We are all short-timers

Seven days ago, 10 government-issue garbage bags, blue and bulging, lined my apartment’s rear balcony, casualties of abandonment. My remaining two roommates had vacated days earlier, no longer willing to put up with a gradually melting ceiling and an intransigent landlady. I was preparing to board my flight back to Los Angeles.

A couple months before – shortly before or after our roommate Nick had returned to Toronto, I can’t remember – Ben and I were talking about the way friends come, then go. When you stick to foreigners’ circles, you tend to see the same faces month to month. But you only make so many friends, and those friends – the ones you hop the MRT on a whim to visit, the ones you build restaurant-exploring expeditions with – are the ones who make a foreign land seem like home, sweet home.

With Nick gone, the construction was faltering. We’re all short-timers here, we realized.

“I gotta figure out when everyone’s leaving,” Ben said, “so I know when to go too.” It’s a go or be-left world, apparently. I left.

It was hard, to be sure, but it was a well-spent five months. Should I even bother trying to encapsulate it all? At best, I’ve written about a tenth of what I experienced; at worst, only a hundredth. I saw a country coming to grips with its history, yet furiously building its future: new MRT lines, a high-speed rail, and for good measure, maybe a new Mitsukoshi or two.

Children study English at cram schools that are as ubiquitous as 7-Elevens. Stand at the doorway of one, and you’ll see another down the road.

Scooters weave precariously between buses, taxis, and cars. Pasta joints battle Thai, Japanese, Buddhist vegetarian, and good ol’ Chinese home cooking for hungry mouths. Hop a bus and be at the other end of the country in a few hours; hop the high-speed and be there in 90 minutes.

This was the Taiwan that my friends and I discovered and loved – and the Taiwan I’ve been missing for seven days now. But if there’s anything I learned in my short time in Taiwan, it’s that little is permanent, including being away from one of my new favorite cities. One day soon, I’ll be back.

Encounter at Sun Moon Lake

Rew and I were in a ghost village. It was a late afternoon on a Monday at Sun Moon Lake, several kilometers from the town from which we’d come.

We had hiked for hours, fighting spiderwebs along scarcely walked trails and jealously eyeing passing cars on the highway. The last time either of us had eaten was breakfast, and now it was pushing dinnertime.

So, exhausted and starving, we expected reprieve when we finally found some signs of life at the Thao village. The Thaos are a small aboriginal tribe – less than 300 – that makes its home at Sun Moon Lake.

But when Rew tried to buy water at a town general store, no one was even around to ring us up. We settled for the only thing around that was open, a restaurant across the street with just one table occupied.

We sat down and ordered.

“Hey there! Hello! Wei!” the other table was waving us over in English and Chinese.

Kenting and the Taiwan tour

Spring has sprung, and with it, Spring Scream. The music festival in Kenting (墾丁) draws probably tens of thousands every year – to alt rock and pop, to sand and sun, to four days of barely controlled chaos.

I don’t know if Spring Scream falls on Tomb Sweeping Festival every year, but it did this year, affording everyone a long weekend to trek southward to Taiwan’s annual music mecca.

But the double whammy also means a clogged highway (reason No. 1 for the new high-speed rail: the country tends to move in mass migrations southward all at the same times every year). Our six-strong group, loaded onto a rented minivan, began our trip midnight Wednesday – away from Taipei’s gloom and toward the sandy shores of Kenting.

Two hours later, we had reached Taoyuan to drop a dog off with a friend. We still had the entire length of Taiwan to go, and a long night in the minivan.