China Vacation 03

We arrived in Pingyao early in the morning after a comfortable night train ride from Xian. The walk from the train station to our hostel was memorable, in that the shops were not open yet, hawkers were out in force, and we were the only tourists on the street. We were bleeding cows trying to cross the piranha-laden Amazon, or the Beatles in Help! It was a strange experience.

Pingyao is a little walled village in a dusty coal mining region. It used to be a banking center for China, kind of along the lines of Greenwich CT. Now, the town’s economy appears to be largely directed at domestic tourism. The flag-led tour groups were even more omnipresent within the confined space of the old walled city than they were anywhere else we saw.

Every nook and cranny is coated with chokingly thick soot from the neighboring coal mines and industry. The little town is so smoggy that you can stare directly at the sun unaffected, like you are wearing dark shades. You want to shower after every time you go outside, just from the pollution.

Although, to be fair, that could be because I was bedridden much of the time we were in Pingyao. To speak discreetly, my stomach had a party and nothing was invited. Not sure what I ate that caused it. Luckily, the hostel was pretty nice and the Houston-Portland playoffs were on TV, albeit a couple hours delayed (Yao is just as big in China as one might think, but so is Kobe and Lebron). I can think of worse situations to be indisposed at length.


One thing that was easy to notice in Pingyao was how much smaller people there were than in the bigger cities. This is especially true with older people, who are dwarfed by the younger generations. However, even the younger crowd is smaller in Pingyao than a similar group of people from Xian or Beijing. One could quickly differentiate local residents and domestic tourists in Pingyao by height alone. Telltale signs of how hard life in the country in China still is.

From Pingyao, we took a “hard sleeper” to Beijing. My parents were worried about the prospect of a night in a hard sleeper train, but it turns out that a soft sleeper only affords you more luggage space and a door. The hard sleeper, by contrast, is only mildly smaller and less comfortable than the more expensive option. I slept rather well.

It was hard to tell where we were as we approached Beijing. The city is similar in size and population to the Greater Los Angeles metro area. There are no high-rises to be seen near the center of the city, and the massive blocks dismay pedestrians attempting to hike between the historical sights near the Forbidden City. Instead of apartment buildings, people appear to live in small Hutongs. Hutongs are little grey-brick neighborhoods, accessible via claustrophobic, winding, and often dirt-paved alleyways. The Hutongs are cool to walk around and have character out-the-wazoo, but they do make life difficult when trying to explain to your cabbie how to get back to your hotel.

Of course, the Beijing accent does not help things in this regard. In general, I feel that I was reasonably successful at communicating throughout the trip. While I am certainly not ready to discuss the nuances of eastern philosophy quite yet, I am quite capable of haggling and dealing with basic transportation issues. The one exception to this was in Beijing. Beijing’s accent is unusual. At best, it sounds like the speaker is pretending to be a pirate by throwing hard “Arrrrr”s into their conversation. At worst it sounds like they are dipping with their left lip and clenching a fat cigar with their right. Needless to say, confusion occurred.

The first place we decided to explore was the Forbidden City and the surrounding parks. There appears to be few traditional public parks in Beijing. Instead, the city has converted the gardens of the imperial court and the larger temples. These gardens have many of the things one might find in a large park in a western city; gazebos, lawns, public work out spaces, etc… We even saw a bumper car ride, with American flag bumper cars, a block from Tiananmen Square. But the most common sight to be seen in the parks of Beijing is the hackey-sackers.

When Americans hear the phrase “hackey sack”, they usually think of college-age hippie assholes, flicking vaguely tribal looking beanbags around with the sides of their Birkenstocks. Yeah, the Chinese don’t truck with that nonsense. They kick stacks of metal washers, “artfully decorated” with a handful of day glow feathers to keep the bottom always pointing down. Rather than hippies, Beijing has middle aged men and women kicking around their washer stacks and acting like shills for the ever-present hawkers that lurk at the edges of the crowd and wait for someone showing interest. Oh, and for the record, those shills are sick-nasty at hacking. They put to shame every sandal-wearing degenerate one trips over on American campuses (you know who you are!).

People say you go to Shanghai for ten years of history, Xian for a thousand years, and Beijing for a hundred. Having learned a bit about the last decades of the Ming dynasty, I cannot help but feel like Beijing got the short end of the stick. All the major historical sights in Beijing are clear demonstrations of how far removed from reality the Chinese political leadership was for hundreds of years until Sun Yat-sen helped organize their ouster.

The Forbidden City is a good place to start. When talking about the Forbidden City, it is only fair to compare it to other buildings of similarly tremendous scale. Unfortunately, the Forbidden City in many ways comes up lacking. The problem is that there are no arches in Chinese architecture. That put a limit on how complex the buildings could be. What is left is a very big network of triple-scaled, bland buildings, with cobblestone parking lots in between them. Compared to St. Peter’s Basilica or even the Summer Palace, and the whole thing comes off less awe-inspiring than just… meh. It reminded me of nothing so much an artfully decorated prison.

But in a way, that’s what it was. The Forbidden City was only accessible by the Emperor’s female family, harem, and eunuchs that served as administrators to the empire. I don’t get the impression that the Emperor got out very much. Having an exclusive city dedicated to yourself is great if you want to be a deity-figurehead, but it also puts a lot of power in the hands of those who interpret your decrees from on high. The Forbidden City was a tool to empower Middle Kingdom middle management.
The Summer Palace was much nicer. While the Forbidden City felt sterile and empty even when filled with crowds of people, the gardens and temples of the Summer Palace were warm and inviting (and also filled with crowds of people). One of my favorite aspects of the Summer Palace is the adjective-heavy names that every room or pagoda has. “The Hall of Benevolence and Longevity”. “The Gardens of Nurtured Harmony”. “The Outhouse of Splendiferous Tranquility”. “The Bedchamber of Pimptastic Crunknasticance”. Ok, so I made up the last two, but you can see what I mean.

The Summer Palace has some hilarious and interesting (read: absurd and terrible) history. It was repeatedly burned down by British and French marines throughout the late 19th century. The Dowager Empress then took funds out of the Chinese navy to rebuild her vacation home. Just another sign of how much the Royals had checked out by the end of the Qing dynasty.

However, it must be noted that my knowledge of this period comes largely from reading the placards in the museums. The current Chinese leadership has found itself in an awkward position when discussing Chinese history. They are clearly proud of China’s culture and accomplishments. Every description of any building or shard of pottery is laden with superlatives. The Most important incense holder. The Greatest south-facing, two floor teahouse. Yadayadaya. But on the other hand, the Communists want to demonstrate why all the painful aspects of the Communist takeover were vitally necessary. So everything is described as graceful and magnificent on the one hand and inept or oppressive on the other.

The next day, we woke early to take a tour van out for a hike on the Great Wall. While the oft-cited claim that it is visible from space is false (indeed, due to it being built out of the same rocks as the mountains it passes through, it is often barely visible just a couple miles away), the Great Wall is still really cool. Totally pointless, of course, but really cool.

I mean, look at those mountains. Would you take an army through that? Of course not. You would do what the Mongols did when they invaded; go to a nice, accessible spot of the Wall, and buy off the guards. In fact, the Wall does not look like a wall so much as a big highway. Those mountains would be much harder to traverse if not for the nice paved walking path running through them.

The Wall is not in particularly good shape, and indeed, more accessible regions of it have disappeared completely. While I am sure the elements have done a number on it through erosion, the biggest factor in the Wall’s decomposition has been theft. Whenever a nearby peasant wanted to build a house, they probably just knocked some bricks out of the wall for it. The section I was at was in such good shape specifically because it was not running through a populated area.

One last thing worth noting about the Wall is the hawkers. Yes, there were people trying to sell things up in the mountains, too. The “Mongolians” that followed us around on the Wall spoke as good English as any group of salesmen we encountered. They were selling postcards, t-shirts, and warm beer. They were even helping people who looked like they were having trouble with the steep staircases or might be in danger of falling. I couldn’t imagine buying things that I would have to carry back into Beijing from them, but all in all the hawkers on the wall were a great bunch.

The strangest thing about going home to Taipei was how nice the air felt upon exiting the plane in Taiyuan International. Taiwan is not known for its superior air quality, but the improvement over Beijing was refreshing. Likewise, while China is by no means a “Third World” country, Taipei has all the middle class affluence of an American city. Really, the two places feel totally different

What I had heard from people in Taiwan was that people in China are very rude. I did not find this to be the case at all. With the notable exception of the cabbie in Hangzhou, everyone we met was impeccably polite and helpful. More recently, I have heard that this is because we are foreigners, and they are less polite to other Chinese. For their part, Taiwanese have a reputation in China of being spoiled and pretentious. This disparity in views is revealing.

When Taiwanese go to China and leave the more affluent cities of Shanghai or Hong Kong, they are really going to a totally different country. Taiwanese have not had the same cultural experience as the Chinese have had, because by and large Taiwan is a middle class country. They must go to China and act like foreigners. But the Chinese treat Taiwan as just another province. In the same way that a big of gawking and discussion on “how people live here” would go over worse in Oklahoma if it came from a New Yorker than if it came from a Malaysian, the Chinese must bristle over their “compatriots” acting like rich Waiguoren (foreigners) rather than Chinese.

Or anyway, that’s my pop-psychology explanation. But what the hell do I know?

Anywhoo, I flew back home to Taipei the day after my Parents left for New York. I spent my last day wandering around Beijing, but nothing noteworthy happened. The trip on the whole was great, but it was nice to be back in Taipei. Coming back to work was rough, but isn’t it always after a vacation? I have some new stories of my Taiwan exploration in May (and by the time I write about them, June), so there should be another post coming soon for that. Hope you enjoyed reading about the trip.

China Vacation 02

After a day of exploring the metropolitan streets of Shanghai, we hopped on a train to the lakeside city of Hangzhou. Hangzhou is a beautiful, old man-made lake and park area surrounded by an otherwise incredibly ugly industrial city. Our first experience of the city was a bad one. We exited the train station and hopped into the first cab that offered his services. Given that the first cab was an unlicensed cab, we would have been better off walking. This particular gentleman responded to my inquiry about how much to take us to the lake with an English “fourteen”.


Or, anyway, I thought he said fourteen. I tried to confirm the fourteeness of the price while the driver was weaving on and off the road and more than occasionally driving against traffic in the wrong lane. Our esteemed chauffeur responded to me with grunts. He did however quickly clarify his position on the price of the trip after dropping us off, explaining that the price was actually forty, not fourteen. He was rather insistent on this matter, and our dialogue boiled down to this.

(Note, that this conversation happened in Chinese, which means that, in the absence of a better translator I have opted for a little flexible interpretation of the major points.)
Cabbie: “You Pay Me 40 Yuan Now, you Dumb white Foreign schmuck!”

Me: “While I hear and understand your proposal, I must respectfully disagree. You initially stated that the cost of your services was only fourteen yuan.

Cabbie: “I am going pretend like I am calling someone to get you in trouble, all while speaking so fast that there is no way you will be able to understand me! Meanwhile, I will shout and grab your arm in the hope that you are intimidated into paying me to go away.”

Me: “I am unfortunately unable to understand the finer points of your arguments due to the velocity of your verbiage. Regardless, you have no hope of receiving the sum you feel is deserved. My parents and I are going into this yonder Starbucks, to drink lattes that each cost more than the difference between our two proposed fees for your services. I recommend you call the police to mediate our predicament, or, barring that, kindly go fornicate yourself.”

Shockingly, the cab driver followed us into the Starbucks. The baristas confirmed that yes, the man was trying to rip us off (a fair price from the train station was apparently 11 or 12 yuan). They then proceeded to mock the cab driver until he left in embarrassment. He did not go far though, but instead sat in his car giving us the finger for, I kid you not, almost twenty minutes while we idly drank our coffee. Some people just cannot let go.

The rest of our time was spent wandering around the lake in Hangzhou. We visited the White Snake Pagoda (There we went again by ourselves. Wait, that’s not how it goes? Never mind). Not too much else happened. We ate beggar’s chicken, and later some great curry, then headed back to the train station via an 11 yuan taxi ride.


The next day we went to Suzhou. Suzhou is known as the “Venice of China”, and whoever dubbed it this clearly had never been to Venice. The canals and gardens were still rather beautiful though, as was the pagoda complex with the two year old Hyatt hotel tastefully integrated with the 500 year old temples. Suzhou was scenic, relaxing, and rather uneventful. So, I will talk about a phenomena we witnessed throughout the trip; the hawkers.
In most tourist locations around the globe, one can find the product that the region is most noted for producing. Predictably, China’s hawkers most often sell cheap plastic crap. I don’t want to seem like I am disparaging it, however; it is really nice cheap plastic crap. Singing peanuts! Surprisingly bright green laser pointers! A gelatinous pig that reforms after you smash it to the ground! All and all, great stuff.

Many cities have hawkers selling things by the street side, but China’s are pretty impressive. By and large, they do not speak any English. They do, however, see foreigners as wallets with legs. So, in an attempt to overcome their communication difficulties, they use the tool most easily available to them; the word “Hello”.


Or, rather, “HelloHelloHello! Helllllloooooo! Hellllloooo? Hellololo!!! Hello!” They seemed to be trying to fit every aspect of their sales pitch into a single, oft-repeated word. The hawkers will follow you wherever you go, saying “Hello?”. When I threw them a little “Wo Bu Yao” (I don’t want), they just laughed and continued saying “Helloo? Hello? Hello!”
After Suzhou, we took a night train to the ancient city of Xian. Xian was one of the first capitals of China, and it looks the part, but other than the old black-brick walls that surround the city center, it hardly looks the part. Much of the city looks quite modern, with tree-shaded wide roads flowing between five or six story buildings on either side (it even has a Walmart!).
This impression did not last once we reached the quite-old Muslim Quarter, however. There, one can see lams and pigs being butchered on the sidewalk, along with cricket shops, little old ladies making dumplings, and, of course, legions of hawkers. The Great Mosque, a mix of Chinese architecture and Islamic calligraphy, is quite beautiful. The thick coat of dust that covers every inch of the place reminds visitors of its rather impressive age (700AD). I thought this was one of the more interesting parts of the trip.


The same cannot be said for the Terracotta Warriors. We took an hour long bus ride out into what one might call the suburbs of Xian to see the “World Wonder”. I was not impressed. That’s a bit strong. I just feel like I got little out of it that I could not have by reading National Geographic. It is big. The tour guide was friendly but largely unhelpful, and mostly just repeated what was on the signs. There are lots of statues, most of which are in broken piles. I don’t know. It just did not do it for me.


After about two hours of looking around, we headed back towards the bus and back to Xian. Later that night, we boarded a night train to Pingyao, which I will write about, along with Beijing, in the next post.

China Vacation 01

So, I am going to break up my writing about the China trip into two or three posts, with this first one covering my time in Macau and Shanghai.


I began my trip in Macau. Macau is an odd city. The Portuguese conquered/leased it in much the same way that the British did in Hong Kong. However, while the British turned Hong Kong into a world class trade and financial center, Macau built Casinos.

This has had a strong impact on the distribution of wealth in the city. There are certainly has rich neighborhoods. The eastern side of the Island is littered with jewelry and electronics shops of all kinds. But outside of the hotel/casino areas of the city, Macau appears significantly poorer. Decrepit high-rises litter much of the island’s skyline, looking like background props from Half Life 2’s dystopian City 17.


With a few exceptions, things seemed better at the street level. While the building style and markets and congestion all feel Asian, something about the winding alleyways and boulevards came off as distinctively Iberian. Maybe it’s the Portuguese signs or the smell of paella coming out of the neighborhood cucinas. Or maybe I’m full of crap and it was all in my head.


I arrived in Macau around 11:30 and promptly decided that I would walk the length of the island tip to tip, to see all the fortresses and cathedrals and temples and whatever. The city is pretty small, but this plan still turned out to be as ill advised as one might guess. Most every monument or historical sight on the oversized pile of coral and casinos and catholic relics is atop its own big goddamn hill. Perhaps I was just overly ambitious, because by the time I had to return to the airport I had completely grouchified myself.


It is well known that casinos are built and designed specifically to prevent their patrons from leaving. Food and entertainment is available and subsidized if not comped entirely, and there are no windows or clocks to remind gamblers how long they have been emptying their wallets. Many have described Macau to me as one big casino, and though I never made a bet while there, I began to see the resemblance while trying to get back to the airport.


The shuttle bus to the airport leaves from a 3x10 foot square of pavement in front of the hydrofoil ferry station. From that same strip of nothing leaves the shuttles for every casino, resort and hotel on the island. The thing is so crowded with people and vehicles that the bus passed by twice before I could flag it down to get it to stop. Worse, the fare is $4.20. You cannot buy tickets in advance and no, they do not give out change thankyouverymuch. I ended up losing a twenty because I had only $4.15 otherwise.


This was especially a problem because I was running low on patacas, the currency for Macau. That’s right, Macau, with just over a half a million people and no sovereignty to speak of, has a currency. It is pegged to the Hong Kong Dollar, and they charge a hefty sum to convert from dollars or yuan. Imagine if the 711’s of Vegas only took casino chips. It is, for the record, a total racket.

In the end, I reached my plane on time only because it was seriously delayed by smog in Shanghai. I got into the city late and made my way to the hotel by bus after spending the Taxi Salesmen *coughcough* I mean “Information Stand” that No, I really didn’t want to spend 200 Yuan on a airport car rather than 25 on a bus ride. It’s funny how different a single place can look from night to day. I was confronted with dark, deserted streets. The hotel was in a semi-residential neighborhood wedged between the convention center and the freeway belt road. The only visible sign of life was the construction crews idly chatting while on break from resurfacing the street.


Upon waking in the morning, I was presented with quite a different view. The streets were almost unrecognizable, with teeming sidewalks of shopping pedestrians. Even the over represented and oft repeated pattern of dvdshop/friedchickenplace/hairsalon seemed more unique and welcoming each time. In Shanghai, people live in gated projects that seemed gloomily authoritarian in the dark, but that morning they bustled with a warm sense of community as the locals hung laundry or picked through the the vegitible stands that appeared to have sprouted from previously abandoned alleys.


Upon exploring deeper into Shanghai, I made a startling discovery; the Shanghainese have gone to great lengths to make their city appear to be an affluent American suburban town. The restaurants are nicer chains of the Noodles & Co variety, the shops are exclusively selling western luxury brands, and the coffee shops have spread in the same kudzu-like fashion that they have back home. Honestly, Shanghai is two Chic-Fillets away from being a Maryland urban planner’s wet dream.

The one exception to Shanghai’s strict rule of modernity is a little tourist trap neighborhood surrounding the city gardens. This collection of teahouses and trinket hawkers has all the authenticity of the China section in Epcot, and the crowds require loads of jostling and not a few sharp elbows to navigate. Still, the buildings and especially the gardens are undeniably beautiful. The gardens feature rivers of gold fish and rockeries. Rockeries, in case you had never heard the term (I hadn’t) are artistically arranged piles of stones that take up most of the area. Yeah, they do that.


The garden also featured a small art museum, filled with cool paintings. Most of the paintings were of guys getting high on opium and talking to monkeys. I am not making this up. China appears to prefer the streetcarnameddesireBrando-style Buddha statues, rather than the apocalypsenowBrando-style Buddhas favored by Chinese take out places back home. Not sure what the reason for that is.

In other areas of the city, newly built high-rises dominate. They are architecturally beautiful, but have contributed to the city’s pollution a surprising amount. Everyone knows China is polluted. But Shanghai’s evil air makes your throat feel raw faster than other areas with far more industry. One reason that I heard for this, beyond the city’s tremendous population (26m!), is all the construction and the lack of adequate building codes. I was told that, in most countries, before doing blasting or other similar construction activities, you need to wet down the area your working on to minimize the amount of dust you kick into the air. Shanghai doesn’t do that. So, with new skyscrapers being built all the time, there is a lot of dust.

More about other cities in the next one! Woo! Something to Write About!

Taiwan Journal 11: Hashrun and Kenting

Well, it has been a while since I posted. In the mean time, quite a bit has happened. More importantly, I have had the opportunity to screw up in a couple of notable and hopefully entertaining ways.

One somewhat legitimate (but utterly untrue) reason for the lack of posts recently is that for weeks my computer was thoroughly incapacitated by viruses. I was unable to solve my problems independently. His presented me with a problem; while there is no shortage of places that could fix my PC, I was not sure who I could find who spoke English. Computer repair is necessarily jargon-laden, and my Chinese just barely escapes the purview of shopping and transportation. I eventually found a guy by searching the English language teacher forums. I called him up and asked him where I could drop off my laptop. He told me not to worry, and that he could come by to pick up the laptop in fifty minutes.


This made me pause. I was suppose to hand my computer to someone I have never met without even knowing his permanent base of operations? Though it was broken, my computer remained a reasonably valuable piece of technology and I was handing it over to a guy in a station wagon. I consoled myself by thinking that, because the guy was a foreigner and the expat community is pretty small, if he screwed me over I would probably be able to track him down. Still, when he called me later that night to tell me he had cleared my PC of Trojans and viruses, and that he could drop off the laptop whenever I was ready, I was quite relieved.

I finally had the opportunity to help lead a run with the Hash Run. The club paired me up with Kevin, one of the older members of the club. Kevin only hares (the run leaders are called the Hares) one run a year, but he has been doing it for a long time. He therefore goes (far) out of his way to make sure he is bringing the club to virgin territory. So we drove out to Dashi, a town south of Taipei close to Chang Kai-Sheik’s burial place. Dashi has a nice mix of farms and jungle hills, but what it lacked was hiking trails of any kind. That was what the “weed whacker” is for.


When I say “weed whacker”, I am not talking about a thing for cutting down dandelions or scrub grass with a spinning plastic whip. This thing is a gas powered buzzsaw at the end of a four foot pole. It cut through saplings and bamboo quite nicely, thank you very much. It is a tool that is appropriate for leaving a “pretty radical” section of lush jungle “smooth as a baby’s butt”, as Kevin says.

So we pieced bits of road and farms together by cutting trails in the hills. At first, Kevin would lead with the weed whacker and I would remove the debris. Now, as some of you might know, I have an irrational phobia of spinning sawblades swung close to and in the direction of my person. The motor is pretty loud, so I would have to get right next to Kevin to tell him anything. Every comment would usually lead to him terrifyingly swinging the whole tree-felling apparatus around in order to reply with a helpful “what!?!” I have had sawblade and woodchip related nightmares quite often recently.

Mind you, on this subject I am a total hypocrite. Once I had my chance with the weed whacker, I happily unleashed a fern holocaust on the jungle. I was like a villain from an episode of Captain Planet. Something about having a diesel-powered cutting device in my hands made me want to violate nature. Only pure willpower allowed me to stifle maniacal laughter as I hacked and gouged a trail through the thick underbrush.

Note: sunny photos are not of my hash run

Rain kept many people from the run, but it was still a pretty good time. However, the whole day I was something of a failure as a navigator. The plastic bag of flour I carried to leave a trail for the other runners sprung a leak early in the run. This meant I had to use chalk to mark the path, and chalk washes away pretty quickly in the rain. Nobody got totally lost, but the run was not as clearly marked as it should have been. After the run, my fellow hashers went out of their way to ensure that I got utterly sloshed. I readily obliged, which was fine until I was asked to help everyone reach the restaurant for the bash. Let’s just say that, while we did reach the restaurant, missteps occurred along the way.

This past weekend, I went down to Kenting for the annual music festival. Kenting is a big national park on the southern tip of Taiwan. My friend Kelly planned the trip and organized rental vans for a group of twelve of us to drive down in. Kenting’s music festival itself was nice I’ve heard, but for me and my friends it was just an excuse to go south for a bunch of wild beach parties on a long, two day weekend.

The parties were pretty wild, too. They were concert/dance clubs in these little coves on the beach. Cheap too, since the 7/11 was just down the street so there was no reason not to BYOB. The music was good and the air was filled with the lights from the many amateur fireworks displays launched from either side or within the crowd. I wont go into too many specifics, but the music kept playing until about 7am, I knew people who slept in McDonalds rather than “splurging” for a tent, and at least one of the people I was with ended up passed out on their tent rather than in it. Good times.


Going to the beach is a little odd in Taiwan. I knew from talking to my students and friends that many Taiwanese people are either incapable of swimming or terrified of the ocean. And yet they still go to the beach decked out in swimwear. I was confused about this until my friend Yvette pointed out that they are just taking pictures of themselves. And truly, that was what they did more than anything else I saw. People were posing, smiling, making funny faces, and jumping in the air all so that they could have pictures of themselves doing all those things, at the beach. The pictures were not to remember the trip, instead they were the purpose of the trip. I am sure I must be missing something, but it was a strange spectacle.

Prior to the trip, I had talked to a bunch of people about driving down to Kenting who had done it before. They all warned me about hellish traffic due to people traveling during Tomb-Sweeping Day weekend. They told me to expect to sit in traffic for hours on the trip back on the Sunday after the festival. On the way down around 1am Saturday morning we sat in pretty bad traffic too, which seemed to hint that Sunday would indeed be bad.

So, once in Kenting I spent a decent amount of time wailing like Cassandra and advocating that we delay returning until Monday, or drive north on smaller roads of Taiwan’s east coast rather than the big superhighway that everyone and their mother would be on. I was ignored, and this caused me not a little bit of consternation. Of course, irony of ironies, we hit zero traffic on the drive back. It took us just six and a half hours to drive the length of the island, two hours less than the trip down. I felt like quite the douchebag for making such a fuss the whole weekend. Still, glad I was shown to be wrong.

Friday I am off to China to hang out with my parents. I am sure that trip will arm me with much to talk about. So, more should be coming fairly quickly.