daytripping to taipei...

i am feeling irrationally proud of myself - i have successfully spent an entire afternoon sightseeing in Taipei without getting lost, mugged, kidnapped, or otherwise led into disaster (the closest i got was an exciting moment crossing the street when all of a sudden about ten fire engines and ambulances came roaring up heading west while another half dozen emergency response vehicles whizzed by with full sirens/lights/etc going in the exact opposite direction.)
my last day at cooking school was fun - i made friends with a pair of very nice kiwi girls, and learned how to make all sorts of curry pastes from scratch (although i suspect that if i do try out some of the recipes when i get home, i will probably just cheat and buy a jar of curry paste from the asian supermarket, as god knows where i am going to find fresh coriander root and siamese ginger in santa rosa, let alone the exact right type of dried chili peppers.) i think a full week of cooking school might have done me in: the calorie- and information-overload of just the two days was about as much as i could handle. but definitely a great experience, and i am really glad i did it (and would highly recommend it to anyone going to chiang mai: it's the chiang mai thai cookery school).
i scooted back to the hotel after school for a quick shower and change and then my "airport transfer" arrived to pick me up - i had booked it before leaving from the u.s., so wasn't sure exactly what to expect (they had charged me $30 for what i realized upon arrival in chiang mai would have been $3 ride in a tuktuk, but i had been feeling nervous enough about wanting as much as possible arranged beforehand that i decided not to worry about it). so at 5 p.m. on the dot this ENORMOUS air conditioned bus with personal TV screens and lace doilies on all the head rests of the seats pulls up outside the guesthouse, and a uniformed driver and conductor hop down and escort me - the sole passenger - and my grotty backpack onto the bus. i rode in solitary princess style in my personal enormous bus to the airport, feeling at least that there was a reason for the $30 charge, even if the travel company had somewhat overestimated my needs. the airport in chiang mai was something of a cultural experience: you're actually not _allowed_ to hang out at the gate until your flight boards, but instead you are shepherded by very persistent airline staff into airline-specific "pre-departure lounges" where you sit on plastic chairs and sip plastic cups of dubious orange soda that more persistent airline stewardesses bring round to you on trays, and then when the flight is announced to be open, there is this sudden massive stampeded to the other end of the airport, because of course the pre-departure lounge is nowhere near the actual gate. funny. anyway. boring flight boring transfer to near-airport bangkok hotel, extremely boring overly short night of sleep in aspetic airport hotel (i had to wake up at 4 a.m. to get the flight to taipei yuck yuck yuck), boring flight to taipei (ooh, except this direction the airline food suddenly got unexpectedly good. i wonder if it's listed in the back of the airline magazine:
MOVIES [Eastbound flights]:
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (German with Chinese subtitles, Chinese with Croatian subtitles, Danish with Laotian commentary]
FOOD [Eastbound flights]:
total crap
MOVIES [Westbound flights]:
something i would actually want to see in a language I can understand
Food [Westbound flights]:
edible!
we'll see. i slept most of the way from bangkok to taipei because i had gotten up at 4 a.m. after all, and 4 a.m. is not my sparkliest time. i sat next to a guy who was coughing and sneezing and dripping snot all over everything, so i am sure i will be coming down with some horrible trans-pacific mutant swine flu virus. OOH, speaking of, so the surgical mask thing that i noticed in taipei airport is not just limited to taipei airport, as it turns out. it's really crazy. maybe a quarter of the regular people just walking around on the street in taipei are wearing surgical masks! it's totally freaky. and the funny thing is that this is clearly not just a "this week in order to avoid the swine flu we're doing this" kind of thing, since some of the younger set are sporting, i am not making this up, fashion surgical masks. i saw black pleather with rhinestones, leopard-print, red sequins - SO WEIRD! (the older generation seem to stick to the more conservative blue paper variety). this bears some further investigation.
anyway. so. i arrived in taipei, and took a deep breath and turned right to "arrivals" rather than left to "transfers", went through immigration, had my passport stampystamped, and i was in taiwan for reals! the nice lady at the tourist information desk gave me a map and i actually got her to write down a couple of key phrases for me on slips of paper, and i was off. i took the bus from the airport into town, and from there a taxi to the national palace museum, which houses the most important collection of chinese art outside of china. it's kind of a funny place - they do have a few beautiful things, but i have to say for the most part i was underwhelmed, partly because the layout of the building is so profoundly unintuitive. you wander from one small dark oddly laid out room to another, with no clear easy sense of chronology or region, and there seemed to be huge gaps of genres/time periods/styles just missing. here's a mystery to ponder: the star of the entire museum collection currently is a jade carving of a bok choy cabbage. it's about seven inches long, and it's an admittedly quite realistic looking bok choy. but at the end of the day it's... a cabbage. made of jade. hmm.
it was interesting to be in a place that was so clearly of the developed world and yet not at all eurocentric - it made me realized how white-people focused all the first world countries i've ever been to are. for instance: in the museum they had a timeline of all the different chinese dynasties (and i will be the first to confess that i was vaguely aware that ming was sort of fifteenth to seventeenth century. ish. and that that was the extend of my chinese dynastic knowledge. so it was good to get a bit more than that). they had a concurrent timeline for korean, indonesian, japanese etc. histories, which were only slightly less detailed than the many subdivisions of the chinese dynasties, and then for europe they had 'classical period' and 'holy roman empire' and that was it. no dark ages, no middle ages, no renaissance, no enlightment, all just 'holy roman empire,' which, while accurate, made me feel a bit defensive, like come on, we had a _bit_ more than that going on.
anyway. after the museum i went to the shi'lin night market, which was fun - five million twenty year olds buying pop culture accoutrements and street food (i bought street food, but decided that the effort involved in staying up to the minute with pop culture would in my case need to be superhuman). other things i noticed: crazy gorgeous temples with elaborate carvings, lit lanterns, people lighting incense and praying etc. with NEON SIGNS STUCK OVER THE TEMPLE DOORS, like supratitles at the opera, presumably advertising times of services?? i don't know. but funny. also i saw a big red parrot perched on a street light. that was cool. i bought some mystery food from a bossy street vendor lady for dinner - i think there was pork and cauliflower involved, but wouldn't swear to it - and then because i still had time i went for a walk along some of the bigger city streets. i was surprised by how incredibly prosperous everyone looked: i will have to pay more attention the next time i am in san francisco chinatown, but my general impression there is that you see way more old people, and way more people looking sort of threadbare and immigranty, whereas most of the people out on the streets of taipei (and there were gajillions of them) looked healthy and well-taken-care-of and snazzily dressed (unlike me, as i was at this point sporting nearly twenty four hours of airport skank) and _young_ - i don't know where all the old people are, but i don't think i saw anyone out and about over the age about fifty. then it started to get cold and wet (i was prepared for the wet, and had my rainponcho, but was NOT prepared for cold) so i hopped onto the metro (check me out yo yo yo taking public transportation in an alien city where the only words i know in chinese are hello and thank you! aren't you impressed? well, you shouldn't really be, because it's disgracefully easy for anglophones to navigate taipei, as it turns out. all the street signs and metro signs are in english as well as chinese. occasionally they try and fool you with an alternate spelling, using an 'x' on the street sign where the map has a 'sh' but i was onto them. also everyone i actually interacted with except for the bossy street vendor mystery pork-and-cauliflower lady seemed to speak brilliant english, which was totally humiliating. it is a city with essentially no tourists (as far as i could tell, unless the other tourists are from other places in taiwan/china) and everyone speaks english. it was kind of like the personal princess-bus from the chiang mai hotel to the airport - as if the entire city of taipei had learned english exclusively for my benefit. spooky, man. but
it was actually really nice to be pretty much the only non-chinese person wandering around, because when you're the only one you forget what you look like and can just wander around unselfconsciously looking at all the random total crap for sale in the street market (lots of 'sexty underwears', hologram keyrings, and ohhhhh the best thing ever, salted dried mango with chili flakes. you know i bought a little baggy of that to keep me going.)
now i am at the airport and have FINISHED oh dear the two books i bought in chiang mai yesterday morning which were supposed to last me until san francisco and i am going to have to go scouting for a bookshop, unless i can face harry potter in chinese with german subtitles again, which i don't think i can.
anyway. love to all and see (some of) you soon!