After more than a little drama, I have planned a successful (though still fairly expensive) trip to a scary country full of guns, non-English speakers, two-parallel-thin-blade electrical outlets, and country music. I’m a citizen of it, and it’s not Brazil. I hope that narrows it down. I will be visiting four law schools between the 21st of March and the 1st of April.
My flights, posted here for self-reference, look like… fun. If you’ll be in any of the areas I’ll be when I am and want to touch base, let me know.
I’m so scared to start spending US dollars again…
21 Mar.
NW 2 HKG-NRT 0825-1325
NW 28 NRT-SFO 1555-0910
NW 342 SFO-DTW 1243-2017
(a few days in Ann Arbor, MI)
25 Mar.
NW 542 DTW-LGA 1010-1148
(a few days in New York, NY, with a one or two-day dash to Philadelphia, PA at the beginning)
1 Apr.
NW 657 EWR-DTW 0910-1114
NW 25 DTW-NRT 1420-1620+1d.
2 Apr.
NW 1 NRT-HKG 1830-2230
(back here)
My blogging and pictures definitely went downhill from day 1.
The last day, I decided to see both Danshui and the hot springs. Unfortunately, both places were cloudy and it actually started drizzling. Got to see some bubbly water, but that’s about all of notice—I didn’t even go in the old Spanish/Dutch/British fort at Danshui because I wouldn’t have been able to see anything.
The flight back was not bad but definitely not good. I am now the proud owner of a resealable clear plastic bag less than 1 liter in volume (the better to beat out EU and now Taiwan and soon Hong Kong regulations with). Unfortunately I was not the owner of a working Eustachian tube during the flight. This manifested as ears which were slow to pop on the way up, and impossible to pop fully on the way down (which in turn manifested as my head feeling like it was going to explode). It didn’t, much, and I think I still have my eardrums intact, but barely. It wasn’t a very fun half hour or so (the descent is nearly half the flight time), and I’ve still got some pressure problems. Still, no delays, and with my bag carried on I just had to wait for the immigration officer to look through every stamp on his desk before finding the STUDENT monstrosity and I was on my way back to campus.
I’m up too late.
The National Palace Museum (national as in China, so there’s a lot of stuff there) was great, but I discovered that the breezy, empty transportation system of mid-weekdays turns into a crowded, slow, snarled mess on weekends. After waiting for around an hour to catch any bus, I curtailed my schedule for today.
No pictures in the museum, of course.
I’m coming down with something (well, I was yesterday) so I’m going to try to take it easy tonight, going out to get a light dinner at the most. And maybe tomorrow. I’ll at least try to see Danshui though; if I stick to the MRT the traffic problem will stay manageable, I think. I’ll try to leave around 5 p.m. tomorrow for the airport, so that should give me good time for a lazy morning, checking out barely on time, and zipping off to the shore.
Last evening, I left off after a streetside dinner which had left me wanting more. So, I got more. I went out to Din Tai Fung, which is a world-famous (among snobby food critics, anyway) place specializing in xiaolongbao (Shanghainese-style soup dumplings). It was what it was cracked up to be.
Also, the lantern festival (which actually starts today) was, for some reason, even more fun at night. My pictures probably didn’t come out well though.
Today, I’m going to the National Palace Museum, and perhaps one of CKS’s old official residences near the corresponding MRT station, before probably paying a return visit to the food court in the basement of Taipei 101. Tomorrow, I’ll be trying to get a bit outside of the city, either toward the hot springs at Beitou or the mouth of the river on the Strait at Danshui.
Here I am in Taipei, my feet destroyed by underestimating the scale of some guidebook maps. My journey was about par for the course; minor delays, unexpected niceties of flying in Asia, and so on.
At the airport my check-in took about 25 minutes—with no line—because “something was wrong.” I was half-expecting to find myself extraordinarily rendered, but it seems that “something” was taken care of. The flight was barely over an hour and a third on a very empty, very new EVA Airwarys Boeing 777-300ER, in their “Premium Economy cabin” (which they don’t mind if you sit in with an Economy ticket on short-haul flights). I can see why they didn’t mind—there couldn’t have been more than 60 people or so on the plane. I wonder why?
EVA seems to have its own (or nearly its own) little terminal at TPE. Immigration was surprisingly quick, even for non-citizens, but I guess that happens when you have just 60 people coming off a wide-body jet. After wandering around the airport, finding an ATM and a bus company, nothing exciting happened until I arrived at the Taipei train station… around midnight, requiring a painfully expensive roaming call to keep the hostel’s doors open.
I’m in the Happy Family Hostel III, a decidedly basic place with a nice owner. Maybe I’ll remember to take a picture or two of my quarters before leaving.
Today I’ve seen Taipei 101, the Sun Yat-Sen and Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Halls, the 2-28 Peace Park, City Hall and its Discovery Center… hmm… lots of big streets… OK, I don’t remember everything. Maybe my pictures do. I’ll try to upload some from here.
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I’m thinking very philosophically (blog-speak for I haven’t even started to think about packing for a flight in a few hours) today. This time I’ll carry a notebook (paper) and take it out on it instead of the blog, but for now you’re stuck with a few fragments from the last couple weeks. I’d checked my bag (all of it) three times in a row, thanks to the Filipino implementation of the “liquids or gels” rule (which is coming to Hong Kong in March, sadly).
I really got a kick, in an Ugly American kind of way, out of the mark left by the USA on the Philippines. That most Filipino of conveyances, the incomparable jeepney, was born from American jeeps; bus drivers and passengers in the north sing along to country music, from cover bands with perfect accents. Firearms are rampant—America! In the parts of the country we visited, the USA gets a better reception than in many places it’s been: compared to the Spanish and the Japanese, US occupation forces came out smelling like roses. Peso bills are the same size as dollar bills. We saw parking spaces at Benguet State reserved for operatives of “Future Farmers of the Philippines.” I could go on.
The Spanish mark, of course, is distinct too, and it’s maybe the combination of these that really got to me. What I think of as Latin American is, in part, really Iberian Colonial—it’s in the Philippines, too. (Literally) loud, public Catholicism (now with competition from charismatic and evangelical sects), some of the food… familiar in a comforting way to me.
Unfortunately, these thoughts aren’t very useful to me when I was planning to leave for the airport at 6 p.m., or maybe even go a little early and try to take care of some business at airline reservations counters. It’s 4:45 p.m. now; time to pack.
As March 1 is suddenly not a very attractive return date (had to book it that way because of when I booked), I had to set my return to the US today. It’s now June 12, and CX is nice enough to not make me go in to an office to change the paper tickets. Cool.
Fares to Taiwan Taipei, China this weekend are about as low as they have been, but much more available than they have been in the post- New Year work frenzy. I might book for Thursday evening… it’s around 1400 HKD tax-in r/t to Taipei. Hmmm.
The next weekend, I might make it to Yangshuo; it seems like the Sri Lankan delegation is considering it. No Weekend Left Behind?
Dinner was at Café Adriatico last night (visit #5 for Trevor and Kerensa, #2 for us), followed by a calamansi juice or two at Hobbit House, before a few stern words with a meter-shirking driver.
This morning Trevor and Kerensa went back, and Nic and I walked around a bit. We saw the waterfront (such as it and its really disgusting little strip of beach were) before walking back to the same café for a pretty good omelet breakfast. Then we walked all the way back up Mabini to our dump, checked out, had another fight over the merits of the taximeter, and THEN the fun began.
We checked in quickly enough (after jumping through a few security hoops) to learn that our flight was grievously overbooked. The offer for volunteers was P3000 cash (~US$60) and a free roundtrip ticket MNL-HKG or vice-versa. We took it. I guess I’ll be going back? Boracay sounds nice. We were offered all of the same again and a hotel room with transfers to abandon our new 6 p.m. flight, but we both had to be back before Tuesday.
The flight was roomy (exit row) and fairly normal, with a minor delay due to the offloading of the checked bags belonging to the 6 p.m. volunteers. To my surprise, our bags made it on the same flight we did and showed up after just a little agonizing in HKG. Scenic bus rides later, we were at Lingnan where I have a ton of work to do for tomorrow. I have to choose a paper topic (or few) by 9:30 and give a presentation at 16:00, in addition to dealing with the paper and electronic pileup of the last couple weeks. Good trip, though.
