I was reminded this morning that today is Christmas. It hardly registers anymore -- I could have just as easily forgotten about it and only noticed days later.
I sit now in an open-front cafe/deli somewhere in the northing end of Yonghe (永和) City, Taipei. I recall a Japanese friend complaining to me how some of the cafes she used to like now have glass fronts that allow people outside to view everything (and everyone) indoors, which is a common dislike among the very private and compartmentalizing Japanese. I wonder what she'd have thought of a place with no front at all. I'm rather partial to it myself.
I came to Yonghe a day after my last writing. It made the most sense to do to come out this way to stay with one of the Couchsurfers from my list. I chose Kristina, a long-term resident whose nationality, although seemingly American, is still a bit of a mystery. (Asking doesn't help much -- only prompting a confusing story of German parentage and international migrations. She calls herself an "earthling" [地球人 in both Chinese and Japanese], which was perhaps a point of attraction for me having spent the last few years with friends who continue [however unconsciously] to draw the Japanese-foreigner distinction between us in most social contexts.) Kristina lives right at the receiving end of the bridge into Yonghe, she and her two European (British and Czech Republican) roommates. The apartment has a tidy, warm atmosphere, and is particularly nice juxtaposing the noisy, slightly moldy surroundings of their rainwater-stained condominium neighborhood, filled with mopeds, wandering dogs and old ladies yelling at invisible family members from their front doors.
The night I decided to go and stay for a week here, Kristina was holding a party (the occasion seemed to concern a translator license practice test she'd just taken) that gathered a pretty diverse range of local foreign residents as well as a few Taiwanese. I was wiped of energy, still getting over a cold that's left me with a bad cough, and having further exhausted myself in conversation (if you can call it that) with "Mommy" (whose real name is Fang Suzen -- I think), who insisted on coming most of the way with me on the subways to make sure I get there (which I greatly appreciated in the end). At the party, I got to know several people who were either as serious as Kristina aobut their residence here or were merely passing in and out, transitioning toward deeper or shallower waters of life in Taiwan. I took a nap at one poin in the middle of everything to subdue a rancorous headache, likely the outcome of my fatigue and quick consumption of three glasses of steaming wine boiled with either cinnamon or something of the sort. When I woke back up, there were even more peole than before. Kristina was thundering with laughter in concert with two Mexican guests, the three of them with their wine resembling one of the slapstick Japanese comedy talkshows of "talents" I used witness sometimes on TV. I had a pleasant conversation with a French girl (Elie), a Spanish guy (Etu?), a couple of Taiwanese (Esther and another whose name I've forgotten), and one of the Mexicans (Fernando, with whom I discussed the ethics of genetic modification, apparently related to his job), before the party began to die down and people went home.
I quickly explored the area the following day, delighting in a long riverside park that surrounded dense, untouched groves of vegetation on the shores of the main disecting river of the city. I followed it from one bridge to another, breathing in the moist green and bird calls and disregarding the distant smog and general bad weather (which only finally cleared up for the first time for me two days later). Finding my way back to the apartment late that afternoon, I entered to meet the only-just-arrived second CS visitor, Ha. Ha was a quiet, very mild-tempered Vietnamese-German who had just finished a semester of exchange study in Hong Kong and had five days to herself to meet with friends in this vicinity and experience the general outlay of the Taipei area -- which she did, quite ambitiously, I might say. She immediately invited me to go with her not an hour after meeting, and over the next couple of days we visited the National Imperial Palace Museum, the Chiang Kai-Shek Memorial, the Sun Yat-sen Memorial, the famous Confuscius Temple, the Pao-an Temple just beside it, and several markets here and there that would recalibrate us to the bustling social life of the city after being engrossed for hours in historical retellings of past Taiwan. Ha always moved at something of a brisk pace -- not hurriedly but goal-oriented -- intent on meeting some unspoken quota of tourist sites that I myself had yet to (probably won't) decide on. On days that Ha and I didn't go out together, I tended to wander slowly in unplanned directions toward unscheduled destinations, more often than not drawn in to parks and cafes in a close proximity to Kristina's apartment. (I'll have to save some room here for a word on parks, though -- the Japanese must have no idea what they're missing, or perhaps they just have no idea what they're doing, ...or perhaps they know exactly what they're doing but don't have any appreciated for parks in regard to cultivating the natural aspect of parks...)
Anyway, getting back to Ha, she's a graduating business major now in a search for internships in Germany, preferably ones that fit her adament appreciation for leisure time and a managable schedule. I think we worked pretty well together, her briskness keeping us on track and taking us to places I'd probably never get to otherwise, while my attention to details and curiosity for explanations behind what we were seeing prevented us from overshooting and missing fields of information that stood to tell us something deeper about the culture here. Her soft disposition was also calming in the face of onslaughts of Taiwanese upfrontery, borderline aggressiveness, wherever we went, further assisted by her Asian appearance that deterred people from being too taken aback by us (me being obscenely white and blond). Sadly, she's gone as of this morning, and I'll be left to my own devices for a while again. Nonetheless, thank you, Ha, for our short and enjoyable time together ^-^
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The tropical / subtropical greenery here in even this densely populated and high-traffic region of Taiwan is new to me. One of the first places I was taken to, even before the riverside park, is a one-lane spacious cobblestone avenue called Boai (博愛) Street, not two minutes walking from Kristina's apartment. Here, ferns and thin elephant-hide camphor trees line the open-front shops and their overhead canopies, swallowed by the city into a shady, clean and peaceful neighborhood that takes a good five to eight minutes to walk through from end to end. According to Kristina, this used to be an artist avenue (explaining one large uninviting building behind iron gates labeled "art museum") subsidized by the government for precisely those purposes. Despite being "run down" now, it still appears to offere a taciturn escape alleyway from the crowdedness and stree noises of the surrounding area.
A particularly nice was a large and beautiful park just across the highway bridge northwest of the apartment, only about a 30 minute walk away. One of the many essential differences between this and the Japanese parks I've been to is: grass. Yes, there is grass in some parks in Japan, but only in the really nice ones, like Ritsurin, and then those areas are usually not meant to be entered, only viewed (although some ignore the small fencing and step and lie on it anyway.) Most park grounds are as bare and dusty as inner baseball fields. In whatever case, accessible glass plots or no, Japan is extensively anal-retentive in tending to, trimming, pruning, over-pruning, mowing and razing portions of their parks and gardens. Nature is apparently more of a color and shape in Japanese culture than a living, breathing essence, and an idea part to something like 'sustainability' or 'natural equilibrium' or 'sustainability' mustbe monstruously counterintuitive for them. (Even the Japanese word for sustainability, 持続発展, seems to disregard the inherent wildness and self-management of natural systems in permaculture and the like.) In short, the natural organisms, the life, in their parks and gardens are carefully (at times, obsessively) plotted (or designated), maintained (controlled), and pruned back (repressed), in none too other a different way than the manner of Japanese society itself and their own lives.
The parks I've seen in Taiwan so far give me some hope for botanical garden care in Southeast Asia. Grass is everywhere, and it seems to be attended to only where it becomes untreadable. Camphor trees, giants, are left to grow and bloom to their full extent, and even where they've been obviously planted in rows in some areas with purpose, they give a temporary sense of wilderness enclosure and relief amid a hot and squirming metropolitan commercial area. They're still nothing like the beautiful, fountain- and cement-less parks of North America that I often pine over in memory. Nonetheless, as far as public gardens in this still economically-developing ('watch your wording, kelsey') part of the world go, I think the so-called well-developed country of Japan and their "appreciation of nature" could gain some insight into the more 'letting-go-letting-be' attitude of the park designers of Taiwan.
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Today, I shall call my friend E--- and discuss this coming week's schedule, starting tomorrow. I'll hopefully get to spend the 25th through the 30th with him and his fajmily before journeying to Tainan to visit Katya for New Year's and deciding where to go from there. I have yet to seriously look into the pervading aboriginal culture here yet -- not much time left, either. Only two of three weeks left... So fast.
