LIVING THROUGH A TYPHOON; THE WORLD'S TALLEST BUILDING; SEVERE JETLAG; AND SNAKEBLOOD. There are but a few of the memories I will take with me from my time in Taiwan.

After having a very nice farewell barbeque at my dad's house with several of my family members I hadn't had a chance to see yet, I drove to JFK airport with my dad for my red-eye flight to Taiwan. It was the longest flight I ever did in one stretch, over 18 hours of travelling including a stopover in Anchorage, Alaska. I left late Friday night and didn't in to Taiwan until 6 a.m. Sunday morning, and it was eternal darkness that entire time since we were flying on the opposite side of the sun. Somehow I completely lost the entire day of Saturday, September 15th, 2007 from my life. I still haven't figured out how that happened.

When I arrived at the Amigo hostel in Taiwan (7 dollars a night, as normal the cheapest I could find, with roaches crawling on the floor and smelling like mildew; I only saw 1 or 2 other guests the whole time I was here), I planned to take a 1 hour nap but ended up sleeping for 3-- in hindsight a big mistake. Feeling a bit groggy but pretty good, I was off to explore a new city, armed with the list of things to see I had been given by my friend Jennie Chung from Hopkins, who is originally from Taiwan.

I travelled on Taipei's wonderfully efficient, equally wonderfully cheap, subway. I had read that Taipei was one of the most crowded cities in the world, but from my experience it was any more crowded than New York. My first stop was Ximen, a trendy district compared to Times Square. As soon as I walked out of the subway station I was drawn to the noises of a parade which was coincidentally passing by at that moment. People were carrying an enormous chines dragon suspended from poles, and a man was doing flips, kicks, and other gracefull martial art moves in front of them, with accompanying grunts and shouts. I watched for a few moments while it passed by, then walked around some, looking around at all the different shops and bright signs with all types of chinese characters written. It was a bit of a cross between New York's Times Square and Chinatown-- upscale and trendy stores but with an obviously a Chinese feel.

From there I wandered to Longshan Temple, which Jennie had recommended. I admired the temple's beautiful architecture, dragons adorning the roof, and countless statues everywhere. I watched, and smelled, with pleasure as people lit incense in the enormous incense holder, and did a series of short prayer bows. But what really made the experience memorable is when more and more people began chanting in unison. I had no idea what they were saying, but it was very beautiful, and even had different harmony.

From there, I just wandered for a while, taking in the city's streets filled with people, cars, and probably tens of thousands of motorbikes zipping around--they were one of the environmental hazards new arrivals had to be particularly weary of. When crossing one street I saw a strangely beautiful view of the sun sinking towards the horizon through the extraordinarily dense smog. I had no idea that would be the one and only time I would see the sun the whole time I was in Taiwan.

That night I went to one of Taipei's famous night markets. One of the chronic problems I had in Taiwan was that it is one of the lesser English-friendly places I've travelled to. Fortunately, most of the Taiwanese people I encountered more than compensated for their lack of English with their exceptional friendliness and genuine desire to help me, so one more than one occassion, just getting to where I wanted to go was half the adventure. My destination was a place called Snake Alley which, as the name suggests, has live snakes, but rather than pet shops, they are found in restaurants. While I felt rather guilty watching, even more so since typhoonI knew that this was all just a spectacle for tourists, I could not take my eyes away when I saw 4 huge snakes suspended by their necks like a noose on ropes from an open restaurant front. It took me a moment to realize from their slowly squirming bodies that they were still alive. I stared in morbid fascination for a few moments, and was about to move on when I saw a man approach the snakes from inside the restaurant. He shouted something in Chinese to the effect of "BOO" to a women who was staring obliviously at the snakes, and she jumped back, startled. The man laughed. He then proceded to take out a small pair of scissors, which he casually thrust into the belly of one of the snakes and slowly worked his way up.

Let's pause for a moment. I remember reading about how they would throw people to the lions in the Roman colliseum a few weeks ago, and thinking, "how could people enjoy watching such brutality?" I know that it was the exact same gut instinct that made me and everyone else eerily fascinated by the spectacle, but I just could not draw my eyes away. And I'll bet you're curious too. If not, you can skip the next 2 paragraphs.

The snake writhed its tail and its mouth opened a tad, in obvious agony. After slitting the entire belly open, the main picked up a pitcher from the table, placed it under the snake, and lifted the tail while blood poured down into the pitcher. He held it there until the steady flow of blood slowed to a trickle. One by one, he did the same thing to each snake in turn. I wondered whether they could see anything from their positions and if they knew what was coming. What was really disturbing was noticing that, even several minutes after having been drained of their blood, the snakes' bodies were still moving. Two of them had their tails tightly wrapped around each other, blood dripping slowly down their soft white undersides. After getting a pitcher of blood, the man made another incision into each snake, closer to the tail, and cut out what I think was probably their gall bladders, which he cut open and squeezed another milky juice from into another container.

Now came the really shocking part. With the 4 snakes still hanging there, pretty dead looking at this point, the man put on a wireless headset microphone, poured the pitchers of snake blood and who knows what else into over-sized shot glasses which he placed onto a tray, and came out into the crowd shouting in Chinese, obviously inviting people to try some. To my horror a man raised his hand and went inside the restaurant where he was served his drinks. More glasses were pourded, and one by one people began to take seats inside. I ate Guinea pig in Peru a few months ago, and decided to draw the line there, and left.

I went to bed around 10 P.M., woke up shortly after midnight. and couldn't get back to sleep the entire night. I've never crossed 12 time zones in one shot before, and didn't know how my body would react. I just layed on the paper thin matress the whole night, listening to the buzz of the fan and sweating slightly. When morning finally came, it was raining steadily. I had planned a full itinerary for the day, but given my exhaustion and the weather, I didn't know how it was going to work out. I decided to spend the morning at the Naitonal Palace museum, which I had found out the day before houses the world's oldest and most extensive collection of Chinese art. To me, the museum's history was as interesting as its contents. In the first half of the 20th century, following the Japanese invasion of Manchuria and the years of fighting between the Communists and the KMT, the works were taken from their original home in the forbidden city of Beijing and shuffled from city to city for years. When the KMT retreated to Taiwan, they took the art with them, and it's been here ever since. China obviously wants the works back, and this is yet another thing Taiwan and mainland China fight about, but Taiwan points out that if the communist forces had obtained them during the revolution, they likely would have destroyed them as relics of the country's burgeious past. I did my best to appreciate the impressive 8,000 years worth of Chinese art, despite my now growing exhaustion.

After leaving the museum, I was frustrated to see that rather than stopping as I had hoped, the rain had only gotten worse. Moreover, I was really tired at this point, and the thought of doing anything that involved more walking was utterly unappealing. I knew I couldn't go to sleep until at least 9, unless I wanted the same thing as last night to happen again, so I decided to go see a movie to stay awake and kill time. I took the subway back to Ximen, where I had seen a theather the day before, and wandered around until I found one.

After the movie got out the rain hadn't let up one bit, and I was sort of a walking zombie at this point. I was in a big city, all by myself, exhasted with nothing to do. I was feeling pretty bad, even depressed. As I walked down the street, trying not to get completely soaked, angry and fearful thoughts went through my mind: "Why did I spend all the money I saved the whole year for THIS??? What's the point? Do I really want to be in Asia by myself for the next 2 months?" It was a long afternoon, but somehow I managed to stay awake until 9, and had a much better night sleep.

I woke up to find it still raining. Frustrated, I grabbed a book and decided to have a slow, relaxing breakfast at McDonalds. I won't deny that I often indulge in McDonalds while travelling for a few simple reasons--It is comfort food, and I know exactly what I'm getting (which was often not the case in Taiwan); I have yet to find a McDonalds where someone doesn't speak at least basic English, and if all else fails, you can always just point to what you want on the menu. Plus the McDonalds in other countries are often alot more luxurious and comfortable than in the U.S.--people often go there to sit, read, and work-- and I discovered at this one, rather than giving you dirty looks for hanging around, they actually had someone who came around to refill your coffee!

I began to read "A Walk in the Woods" by Bill Bryson, a book about a man who hiked the Appalachian trail, and his numerous adventures and misadventures. My mom had given it to me as a present years ago, and I just happened to grab it from my bookshelf before heading out. It was absolutely the perfect book at the perfect time. I lauged at loud reading it in the McDonalds, and probably got more than one strange look. I couldn't help but laugh at how much I related with this guy's adventures on the opposite side of the world. (It also had a strong dose of good old fashioned American sarcasm, something I don't think they've herad of here in Taiwan, and even if they have I'd have no way of knowing it) When Bryson described all the dangers he worried about, bears, snakes, freak lightning bolts, etc, I thought back to how only the night before I had seen news reports about a particularly bad plane crash in Phuket, Thailand killing 89 people, caused by the same bad weather I was now experiencing, and raising concerns about the safety of discount airlines in Asia (just before seeing the story I had been on the websites of several discount airlines seeing how much it would cost for me to fly from Manila) Last week, a series of violent earthquakes shook Indonesia, causing panicked people to flee fearing another tsunamai. A story on CNN featured an interview with a scientist who feared that an even bigger one, perhaps a rare magnitude 9, was due any day now, "sooner rather than later" in the words of the reporter (I'll be ok since I'm going to the Philippines, not Indonesia, right?)

Despite all that, the book was just what I needed to get back into an adventurous spirit. Thanks again for the gift mom, about 4 years later. After reading for 2 hours, and having 3 refills of coffee, I decided it was time to go. I got up, went to the closest 7-11 (yes, Taiwan has probably the highest density of 7-11s of anywhere I've ever seen) where I invested in a stylish poncho, and was off.

OK, I'm sitting here writing in my hostel, and I just realized that I have a flight to the Philippines to catch in a few hours, so I'm going to have to wrap this up. I spent the day up in Danshui, where the Danshui river meets the ocean. I had come to find out that the rain was actually a Typhoon passing over the island--mainland China later evacuated 2 million people because of flooding( http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-china-typhoon.html ), and saw huge waves and high winds. While normally a very popular touristy place, mostly everything was closed. Nonetheless, I had a great time walking around in my poncho. I had a delicious lunch of pork dumplings, spicy tofu soup, and soybean mild. That evening, still raining, I went to another night market.

Yesterday I took a day trip to Yingae, a city about half an hour from Taipei which is famous for producing pottery. I walked around to some cheap-o souveneir places and also some very nice galleries with high end ceramics, visited to city's pottery museum, which was quite obviously its pride and joy. As enthusiastic as they were about their ceramics, it just didn't do it for me.
In the afternoon I headed over to the Taipei 101, the world's tallest building at over half a kilometer high. I shelled out for the overpriced ticket to visit the observation deck. It had stopped raining for the most part, and while still a bit foggy it was still an impressive view. The low clouds cutting across the green, subtropical forrested mountainsides surrounding the city were particularly beautiful. I stayed a few hours until it was dark, and watched as the city lit up. I had some yummy spicy Singapore style chicken curry soup in the food court downstairs, and headed back to my hostel.

I think that's about all I wanted to write about my time here. I'm sure I'm forgetting something, but I'm going to miss my flight if I don't get moving. I apologize for any grammar, spelling, or other mistakes, I'm just going to have to post this without even reading it over.