There are days when you feel like catching a series of trains and buses you aren't sure exist to get to an airport hotel at the other end of the country so you can get up at 4 the following morning to catch a flight to somewhere you can't remember why you wanted to go, and there are days when you don't. By bad luck, the day I had to leave Tainan was one of the latter.
Tainan station is small, but packs in a lot of complicatedness. I bought a ticket for the slow train to the high-speed train station -- conveniently located 20 minutes outside the city -- but finding the right train was hard. Finally, I spotted a train number that matched one on a relevant-seeming schedule and jumped on just before it pulled out.
There's a specific kind of sinking feeling you only get from catching the wrong train in a foreign country. You have time to accumulate clues. I gradually decided that "Yongkang" probably wasn't the destination I wanted.
The only thing to do was to sit and try to look like I wanted to go to Yongkang. Why wouldn't I? Maybe there's an internet fad involving Yongkang, and I'm a pilgrim. Maybe I have business dealings in Yongkang. Maybe I'm from Yongkang, and there's a lesson here for everyone else in the car about not judging by appearances.
The conductor saw me, asked for my ticket, and laughed in what I think might have been a commiserating way. He tried to explain what I should do by opening his notebook and writing down a sloping column of times and numbers. Seemed I needed to catch a train back to Tainan. In Yongkang, I started off to look for a platform and departure time that related somehow to the numbers he'd written down. The conductor spotted me, looked surprised, and waved me back on the train.
He recruited a student to interpret. This gave us a shared vocabulary of 10 numerals and some 15 English words, and now we made serious headway. I gathered that I needed to stay on this train, which was now going back to Tainan, and switch there. In Tainan, I got off again, and the conductor, laughing appreciatively at the entertainment I was giving him, waved me back on. When this train -- and it had been sort of the right one all along, I had just gotten on when it was going in the wrong direction -- got to the high-speed station, I looked for the conductor to thank him, but couldn't find him. I think he was afraid he would have found our parting too emotional.
The high-speed train trip was the same line I'd already taken, except for the massive lantern festival in Taichung -- a sudden crepe-paper amusement park in a vast open lot by the train station. In Taoyuan, there was a crowded shuttle, an airport hotel that had a series of blackouts, and an incredibly early trip to the airport to catch a 7am flight to Okinawa.
The flight from Taipei to Naha is barely an hour. During takeoff and landing, EVA played soothing classical music extremely loudly. An interesting thing about soothing music is that it becomes extremely alarming music if it's played loudly enough, particularly if the context is right -- say, for example, you're on an airplane and the pilots have just blown their first landing approach in bad weather.
In Okinawa I had my first customs inspection. Maybe because there was no one else there and the guard was bored, maybe because I was a little pale and vacant from cold-and-flu tablets and sleep deprivation, and may have looked just a little like someone with a ruptured heroin balloon in his system. I wasn't proud of my luggage after seven weeks of travel, but there was nothing illegal. Yes, the laundry is disgusting, sorry. Yes, the Barbie toothpaste is odd, but it was the only tube I could find in Tainan that was small enough to fly with. Anyway, it makes brushing my teeth a fun, stylish, masculinity-affirming adventure, and that's not a crime.
Naha airport felt like Japan right away. The cleanliness, the curious ATMs that wouldn't accept my card, the designated outdoor toilet for seeing-eye dogs with its polished spade and raked sand pit.
I rode the elevated monorail into the city. It was still early when I found the hotel, still fairly early when I worked out how to get into it, and still too early to check in even after I'd worked out how to make a credit card payment to it. I loitered in the parks and pachinko palaces and shopping malls of the neighbourhood for three hours. A good way to kill time in Japan is to go a Namco arcade and try to understand what's happening. I walked up and down rows of crane games, glassily comparing the prizes available: Plush dolls, candy, giant tubes of Pringles, baked goods, frying pans. Just trying to imagine the world of someone who would play a crane game to win a frying pan seemed to take hours. Finally, I realized that I'd flown into a different time zone, and that I could have checked in earlier.
The room is a tiny space with an electronic toilet, a trouser press, a large white device I haven't yet identified, and a mauve-trimmed nightshirt I'm still trying to decide is unisex or not.
Tainan station is small, but packs in a lot of complicatedness. I bought a ticket for the slow train to the high-speed train station -- conveniently located 20 minutes outside the city -- but finding the right train was hard. Finally, I spotted a train number that matched one on a relevant-seeming schedule and jumped on just before it pulled out.
There's a specific kind of sinking feeling you only get from catching the wrong train in a foreign country. You have time to accumulate clues. I gradually decided that "Yongkang" probably wasn't the destination I wanted.
The only thing to do was to sit and try to look like I wanted to go to Yongkang. Why wouldn't I? Maybe there's an internet fad involving Yongkang, and I'm a pilgrim. Maybe I have business dealings in Yongkang. Maybe I'm from Yongkang, and there's a lesson here for everyone else in the car about not judging by appearances.
The conductor saw me, asked for my ticket, and laughed in what I think might have been a commiserating way. He tried to explain what I should do by opening his notebook and writing down a sloping column of times and numbers. Seemed I needed to catch a train back to Tainan. In Yongkang, I started off to look for a platform and departure time that related somehow to the numbers he'd written down. The conductor spotted me, looked surprised, and waved me back on the train.
He recruited a student to interpret. This gave us a shared vocabulary of 10 numerals and some 15 English words, and now we made serious headway. I gathered that I needed to stay on this train, which was now going back to Tainan, and switch there. In Tainan, I got off again, and the conductor, laughing appreciatively at the entertainment I was giving him, waved me back on. When this train -- and it had been sort of the right one all along, I had just gotten on when it was going in the wrong direction -- got to the high-speed station, I looked for the conductor to thank him, but couldn't find him. I think he was afraid he would have found our parting too emotional.
The high-speed train trip was the same line I'd already taken, except for the massive lantern festival in Taichung -- a sudden crepe-paper amusement park in a vast open lot by the train station. In Taoyuan, there was a crowded shuttle, an airport hotel that had a series of blackouts, and an incredibly early trip to the airport to catch a 7am flight to Okinawa.
The flight from Taipei to Naha is barely an hour. During takeoff and landing, EVA played soothing classical music extremely loudly. An interesting thing about soothing music is that it becomes extremely alarming music if it's played loudly enough, particularly if the context is right -- say, for example, you're on an airplane and the pilots have just blown their first landing approach in bad weather.
In Okinawa I had my first customs inspection. Maybe because there was no one else there and the guard was bored, maybe because I was a little pale and vacant from cold-and-flu tablets and sleep deprivation, and may have looked just a little like someone with a ruptured heroin balloon in his system. I wasn't proud of my luggage after seven weeks of travel, but there was nothing illegal. Yes, the laundry is disgusting, sorry. Yes, the Barbie toothpaste is odd, but it was the only tube I could find in Tainan that was small enough to fly with. Anyway, it makes brushing my teeth a fun, stylish, masculinity-affirming adventure, and that's not a crime.
Naha airport felt like Japan right away. The cleanliness, the curious ATMs that wouldn't accept my card, the designated outdoor toilet for seeing-eye dogs with its polished spade and raked sand pit.
I rode the elevated monorail into the city. It was still early when I found the hotel, still fairly early when I worked out how to get into it, and still too early to check in even after I'd worked out how to make a credit card payment to it. I loitered in the parks and pachinko palaces and shopping malls of the neighbourhood for three hours. A good way to kill time in Japan is to go a Namco arcade and try to understand what's happening. I walked up and down rows of crane games, glassily comparing the prizes available: Plush dolls, candy, giant tubes of Pringles, baked goods, frying pans. Just trying to imagine the world of someone who would play a crane game to win a frying pan seemed to take hours. Finally, I realized that I'd flown into a different time zone, and that I could have checked in earlier.
The room is a tiny space with an electronic toilet, a trouser press, a large white device I haven't yet identified, and a mauve-trimmed nightshirt I'm still trying to decide is unisex or not.
