On Tuesday afternoon YC and I arrived back in Madison from our trip to Taiwan. The trip went like this:
YC left 3 weeks before I did because she had to get there quick for some traditional post-relative-death ceremonies. I spent most of those 3 weeks at work working too much. I spent some of it looking at houses to buy, and some of it fretting about my upcoming trip.
On Monday (3 weeks ago) I had Atticus drive me to the airport, where the TV screens all talked about H1N1. I washed my hands a lot. I took a small plane to O'Hare, where I had 4 hours to kill, and spent them wandering from one end of terminal 3 to terminal 1 and through the tunnel and back. The next plane I was stuck in the middle of, but had an open seat next to me where I could keep some of my gear. I watched Paul Blart: Mall Cop and Defiance. We flew over Anchorage. I played tetris and read Game of Thrones a bit.
After 12 hours of that really boring plane ride, we arrived at the Narita airport (near Tokyo), and had to sit in the plane for another half hour while some guys in plastic suits handed out surveys. It took me a while to get one with instructions in English. It basically asked if we had pig flu. I said no.
I wandered around that airport and took some pictures, and then boarded my last plane. That one took about 3 hours and took us to Taoyuan airport, which is near Taipei. I got really sleepy on that one, and played go. It was dark outside, so even though I had a window seat, there wasn't much to see.
After arriving at the airport in Taiwan, I left my hat on too long, which made my head look hot, so some folks stuck a thermometer in my ear to make sure I didn't have a fever. Then I took 20 minutes to get through the immigration counter line, and another 10 to re-do some paperwork that I messed up. Then I tried to find YC in 'waiting area C', but there was no waiting area C. As I asked a guy where waiting area C was, YC found me, and we got in her car (borrowed from her grandma) and drove to Taipei. There I got to see lots of elevated highways and complicated intersections where people motorcycle and scooters would whiz by us from unexpected directions. Eventually we found her mom's apartment, where the lease hadn't expired yet, and is where we stayed for the next 3 nights.
The first day we visited a Chiang Kai-shek park (it was basically a botanical garden) and drove to a park up in the mountains north of Taipei, and the next day we took the subway to a suburb in the northwest where I almost lost my hat in a restaurant. On the way back we visited YC's brother at his office and went to the top of the Taipei 101.
The next day we drove east and picked up YC's friend Eve. We then drove east some more to go visit Chieufen (spelling differs depending on what sign you're looking at. YC pronounces it "Jo-fuhn"). It was packed with Chinese tourists and we had to park in a parking lot and take a bus to get there. I walked up a mountain that stuck out into the ocean and from the top I could see the Taipei 101. I switched memory cards a few times.
From there we drove south, and that included going through a really long tunnel that I was told made the trip much shorter than it had been without the tunnel. We ate at a restaurant and stayed in someone's apartment and had McDonalds bagels and coffee for breakfast. Then we drove some more. We stopped at a brewery and a 'water park' (a park next to a river with some gross water that people mostly just walk around rather than through), and then we drove south along the east coast on a really neat but dangerous cliffside road. We found another civilian residence (basically a bed and breakfast) to stay in, and the next morning Eve had to quick catch a train to get back to Taipei because she has a job that or something.
After attempting to make sure YC didn't get a ticket for some strange driving at a stoplight she had done (traffic cop HQ in Hualien was closed for the day) YC and I drove back north to Toroko National Park and hiked around a bit before driving further up into the mountains where we ate really bad food and stayed at a Catholic hostel with dogs and cats and a creepy guy.
The next day we drove even higher, out of Taroko National Park, and hiked up a mountain at a point above most of the clouds where there were few trees. It was very tiring. We then started down the other side of the mountain range and camped in a small town with at least 3 7 Elevens. Camping was kind of uncomfy because my sleeping bag was too small.
We got up the next morning and had 7 Eleven breakfast and played with a cat that followed us around. Then we went to a sheep farm and looked at sheep and walked around some more. Then we drove the rest of the way down the mountain to Puli, where we almost went to see the geographical center of Taiwan, but didn't because we were tired and YC wanted to get to her grandma's place in Kaohsiung to deal with wine stuff.
We spent several days in Kaohsiung where YC dealt with wine and other stuff for her grandma. I mostly read Game of Thrones. We also took a day and a night to go see an aquarium and go camping and sight seeing and playing at the beach near the south tip. Where we camped it was really windy and I didn't sleep well. We took another day and night to go to Taichung to visit YC's uncles and her brother and do some sight-seeing and resturant-eating-at with them.
After Taichung, we drove back to Kaohsiung and stayed at Grandma's apartment for one more night before catching a bus early in the morning towards Taoyuan where we had to catch our plane. On the Japan Airlines leg of the trip we had Sky Time (which seemed like weakly flavored uncarbonated orange soda) and a meal. YC had derided me earlier for not partaking in these things on my way into Taiwan, but after having them I didn't think they were all that great anyway. I did appreciate that when asking you what you wanted to eat they had pictures that one could point at if they didn't share a common language with the flight attendant. They all spoke pretty good English, Japanese, and Chinese, though.
The 12-hour leg of the trip took a different route than I had come. We went over the Pacific ocean south of Alaska instead of going right over Anchorage. It came to be midnight, passed midnight, Wednesday morning, and then Tuesday morning again when we crossed the international date line. I watched Gran Torino. We only had one hour to transfer to our Madison flight 3Aat O'Hare and had to scurry to get past the immigration desk and to the other terminal just in time.
Dreams
While at Granny's apartment I dreamt that I had to go back and repeat high school. I was about to get all stressed out but then realized that I already knew most of the stuff they were going to try to teach me, and that I already had a good job, so didn't really need to worry about my grades, anyway.
While we were staying at Uncle John's place I had a bunch of dreams:
Mr. Camosy was having me take a physics test. It was only 5 questions and they were really easy, so I just answered then quick and turned it in. Later I thought it had been so easy that I must have missed something and went back to look for Mr. Comosy. Eventually I found him and he told me that I had done just fine.
There was some bad gas in the air or water that would mess up your mind. I might have breathed some, and was trying to get out of the area before I was incapacitated. I remember turning onto Hammersley from Gilbert after driving up the hill.
I had 2 younger but otherwise identical brothers. We were driving around in a van on a foresty hillside road. It was raining. A lady we met introduced one of my brothers to her daughter. They got along great, like they were about to start 'going steady'. I was happy for my brother.
I was taking a 2 week trip to have an adventure at some sort of huge medieval-themed area spread across 4 US states. People lived there. They had internets, but they didn't drive cars. I was with a group of people that were on a quest, and we had to keep moving between different places. I told Fizz that he should visit us while we were in a town in Colorado. We kept having to go back to a town called "Rivendell" to get hints or something.
In one town that we stayed in it was winter. It was on a hillside with a creek flowing down along one side, and there was a road at the bottom of the town (about halfway down the whole hill) which crossed the creek. So together the creek and the road divided this place into 4 quadrants. My friends and I found an Aerobie and went over to the flattest, emptiest quadrant, opposite the lodge, to throw it around. These Aerobies were special and would change shape (becoming what looked like a pile of short tubes) halfway through their flight and float back to you.
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