Green Acres

Been there, done that

Islands can be quite big, I'm discovering. Formosa can seem quite the insignificant spec, but about two hours into the drive out from the airport, I had to accept that the entire island was not essentially a suburb of Taipei.

Spent the last few days in Taipei and am at this very moment sitting at Taipei Taoyuan International waiting for my flight to HK. This is all after a pretty arduous first several days on this trip in Taichung, which was not the sort of place I had in mind when I envisioned a vacation in the metropolitan centers of expatriate or formerly expatriate Chinese territories.

Given the relations many of us have to the folks here, let me warn the uninitiated that, at least for the next five-ten years, you will want to regard any warm-hearted and generous offer of lodging and visitation in Taichung with measured gratitude and great caution. When I heard 'rural' I pictured rural Marin relative to SF Bay, or even Narita to Tokyo. In fact it bore much closer resemblance to some of the provincial towns I visited in Rio recently or in China several years ago, though by many counts it still compares favorably.

But still, the streets are often unpaved, traffic is total chaos, the skeeters are numerous and very hungry, stray dogs and cats wander the streets, and the weather is a hot, sticky, muggy mess. Internet cafes were remarkably hard to find -- I finally had to take my laptop out and find WiFi hotspots at coffee shops.

Pretty rural street. Not pictured: mosquitos, strays

It all made for kind of an awkward situation when I really wanted to take off for Taipei. Uncle #2 was generous and hospitable to a fault, but the whole place got to be a terrific downer. Most days we'd spend sitting in the house watching TV as the rain came down in sheets. When we wanted to go out he or his daughters would insist on driving us, which became problematic as they tended to miss turns and get lost a lot, which only added to the list of things they were constantly bickering about. Meanwhile we'd be doing our best to stifle gasps and shrieks as we rode shotgun to the kind of driving that'd reinforce your worst stereotypes of Asian female and elder driving.

And obviously this is nobody's fault, but it got incredibly depressing because #2's wife had a stroke a year or so ago and was now wheelchair bound and vegetative (not in the clinical sense, but she couldn't talk or interact much). She'd sit there and kind of gaze around, looking at each of us and grin or chuckle occasionally. She'd still eat normally if spoon fed, but it was hard to figure out what was going on in there. I remember her from when she visited several years ago and was one of the few family members I had that enjoyed having my dog around.

Basically it was a good bunch of people that we wanted to see, but there really wasn't much to do in that town and they really seemed to want to monopolize our time here. My mom had been there over a week and only planned on spending a few days originally. I went to bed last Saturday night thinking we'd be on an HSR to Taipei by noon Sunday, but woke up to find that they didn't help reserve the tix they said they would and were suggesting we stay on for another 2-3 days. I put the proverbial kibosh on that and we were in Taipei by Sunday night.

Taipei 101 -- I've rarely been this happy in a mall