on burning my back and hiding my head in my hands
Sometimes when you are traveling you do something stupid or embarassing. Half the time you didn't even notice so it doesn't matter. Other half of the time you do notice but you don't care because you're on holiday, damnit. And the third half of the time, you just feel like an idiot.
Tonight was the third half.
Today i left the far north Dajia district of Taichung aiming to head to the south on the border with Changhua, and perhaps beyond. But i did not really take into account how fucking bad my sunburn was from yesterday. As i wrote, i've been sunburned all over due to missing various stripes, but none of it was bad as my legs. I wear pants always, all the time, even when i go on my weekend bicycle adventures, but part of going into holiday mode (and traveling with a heavier load on the bike than normal) means exposing my pasty white knees to the world. And since they haven't seen the light of day in over a year, they immediately turned a bright, raging pink.
But wait, i lie. My legs weren't the worst of it. They should've been the worst of it. But here's the really dumb part. In the hottest part of the day yesterday, i rolled up my tank top and stuck it into my bra so that my stomach and back could get some air. Yes, the classic 膀爺 "shoulder grandpa" look that is the butt of jokes amongst the Chinese youth who are far too cool to go outside in the sun or take off their designer hoodies even when they do.
Well, now i have a scalding red, full-width tramp stamp right over the top of my cute little tribal tramp stamp that i have no shame about being my first tattoo.
Wait, i thought this post was going to be about embarassing things? Right. So, i left my hotel slathered in aloe vera gel, which did nothing because the sunburn is right where my pants waist is. It hurts. I'm tired. I started to bike the 30something kilometers to the southern side of Taichung, then got distracted by a long detour around a wetlands because there was a greenway over there and i do like to be beside the seaside (where i promptly got more burnt). Somewhere in the ass end of nowhere with only a windmill for company i decided i was not going to bike to the highway bridge and walk several kilometers over the river in the middle of traffic like a psycho, i would get a train instead.
With that in my mind, i could focus on just going the 30km, which was still 30km after my detour. I followed a bunch of dykes down, and it struck me how nice it is to bike on dykes. I guess it's in my blood, at least from my mother's (Dutch) side. I've long given up trying to put together a predictable but groantastic pun about riding dykes in Taiwan... until i found a dyke with a goddamn 彩虹廊道 rainbow porch tunnel on it. So, enjoy. The hot dykes of Taichung.
This is one of the few times in my life where i wish i had a partner, so she could pose on her bike under the rainbow tunnel and then there it would've been a photo of a dyke on a bike on a dyke.
Anywho. The ride was nice. But i tell you what, when i made it to Chenggong station right on the south end of Taichung, i was glad to step onto that air conditioned train for all of five minutes. And thus ended my fun little stretch of only using human-powered transport to make my way across the country.
I checked into what i think might be a hotel that i stayed at before. It's cheap and it's right next to the Changhua central train station, so i've probably stayed here before. I remember the old vaulted ceilings and funky switchboard next to the bed that once upon a time might have had an old-timey radio or eight-track connected to it, but now it just controls the lights. It's like a 1960s or 1970s swish business hotel whose best days are long, long behind it. I think last time i was here my room got invaded by ants, if it's the same place.
Well, after applying a bunch more aloe, i headed out for dinner. And i struggled. Up north i just launched into 國語 (the Taiwanese term for Mandarin Chinese) wherever i wanted to eat and they just spoke it back because they speak Mandarin all day and if a foreigner walks in and orders off the menu which is all in Chinese, they obviously aren't a total moron who's going to ask for a fork and then complain that something seasoned only with white pepper is too spicy. But here i go to the 葱抓餅 green onion pancake place and i am looking at the menu for the 原味 (default/standard flavor) option which is hard to find because they have the whole Monty Python spam menu going on, and then the guy starts speaking broken English to me about "e-geh", "chee-suh" and i responded (in Chinese) that i just was looking for the 原味 so then he switched to listing ingredients in exaggerated Mandarin instead. Now, it might have been because he was a native Taiwanese Hokkien speaker (many in the south are), but it came across like he was making fun of my pronunciation, or doing baby-talk so that i would understand it, but actually when you get to a certain point of fluency it's harder to understand people speaking baby-talk than just fucking saying the thing. Or, you know, just listening to what i asked for in the first place which is plain pancake, no accompaniments.
Anyway, i shrugged it off and then went on to find something else to eat. And that's when the actually mortifying moment happened. I walked up to a stall selling 割包 which i didn't think i'd seen before, so i was curious. But the lady in front ordered a 潤餅 (lumpia), so alas i couldn't nosy my way into seeing what it was. Then, instead of taking her lumpia and getting back on her moped, she stood there, staring at me. I know this stare. I got it all the time in small town China. It's the local person watching the foreigner to see what they are about to do, and perhaps spring to their aid, or perhaps laugh at them, probably both. It's when you, as a traveler, become a zoo animal, and it's not fun.
I decided to just ask her what is this thing "gē bāo"? She looked at me like i was crazy, so i thought i must have read the character wrong so instead asked if it was a "jiàn bāo". 割 reminded me of 劍 (jiàn) because they both have the knife radical on the right-hand side and i figured it had to be something to do with cutting a bun. Instead of speaking Chinese she said in broken English "it's like meat in a bread", so i said (in Chinese) "is it like a guà bāo?", which is the famous Taiwanese steam bun that is folded over like a taco and usually has pork belly tucked inside of it. She nodded, so i felt like i was ready to order. (I should add here that guà bāo is usually spelled 刈包 in Taipei, which itself is weird because 刈 is actually pronounced yì, but in the context of a 刈包 it's pronounced guà bāo.) In my infinite wisdom, i ordered a jiàn bāo, because i thought the lady had actually understood that i did not recognize the character 割 but i did know the dish guà bāo, so she was confirming that i had the right pronunciation and the dish was more or less the same thing. (There are lots of dishes that have different regional names that are the same thing.) But instead it seems she just thought i was speaking gibberish, and did not provide me with any help at all, so the 老闆 thought i was even more of an idiot when i asked for a jiàn bāo, which is something that doesn't exist, and then i pointed at the 割包 on the menu and he said 台灣漢堡, which means "Taiwan hamburger", the ultimate "you stupid foreigner it's just a fucking burger" diss when someone complains that they don't like Asian food even when it's literally just pork in a bun. Then i asked him what's in it, because i wanted to know if there was options, and he's like "meat, egg, vegetable", so i ask what meat, and he rolls his eyes and says "Taiwan hamburger, Taiwan hamburger" and i wanted to scream because I KNOW WHAT A FUCKING GUA BAO IS MOTHERFUCKER I JUST DIDN'T RECOGNIZE THE CHARACTER 割.
God, it was the worst. When i finally got it i walked away in a ball of shame and anger and despair and looked up 割 in my phone... AND IT IS PRONOUNCED gē! I was right in the first place! I did recognize the character, but the "helpful" woman who was waiting for the foreigner to make a fool of themselves misled me by not immediately saying "oh yes, normally it is pronounced gē, except in the context of a guà bāo because actually 割包 is a Taiwanese Hokkien word that is pronounced koah pau and Mandarin speakers decided to morph that into guà bāo while keeping the same characters that we used in Hokkien".
Chinese language is full of this sort of bullshit. Mutually unintelligible languages like Hokkien, Hakka, Cantonese, Taishanese, Teochow etc all lived side-by-side for centuries, until finally the northern bureaucrats succeeded in forcing everyone to speak Mandarin. (Literally only in the last 50-100 years.) The common thread between all the different Chinese languages is allegedly the written characters, but they all pronounce the same characters differently and also use completely different characters to express the same thing, so especially when it comes to food and place names in Taiwan and southern China, you end up with a complete clusterfuck of characters that have multiple different pronunciations and meanings that makes learning them even more difficult than it already was if you only had to deal the single version of Chinese mandated by the bureaucrats in Beijing. Don't even get me started on the different romanizations, because Taiwan has a billion of them. (I can't tell you how weird it feels to write Taipei and Hsinchu and Taichung and Changhua when the pinyin romanizations that i use to type Chinese on my phone are Taibei, Xinzhu, Taizhong and Zhanghua, respectively. And Kaohsiung/Gaoxiong, for fuck's sake...)
Anyway, i felt like the biggest jackass on the planet. I mean, the guabao was great, but it was colored by my mood. I felt like a total fucking 北佬, which is Cantonese slang for northern guy, kind of like gweilo but for anyone north of the Nanling mountains. Hongkongers probably use it for anyone north of the Sam Chun (Shenzhen) river. I don't know what they call 北佬 in Taiwan, but i am sure they have a word for the ignorant, Mandarin-speaking, Taipei-dwelling asshats who can't speak Hokkien. And now i am one of them. Plus a white guy too, so i am like a double 北佬. A fucking 鬼鬼北佬. Argh!
The shame, the shame.
Anyway, now i wrote all this out i'm not feeling bummed any more, and tomorrow i will head out to the county to noodle around a bit on the local share bikes. Or maybe i will just get on the train to Yunlin County. Or skip the whole damn lot and go straight to Chiayi (Jiayi, sigh), which i kinda remember liking last time i was traveling this corner of the country.
So, good times.
Tonight was the third half.
Today i left the far north Dajia district of Taichung aiming to head to the south on the border with Changhua, and perhaps beyond. But i did not really take into account how fucking bad my sunburn was from yesterday. As i wrote, i've been sunburned all over due to missing various stripes, but none of it was bad as my legs. I wear pants always, all the time, even when i go on my weekend bicycle adventures, but part of going into holiday mode (and traveling with a heavier load on the bike than normal) means exposing my pasty white knees to the world. And since they haven't seen the light of day in over a year, they immediately turned a bright, raging pink.
But wait, i lie. My legs weren't the worst of it. They should've been the worst of it. But here's the really dumb part. In the hottest part of the day yesterday, i rolled up my tank top and stuck it into my bra so that my stomach and back could get some air. Yes, the classic 膀爺 "shoulder grandpa" look that is the butt of jokes amongst the Chinese youth who are far too cool to go outside in the sun or take off their designer hoodies even when they do.
Well, now i have a scalding red, full-width tramp stamp right over the top of my cute little tribal tramp stamp that i have no shame about being my first tattoo.
Wait, i thought this post was going to be about embarassing things? Right. So, i left my hotel slathered in aloe vera gel, which did nothing because the sunburn is right where my pants waist is. It hurts. I'm tired. I started to bike the 30something kilometers to the southern side of Taichung, then got distracted by a long detour around a wetlands because there was a greenway over there and i do like to be beside the seaside (where i promptly got more burnt). Somewhere in the ass end of nowhere with only a windmill for company i decided i was not going to bike to the highway bridge and walk several kilometers over the river in the middle of traffic like a psycho, i would get a train instead.
With that in my mind, i could focus on just going the 30km, which was still 30km after my detour. I followed a bunch of dykes down, and it struck me how nice it is to bike on dykes. I guess it's in my blood, at least from my mother's (Dutch) side. I've long given up trying to put together a predictable but groantastic pun about riding dykes in Taiwan... until i found a dyke with a goddamn 彩虹廊道 rainbow porch tunnel on it. So, enjoy. The hot dykes of Taichung.
This is one of the few times in my life where i wish i had a partner, so she could pose on her bike under the rainbow tunnel and then there it would've been a photo of a dyke on a bike on a dyke.
Anywho. The ride was nice. But i tell you what, when i made it to Chenggong station right on the south end of Taichung, i was glad to step onto that air conditioned train for all of five minutes. And thus ended my fun little stretch of only using human-powered transport to make my way across the country.
I checked into what i think might be a hotel that i stayed at before. It's cheap and it's right next to the Changhua central train station, so i've probably stayed here before. I remember the old vaulted ceilings and funky switchboard next to the bed that once upon a time might have had an old-timey radio or eight-track connected to it, but now it just controls the lights. It's like a 1960s or 1970s swish business hotel whose best days are long, long behind it. I think last time i was here my room got invaded by ants, if it's the same place.
Well, after applying a bunch more aloe, i headed out for dinner. And i struggled. Up north i just launched into 國語 (the Taiwanese term for Mandarin Chinese) wherever i wanted to eat and they just spoke it back because they speak Mandarin all day and if a foreigner walks in and orders off the menu which is all in Chinese, they obviously aren't a total moron who's going to ask for a fork and then complain that something seasoned only with white pepper is too spicy. But here i go to the 葱抓餅 green onion pancake place and i am looking at the menu for the 原味 (default/standard flavor) option which is hard to find because they have the whole Monty Python spam menu going on, and then the guy starts speaking broken English to me about "e-geh", "chee-suh" and i responded (in Chinese) that i just was looking for the 原味 so then he switched to listing ingredients in exaggerated Mandarin instead. Now, it might have been because he was a native Taiwanese Hokkien speaker (many in the south are), but it came across like he was making fun of my pronunciation, or doing baby-talk so that i would understand it, but actually when you get to a certain point of fluency it's harder to understand people speaking baby-talk than just fucking saying the thing. Or, you know, just listening to what i asked for in the first place which is plain pancake, no accompaniments.
Anyway, i shrugged it off and then went on to find something else to eat. And that's when the actually mortifying moment happened. I walked up to a stall selling 割包 which i didn't think i'd seen before, so i was curious. But the lady in front ordered a 潤餅 (lumpia), so alas i couldn't nosy my way into seeing what it was. Then, instead of taking her lumpia and getting back on her moped, she stood there, staring at me. I know this stare. I got it all the time in small town China. It's the local person watching the foreigner to see what they are about to do, and perhaps spring to their aid, or perhaps laugh at them, probably both. It's when you, as a traveler, become a zoo animal, and it's not fun.
I decided to just ask her what is this thing "gē bāo"? She looked at me like i was crazy, so i thought i must have read the character wrong so instead asked if it was a "jiàn bāo". 割 reminded me of 劍 (jiàn) because they both have the knife radical on the right-hand side and i figured it had to be something to do with cutting a bun. Instead of speaking Chinese she said in broken English "it's like meat in a bread", so i said (in Chinese) "is it like a guà bāo?", which is the famous Taiwanese steam bun that is folded over like a taco and usually has pork belly tucked inside of it. She nodded, so i felt like i was ready to order. (I should add here that guà bāo is usually spelled 刈包 in Taipei, which itself is weird because 刈 is actually pronounced yì, but in the context of a 刈包 it's pronounced guà bāo.) In my infinite wisdom, i ordered a jiàn bāo, because i thought the lady had actually understood that i did not recognize the character 割 but i did know the dish guà bāo, so she was confirming that i had the right pronunciation and the dish was more or less the same thing. (There are lots of dishes that have different regional names that are the same thing.) But instead it seems she just thought i was speaking gibberish, and did not provide me with any help at all, so the 老闆 thought i was even more of an idiot when i asked for a jiàn bāo, which is something that doesn't exist, and then i pointed at the 割包 on the menu and he said 台灣漢堡, which means "Taiwan hamburger", the ultimate "you stupid foreigner it's just a fucking burger" diss when someone complains that they don't like Asian food even when it's literally just pork in a bun. Then i asked him what's in it, because i wanted to know if there was options, and he's like "meat, egg, vegetable", so i ask what meat, and he rolls his eyes and says "Taiwan hamburger, Taiwan hamburger" and i wanted to scream because I KNOW WHAT A FUCKING GUA BAO IS MOTHERFUCKER I JUST DIDN'T RECOGNIZE THE CHARACTER 割.
God, it was the worst. When i finally got it i walked away in a ball of shame and anger and despair and looked up 割 in my phone... AND IT IS PRONOUNCED gē! I was right in the first place! I did recognize the character, but the "helpful" woman who was waiting for the foreigner to make a fool of themselves misled me by not immediately saying "oh yes, normally it is pronounced gē, except in the context of a guà bāo because actually 割包 is a Taiwanese Hokkien word that is pronounced koah pau and Mandarin speakers decided to morph that into guà bāo while keeping the same characters that we used in Hokkien".
Chinese language is full of this sort of bullshit. Mutually unintelligible languages like Hokkien, Hakka, Cantonese, Taishanese, Teochow etc all lived side-by-side for centuries, until finally the northern bureaucrats succeeded in forcing everyone to speak Mandarin. (Literally only in the last 50-100 years.) The common thread between all the different Chinese languages is allegedly the written characters, but they all pronounce the same characters differently and also use completely different characters to express the same thing, so especially when it comes to food and place names in Taiwan and southern China, you end up with a complete clusterfuck of characters that have multiple different pronunciations and meanings that makes learning them even more difficult than it already was if you only had to deal the single version of Chinese mandated by the bureaucrats in Beijing. Don't even get me started on the different romanizations, because Taiwan has a billion of them. (I can't tell you how weird it feels to write Taipei and Hsinchu and Taichung and Changhua when the pinyin romanizations that i use to type Chinese on my phone are Taibei, Xinzhu, Taizhong and Zhanghua, respectively. And Kaohsiung/Gaoxiong, for fuck's sake...)
Anyway, i felt like the biggest jackass on the planet. I mean, the guabao was great, but it was colored by my mood. I felt like a total fucking 北佬, which is Cantonese slang for northern guy, kind of like gweilo but for anyone north of the Nanling mountains. Hongkongers probably use it for anyone north of the Sam Chun (Shenzhen) river. I don't know what they call 北佬 in Taiwan, but i am sure they have a word for the ignorant, Mandarin-speaking, Taipei-dwelling asshats who can't speak Hokkien. And now i am one of them. Plus a white guy too, so i am like a double 北佬. A fucking 鬼鬼北佬. Argh!
The shame, the shame.
Anyway, now i wrote all this out i'm not feeling bummed any more, and tomorrow i will head out to the county to noodle around a bit on the local share bikes. Or maybe i will just get on the train to Yunlin County. Or skip the whole damn lot and go straight to Chiayi (Jiayi, sigh), which i kinda remember liking last time i was traveling this corner of the country.
So, good times.