By Lucy

Marco’s replacement arrived while I was away, a limey named Danny. He’s from Sheffield, skinny and tattooed and a vagabond who’s been travelling across Asia for two years and is about ready to admit he’s too broke to keep going. I made the mistake of addressing him with a flirtatious “hey Danny” and he spent the rest of the week calling me “love” and “sweetheart”, which I hated but couldn’t tell him to stop because it hit my dopamine receptors. I want to say it unfortunately reminded me of all the things I miss about Rich, but I suppose “unfortunate” is a matter of debate. It was also a guilty pleasure.

We didn’t have a lot of guests, as most people who would travel had hunkered down, but some people had still checked in and then didn’t dare checking out. Unfortunately, they put guests in our room again and I found it very disruptive.

I could barely peel myself out of bed for work and it marked the only time I wasn’t 10 minutes early for my shift. Annalisa was off, so I had the fourth and third floor; Martin was teaching Danny on one and two.

We were told to flip all the mattresses for comfort, or something. I flipped a couple and then couldn’t be bothered to do the rest. They’re foam mattresses – in Canada things this flimsy would be a mattress topper, not THE mattress. What difference does flipping it make? I also couldn’t be bothered to clean the showers properly and just splashed some bleach around so it smelled clean. I’m so tired.

As I worked, one of the lights in the hallway started flickering. I ignored it, and then a second, and a third, started up. The pace of the flickering increased over a period of about ten minutes until it looked and sounded like a rave. I took a video and posted it to the group chat, and a minute later Mei flew up the stairs. She stared at it for a moment before turning the light off. “The switch is here.” She told me.

Ok, I know where the switch is. I just figured you should know what was happening.

As I finished up for the day, Martin complimented me for an exceptional job. My mind flashed back to the Dutch super complimenting me in FF.

If there is a god, they have a sense of humor.

We spent most of the day waiting for the other shoe to fall. There’s a cold blob in the ocean east of Taiwan, which slowed down and depleted the typhoon as it approached. A Friday landfall was pushed back to Saturday, although there was some light rain.

Around 3, I finally felt capable of going shopping for food. Unfortunately, it was too late. All of the shops had closed up early for the typhoon. With nothing open on Sunday, it means I have 3 days to figure out how to fend for myself. As I walked around looking for a store that’s open, I noticed most of the shops had been visited by the sandbag fairy.

Spooky.

I even tried opening UberEats, to see if there was anything. I was greeted by an announcement that the government had suspended all delivery services.

The bento place around the corner that just serves meatballs and white rice is still open, for some reason. I grabbed a couple of these, in case they were closed later. Then I walked down to Carrefour for some more supplies.

We had a group dinner. Seems the others had organized something – excluding me, of course – and each had bought a serving of something. Scallion pancakes, bao, fried sausage, cabbage potstickers. Even though I had nothing to offer, Marco waved me over and made Annalisa include me.

“Where dangerous place would you go if you could go anywhere.” Danny asked the table.

“Iran.” I say immediately. Everyone nodded.

Danger is also relative, I suppose. Technically I could go to the PRC, it’s just my opinion not to. I could also go to Russia, although it occurs to me that now I’ve posted pictures of myself with a draft dodger, I’m probably on some kind of watch list. Still, I stubbornly insist that Putin is but mortal and one day he will die and something will change in Russia. Maybe better, maybe worse.

The next day was a nothing burger. Still can’t sleep. Not many check outs. Bavi had technically landed, but from the hostel, it didn’t even look like it was raining that much. It seems like other parts of the country had floods and slips, but Taipei is pretty resistant to typhoons. The only damage I noticed were some posters and scaffolding hoardings that were torn to shreds. I went outside to the sidewalk a couple of times for fresh air, but I was glad for the excuse to do nothing.

The Try Guys put out a series about one of their employees going through IVF, “Marissa In Fertility”. It’s only three episodes long, on Youtube, but it contains a lot of information that’s not commonly available, that blindsided even me when I was trying to access IVF. One of the things I don’t mention, when I gave up on having kids, is that you can go through multiple expensive rounds of IVF and still end up with no kids. The average round of IVF harvests 14 eggs and results in one or two viable embryos, but the problem is that I have the genetic illness. It’s statistically possible, if unlikely, that all of my eggs might have the disease, or that it might take multiple rounds of harvesting to get some viable eggs that are mutation free. It took about three months to do all the testing – some of it has to be done of very specific days of your cycle, which means taking time off work – and ten thousand dollars just to get to the point that they can start prepping you to harvest eggs, and at that point was when my landlord had served me a notice to vacate and by the time I was stable again, I had switched careers and broken up with James. Then the despair sank in; I’d have to repeat all the testing all over again, with more costs if I had to purchase sperm, and at that point I gave up.

In the evening, we had a strange guest check-in. Now, I hesitate to dismiss people as drunk. People have died because they had a diabetic attack while out and about and entered an altered state, and people ignored them, assuming they were drunk. However, it was Saturday night and she was staggering around in a leopard print mini-dress, so drunk seemed like a safe bet. She wandered in and out, acting erratically.

As I went to get ready for bed, one of the toilet doorknobs fell off in my hand, so I posted it to the group chat and the old man came upstairs to fix it right away. At that point, the erratic woman had decided to have a shower, and, having stripped completely naked, was wandering between the three shower stalls apparently testing the water pressure with the doors open, oblivious to me and him. He shook his head and swore in Chinese.

Sunday was just me and Danny. Joy and bliss.

We did alright, actually. I shouldn’t resent him for what he’s not.

The crazy lady left a shower floor covered in shampoo. When I went to wash it, I just left the water running for a few minutes until it stopped foaming up.

Mei made us lunch again. She let us off work early and corralled us together and made us wear fake afros for photos for social media… for reasons. We put on the afros and smiled for the photos and ate the free food. It’s better than instant noodles with a soft-boiled egg again.

This is when I discovered Danny is obsessed with Pokemon Go.

So, I also play Pokemon Go… sometimes. I didn’t get into it when it first came out, because even though that was only a decade ago, I actually didn’t have mobile data at that time. I resisted getting data until I broke up with my husband, because I just used his phone whenever I encountered a situation that required an app or data. So it’s only been 6 or 7 years that I’ve had a ‘smartphone’; when we broke up, I bit the bullet.

If you know nothing about Pokemon, the slogan is “Gotta catch ’em all”; there are over a thousand of them, not counting variants, “shinies”, and “costumes” (God I hate the Pikachu costumes). You start out with like 500 slots for free in this game, and you can buy an extra 50 slots for 200 coins. However, you can only earn 50 free coins a day, although if you want to spend actual money there’s no limit on that, and occasionally I have, because earning coins is fiddly. You have to capture a gym and hold on to it for a certain amount of time (gyms in popular spots earn coins faster because they’re more likely to be taken), but the problem is that you only earn the coins when the gym is taken… meaning if you live in a place where there’s not a lot of action, many days can go by with your Pokemon languishing, unchallenged, in the gym, and not earning any coins at all.

It’s also a difficult game to play if you have mobility challenges. I like the idea of a game that makes you get off the couch and walk around, but the flipside is that it sort of locks you out if you can’t.

My interest in the game waxes and wanes. If I’m on a hot streak earning lots of coins and not hitting the Pokemon limit, I’ll keep playing, but eventually I hit a wall where I stop earning coins for a bit and then I lose interest again.

This weekend is “Go Fest”, where they throw out a lot of experience and “Mega” points and rare Pokemon for a limited time only, and the fervor was such that the cell towers actually crashed in Taipei. And since I had Danny to help me, I went out with him for the afternoon and we spent several hours loitering in the subway for free wifi and AC as we caught Pokemon and battled in raids. I levelled up twice and caught like ten Mewtwo’s, it was amazing.

I had Monday and Tuesday off.

Monday Marco left. His mother got tired of waiting for the airline to rebook/ refund his ticket and bought him a new one because she wanted him home. I’ll miss him.

After he left, I got the green line down to the end and got on the bus to Wulai.

Wulai is a small town about a half hour bus ride away from Taipei, popular as a day trip because of its accessibility. It’s up in the mountains, but the roads are mostly gentle slopes. The popular tourist track is to wander through the old town market, then take the “logging train” a kilometer up the road to the waterfall, and walk back to town.

Worth noting; most people take the subway to the end of the green line and catch the bus there, but the bus technically leaves from main station and you could catch it there.

Also, I did not misspell the name of this post. Wutai is a gaming term for a level that is inexplicably Japanese in a game otherwise not very Asian. Wulai is very Japanese, as is the day trip for Tuesday, Beitou. Both retained Japanese influences and names after the “liberation”.

It’s a very pretty town; there’s a bright red suspension bridge to a Buddhist temple over the river, and the middle of town is dominated by the merge of two rivers, which have different colours and it’s fascinating to watch them mix.

I grabbed lunch at the market. I stopped at one place selling sausages – I got the cracked black pepper one, but it was still super sweet – and a popsicle of sticky rice coated in honey and powdered peanut butter that I could have had more of. I kept moving – they have some interesting fruit here – and found another booth selling a quarter of a scallion pancake with a fried egg in the middle for 75NTD and that seemed filling. I was waiting for a minute, as once I’d paid and the surly teenager who was clearly being groomed to take over the booth cracked an egg onto the flat top, he discovered the gas had run out and panicked to run for his mother. I waited patiently; he’s learned a valuable lesson now!

Afterwards, I went into the local museum, which is free and small. Some of the exhibits were in English and Chinese, but mostly it was in Chinese. I drifted through and kept walking.

At the end of old street is the big steel bridge, and on the other side (up some steps) is the logging train.

The train isn’t very long – like I said, it only goes a kilometer or two up the road – but it’s cute and cheap, only like 1 USD, so it’s a fun little distraction. You can pay to go both ways, but I wanted to walk back. It is the original logging line; the locals started rigging up the logging carts with little benches to take them up the hill instead of walking, and eventually the whole line was converted to these little bench carts as a novelty.

At the end of the line is the falls, the tallest falls in Taiwan, and they’re pretty nice. They’re not Kakabeka Falls, but you’d definitely have to raise your voice to be heard over them. Uniquely, above the falls is a hotel that can only be reached via gondola over the falls themselves. You can just take the gondola for the experience, but it cost like 30 CAD and that’s too rich for my blood. I decided I’d rather save the experience for a future visit to Taiwan, and stay overnight at the hotel. They have hiking trails and a lake with canoes!

There’s lots of little tourist shops and a little museum entirely in Chinese again, so I walked around a bit and headed out.

It was a nice walk down the riverside road! I found an abandoned resort that used to be called Lovers Trail and I was tempted to explore it, but decided against it.

Which was good, because there are spiders.

Now, I’d considered myself lucky because I had only run into a couple large spiders, and a few small ones, in my whole trip across the tropics. I assumed the tendency for spiders to grow large means there aren’t really any small ones, and the large ones are deep in the jungle.

In Wulai, there are free public hot springs. They’re out of the way and not signposted, but I did find one. However, as I was walking down the path, I observed the largest spider I have ever since in my life! It was bright blue, with yellow balls for joints, and large enough it could have comfortable wrapped its legs around my tablet. I could have ducked under its web, but I noped out of there and decided against trying to find a different public spring.

Instead, I paid like ten dollars for a private hot spring. The lady showed me in and explained a few things, but after she left, I realized I had a couple dumb questions. Like, am I meant to completely undress and submerge up to my neck? That’s what I would assume, but the pipes that deliver the water go to the interior step. Will they continue to full the tub if submerged?

I split the difference, filling the tub to the level of my knees and then submerging my lower half. I only really wanted to soak my legs anyway.

It was a lovely experience. I’d picked a spa that faced the river, so my window opened onto the river and I could hear it rushing by as I soaked, which was soothing.

I took the long way around and stopped by the temple, before crossing the red suspension bridge back to the bus stop. I could smell rain.

At the bus stop, I was accosted by an Indian family who were lost and I guess decided to ask me because I looked like I spoke English.

It wasn’t a long trip – all together, it was about 4 hours – but it was a nice relaxing day. If I lived in Taipei, I could see myself repeating the journey. A walk, a soak, some lunch.

On the way back, I grabbed my favourite chicken. I decided to try the seaweed flavoured one, which was… certainly seaweed-forward.

As I got back to the hostel, the sky split with a bolt of lightening and a crack of thunder so loud it made everyone run for cover. Day turned to night.

I tried to warn Annalisa as she headed out, but she ignored me. A few minutes later, the skies opened and it rained hard. She came back soaking wet.

On one of the tables were 9 bubble teas. Apparently the crazy guest was still here. She had just bought them and then left them on the table. In the evening, the old man put them in the fridge. Two days later, they hadn’t been touched and he threw them out. It wouldn’t surprise me if she had bought them in an altered state and forgot. She’s not drunk; she needs help.

As I watched Youtube with dinner, a guest interrupted me. He was also stranded by the typhoon, on his way to the PRC, and was wondering if I had any suggestions for sightseeing. He enjoys big cities – he’s visited Jakarta, and as a Dutch man, had thoughts about colonialism – and we had an engrossing conversation that ended with him asking me about my tattoos.

As I explained the Lupus Metallorum one to him, he stopped and stroked his chin, “Antimony… isn’t that for refining lead into gold?”

“Yes. I thought of this trip as… life changing.”

“So, do you think you have been transformed into gold?” He asked, half serious, half joking.

After thinking about it for a minute, I nodded.

I haven’t considered it. I did get the tattoo as a symbol of change, didn’t I? And the journey was almost over, time to reflect. I usually use “you can’t go home again” for trauma, but I realize, it applies to good experiences as well. I’m not returning the same. I have been changed.

Shortly, I excused myself for bed. I didn’t see him again.

Annalisa left in the morning. She did not say goodbye.

I took the train up to Tamsui. Tamsui is on the north coast of Taiwan, and it’s about a 45 minutes on the subway. Plus the LRT right to the beach.

There is a fort – Fort San Domingo – but when I’d walked over there, I decided I actually didn’t feel like paying money to walk around another museum. Instead, I walked from the Tamsui station, all the way up the boardwalk along the river, until I reached the bridge.

At this point, the waterfront turned into a rich person yacht club; the sidewalks and shade disappeared and left only parking lots baking in the noon sun.

I was startled as I crossed one area; some infantrymen were doing military exercise in the empty parking lot with a tank. They paid me no mind, so I watched for a bit.

Around 3, I finally reached the edge of the ocean. I sat and watched the waves for a bit, and kind of wished I’d brought my bathing suit, before moving on.

I got on the light rail back to the subway, and took the subway to the Xinbeitou stop, where there’s a second light rail station to Beitou, the hot spring capital of Taiwan. The downtown core is full of spas and Japanese restaurants. There’s a museum about the hot springs and “Thermal Valley”, and the whole town stinks of sulfur. Up the road five minutes is a free public hot spring, but you can only submerge up to your knees. I bathed there for about half an hour, wedged between the locals until it felt like my skin would peel off from the heat of the water.

Then I went back to the subway. I meant to get off for the Shilin market for dinner, but I got off at the wrong station and had to walk for over a kilometer to get to it. The food was good, if standard, and then I hopped on the MRT back home. I’d walked 13 kilometers in total and was feeling it.

As I headed home, I think about the picture of the bridge and imagine myself sending it to Bruce. “How does it stay up? Why do all the bridges have those steel cables?”

I imagine his reply, a sigh and a smile, “I don’t know, Lucy, I’m not an engineer.”

It’s been like that since high school. Me waiting by the door for the teachers in the morning, pestering them with questions about some scientific paper I’d read the night before. Their weariness and perplexation, “I don’t know, I’m just a high school teacher. You’re so smart, Lucy, why don’t you ever turn in your homework?”

But this is different. I’m not 15 and unable to do my homework because my parents locked me in my room the night before. I’m not trapped in the subpar public education system, wasting away. I could find the answers; I could even do something with them. And showing Bruce how smart I am only increases my odds of going somewhere in the hall. I just need to keep my strength long enough to get my journeyman, that’s all. Not the last leg of the marathon, but I’m getting there.

When I get back to the hostel that night, I debated just sitting on my phone and reading my book, but there’s some Spanish girl having a loud speakerphone conversation in the common room. I grab my noise cancelling headphones and the Pocari Marco left behind, and sit myself next to the kitchen so the sound of the fridge drowns her out.

I’ve found this musician through Reels, it embarrasses me to admit. But he’s Canadian; not only that, he’s a brother, a scaffolder from the West Coast. His music scratches all the right itches. Too bad I’m threading the needle of where his tour is and I won’t see him. I wonder if we could book him for Wake the Giant or something…

Annalisa’s replacement showed up late that night, a Polish girl named Nadia. She’s young but smart, and this is her first Worldpackers placement. She’d done 6 months in the PRC learning Mandarin, so she can mostly get around without Google translate.

Some genius only scheduled me and her for the day, which meant my last day of work was doing all 4 floors while also training Nadia.

Fairness, what is that.

The crazy lady stole one of the extension cords from the main lobby. Martin told me to bring it back.

Me and Nadia had a lot of fun talking. We really clicked and in the evening, after I finished packing, I took her around the area to show her all the good restaurants. We ended up doing a mall crawl, ducking into all kinds of shops and trying some of the food stalls. Actually, we had so much fun talking that I debated cancelling my plans for the next couple of days and staying to hang out with her, but I didn’t. It seemed silly.

In the morning, I got up early and went to the train station. There is no option but to take the fast train to Hualien. Actually, they’re running a fast train every 15 minutes, because so many people are going to Hualien for the festival.

The train ride was nice, mostly along the coast. I’d learned later that a train bound to Hualien had derailed only a couple of years before, which was a little nerve-wracking. I also had to contend with the kid in the seat next to me, immodestly sniffing the whole trip. I had my noise cancelling headphones on just to silence him.

As we pulled into town, I spied a large baseball diamond in the distance. I betcha that’s where the festival is.

I had debated doing what I’d done for Sun Moon Lake, taking a bag or two with the things I need and leaving my large bag in Taipei, but I had decided against it. I like having my things with me.

I got this small hostel within a stone’s throw from the train station, although Hualien is a small town. They’ve suffered the last couple of years; they used to be the jumping off point for people who wanted to hike Taroko Gorge, one of the few entirely marble gorges that exist in the world. It was devastated a couple of years ago by an earthquake, although a few trails reopened very recently, you have to book a guide and it’s a whole thing.

The hostel was very nice. The front desk had a whole dinner menu of options, from places to eat to things to do, and I instantly felt bad that I had only penciled in a couple of days for the festival. I could do a solid 2 weeks here.

They also had BOOKS!

“I’m actually here for the millet harvest festival.” I say.

“Ah.” He gestures. “It’s up at the baseball diamond. 5:30 start.”

Bingo.

It rained off and on throughout the day, not that I was arguing. It helped keep it cool and shady.

I headed out a bit before 5 – it took half an hour to walk there – but I discovered the 5:30 start was misinformed. Technically the events started at 5:30, but they had been pre-gaming all day, and there was a lively market out front selling all kinds of things. As I wandered between booths selling beaded belts and anklets with bells, I thought to myself that it looks an awful lot like the kind of things they sell at pow wows. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it?

I got a booklet of the festivities that was mostly in Chinese, but I managed to translate enough of it to understand what was going on.

I wandered into the outdoor diamond, where a stage had been set up, and found a vacant stool next to an elderly couple. The man spoke passable English.

The first act was a band from Madagascar, which was novel. They grooved along for an hour and I enjoyed it. What I enjoyed considerably less was the drone hovering noisily overhead, but it was official so there wasn’t anything to do about it. We also got rained on.

I laughed every time I caught a glimpse of myself on the Jumbotron. The only white person in a sea of Asians, and I was wearing my orange “Every Child Matters” shirt.

After them was a Taiwanese pop band. Their first song was called “Hey Girl”, but all the rest of the lyrics were in Chinese. The female vocalist was trying really hard to work the crowd, but not having much success.

At 6:30 I realized the dancing wasn’t happening until 7 or later, so I excused myself and went for a walk in the market. I found a row of portapotties – squat toilets only – and once I had doused myself in hand sanitizer, I grabbed a couple of sausages and went back to my seat. The last act was on, a large man in a see-through blue sequined suit, although he was much more popular. Large numbers of people were moshing by the stage.

Around 7:20, his show finished up and they started clearing away the stools. Sweet.

So, I’m not sure how much I missed by not staying for all four days, but the first day was just a dance-off. They put a bunch of dancers in tribal costumes on the stage and had them perform the dances we were expected to follow along with. I had a little difficulty; most of the tribal dances I’d seen on reels before, so I had a rough idea.

I danced for a couple of hours. There were some dances that required you to hold hands with your neighbours and form a line, and the Taiwanese people next to me eagerly offered me their hands and showed me the steps. We all sweated and laughed together and afterwards they took a selfie with me, another selfie lost on social media. “Who’s this white chick?”

I took a break then, staggering to the outside of the stadium, where there were a few stools abandoned. I sat down and chugged my water.

A Taiwanese woman with a microphone and a camera walked up to me. “Would you mind answering a few questions?”

“Sure!”

And so it was that I got interviewed on the 5 o’clock news.

Now, most of the questions were pretty basic – where are you from, are you enjoying the event – but then she asked how I’d heard about the event. I admitted I was actually in Hualien just for the event because I seek out indigenous events. She asked me why and I was so godamn exhausted I lapsed into a tirade about indigenous rights that I realized halfway through didn’t apply because I wasn’t in North America. I cut myself off and rambled about it being “authentic” (stupid buzzwords) and she stared at me, baffled, for a moment. Then she asked me to say the slogan for the event while looking into the camera and took off.

Wait, what?

So yeah. Maybe I was on Taiwanese news making a fool of myself. Who knows. I haven’t found the video.

Anyway, I tried to dance a bit longer, but the night was winding down and I was tired. I limped back to the hostel, stopping to buy a Pocari on the way. A few other people from the hostel had also been there and were up in the common room, snacking on chips. We passed the chips around (they were Century Egg flavoured) and chatted for a bit, and then I went to bed.

Do you think I could sleep?
Silly rabbit.

I was up at 6. They have free breakfast, so I made myself a bowl of oatmeal and a coffee. At 8, one of the girls wandered downstairs; she also volunteers here. They do a hot breakfast, so she made me a plate of vegetarian potstickers and some scrambled eggs. We chatted for a bit; she’s from Singapore.

I was wrecked. My dorm room was on the third floor and the bathroom is on the second floor and I could barely crawl up the stairs. The pain was mostly in my hip flexors.

I wanted to go out sightseeing, but the day passed and I only left the hostel to go to 7-Eleven for lunch. I passed out in my bunk for a couple of hours. Vlad convinced me not to walk down to the festival for the second night, even though I wrang my hands about it for a couple of hours, I eventually conceded the point. I was too tired.

I still couldn’t sleep that night. The girl in the bunk above mine was watching TV on her phone until late in the night. The blue light filtered down the gap between the headboard and the wall and kept me awake.

I was so sleep deprived on Saturday I was nauseous. I managed to choke down breakfast, pack up, and check out.

I got the fast train back to Taipei at 11. I had been hemming and hawing over when to head back, but if the event didn’t really start until 5:30, there wasn’t any point in sticking around. I’m not getting a late train back to Taipei.

Instead, I made a last minute appointment to get my legs waxed, and me and Nadia made plans to go out for hotpot.

I sat next to a nice boy who offered me some of his fried chicken and cheese-coated fries, and we chatted as best as Google translate allows. I dropped my bags off at the hostel I stayed in for the conference, then got the subway over to the wax place.

I had a bit of moment when I realized the place I had booked was someone’s apartment. She had me wait in the lobby for her, where someone was packing up boxes for a drop-shipping business, and wondered if I was about to get my kidneys stolen.

Jokes on them.

It was fine. She was decent, although obviously untrained. We went over time. She did comment that I have curly hair and gave me a small container of exfoliant for my legs, which was very kind of her.

When I got back to the other hostel, the only person interested in coming with me and Nadia was Danny, so away we went.

We had a bit of trouble trying to find a hotpot place that wasn’t booked solid with reservations. Eventually we found one place that was a bit pricey because it offered unlimited self-service alcohol and Haagen Daaz.

Mandarin, eat your heart out.

We had fun, though. The time limit was two hours and we got one broth each. Most of the vegetables and meats were self service, but the prime cuts were ordered via an Ipad and delivered to our table by the same robot server I’d seen in Singapore, but the other two had never encountered it and were tickled pink.

The food was pretty good. The alcoholic beverages were overly sweet, probably because they had been watered down, but I enjoyed trying a small cup of each. Danny wasn’t hungry, so he just watched us eat. Nadia finished her meal with 3 bowls of ice cream and made herself sick. All-in-all, it was an excellent end to my adventure in Taipei.

We had such a good vibe the other two lamented that I was leaving just as they had arrived, but there’s nothing I can do about it, I have to go to the Soroptimist conference.