Today we can talk about the people. When travelling without a GPS or phone, you're bound to get lost. You can bully through maps to get back on track, but my favorite thing is to ask someone nearby. Even if they just point you in the right direction, it tends to be enough. This is a great method in Japan where I can speak the language. Chinese, on the other hand, proved so difficult for me that I couldn't even pronounce the place names in a way that locals could understand. In the end I abandoned my useful phrase list and stuck with English, which a surprising number of people know!
Everyone I met seemed really friendly. In Taipei there were a fair number of foreigners, but in the rest of the country Jackie and I were real celebrities. Many stared, some shouted hello in passing, and there were quite a few "secret" cellphone shots of us out and about. A few times at famous places, groups of grandmas and grandpas swarmed us to take pictures together as though we were the main attraction. But the people that went beyond this stick out as some of my best memories in the country. Here's a list of who they were and how we met!
Old man hiker
I met him on the Qixing trail at Yangmingshan National Park. I was cruising up the stairs in a race against time, but when I tried to pass this old man, he kept pace. "Nihao", I said too chirpily to be correct, and he started up a conversation all in English. It turned out he hikes that path every day now that he's retired, and then goes running every night. Talk about physically fit! We kept each other company halfway up the mountain. I learned about his son working in the UK, his grandchildren who live nearby, and the regulars of the park. Nice encounter in an unexpected place.
Janet (Li-jun)
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| Bite sized egg and shrimp combo. |
We shared a room at the Taipei hostel. She's a 22 year old (same age!) girl just finishing up college. Actually, the reason she was in Taipei was to take a big test to get in to grad-school. She and her friends were up all night studying and then left around 6:30 am to take the test. Yikes! After that she went back home to Kaohsiung, where we met up with her at the end of our trip. She introduced us to the Liu He night market, "only for tourists", and explained all the different foods. We had stinky tofu together, tried flower pot ice cream, and got their famous sausage. She tried to get us to eat goose head, something "so delicious!", but we said we'd save it for another day. Or ... not. It was fun to meet such a cute, peppy youth of Taiwan and hang out for an evening.
Wallace and Louie
Are you noticing a theme on names? That's because all Taiwanese students get foreign names in their English classes. One day Jackie and I headed out to the Qingsui cliffs. Public transport was a little lax, so we ended up walking a good ways to the cliffs, with plenty of time to spare before the next train back. While there we saw a couple young guys writing something in the sand. It looked like
Miss #$x (indecipherable). The waves kept washing it away before they could snap a proper picture. Anyway, after that we started the long walk back, but soon a car stopped. It was the same two guys, who offered to take us back to the main city on their way. "Wallace" was a social worker who did most of the talking. Louie worked at a bar, but was a shy boy and only spoke a couple English phrases. Right before they dropped us off, we asked about the message on the beach. Wallace explained it was to Louie's new girlfriend. When Louie understood the conversation he first looked shocked, then rebuffed his friend for outing his secret, then declared to us all "I love her!" before covering his mouth in a fit of giggles.
Akiyo and the Aboriginals
On the last day in Hualien, Jackie and I split up. I went to a city in the area and asked an older couple how to get to a nearby tea plantation. "Oh, that place?" the husband said,
in English, "we live right by there!" They offered to take me on their way home. Neither the tea plantation or the Tropic of Cancer were quite as beauteous as I had imagined, but the day I got out of asking for them was well worth it. We hit it off in the car while chatting about English teaching (he got his PHD in the UK and is now a professor at a local university). I also learned that both of them are Taiwanese aboriginals, from different tribes. They were on the way to visit Akiyo's mother, and invited me in. I was worried at first about being able to talk with her, but he told me excitedly voice, "
Nooo problem!". She grew up during the Japanese occupation of Taiwan and could speak it fluently. And when her friends hobbled by and stopped in to stare, I found out they could speak Japanese too. Then they took me to their farm, where we planted a mango tree, passion fruit tree, and a secret tree. I was told to come back in a year if I want to know what it turns into. They gathered up dry wood from the ground, uprooted a few vegetables, and cooked a delicious pot of stew over an open flame stove. On the way back to the train station, we stopped by the wife's dad's place in another aboriginal village. He smiled at me with a row of shiny silver teeth and spoke in Japanese.
These were just a few of the encounters we had over there every day. Others were the volunteer at the temple who gave us his own calligraphy papers, or the Chinese swimmer who joined us touring the Anping area, and the kind hostel owners that explained everything about the cities we visited. If the Taiwanese are really Chinese, then I'm going to need to change my presumptions about them. Because the people I met were not the rude, unsanitary, manipulative ones I expected, but kind, generous, and curious.
