way and preparing himself to veer to the left or right if I came up beside him. Most scooter drivers pass cars like maniacs on the left or right. I was content to just stay behind him and match his speed. We arrived at a red light, and he tried one last time to jam me into the curb, but I just stayed behind him until he came to a complete stop. There happened to be a police officer standing right on that corner, and I pulled up next to him and spoke to him and pointed out the taxi. He didn’t speak any English, but I got him to understand (I think) with hand gestures that the taxi driver had been trying to kill me. I don’t think that would surprise any police officer. He went over to the taxi driver and they had a little discussion, but nothing came of it, of course. The Taiwanese are very nice people and very hospitable, but when it comes to anything official, the foreigner loses. It’s just a fact of life. Most foreigners here have learned that the last thing you want to do is approach the police about anything. All it means is that you will be in trouble. I have no idea what the taxi driver said, but the police officer had a very grim and unfriendly expression on his face when he turned back to me. I was still quite good-humored about the whole experience. It was so over-the-top that it didn’t seem real to me. The taxi driver had no chance at all of actually hitting me no matter how much he tried. A scooter is far too maneuverable for that. He could never catch me or hit me no matter how much he tried, so I hadn’t been worried about that at all. It was like acting out a scene from a movie. I simply smiled at the police officer and waved at the taxi driver a final goodbye and went to park my scooter on the street. The taxi driver went by as I was leaving my scooter, and he leaned over to the side and gave me the finger – a gesture he surely DID learn from movies.

The exact same thing happened to me yesterday as I was driving around this area. It was a normal car this time, and the driver was just a hot-rod kind of guy. He blasted his horn three times as he forced me over. I simply gave him three little toots back on my horn. He then swung out into oncoming traffic across a double line to pass the truck that was now in front of him. Everyone had to swerve out of his way to avoid a head-on collision. The amazing thing is that no one was angry about this. The Taiwanese will put up with the craziest and most extreme and rude driving, and it never fails to amaze me. There is something in their psyche that accounts for it, but I can’t imagine what it is other than my goofy idea that they let other people do it so that they can do it in turn. Anyway, enough about crazy driving. If you worried about crazy driving, you’d never have time or energy for anything else in this part of the world. It’s one of the charms of life overseas.

 

In the morning yesterday, I walked around Neiwan exploring the place. I was more right than I imagined in my description of this place as an odd mix of interesting and gaudy. I found lots of interesting places, such as a Hakka museum. They had some large photos from the thirties, forties, and fifties. Photographs often have a big impact on me. These photographs were of big public events, such as a track meet and a funeral. They were also of ordinary street scenes, such as a man selling his wares to children. It was a very different time for Taiwan. The children were all barefoot. Everyone looked more traditionally Chinese. Not too to be too much of a cliché, but I often end up reflecting on all the people in the photos – how their lives were just as intense and real to them as mine is to me, and how most (probably all) of the people in those photos have lived their lives and are now gone. I find it hard to bring artifacts in museums to life, but photos are always very interesting to me.

There was also lots of interesting street food for sale. Much of it you would never see in a safe, safe, safe place like Canada. The most interesting was a young fellow selling honey. He didn’t mess around with photographs of his bees and the bee hives. He had the bees right there at the side of the crowded narrow alley. There were bee hives behind him with hundreds of bees flying in and out. And the man had a hive right at his feet. He was standing there with one of the sections pulled out of the hive. Hundreds of bees were crawling all over the section. People who walked by passed through clouds of bees. No one seemed worried about getting stung.

I also walked along a beautiful boardwalk beside the river. I followed it to an old suspension bridge. There must be an interesting story there, because one sees suspension bridges all over Taiwan. They serve little purpose beyond tourism today, but there must have been a time when they were essential to the people living in the mountains. They aren’t little bridges and they wouldn’t have been cheap. Who built them? Who paid for them? How many are there today? I wonder if the Japanese built them. That would make sense. I’ll have to do some research.

On the far side of town next to the main highway, I found two large go-cart tracks. I think of go-cart tracks as the ultimate in cheap and gaudy tourism. The worst places in the world always seem to have a go-cart track. They are ugly and usually uncared for. Yet, they seem to stay in business. I also saw a kind of museum of the weird. I didn’t go inside, but from the posters and signs it looked to be dedicated to the weird and wonderful of life – a girl eaten by a python, a rabbit that weighed a hundred pounds, a man born with an elephant’s trunk instead of a nose – that sort of thing. Very strange for Taiwan.

In the afternoon, I hopped on my scooter and went into the mountains. I saw another sign for an Economic Hostel, and I decided to track it down. The sign pointed down a side road heading up into the mountains. I never did find the Economic Hostel, but it was a beautiful trip. The road climbed higher and higher and higher, and I got beautiful views of the mountains. Unfortunately, it was very hazy, so I couldn’t get any clear pictures. I stopped at an interesting place at the side of the road that sold coffee. I sat there in the sun and read a book.

I was worried a bit about gas. I’d not bothered to fill the tank, but I was thinking I should have. So I asked some people where the road was going. Did it just keep going forever, or did it end somewhere? I learned that it went to the top of the mountain and stopped. There was a kind of look-out point up there. Two men actually came to my table and asked me in English if I needed any help. They were very surprised to see a lone foreigner up there in the mountains and they thought perhaps I was lost or in trouble. I asked them, too, about where the road ended. They told me that it ended in six kilometers and was for sight-seeing. I wasn’t surprised, then, to find at the end of the road not a look-out point, but a huge mountain resort. Again, I think the Taiwanese were so used to people just knowing everything that it never occurred to them to tell me it was there and that was where the road was leading. They probably assumed I knew all about it. Doesn’t everyone?

This resort explained the large amount of traffic I’d noticed. I’ve traveled on a lot of these small mountain roads, but I rarely see expensive cars on them. This road had a lot of expensive cars traveling on it. The resort was huge. There were hotels and cabins and five or six outdoor restaurants with large areas of tables outside to take advantage of the mountain views. There were trails around the mountains, huge parking lots, restrooms, and other things.

Tags: Canada, Economic Hostel, Hsinchu County Trip, scooter, Taiwan