Missed last week for no particular reason. You know, beyond laziness.
For Halloween, my boss “volunteered” me to dress like a gorilla and go from class to class playing games with the children. An unanticipated consequence of this is, now when I sub for another teacher, the children greet me as “Monkey Teacher Ben”. Know what I don’t need? Dignity.
Actually, there was one good result of Halloween; I made a small girl cry. During my vocabulary-word-laden retelling of the legend of sleepy hollow, I removed a zombified head mask from my bag. This elicited a bout of terrified laughter. But then I passed the head around the class, eventually having it end up on the desk of one girl who really did not want it. Thankfully, this experience prepared me for the waterworks caused by me telling a different girl to team up with the fat kid. I know, I am such a dick. What was I thinking?
Yesterday I went downtown to pickup my new visa, and ran into the anti-China protests. President Ma’s negotiations with mainland diplomats have caused considerable consternation here, specifically because the Chinese delegation will not address Ma as “President”. The protests outside the President’s residence and Chiang Kai-Shek Memorial were huge, complete with food stands, loudspeaker trucks, and T-shirt carts (sporting multilingual “Yes We Can” shirts, no less). Many people wore ribbons with “Taiwan is My Country” written in Mandarin, English, and Russian. The chant for the day translates roughly to “Communist Bandit Go Home”, or so I was told. Surrounding the many government buildings were large portable barbed wire blockades and legions of riot police.
I witnessed the crowd surge on a firetruck, breaking off its mirrors and trying to physically block its path. Later that night, protesters attacked the riot police with sticks and bottles. This must of made the police feel rather odd, given that I imagine they are rather nationalist themselves (how many cops do you know who you would not classify as “nationalistic”?).
The truth is though that the protesters have little reason to complain. The negotiations are merely aimed at making travel and trade between the two countries less difficult, and did not touch on any independence-related issues. Meanwhile, Taiwan has practical autonomy guaranteed by the US, so long as it does not provoke a war by actually declaring independence. The relatively small (23 million) republic has no chance in a war against the Peoples Republic of China without American help, and it hardly seems worth it over a title and a vote in the UN.
Taipei is choc-filled with semi-feral dogs. Collared mutts with no masters roam BaDe Rd between the Beer Factory and the Main Station. I have heard that the locals are too Buddist to authorize wholesale slaughter of vagrant dogs without clear cause. There is something to this. The island is rabies free, and the dogs don’t beg or raid garbage cans that I have seen. That said, the other day I had a woman, complete stranger to me, hanging off my arm in fear at a crosswalk while a pack of pooches wandered by. 
Yesterday I took the bus south to Wulai, a little mountain town known for its hot springs and aboriginal culture. On the bus I met a couple of French backpackers who were equally ambivalent about what to do in Wulai. After viewing the town’s offering of tacky “aboriginal” art and sausage-on-a-stick stands, we decided to find our way towards Nedong National Forest. The tourist information center pointed us down the river, and an hour and a half later we arrived at the park. Well, the outside of the park anyway. Upon arriving we were turned away, due to the park being closed for mudslides or renovations or chupacabra infestation or whatever. The guy at the gate didn’t speak English.
As fate would have it, closer into town there is a small resort labeled an “amusement park” on the side of the ravine overlooking Wulai. The “amusements” include a decrepit ropes course, some fairground style games, and a “forest walk” path whose wooden boards could not be more slippery were they were greased with bacon fat. The only way into the resort is a gondola up from the river just south of town. The whole place feels like it is one gondola mishap away from being the local for a late 70’s slasher movie. Really creepy.
My work situation is quite odd now. I have only been given ten hours a week of work, which puts me in the awkward situation of having too much free time and not enough money to spend during it. I cannot easily pick up work elsewhere, because it would break my contract with Kojen and subject me to penalty fees. My work situation is going to have to change soon, one way or another.
