2 posts tagged “taiwan”

When you travel, do you use a guidebook so that you're well prepared, or do you go without much prior knowledge so that you're surprised?
Submitted by Jack Yan.

Good question, Jack.

Normally, I fly by the seat of my pants, or skirt.  I went to Taiwan, for example, prepared only with a Japanese-English dictionary (yes, I was and am well aware that they do not speak Japanese in Taiwan; however, the kanji came in really handy, even though the characters in Taiwan are slightly different from those in Japan).  Of course, I only went to Taiwan because it was the cheapest airfare that weekend.  When I walked up to a Japanese travel agent and just asked her to book the cheapest available plane out of the country, she was shocked and bewildered.  I have come to understand that that is NOT how the Japanese travel.  We also went through China with no guidebook, no phrasebook, no nothin.  Again, kanji were helpful, but China was...I am guessing a guidebook would have made our time there much easier and more comfortable, but we wouldn't have seen the crazy shit we saw either.  Or so I suppose.  On the other hand, we might have actually been able to find a restaurant where people would serve us food if we'd had a guidebook to steer us.

Sometimes I buy guidebooks before the trip.  Usually, I do this mainly because I am having a shitty time at work or something, and daydreaming via the guidebook in my break time helps me get through.  Such was the case with the in-depth reading I did about Macau (which we never actually went to--fuck Hong Kong, anyway!) and Malaysia.  I nearly always, though, end up getting to the country and just winging it.  For example, I had a nice hotel picked out in the Hong Kong/Macau guidebook, but instead we were drawn in by the seedy romance and utter chaos of the Mirador Mansions.  I mean, what is the point of travel if not seedy romance and chaos?

In Vietnam, I used a guidebook and phrasebook quite a lot.  We were there for 3 weeks, and we did a lot of moving around, so we really needed it.  Plus I was about two months pregnant and going through spurts in which I just could not eat Vietnamese street food and we had to find, you know, a restaurant that served something at least moderately familiar.  (I love Vietnamese food, especially the street food, under normal conditions, but the first trimester of pregnancy does things to a girl, and I really could not take it.  Once T was eating some noodles with god knows what sort of animal part in them, and I started gagging from the smell and sight.  Then I had to use the guidebook to find the nearest croque monsieur that I could eat.  It sucked, since one of the main reasons I wanted to go there was for the food.  I did eat a lot of Vietnamese food, just in fits instead of steadily.

Anyway, a guidebook really isn't adequate preparation for Vietnam.  I could have read every guidebook on the market, and Hanoi still would have slapped me, and I doubt it would have spared us the food poisoning in Danang either. 

So I guess the answer is "little bit of both" but not too much of the guidebook routine.

Today was pretty good, much better than the past few days.  Tonight, as I was scanning my hard drive yet again to get rid of the evil fuck known as Vundo, I found myself flipping through an old photo album from my first year in Japan.  It includes the photos from my serendipitous and entirely enjoyable mini-vacation to Taipei. 

When I first went to Japan, see, my life was in shambles.  I owed money to everyone in the world with the fortunate exception of the mafia.  I had not finished my MA because I totally wussed out on my thesis (does anyone--but anyone--care about the morphosyntax of Snchitsu'umshtsn aka Coeur d'Alene Salish?  No?  Good, because it's a dead language anyway, and I didn't finish my thesis, OK?).  Just--it was all a mess.  I had been working for minimum wage as a cook/dishwasher at a Vietnamese restaurant and had been, well, living in my car.  Things weren't good.

So, I got a job in Japan and went there, very spontaneously, on a 3-month tourist visa.  Let's skip over some of the trivial details here and get to the meat of the matter:  My three months was up, I still didn't have my working visa, and thus...well, I had to leave Japan, but only for a weekend.  I had to be back to work on Monday, and anyway a weekend was enough to get me a new tourist visa to hold me over until my work visa came through.

I didn't have a lot of money.  I went to a travel agent and told her, in pidgin basically, that I had to leave Japan.  Naturally, she thought the destination was important.  I said, "Listen, just get me the cheapest plane ticket out of here, as long as I can be back on Monday."  Japanese people apparently don't travel this way, and she was very flustered by it all, but as it turned out, the tickets to Taipei that weekend were cheap and available.  So, Taipei it was.

And, oh how fortunate.  I went to Taipei on Saturday.  I had no guidebook, no phrasebook, no hotel reservation, no knowledge of Taiwan at all.  I did have my charming smile, my wits, and an unceasing curiosity.  Oh, I did also--and this came in handy a few times--have my Japanese-English dictionary.

I took a bus from the airport to the city.  On the bus, I started chatting with two gentlemen, one foreign and one Taiwanese, who were business partners or something.  They took a liking to me, got on the mobile, found me a hotel room, and took me there by taxi.  The foreign one--American, I think--asked me to go out with him, which led to hushed conversation between the two of them; as it happened, the Taiwanese had, erm, engaged an escort for his American friend, so the date was off.  

Before they left to meet their escorts, they did let me know where the fun things to do and see were and let me know that this weekend was the Lantern Festival to celebrate the Chinese new year.  Awesome!  I set out on foot to find the party.  I was careful to take a business card with me so that I could get back to the hotel.

And I walked my ass off, let me tell you.  I went to a street market and had all this amazing food.  I bought myself a wee teapot that I still have in an unbroken state.  I saw men wrangling snakes.  I ate a durian fritter sold to me by a very friendly man.  I bought beer (don't remember what kind) and KinderEggs at a convenience store and got drunk, there on the street.  One of the KinderEgg toys was a sort of crabman, which eventually led to the saying:  "For all I know, I rode the crabman home." 

The next day I woke late and left the hotel.  I had in mind to see the National Palace Museum, and I had a sort of tourist map.  I again set out walking. 

Now, you know that some silly white girl from Montana can't just walk across Taipei and happen across the National Palace Museum.  But what I did happen on were two fetching young men playing ball in a parking lot.  They recognized the "damsel in distress" look on my face and rushed over to help, offering their services to me in rapid and intense Chinese, a language of which I speak exactly one word:  xie xie (and my Chinese friends say I pronounce even that horribly).  They spoke even less English, and so I showed them the map.  When they realized my destination and how bloody far away from it I was, they offered to take me in their car, a car so small I thought a thousand clowns would leap out of it.  I got in the backseat, such as it was, for a perilous journey during which we communicated via...yes, the Japanese-English dictionary.  Kanji are a wonderful thing.  If I wanted to say something, I pointed to the appropriate Japanese word, and by recognizing the kanji they could more or less get my point.  They were very chipper and excited to have a new American friend.  They dropped me off at the museum, we ceremoniously exchanged business cards, and they left. 

I never actually entered the museum.  Oh, sure, I strolled the grounds and took lots of pictures, for it is impressive, but I was too cheap to pay to go inside--that money was much better spent on street food and beer.  On the way out, I saw a model posing on the steps, bottle of whiskey in her hands, camera crew and stylists swirling about. 

I stumbled my way back through the mean streets of Taipei, stopping occasionally to take pictures, sniff durian, and buy smoked goose flavor potato chips.

I finally got back to my hotel and almost immediately set out again to find the famed Lantern Festival.  I'm not going to bore you with a whole lot of details about it.  Suffice it to say there were lanterns--lots and lots of lanterns.  Then a light show.  It was the year of the horse that year.  The floats in the parade, though, were all kinds of things--my favorite was two dragons playing go.

The next day I was scheduled to leave on an early flight.  I overslept from being out too late at the festival.  The desk people gave me a wakeup call, even though I had not requested one, and told me to get my butt on the bus, or I would miss my flight.  I barely made my flight, barely made the shinkansen out of Tokyo, barely made it to work on time.  But I did.  Because I had serendipity on my side.