...or hardly working?

Who would have thought that a one-month 140-hour intensive training course would be hard? Well, me, for one, but I didn't imagine it would take up quite this much of my time. I spend from 9 until 7 at school every day and sometimes (when I have to prepare for exams or write essays) for awhile after. This week is the culmination of all that work, and that means there's a new big task due every day. And that means very little blogging time for yours truly!

In other words: check back soon, I have lots of amazing things to tell you about my Equinox celebration (which included amazing wild boar tacos and dancing with Aztecs next to ancient pyramids at sunset.) But the time for that is, alas, not yet. I have a mess of essays, applications, lesson plans, and tests to deal with.

REWIND: Taiwan

In keeping with my new blogging feature, here is a quickie-rewind version of my adventures in Taiwan, a whirlwind recounting that will hopefully whet your appetite for more detailed posts in the future.

Taipei, part 1
*Joined by my university friend, Mel, I spent a few days exploring Taipei's old neighborhoods, many temples, and hotsprings. We spent a lovely evening in Danshui in the northern part of the city, a community resting on a riverbank where fishing boats ply the waters and a carnival-like atmosphere rules the open-air shops that line the shore.

*No trip to Taipei would be complete without a visit to the t night market, where a multitude of delicious food and cheap fashions await your discovery. My favorite part of the night market: very real looking rolls (the bread kind) made out of foam rubber, sold at virtually every stand. Neither Mel nor I could divine their purpose-- they all had silly faces piped onto them with brown ink, so they couldn't be for tricking your friends. Maybe, we thought, they're like pet rocks?

Worshipping at a temple in Taipei

A man fishing at Danshui
Some of the wonders at the night market
Sun Moon Lake
*Coincidentally, I have several friends who ended up in Taiwan this year, either teaching English or returning to their families to plot their next post-university move. So my next step moving south from Taipei was to meet up with Sam, a very old friend from middle school. He showed me around his neighborhood, Jhubei, and then we took a brief weekend trip to SunMoon Lake, one of the foremost tourist attractions in Taiwan. The lake featured an interesting aboriginal population, several beautiful lakeside temples, and a good deal of the misty-mountain scenery that one associates with Taiwan. On Sunday before parting ways we took a boatride along the lake. Very pleasant, indeed.

Beautiful masks hanging in one of the aboriginal villages lining the lake
A ferocious lion guards a temple

Lake scenery
Kaohsiung
*From Sun Moon lake I took the train south to visit another university friend, Maya, where she was teaching in Kaohsiung, an industrial city in the southwest. I got to go to school with her for a day to see her teach, and I also spent a lovely day roaming the city with a couchsurfer who took me to the top of the highest hill in the area for a beautiful view of the city and also introduced me to PigDog Cafe, a haven for the city's independent thinkers, half art-gallery half cafe. It was a day of great conversation and scenery. On the last day before I left Kaohsiung, Maya and I went to Lotus Lake, which is famous for its temple- and shrine-lined shores. There we stumbled on the birthday of a local god, and were treated to a live orchestral performance, after which we were made to eat many delicious bean-paste sweets and other goodies.

My new Kaohsiung-native friend, Jolie

Along the shores of Lotus Lake

Tainan
*While in Kaohsiung, I took a day trip to Tainan, a city filled with temples. I spent the day wandering among a variety of fascinating, beautiful temples, a day tempered only by the fact that my cell phone was stolen in the afternoon as I was preparing to return to Kaohsiung.



Taitung
*The highlight of my time in Taitung was the opportunity to attend an Aboriginal Taiwanese wedding. Through a series of convoluted connections originating with people I met on couch surfing, I was invited into the hills to a wedding celebrating of the Bunun people. A German couchsurfer picked me up on an old-fashioned Kawasaki motorbike (the first motorcycle I'd ever ridden) and sped me into the hills, where we feasted with a cast of hundreds, eventually retiring to the bride's family's house and then to an unlikely karaoke location. It was in this way that I found myself huddled, freezing in the chill of a Taiwanese spring night in a tiny house/shack that passed for a karaoke club, perched on the edge of a deep gorge that divides southern Taiwan in half

Wedding festivities

The East Coast-- Hualien and Taroko
*On the recommendation of friends, fellow travelers, and guidebooks I took an extremely scenic bus trip up the eastern coast of Taiwan, where I couchsurfed with a very friendly Taiwanese med student who came out to me, locked her keys in her sixth-floor apartment, and engaged in an extremely daring/foolhardy caper to get back in (which included swinging briefly off the roof of her building, much to my terror)-- all in one night. Then I taught her the word "badass" and we went to another of Taiwan's fabulous night markets.

*Taroko Gorge has got to be one of the most impressive and stunning places I've been. Short on time and independent transport, I joined a small tour for a day and soaked in the remarkable scenery, which I utterly failed to capture with my little point-and-shoot camera.

From the Hualien night market
Not doing Taroko Gorge any justice

Nan'ao
*Given my interest in aboriginal culture, Maya agreed to help me get in touch with one of her fellow Fulbrighters who was working in an aboriginal school in Nan'ao, a little southeast of Taipei. I stayed with Julia for a few days, and she was an amazing host. On the first night we took her scooter out to the beach and made a fire, eating dumplings and roasting tiny, sugary marshmallows among the dunes. The second day I wandered the town and visited the school where Julia taught. And on the last day we took her scooter into the countryside, where we climbed up a river valley to a beautiful waterfall and then road to a hotspring.

Language learning at the Nan'ao school

If you look really closely you can see Julia on top of the waterfall, on the left side
Taipei, again
*I returned to Taipei, and to Mel, for another few days at the end of my Taiwan sojourn. This time we visited several museums and went to the top of Taipei 101, the tallest building in the world. Nothing quite like that feeling, being higher than pretty much everybody. That soaring feeling gave me a good push, energy that would last me until I had landed in my next destination-- Osaka, Japan.

The tallest building in the world, modeled after a bamboo shoot

View from the top

Snorkeling, soldier crabs, and soda

I rode into Airlie Beach, gateway to the Whitsunday Islands, in the pouring rain. This wasn't particularly a surprise, as it was the rainy season in Queensland, but I was feeling gloomy nonetheless: I was hoping to take a sailing trip around the Whitsundays that day, but that wouldn't be much fun in the rain.

I had arranged to be dropped off at a backpacker's: my couch surfing host, Bill, was working all day, but I could store my stuff at the backpacker's for the day if I paid a small fee. The owner also agreed to book me on the aforementioned sailing trip, as many of the tourist day trips picked up from his place. Unfortunately, my train was late because of the rain, and that gave me literally 10 minutes to drag my things down the long driveway, change, and pack a day bag before turning around and heading out into the downpour.

We left port on a repurposed military raft, and the first hour or so miserable. The surf was choppy because of the rain, I felt a bit nauseous, and I couldn't see anything through the deluge. At length things started to look up, just in time for us to land at Whitehaven beach, one of the most photographed beaches in the world. We took a bush walk (Australian for "hike") through dense rain forest to a beautiful look out, then walked across a long, ankle deep inlet back to the boat, shuffling our feet to avoid rousing stingrays.

Whitehaven Beach, still cloudy


We lunched on a beach near Whitehaven, with the whitest sand I've ever seen. According to our guides, the sand is 100% silica, which gives it its white color and also makes it great for polishing jewelery. I considered trying to get the scratches out of my glasses but thought better of it. By the end of lunch the sky was clearing a bit, which cheered us up, although by then we had begun a day-long battle with marsh flies, which are some kind of devil's spawn of a mosquito and horse fly.

Leaving my mark (temporarily) in 100% silica


We spent the afternoon snorkeling at Border Island. The Whitsundays are at the very southern tip of the Great Barrier Reef, and this was my first taste of the wonders of the reef. The fish were gorgeous, and the coral remarkable. It was larger and more diverse than anything I'd seen in previous snorkeling in Bermuda and Virgin Gorda. And it carpeted the entire bay, as far as the eye could see, in knobs and swirls, branches and intricate patterns front light green to dull red to purple.

The rafting company dropped me back at the backpacker's, where I met my couch surfing host, Bill. Bill was a bit of a nomad: he worked out on one of the resort islands five days a week, then came into Airlie Beach each weekend to do overnight security work, sleeping in a motel. He had generously offered to let me stay in his room, which was a lot less suspect than it sounds, given that he was gone most of the time.

Airlie Beach is basically a big backpacker party all the time. The town is essentially pure tourist creation, and there are an endless supply of travelers, mostly foreign and ages 18-28, coming throughat all times. This meant that most of Airlie's main drag consisted of huge, rather expensive backpacker bars filled with glitzy people drinking copiously. I walked down the street looking at bar after bar filled with drunk co-eds but enjoying the warm night air. At length I chanced upon a little restaurant at the end of the road with a cheap soup of the day and a man playing an acoustic guitar at the bar. So I had my dinner, drank a cider, and felt good about finding a spot that fit me in the midst of so much else.

In the morning, Bill and I went sightseeing. We stopped first at the weekly Airlie Beach market to browse the crafts and produce stalls. This is one of the best market locations anywhere, I think, abutting a sparkling blue sea lapping under coconut palms. I tried to have coconut milk for breakfast but it was sour in a way I wasn't used to, so I ate dim sum pork buns instead.

Best market location ever


The wonderful thing about couch surfing (well, one of the wonderful things) in a place like Airlie Beach is that your host can take your off the beaten track and away from the plastic key chains and $10 Coronas. Bill was kind enough to spend the afternoon with me, driving me to a beautiful lookout over Shute Harbor (where the boats from the Whitsundays dock) and a gorgeous, deserted beach, and taking me to see a huge, old tree and a woodland waterfall.

Shute Harbor


Maybe the oldest tree in Queensland. To give you an idea of scale, you can just see Bill leaning against the the bottom of the trunk


Along the way, he told me a little about his experience growing up as an Aborigine. He was raised by his grandparents (although he didn't mention it, I inferred that his parents were among the Stolen Generation, an entire generation of Aborigines who were taken away from their parents and made to assimilate to white Australian culture at boarding schools, often never seeing their families again.) His grandfather was left to tell him about his family's people, who lived originally inthe Blue Mountains area outside of Sydney. Bill had had some success getting his people, who had scattered through New South Wales, to come back together and apply to be recognized by Government and reclaim some of their land, although much of that effort had come to nothing due to infighting.

As we walked through dappled sunlight out to a swimming hole/waterfall in the woods, Bill told me the story of the "Dreaming of" an area near the place he grew up. In Aborigine parlance, during the Dreamtime (a sort of prehistory) the ancestors sang or dreamed various places into being, so all creation stories involve the dreaming of a place, tradition, or landmark. This one involved a wise eagle fighting against dark spirits.

Waterfall

Our last stop was the beach. The tide was out and the sand extended about a quarter mile to the water, which blended seamlessly with the cloudy sky. It was dotted with seaweed and mineature armies of soldier crabs, tiny blue marbles with legs that travel in masses of hundreds or thousands and whose simultaneous scurrying sounds exactly like soda when you've just opened it. The tide had carved curving lines into the shore, and I wandered for a time hunting soldier crabs and relishing the solitude of an empty beach.

Soldier crabs


I spent that night at a little Thai restaurant, then back at the same bar with a different acoustic guitarist, this one accompanied by a drummer with an electric drum set. Between songs they were heckled by couple of very drunk, enthusiastic Kiwis, who would whoop, shriek, and yell at the performers to "get out the little brown cigar, broo!" ("broo" is what very Kiwi Kiwis call one another.) It took me several songs worth of heckling to realize that the "little brown cigar" they were referring to was a didjeridoo, and when the duo finally heeded their demands and played an acoustic version of "I Come From the Land Down Under" with didjeridoo accompaniment I experienced a moment of elated, hilarious harmony. I told you Aussies love that song.

The beach

Making tracks in Sydney: Part 1

I am surprised every time exactly how long a 14-hour flight is. That is to say, I haven't done it too many times (back and forth to China twice; back and forth from New Zealand once), but every time I am surprised exactly what it feels like when you have been in a plane for 7 hours and you know you will be in that same plane for another 7 hours. And then when you leave you will be in an entirely new place very far from where you started. Such is the miracle of air travel.

To be fair, Qantas made it as enjoyable as possible to sit in a tin box for that long. They have an absurd selection of movies, TV shows, even video games and CDs, all available for starting on-demand whenever you want. I watched a funny Indian sitcom called "Mumbai Calling" about a call center, "In Bruges" (which, sorry, I don't really see the big deal), some standard American sitcom fare, and two tourist videos about Sydney and Brisbane. Qantas served a couple of quite passable meals, I managed to procure some Australian wine to help me fall asleep, and I woke up in time to help the Greek Australian woman next to me with her immigration card.

Customs took forever, as usual, but then I was wandering out into the bright light of Australian morning. The humidity even in the arrival hall was palpable. Without really understanding what I was doing, I used my AAA travel card to get some money from an ATM and bought myself an Australian SIM card, marveling at this brand new place in which I could function, even delirious from air travel. I took a long, sweaty bus ride from the airport to Burwood, the suburb where I would be staying for the next five days. I watched the Sydney streets crawl past and all I could think was “This is real this is real this is real.” For so long I had been looking ahead to this morning, and it had arrived.

As it turned out, Burwood was a nice medium-sized suburb/village with a huge Chinese population, obvious in the foot traffic on the street, the Chinese language signage, and the multitude of yum cha/dim sum restaurants lining the main street. This street also featured coffee shops with doors closed until after the New Years holiday week; several Adult Book stores; a grocery store; a fruit shop called the Fruit Bowl; a couple of Chinese-style bakeries (my favorite of these was called "Leanly Hot Bread"); and trinket shops of the kind I got used to in Kunming that sell plastic shower shoes, $3 hats, and a world of other non-necessities. It was a fairly quiet, safe town except once, late at night, when a couple of drunk boys yelled so loudly and suddenly out their open windows that I stopped short and then hurried back to my host's house.

The Rs were a lovely first-time couch surfing host family. The father regarded me suspiciously but was friendly (he once made a half joke about my stealing all their money.) The mother was rotund and looked vaguely like an ex-nurse although I never found out what she did. She spent a lot of time kindly lecturing me on wearing enough “mozzie spray” and sunscreen and was less than helpful in a friendly way about figuring out train tickets-- she was in short a nice stand-in for a mom. James, their son and my connection through couch surfing, was in his late 20s or early 30s, a science teacher and avid traveler, in great shape and fairly handsome. He was in the habit of raising his eyebrows a lot while he talked, so I could never tell if he was amused by something I said. As a teacher he was in the midst of summer holidays and had just bought a motorbike, so he was often off helping his father learn to ride or taking a spin down to various areas of the city, most often Bondi Beach (pronounced Bond-EYE, not that I knew that until I heard someone else say it) where I think he had something going on with a French couch surfer. That meant my Sydney time was mostly self directed.

The foyer of the R House; James, looking amused as usual

Dazed from the 14 hour flight, unable to believe I had really arrived, and feeling as if I were in another world, I dropped my bags at the R's house, walked 10 minutes down to the train station, and in half an hour was goggling at the Opera House. The building is pure poetry. You’ve seen pictures, but I have to say that nothing is quite like being next to it. It is breathtaking. The two partners, opera house and bridge, make for a fantastic view. You walk out of the subway stop at Circular Quay (you say it "Key," another pronunciation obstacle for me) and boom. There they are.

The sights of Sydney Harbor

It was incredibly hot and I found myself in a torpor of epic proportions. I ordered an ice coffee along the Esplanade, only to find that that meant ice cream and coffee rather than coffee made cold. I drank it watching tourists of all colors come and go, the ferries from all over the harbour fill and empty. At one point in the afternoon I visited the Museum of Contemporary Art--hooray, free admission!-- which had some really interesting exhibits. But jet lag hit big just then, and I spent the last part of the museum barely looking at the art, wandering from room to room, and trying to decide if it would be acceptable to lie down on the lawn outside the Museum with all the tourists going by. Luckily, within an hour or so the feeling passed.

Just outside the museum I met Graheme, a great-looking character busking on the Quay for the tourists passing by. I got into a conversation with him in which he revealed that he was a milkman by trade until about 10 years ago, when milkmen finally lost out to supermarkets. Now he sits on the Quay day in and day out playing Bob Dylan and traditional folk Australiana and trying to convince people to leave him tips. I sat and listened to him for awhile. He played some great old Dylan and “Waltzing Matilda” (which might as well be the national anthem here), as well as another song whose chorus included the worlds “tie my kangaroo down, boys.” I really loved having a chance to talk to him. That sort of interaction with interesting, real people, however brief, is one of my favorite parts about traveling.

Graheme in action

Before dinner I was supposed to meet James at a bar to watch salsa lessons but got hopelessly lost in the business district. It was a nice way to see a bit of the city, but I ended up having to buy a meat pie from a fast food purveyor (meat pies are left over from the British influence) and after a brief stop at said bar (where they were just finishing off the salsa lesson) jet lag called me back to Burwood.

Although exploring the city alone had its own merits, I decided to try and meet up with some couch surfers also traveling in the area for the next few days. The next morning I found Wil, from Sussex, England, in a coffee shop in The Rocks, which is the oldest part of Sydney, and later on we met up with Sonia, who hails from Brookline (Massachusetts) and with whom I had friends in common back in the US. The Rocks is a great tourist draw that has been heavily preserved, and it is very charming, with lovely Victorian architecture. As I remarked to my companions, I was very aware that the neighborhood was engineered to appeal to me-- and it quite succeeded. We spent the morning wandering along cobblestone alleyways past at least three bars claiming to be the Oldest Pub In Sydney, and divided our time between a neat historical museum, a honey shop (who knew there were that many kinds of honey? I could even taste the difference), and an amazing puppet store located in an old basement.

The puppet shop

After the Rocks we headed to the Australian Museum, which was a nice diversion that included interesting bits about Australian history (a subject about which I have learned a great deal since I arrived here) and some funny exhibits about weird Australian pets. We wandered from there through Darling Harbor, a very ritzy area chock full of fancy boats and fancier bars, through to the area of the city known informally as Chinatown. The street was lined with yum cha shops and tea houses, but we walked past them to Market City, a massive Asian-centric mall filled with internet cafes, cell phone bling shops, Hello Kitty outlets, fully stocked arcades replete with sweaty DDRing coeds, and an enormous food court featuring most Asian delicacy you can think of. As I rested our feet and relished my cheap, rich miso ramen, it was easy to forget where I was. Sitting in Market City was like landing on a piece of an entirely different continent. I saw maybe two other Caucasians in the entire mall, which is remarkable considering that Australia is something like 95% white.

It was raining by the time we'd finished, and we made a dash to the train station to go our separate ways. But not before Sonia and I decided to take the plunge and meet up at 7 AM the next day to go to what was said to be the best and most extensive fish market outside of Tsukiji in Tokyo.

An Aboriginal man in traditional dress and paint sells his techno-didjeridoo CDs to the throngs on Circular Quay. I had mixed feelings when I saw this, and still do, but having witnessed the poverty of many Aboriginals living in Australian cities my perspective is a bit different. I especially like this photo because of the bridge acting as a frame.