Miles to go

Whether they are people or cartoon bears, everyone I have met so far has been cheerful and helpful, and with only a couple exceptions I am not being stared at, which was a common occurrence in Seoul.

The Taiwanese do not appear to expect me to speak Mandarin, or what they call Guoyu, and when I do, they need a moment to adjust. My pronunciations are spot-on, though my intonations are almost certainly spot-off. My biggest handicaps — a limited vocabulary and an inability to read the language — aren't going away anytime soon. I miss a lot of details at street level.

My home is on the fourth floor of a narrow old building on Neijiang Street. The apartment is one of about five. The other tenants are a hair salon and restaurant, and strong food smells started rising about 10:30 this morning. There is a machining shop somewhere adjacent; whirring, grinding noises go on from 8 to 5, but they don’t bother me. [Author's note: There is no machining shop. Peace has been restored.]

My camera’s sensor is fouled up. Luckily, I am only blocks from the camera district (Boai Lu, above), and the young fellow at No. 18 said the problem is common with Ricohs. Maybe they can fix it, maybe not, but he will need a few days to find out. So I dropped it off and picked up a little Canon with fewer features for $2,700 NTDs ($85 USD).

People complain about the prices here, but stuff seems cheap. The hourlong bus ride from the airport was $4 USD. A taxi from Taipei Main Station to Neijiang Street was another $4. Back home, just getting a driver to drop his flag costs about that.

My knee took a turn for the worse on the plane ride over but by morning it hadn’t developed into a crippling problem. We ran into headwinds and storms over the Pacific, and the flight stretched to nearly 15 hours. Even the stewardesses said it was unusual. I'll tell you what's unusual: Sitting in a cramped United seat for four hours, glancing at your watch and realizing there are ELEVEN MORE HOURS TO GO. But time marches on and you are delivered to an island in the South China Sea, finding yourself speaking Chinese to another person for the first time in your life.

I got an Easy Card for public transportation and convenience-store use. Wendy, a supremely organized accountant renting me the apartment, was nice enough to let me use her local phone number to register it with Taipei’s YouBike program, so now I can grab a bicycle anytime I want outside Ximen station, two blocks away. They are free for the first half hour and about 60 cents USD per hour after that. After four hours, the price goes up again. Like I said, cheap. Haven't tried them yet; will report.

I get jet-lagged flying to Europe, not to Asia. But some chick on the TV is pretending to be a Japanese singer, and the daffiness of it all, combined with the hum of metal on metal from the machines downstairs, is bringing on naptime in the middle of the afternoon. If I stay up all night and miss work tomorrow, well, the boss man will just have to deal.