The Exile

Wedding Day

2006-04-20T23:36:00.000-07:00

Wedding Directions

2006-01-09T21:43:00.000-08:00

Head south on Jinhua until you reach the intersection with Junghua South Rd. There will be a Smile gas station on your right. Go straight and onto Mingsing Rd. Keep on this until you have passed your third 7-11 (the first is on your right, the other two are on the left). You're now in Wanli. Evon's house is on the left hand side about 150 meters before the bridge (see photo below),
#1397.

Wedding Locale

2006-01-09T21:36:00.000-08:00

One Brief Shining Moment

2005-07-18T18:10:00.000-07:00

I had worked at plenty of jobs in my life that I considered hard, or sometimes even unpleasant. Deckhanding on commercial fishing boats, creek-cleaning, tree planting, and, worst of all, delivering junk mail for Canada Post, the first job from which I was fired. All of these travails ill prepared me for the two years I spent in Toronto framing houses during the mad building boom that gripped the region like some kind of gold-rush. Most of the houses we (my high-school friend Todd and I) built were sold before the foundation had even been poured. You couldn’t finish them fast enough, and it took a toll after awhile. We once worked a 15 day stretch for which I billed Todd for 171 hours. That was to finish up the three or four buildings we had going simultaneously so we could go home for Christmas. Toronto in December. On the nice days it would warm up to minus 15 or 10, on the windy days we were out in minus 30 for twelve hours at a time, spending nearly half that working in the dark under halogen lights. When I finally got back to the coast and had a minute to look in the mirror, there was somebody looking back at me, but I didn’t know him.

The morning I left all that behind was cool and clear. The end of May, when winter had finally surrendered the land to new buds and birdsong. I fired up the Mustang at about 5:30 and as I sat there listening to that irritable rumble, I felt all the frustration and pressure lift from me with the knowledge that I was not driving out to some mud-pit of a jobsite to start yet another endless day of hammering. I was going home, to huge fish and epic bike rides, friends and family, and, when summer was over, Taiwan.

On the trip out east I had been a good patriot and taken the Trans-Canada the whole way, getting nailed for speeding only once and enduring the tortuous stretch from the Manitoba border all the way to Barrie. That was enough to send me south for the return journey, through Detroit and Chicago, Milwaulkee, and then a left turn and a nearly straight run all the way to Montana. It was the Memorial Day weekend, or maybe Veterans Day, or some such holiday like that, but the effect was to clear the interstate of almost all traffic, including cops, from the middle of Wisconsin until I crossed back into Canada in Alberta. The road was mine, the music was loud, and the 5.0 ate up the asphalt with a gleeful howl. By the night of the second day I was already in Rapid City, South Dakota, where I found a cheap motel right next to a store called, no shit, Yeee-Haaa Likker.

There were only three things I considered worth stopping for in the American leg of the journey, and they were all parked right on the route. The first was Mt. Rushmore, which is a whole lot smaller than you’d think, and the second was Devil’s Tower, from “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” fame, which is as spectacular as you could imagine. The third was The Little Bighorn, still one of the best public attractions I've ever seen. The sky clouded over as I was leaving Rushmore, and a short time later the thunderstorms broke, dumping torrents of rain amid strobes of lightning and that ever so mesmerizing sound of thunder. It was with some haste that I made for Devil’s Tower, hoping to get there before the rain did. And then it happened, one of those truly sublime moments that you can and will never forget as long as you live. The deluge had just stopped as I crested a hill doing about 190 to see the rain-slicked road snaking off into the distance like a silver ribbon, disappearing into the one bright spot in the blackened sky as jags of lightning fell all around me. If you saw it in a movie you’d have sniggered at the fakery of it all, but there it was, in the raw, and still giving me shivers thinking about it four years later. My whole ordeal was paid off in that moment alone.

The rest of the trip, and the rest of that summer unfolded like a lazy dream, drenched in sunshine, until a phone call from my brother on the morning of September 11th telling us to turn on the TV quick brought me back to reality. Less than a month later I landed in Kaohsiung to begin an odyssey filled with new sights and sounds and smells, but that’s a whole other story…

2005-04-21T18:21:00.000-07:00

Round 3...

2005-04-21T18:06:00.000-07:00

Electric dream...

2005-04-04T09:05:00.000-07:00

On the way to Halong bay...

2005-04-04T09:02:00.000-07:00

Back from the Perfume Pagoda...

2005-04-04T08:59:00.000-07:00

Surprise Cave. Spot the two tourists just below center...

2005-04-04T08:57:00.000-07:00

The secret bay...

2005-04-04T07:36:00.000-07:00

Halong bay at night...

2005-04-04T07:35:00.000-07:00

So, how does one claim this?

2005-04-04T07:29:00.000-07:00

City at night...

2004-12-14T20:58:00.000-08:00

Sunday Morning

2004-12-14T20:49:00.000-08:00

The Lost Boys

2004-12-14T20:42:00.000-08:00

Nighttrain

2004-11-25T23:04:00.000-08:00

Sophia

2004-11-25T22:59:00.000-08:00

Suicide

2004-09-25T03:12:00.000-07:00

Into the jungle

2004-09-25T03:09:00.000-07:00

Reflection

2004-09-14T00:07:00.000-07:00

Firelight

2004-09-14T00:02:00.000-07:00

Gunner in blue and red

2004-09-10T17:31:00.000-07:00

The East Mountain Temple. The place to go for exorcisms and communion with the dead...

2004-09-10T17:28:00.000-07:00

Once bitten... now where's the next one??

2004-08-29T22:56:00.000-07:00

In da club... Viva in Kaohsiung

Watchcraft

2004-08-26T23:40:00.000-07:00

Taiwan will forever be an enigma. As a parting gift from an ex-girlfriend, I recieved a slick looking Swatch. Another Taiwanese friend later informed me that many believe giving people clocks here is cursing them with death...

2004-08-26T07:51:00.000-07:00

Sheldon (L) and Mike. Up close and personal...

2004-08-26T07:12:00.000-07:00

There's a will, and there's a way...

2004-08-26T07:08:00.000-07:00

Therapy

2004-08-25T08:23:00.000-07:00

Outgunned

2004-08-25T08:10:00.000-07:00

Not guaranteed to make you Spiderman

2004-08-25T08:04:00.000-07:00

Rooftop Sunset

2004-08-25T07:55:00.000-07:00

Great disorder in Heaven

Taiwan the First

2004-08-25T06:57:00.000-07:00

Hard to believe I wrote this almost three years ago (Oct 2001). How times have
changed. Back then I was all bright-eyed and green....

Greetings Sisters. I hope all is well with you, thanks a lot to those of
you who have sent me messages, I'm happy to hear from you. It hasn't even
been a week here, but I'm already settling in well. I'm picking up a bit
of Mandarin, and I'm happy to find that the people here are really
friendly and accommodating. Read on for more..
The other night, I experienced the night-market scene in full. Wade, Sharon (Wade's
girlfriend) and I went to the largest night-market in Tainan. It is held
(nightly, I think) in a large lot somewhere downtown (my bearings are still
a little shaky). Approximately half of the lot is set aside for scooter
parking, and there must have been at least a thousand of them jammed
together in rows with inches to spare between them. A lot of people travel
on a thousand scooters. One night near Wade's I saw 4 people on a 50cc
scooter, and Wade has seen 5 people on them more than once. So, needless to
say, the place was packed with people perusing all kinds of counterfeit
designer clothes ( I saw a Stussy bucket hat for 5 bucks CDN). Jewellery
also figures big on the scene, but most of it is pretty run-of-the-mill
stuff, nothing really eye-catching that I could see. No fake Rolexes or
anything like that. And of course there was food. Unfortunately, as you
walk by some of the food stalls, you are assaulted by a stench you could
swim through (well, those of you who can swim could). I've smelled some
unsavory things in my life, but even a three week ripe sea otter on Catala
Island can't compare with this olfactory offense. I had noticed this smell
before at other markets, and was understandably a little leery of trying
anything from the street vendors until Wade told me that the smell was
deep-fried tofu. Apparently frying it causes it to give off this unpleasant
odor. Mystery solved, and confidence restored. And to top it all off, there
were animals. Birds, turtles, rodents, fish, reptiles, anything you could
hope to have crawling around your place. A group of week-old bunnies
sitting on top of their cages caught my eye, but when I went to take a
picture of one, the vendor rushed over to smack it on the head a couple
times to wake it up for the camera. Not exactly what I would have
requested. There were cages full of mice sitting next to cages full of the snakes
they'll eventually get fed to.
I ought to say something about traffic here. It's actually not as bad as
you might think for a Vancouver-sized city like Tainan. I think that is due
in large part to the fact that a lot of people drive scooters. I've yet to
see a traffic jam. I heard that there are 22 million people in Taiwan, and
40 million scooters. On the average day on the streets, I believe it.
There's a whole culture here revolving around scooters. You can see whole
families driving around on them. People carrying a couple 50lb. propane
bottles behind them, stacks of flattened cardboard boxes perched
precariously on the back, pets in the basket on front. Everything. And of
course there are a bunch of young punks who hot-rod their rides with
liquid-cooled engines and race around in packs, bristling with Tazer guns
and pepper spray (firearms are, unfortunately, highly illegal here). You
can see people wearing full leather riding suits on a weenis little
putt-putt. It's great. And you won't believe the things the manufacturers
write on the sides of their scooters. I think the first time I went out
walking, I decided to write down some of these inscriptions. The list
follows this message. I was lucky to not only find a scooter that was
functional, but also one that wouldn't make me burst out laughing every
time I looked at it. Drivers of all types seem to take the rules of the
road more as suggestions than laws. Red lights seem to say that it might be
a good idea to think about perhaps stopping, or at least slowing down to
see if anyone is coming the other way before continuing. Most, but not all,
scooters drive on the right-hand side of the road. Fortunately I've yet to
see a 4 wheeler driving on the left, but I have no doubt that it happens.
There aren't any sidewalks here, each store seems to be in control of the
patch between the door and the street, so pedestrians (the very few of them
that there are), walk on the street too. Cockroaches scuttle around, and
the other night a rat came barreling out from an alley in front of me with
a cat hot on it's tail. The rat made good his escape under the cars, while
the cat thought better of dodging the traffic to pursue his prey. It's a
big, dirty town.
I've been to observe the first couple classes at the
school I hope to teach at. It looks like I'm going to be a kindergarten
teacher. The kids, well, they're kids. Pretty much the same wherever you
go. The school runs an English immersion program, and I think some of the
students can speak English better than I could at their age. I observed two
classes, the first starting at 4:30 pm and the second starting at 5:30 pm.
Classes for these kids (they look to be anywhere from 4 to 8) run as late
as 9:30 at night. I have a couple more classes to observe, and then a
couple weeks of training, Then I start teaching. I'm really looking
forward to it, as it looks like a lot of fun. The last think I'd like
talk about is the heat. To say that it's hot here is an understatement.
When I first arrived, it was about ten pm, and I think at that time it was
as almost as hot as any day I had experienced in Toronto. And we're at the
tail end of the warm season here. Sometimes during the day we'll step out
of Wade's Air conditioned apartment and the heat will pour in through the
door like a flood. Walking through the humidity feels like wading through a
warm bath. Your movements feel sluggish, as in a dream. In this the
Taiwanese will dress themselves from head to foot in long-sleeved shirts,
and long pants in an effort to prevent themselves from tanning. Lots of
people in the west make an effort to tan themselves darker, whereas here
everyone seems to wish to be lighter. I guess the grass is really greener
on the other side of the fence. Some people attach muffs to the handlebars
of their scooters to keep their hands warm?? Crazy. While I¡¦m withering in
the heat like an unwatered tomato plant, wearing shorts, a short-sleeved
shirt and sandals, I'm surrounded by Taiwanese folks wearing jackets and
long pants, hats and boots. Again, crazy. So that's all for now. I'll
write again in a couple weeks to update you. By then I should be teaching,
and I should be moved in to my new place. There's a snake farm near the
city that we will have visited by then, and a monkey mountain I hope to see
too. Still no mountain biking, I'm still in the process of trying to
rustle up a Kona to ride in a country where every Kona is built, but none
are available. Take care all! I'd love to hear how things are going for
you all back home.
Regards, Chris

Here is the scooter script list. There are no typos.
-Jog is fascinating to you
-Man Boy Jeep Bike
-Man Boy enjoyyourself
-Dio Set me free let me alone
-Dio New ecology& new stand
-FAC xc The new start on sunny
-Cabin Sparkling scooter
-Dio Shuttle in the city jengle, the new speedy snail clan
-Jockey The better than than from Kymco. Better
-Cabin With fashionable feeling
-Chacha Giving you the best sensation all I have
-Duke The friendly scooter on earth
-Atilla The modern scooter citizen
And the all time weirdest thing you¡¦ll see on a scooter, or anywhere else for
that matter.
-Grand Dink 150