i don't know how to begin

weekends like this make it hard to believe i've been in taipei for less than a week.

a lot happened since friday and i can't well remember all of it, but the important stuff begs to be retold, the important stuff being saturday.

my mission for the day had been to find a leather belt and a pair of office-suitable shoes; i had also heard about a cheap show in a renowned punk bar in the university district by a couple local bands i had never heard of, and in the spirit of adventure and scholarly interest i decided to go. after a brief trip with my host parents to a too-pricey factory outlet (i resolved with joan to go to a famous flea market in an outlying area of the city densely populated by foreigners, which makes me more excited still) i took the whole day to wander around the night markets and look for some cheap office-wear, and also to visit the 101 area where i heard there was a giant bookstore where i could find english books. the day began in gongguan, a market area not far from where i lived last time i was here and that i know pretty well. i walked around a good deal without any luck and so decided to go to the city hall area.

having no idea where i was going and only knowing that the bookstore i was seeking was near the 101, i wandered toward the massive structure with no strong intentions to go inside (i figured i should save that milestone for when i have somebody to go with me). besides becoming fully aware of the imposing dimensions of the building, i found little of interested in the area besides some unearthly yo-yo-wielding street performers and a group of university students offering hugs to passersby on the street - they were charging 100NT for each hug (roughly $2.75 US) so i did not oblige them, though they were pretty precious.

eventually i was directed to the bookstore building, which was certainly bigger than any bookstore i had ever seen - six floors plus a basement level with a foodcourt, the place had a starbucks-like cafe on the ground floor and all kinds of perfume and watch and bag shops scattered among the floors. i was having a hard time finding where the books in english were; i had been told by several sources that they were there, but there was no indication of which floor they were on, and i traipsed about the floors for a good while without any sense of direction. eventually i came upon a tiny corner of the store that had a few boutique acoustic guitars for sale. in my boredom i decided to take a break and sat down to play one. i noodled around for maybe twenty minutes, seeing the confused looks on other customers walking by. i moved to put the guitar back and the two employees shyly asked me how the guitar felt, and made some complimentary remarks on my playing - eventually one of them asked if they could take a video of me performing a song that they could post on the facebook page for the store, which i agreed to do (although in the midst of the ensuing conversation we ended up forgetting to do it). eventually we struck up a conversation, and we talked about the kind of music we played, and did we play in bands, and all that - it culminated in a fellow named van finding me online and offering a standing invitation to join him in a park near where i work to, in his words, "drink a lot of black tea, play guitar and ignore the cops." pretty cool, right?

it gets better. for one thing, on my way out of the store i finally found the english literature section and walked out with a copy of the mayor of casterbridge in an absolutely beautiful edition (gilded pages!) for about $8 USD. for another, i ate a sumptuous meal in gongguan punctuated by a tasty milk drink with brown sugar pearls not found anywhere else in the area. and lastly, i saw one of the best shows i've seen all year.

like i said, the bar was a little place in the university district, called the underworld (地下社会). the time leading up to the show had been mostly spent trying not to collapse from heatstroke - i don't think i had ever been thankful to find a starbucks in my life. anyway, the bar itself is great, and reminds one of the way american dive bars were in the old days, or at least those older days when i was way too young to be hanging out in dive bars - dark but welcoming, cheap drinks, indoor smokers, faulty bar stools. it felt like home immediately.

then the first band takes the stage - they're called AAN 安, and they sound incredible. their sound is hard to pin down - they were slow and often pretty spacey or psychedelic, but the guitar and bass arrangements were very intricate and precise, the playing spot-on. their singer, jasper, described his influences as being california metal bands from the 90s like incubus, but i don't think the comparison does them justice - there were the fingerprints of bands like led zeppelin and pink floyd on them, and then also the voicings and melodies of the guitar made me think of the smiths or the sundays, though the gestalt of the music doesn't support such a comparison. they had the slow-burn intensity of early grunge but the impeccable melodic sense of indie pop... but here my pseudo-journalistic wanking is diluting how great an impact their set had on me. i'll say this: when jasper showed me a few famous local acts in the time since saturday night i noticed a distinct similarity, and since his own points of reference seemed inadequate to describe his style i feel as though i'm being led to an exciting (if premature) conclusion that there is a local element at work here, although i can't say what just yet.

anyway, i offered my appreciation to the members of the band, and wound up in a long conversation with jasper (who works as an english teacher at a cram school, which made communication much easier than it would have been if i had tried to have this conversation in chinese) about music in the city and music in general. we talked for a long time; i asked him about himself, how the band started, what their influences were, and more general questions about the history of local rock music in taipei, and while gathering a lot of information i developed a real rapport with the guy. besides being very talented and friendly, he also was very humble and insightful - approaching 30, he's been a part of the local scene for a long time, and yet declined to make any broad generalizations about the scene, in spite of my certainty that he was qualified. it would be too much to go into everything i learned here, but one of the most interesting things i came away with was that the first local rock music to become popular on the island was punk, and that it was at least in part fomented by expats. later on, jasper gave me a ton of links to songs and videos and whatnot related to several of the founding figures of taipei rock music and information on where/when to go to see more acts - as we speak, he's helping me figure out travel details to a massive free rock festival in a somewhat outlying village this weekend. this dude is one of the coolest i've met anywhere, and has show me a route into exactly what i came to taipei to do, and this after having been in town for four days. the feeling i had making my way home that night was indescribable, as is evident by the fact that i've lost any sense of the organization of this paragraph as i've written it, and now have no idea how to end it. i guess the point is, in one day i found an outlet, a home base, a friend and a guide; and for that matter, a pretty nice leather belt.

then of course on sunday between the two classes i had to teach (totally winging it, i might add, more on that at a later date) i started feeling feverish and very sore - i made it through two hours with a fresh group of young, awkward students with a very limited grasp of english to come home and more or less pass out until the next morning, when i still felt not quite well enough to go to work. happy fourth of july!

you know how far away we are

for some reason i haven't been able to get a memory from yesterday out of my mind, and i'm surprised i forgot to mention it in last night's entry. when joan and lin were driving around our neighborhood, showing me how to get to my various workplaces, there was of course a jay chou CD playing on the car stereo. joan and lin, like pretty much everyone else in taiwan and probably most of the rest of asia, are massive fans and were proudly showing off the albums of his they had in their car, which were in DVD size cases with the most ludicrously gaudy album art i've ever seen, and that's saying something. i don't particularly mind jay chou's fluffy pop-r&b, but i did hear several of the songs between three and five times. writing this makes me wish i knew any of the songs' names; there was one particular track (that i happened to recognize) that i must have heard about six times because, as i deduced from the lyric sheet lin had in his lap as he was driving, my host father was trying to memorize all the lyrics to that song, presumably in the interest of performing it at KTV some time in the future.

i love my host parents. they are quintessential wealthy taiwanese people who absolutely adore being wealthy taiwanese people, with their gleaming, palatial apartment suited to meet the needs of all of its current inhabitants to mathematical precision, and their family sedan with its tinted windows, leather seats and state-of-the-art climate control system; everything in their lives strikes a perfect balance between luxury and pragmatism, the ultimate chinese capitalist ideal. they are also completely wonderful people, welcoming me without hesitation and treating me with unconditional respect and hospitality, even willingly conversing with me at length, which can be a problem for anyone. did i mention i have an entire freaking bathroom to myself? seriously, this is probably the most comfortable place i've ever lived in (objectively, that is) and i get to enjoy it as a part of the greater experience of being in taipei seeking my fortune. it's hard to imagine being any luckier than i've been.

moving on from sentimentality, today was my first day at both of my jobs. my day began by misjudging what constitutes a proper breakfast (hint: it's not milk bread) and taking the wrong bus twice, resulting in being ten minutes late for my first day at the law firm. did i mention i'm interning at a law firm? you might not know it, because i forgot to bring a belt here and i still only have my red converses, so i must have been quite a sight on the elevator ride up this morning, and anyway at the job itself i so far have received literally no work to do. the most taxing part of the work day (besides passively beginning my study of the taiwanese phonetic alphabet) was my introduction to my coworkers, who by and large are around the same age as i, if maybe a few years older altogether. apparently, in taiwan the legal system works differently in such a way that a law degree is an undergraduate degree, one's course after receiving which is determined by associateships and various examinations. in other words, you have kids who've just finished their undergrads going pretty much straight into legal practice, and other kids who pass the exams to become judges before they turn 30, with no need to practice as a lawyer beforehand. naturally, this has engendered a host of colorful personalities. after awkwardly stumbling through my initial self-introduction, the first question i received (from the absolutely adorable IT girl named lala) was a curt "girlfriend?" when asked why i came to taiwan, i jokingly replied that i was searching for a wife, which sent a ripple of titters around the lunch table; marie warned me against such remarks in view of the different dating/marriage practices prevalent among young professionals on the island. she was totally kidding, but she also wasn't. (as far as i'm concerned, if the twenty dozen corner stores per square mile here are selling every variety of condom right out there on the racks, i don't think i need to give incredible gravity to the issue.)

as for the class, i had my first meeting with my seventh graders tonight (of course after a fiasco with the bus route and another near lateness), whom i like and i think it's safe to say like me. there were some setbacks, the main one being that i didn't get a copy of the damn textbook and had to improvise literally every second of the two hour lesson, but i think i did okay with winging it and the kids seemed to enjoy it. being an already strange person under duress who's out of practice with regards to addressing young english language learners i can safely say the kids thought i was a total weirdo, but i think i came off as the sort of weirdo they should respect, and the class went off without incident. i really missed working with kids, in large part because they say such funny things. case in point: when asked to describe a female bus driver named ms. black, one little boy said she isn't married because she (apparently) works all the time; at another point, when asked to describe a gardener, one little girl said that he's very good at his job because he is smiling and "looks very focused" (in the simplistic drawing, the man in question is staring intently, if blankly, at the ground); when asked to describe me, one little boy said i was very handsome. pretty astute, eh? seriously, though it was nice but a little awkward, and i sort of hope he doesn't tell his parents that he said that. i have to say though, there's a unique feeling of satisfaction explaining to a group of young english learners what a beret or a tulip is and seeing them studiously note the information in their textbooks; the looks on their faces when i told them how to spell "beret" were pretty priceless.

if i stay up any later i'm going to die. tomorrow will find me possibly trying to pitch myself as a guitar teacher for a local rock music school (all the way from america! it is best rock and roll guitar professor!) and my first random foray into taipei's underground nightlife.

lucky lucky lucky on your first day

i suffered a grave disappointment today: the tea shop where i spent so many afternoons two summers ago is no longer in its old location right near my old apartment. whether this means they've moved or gone out of business i don't know; i sent them an e-mail asking if they were around and if they'd like to get together, which translates to, i hope mimi still has the same e-mail address and that she doesn't mind it's taken me two years to actually write to her. for those who haven't heard me gush about this i'll give the short version of this story: during my last visit to taipei, when i was here with my brother wes and sister katie, there was a tiny tea shop and book store that had just opened up a few days after we arrived by a woman whom i called mimi jie (or 'big sister mimi') and staffed by her two school-age daughters and a few of their friends. we were her first customers, first patronizing the store three days before it opened, and we rarely if ever paid for our drinks there. all of the girls were very friendly and mimi in particular spoke good english, so we went to the shop every day to check up on them and unwind after working at the YMCA. (full disclosure: the young girls there all developed serious crushes on my brother.) mimi's story is an amazing one: in the past she had worked as an opera singer, both in western and beijing styles, and also a voice actor for chinese language cartoons (including western ones in translation; we received samples of all of the above, and she was very talented), and then worked for many years as a kindergarten teacher. she opened the tea shop after her husband died and from all appearances it was pretty successful. we got close enough to them that on our last night in the city, she took all of us and the girls out to dinner to celebrate. spending time with her in that shop is one of my best memories of taipei, and i hope i can get in touch with her again.

other than that, though, everything is great. i hung out a bit with my host family and broke down the language barrier with them, making communication a lot easier, and i got to see my office and meet most of my coworkers, and despite it being tremendously awkward on account of my rusty chinese and difficulty understand the taiwanese accent, it looks like i'll have a pretty amazing setup there. it even turns out that there is a girl my age from penn state (named jeannie, what do you know) that makes up the other half of what marie dubbed the "oddball contingent," from whom i hope to find a little sanity amidst all the chinese-speaking.

i also found the secondhand book and record store i loved so much for last time and began my research on local independent music. i found the beginnings of pretty much everything i was looking for, from ratty expat punk to green day-inspired pop to an awesome twee pop band called tanapo!! who, to my dismay, broke up just a few months ago. i did get links to some record labels, though, and miraculously found a website with a complete history of alternative music on the island as well as descriptions of local indie bands of every stripe, local punk and indie labels, and listings for clubs and festivals across the city. (side note: if anyone's interested in learning a little about this stuff, the site is called island of sound) i've already made plans to check out a couple of bands this weekend, including motherfucking dean and britta plays galaxie 500 playing right in my goddamn neighborhood this sunday, and a local feminist folk-punk bar (!) that i might be able to do a little playing in if i can play my cards right. in other words, i've been on the island for less than 24 hours and i've already found pretty much exactly what i was looking for before i came.

i also met the little ones i'll be living with today, a boy-girl pair of twins named sean and cheval, around ten years old. they were very shy with me, probably because they're not confident english speakers, but they seem like sweet kids. joan, my host mother, told me today she's considering having them take guitar lessons at a local rock school/practice space down the street (oh yeah, i also found that).

as my last act of the evening, i just want to put in my two cents for taipei being one of the friendliest cities i've ever been to. i'm not just talking accommodating sales staff either, although it does bear mentioning that they are among the most helpful i've encountered anywhere. white people may be put off that it's not customary here to excuse oneself when bumping into a stranger on the sidewalk, but everyone i asked for directions from went to greater lengths than anyone before to direct me, some even going so far as to write down addresses with pinyin and the names of nearby metro stops and other landmarks. maybe it doesn't sound like much, but it was prominent among the many things that made me feel already very much at home in taipei.

tomorrow is my first day at the office, and also my first day teaching seventh graders. wish me luck.

taipei sky

let me tell you, the thing that really made the 24+ hour ordeal that was my flight from boston to taipei worth it was the food. i think i was given a total of five airplane meals, four of them during the 13-hour stretch between washington, d.c. and tokyo. why my flight was routed through d.c. i have no idea. really though, i've never felt so empty so quickly after eating so much so often. i also probably set a personal record for number of cups of coffee consumed in a 24 hour period; more on that presently.

i had always known, both from looking at my travel itinerary and from firsthand experience, that the trip to the orient is going to be rough. i was halfway to being nocturnal by my departure date anyway, so on my last night in JP i decided to mostly forgo sleep in the interest of celebrating my last night with my roommates; i'd say at most i got about two hours, probably closer to an hour and a half. the flight to d.c., besides being pointless, went off without incident, and i was feeling fine. from thence i boarded the plane to tokyo, and that's when things started to get a little weird.

i spent the first of the fourteen or so hours i was on that plane (there was a delay after we boarded, of course) in an ethereal haze that the poetically or perhaps sensually inclined person might liken to sleep, but despite my random upgrade to "economy plus" (five more inches of legroom!) it was pretty much impossible to find a position comfortable enough to sleep in sitting in that seat, so i wound up tearing through the only book i brought within the first quarter of just this one leg of the trip, leaving me stranded with my ipod (dying quickly in the absence of a cable because i'm an idiot and always forget something) and a paltry array of united airlines-sanctioned in-flight entertainment. the verdict: win win and jane eyre are decent movies; family guy still isn't funny; house is actually alright, although i can't tell if it's because i like his character or the actress who plays 13.

by now i've touched down, connected with my surrogate aunt, received my teaching materials and a briefing of my full-time work schedule for the next two months (saturdays off! but sundays full damn time), and had an exceedingly awkward introduction to my incredibly generous host family and their immaculate apartment. i have a double bed, an air conditioner, desk (with drawers), bookshelves, bureau and wardrobe to myself in here, not to mention a great view of downtown taipei, plus an entire bathroom reserved pretty much exclusively for my use. not to mention laundry machines and full kitchen access... i was actually speechless when being shown the place (granted, my language abilities were impaired after two more or less full days in a sitting position without sleep) and can't help the idea that i've given the impression of being a blithering idiot. i could barely form any sentences in chinese when trying to talk to these wonderful people. i haven't met the kids yet, but apparently one of them wears glasses so i'll fit right in (?).

the humidity and all is getting to me so i should go to bed - tomorrow, it's a tour of my workplaces this summer, and hopefully a chance to find some of the old haunts from the last time i was here. also, tomorrow is hopefully another entry in this journal, or at least a solid plan to write in it at a later date when there is more to report. i cannot remember the last time i wanted so desperately and single-mindedly to sleep.