Honeymooning Down By The Seine

Pi Chi always wanted to go to Bora Bora or Palau for our honeymoon. Bora Bora is a few lottery tickets out of our price range and Palau does nothing for me. Although I suspect if I ever go there I may change my mind. Sometime during the summer one of her papers was accepted to a conference in Mexico City. The conference was scheduled for right in the middle of what would be our honeymoon. I have not had real Mexican food in years and would gladly go to Yucatan or one of those places the Love Boat docked just to eat, but I do not want to honeymoon in Mexico City. I do not want to go to Mexico City for any reason. I convinced Pi Chi that Mexico City is not the greatest vacation spot in the world.

But then the head doctor type at her hospital got his own paper accepted. He wanted to go because he has relatives in Los Angeles and the easiest way to fly from here to there is to connect in LA. The hospital will pay for any trips to anywhere up to a point as long as a publishable paper is involved, and the head doctor offered to pay for the business class upgrades he required. The original plan was for Pi Chi to go with him and two other nurses to Los Angles for two days and then on to Mexico City for the conference. I was not in the equation for several reasons. I had already made my opinion of Mexico City clear and Dr Head was not going to pay for me to fly business class and stay at a nicer hotel. Dr Head also has a bit of a crush on Pi Chi, not on me.

The idea of Pi Chi flying to another continent with the boss of her boss did not bother me. She constantly reminds me of how old I am and this guy is even older. He is also a doctor, and working as a nurse for as long as Pi Chi has has convinced her that doctors are the last people you want to have any extracurricular relationships with. Plus if you draw a line between Brad Pitt and a baboon, he is much closer than I to the baboon. This does not imply that I am near Mr Pitt; only that I am farther away from the monkey.

We decided that we could honeymoon in Palau after the conference.

My primary concern with Pi Chi going to Mexico is that it is in Mexico. She comes from a culture where one can walk down the street while counting one’s cash one just removed from an automated teller machine. She and pretty much every other woman around here regularly leaves her purse open. Car doors are not always locked and parking a car anywhere is always an option. Your grandmother and young child can walk down any dark alley at any time of night. Guns are very illegal and kidnapping is unheard of. You could have your child wait outside while you go into a KTV for special service and she will still be there when you come out.

This is not Mexico City.

Most of your Chinese types are scared shitless when it comes to South Africa. They see it the way June Cleaver might see Florence and Normandie. It is generally assumed amongst the Chinese that any visit to South Africa will result in death and destruction. Or at least some kind of syringe attack wherein a large black savage forces AIDS-infected blood into some innocent Chinese arm. The Chinese are unapologetically racist and blacks are far higher on their terror alert chart than whites. And these are people who tell their children that whitey will eat them while they sleep if they are bad.

When we went to South Africa I had to convince Pi Chi that she would not only survive, but would likely not face any type of crime whatsoever. Not that my Magic 8 Ball is ever very accurate, but I know that most crime in South Africa is racially segregated. Black criminals mostly target black victims. White criminals mostly target white victims. There are simply not enough Chinese in South Africa for Pi Chi to worry.

When she decided to go to Mexico City I told her that all her paranoia about South Africa should apply. This has less to do with my own prejudice against cholos and is more about every statistic sheet in the world telling you that a foreigner is over one thousand times more likely to be kidnapped in Mexico than in South Africa.

But I liked the idea of having some time at home alone. I am fully prepared to spend the rest of my life with Pi Chi. It is worth mentioning that I assume I will not live very long. Regardless, there are times I just want her to get out of the house. If she went to Mexico for a week or more I could get some peace and quiet. Pi Chi is like a child in some ways. She told me this just yesterday and I agree. If we are both home at the same time I cannot do anything that does not involve her. She needs my constant attention when I have things to do, but is perfectly self-sufficient when I have no plans.

On the other hand I was never really comfortable with her going to Mexico without me.

Before I could worry about it Pi Chi got a paper accepted to a conference in Paris. This solved everything. Pi Chi loves Paris because it is where rich snobs shop and it is where I proposed. A honeymoon there seemed appropriate. But then she had to tell Dr Boss.

The Paris and Mexico conferences were at about the same time. She had already accepted Dr Head’s offer and turning it down would only make her lose face. This is a big issue to these people. But Paris is Paris and nobody around here talks about all the great shopping in Mexico. Dr Boss was disappointed, especially when the other nurses backed out and he had to go alone, but he paid the fees for her paper to be submitted to the Mexico conference anyway.

Pi Chi was one step away from getting a visa to Mexico and now she had to get a Schengen visa. This took longer than it should because she likes to do everything at the last minute and there is a new rule that forces some foreigners to get health insurance. Apparently the Europeans are tired of people from countries with universal health care going to their hospitals for every minor thing. People around here go to the hospital when they sneeze. Americans do not need insurance because we can have an appendage severed and talk about sleeping it off.

For weeks I told Pi Chi that if she did not get the visa in time I would go without her. She thought I was joking but once everything was paid for I was going to go no matter what. As much as I like spending time alone at home, I like traveling alone more. Pi Chi wants to see the history and culture long enough to say that she saw it, whereas I have been known to sit in front of Het korporaalschap van kapitein Frans Banninck Cocq en luitenant Willem van Ruytenburch at the Rijksmuseum all afternoon. It takes a lot longer to really see the painting than to say its name. Conversely, Pi Chi can spend an entire day in a department store picking up every single item while I stand against a wall like a zombie humming Krofft Supershow theme songs to my imaginary hand puppet friend, Lester. In a place like Paris I want to go to the Louvre, Montmartre and that sandwich shop on Rue d’Anjou. They have very good sandwiches. The less time I spend at Louis Vuitton the better.

We arrived in Paris at the end of an unusual warm spell and the weather could not have been better. Unfortunately, the weather could not have been better so everyone who was in Paris at the time was out on the town. We walked down les Avenue des Champs-Élysées because that was where we first went on our first trip to Paris. It is our Memory Lane. That was where we ate our first ridiculously overpriced meal, where we saw Woody Allen’s “Match Point” and where Louis Vuitton drained the very essence of whatever was left of my soul. We have since learned that eating in Paris need not require a bank loan. There was a large line to enter Louis Vuitton so just having a quick look around was never an option. Apparently people are willing to wait in line all day simply to enter Louis Vuitton. There was no line on our first trip but that was in January. Everything has fewer lines when the beggars taking a leak on trees get stuck. And the theater was playing nothing but crap.

Walking down the Champs-Élysées was like walking in Tokyo Disneyland. Except that every single man, woman, child and dog in Paris smokes. If you have ever been to Tokyo Disneyland you know that it is just stupid crowded. Kind of like the Champs-Élysées on an unusually warm October afternoon.

I have mentioned once or twice to anyone who will listen that the Chinese are the most selfish people in the world. They drive the way they walk and they walk as though no one else is on the planet. The more crowded it is the more oblivious they are to the existence of others. But I found people acting Chinese in Paris.

When I was a child we were supposed to move out of the way of adults. This was something they called courtesy. As an adult I find myself moving out of the way of children. If I did not they would run into me. They are probably staring at me with their mouths wide open, but they cannot see me anyway. I could walk down the street maniacally wielding a flamethrower and lightsaber and everyone would still walk into me while staring directly at me. I also move aside for old people. This seems normal to me. But it is alien to not only the Chinese but also Parisiens. On the Champs-Élysées I saw old people moving aside for adults who moved aside for children. This seems backward to me. Perhaps because I am old. I should have been a child after children were put in charge.

Something that bothers me but probably should not is when people completely block the only available path even though they likely know that other people exist. Chinese people always stop in doorways and at the ends of escalators. Always. If there is only one way to walk through there is probably a Chinese person standing there. And they love to jump in front of me and come to a dead stop. But this is less annoying on foot than it is in a car. This trip to Paris showed me that Parisiens are just as inconsiderate as Chinese.

When I am photographing popular landmarks I usually lean against a lamp post or wall-type object. Not only because this helps stabilize the camera but also because it gets me out of everyone else’s way. When I wanted to photograph the Louvre from large steps where hundreds of people were walking I stood behind a couple who were sitting on the steps. Pi Chi asked me why I was standing there and not in the middle of the steps where inconsiderate tourists were taking their pictures. I pointed out that by standing behind the couple I was not blocking the flow of traffic in any way. This blew her mind since, as a Chinese person, she would have never considered it. The couple also offered me protection since most of the traffic was moving uphill and I was facing the same direction.

When we arrived in Paris we wanted to check in to our hotel. Because we are conventional like that. We, meaning I, dragged a large suitcase through the city’s metro system and on the sidewalks near our hotel. We had a large suitcase because Pi Chi likes to bring what she knows she needs, what she thinks she needs, what she thinks she might need, and what she thinks she might possibly want to look at or think about looking at at some time during the trip. She would have loved living in the age of steamer trunks. She could almost fit what she brings on a weekend trip into one of those.

The Paris metro system if very efficient and goes pretty much everywhere within Paris. But it sucks fat hobos if you have a large suitcase. Escalators are rare. Elevators even more so. There is probably a reason I have never seen someone in a wheelchair on the metro. Most of the stations and transfer areas rely on a labyrinth of stairs. I think the people in charge of the Paris metro are under the impression that regular humans do not carry large suitcases anymore. They may be right since I was the only person I saw carrying a large suitcase. It could be that the large suitcase types use taxis, but taxis in Paris are more expensive than lunch on the Champs-Élysées.

When we finally got out of the metro I had to drag that suitcase to our hotel. Unfortunately, we arrived in Paris at the end of an unusual warm spell and everyone who was in Paris at the time was out on the town. When I am walking down the street and I see someone with a large suitcase I move out of their way. Not because I am a great hero but because it is the decent thing to do. And I do not want to get hit with that large suitcase. But when I am walking down the street with a large suitcase I have to move out of everyone else’s way. And at least half of them blocked my path, forcing me to take the long way. And they were all smoking. I found myself thinking that maybe the Chinese are not alone in their selfish assbag ways.

My faithlessness in mankind was fortunately restored when we returned home and I had to drive to work. Nothing shows the selfishness of the Chinese like their driving.

The hotel on our first trip to Paris was on the Right Bank, in the 8th arrondissement. It was on a quiet residential street between a Monoprix with excellent cookies and a metro stop, not too terribly far from the Champs-Élysées. It was a very nice hotel and a good choice for a honeymoon. But it is beyond Pi Chi’s hospital’s price range. Our hotel on this trip was on the Left Bank, in the 5th arrondissement’s Quartier latin. Pi Chi was not impressed with the hotel, even though I convinced the front desk clerk to give us a room with a balcony for no extra charge by promising her our first born, until I took her past the selfish smoking assbags and around the corner where she saw the Seine and this:

She also liked the fact that the hotel was completely surrounded by food.

Pi Chi and I are fundamentally incompatible when it comes to food. She eats the standard five Chinese meals each day. Breakfast is whenever they wake up, usually early. Brunch is not like an American brunch but rather a quick meal after you get to work but before lunch; about 9 am. Lunch is at noon. It generally lasts 90 minutes and the entire country stops. Afternoon tea is another quick meal after lunch and before it is time to go home; usually around 3 pm. Dinner is at 5. There is also a standard snack time anywhere from 10 pm and midnight.

I eat two meals on a slow day. More likely one meal and a snack. I rarely wake up before 9 am. Experience has shown me that eating when I wake up is a bad idea so I tend to let a few hours go before I have breakfast. By then lunch is ending for the people around me and Pi Chi has already eaten three bowls of soup, a dozen dumplings, a bowl of noodles, a bowl of rice and various parts of various mammals. I usually have a bagel.

Pi Chi will have another two bowls of soup, more dumplings, more rice and/or noodles and even more chopped up carcass by the time I get home and have dinner. Sometimes I have rice. Sometimes I have noodles. I like to live on the edge.

We never eat at the same time. I could never possibly eat as many meals as she does and even if I did we would not eat together. She works banker’s hours. I work babysitter’s hours. We never eat the same food. Chinese people like Chinese food. When they travel abroad they seek out Chinese food. When I was in Kenya my driver told me that Chinese tour groups always bring crates of food with them. There is little Chinese food on the Serengeti. I have nothing against Chinese food but I like a little variety now and then. I make most of my own food while Pi Chi buys from “restaurants”. This is not nearly as expensive as it sounds since a restaurant could be little more than plastic stools around some guy’s blue truck. And the little stalls really do have better food than most real restaurants anyway.

On rare occasions Pi Chi will eat something I have made. She thinks I am a great cook and often begs me to make something for her. Keep in mind that she gets most of her food from shacks and trucks so her definition of great cooking might not be the same as yours or mine. But whenever I make something for her she takes a bite or two and never finishes. I would take this personally but it is less about taste and more about the fact that she probably snacked on tiny fishes and dessicated fruits the entire time I was making her food. Even some quick sautéed tomatoes with garlic, basil and olive oil on grilled garlic bread takes longer than the noodles and fish eyeballs she gets from the back of a truck. She simply does not have the patience for my roasted potatoes and mushrooms. And I never make Chinese food.

On our first trip to Paris Pi Chi mostly ate at a Chinese restaurant around the corner from our hotel. I ate food from all over the place. The only time I can get genuine non-Chinese food is when I travel. Most of the foreigners around here go to places like Thailand and Amsterdam for the drugs and whores. I go for the food. I usually eat like a Chinese on vacation. In quantity, not quality. I ate a lot of sandwiches on our first Paris trip. A sandwich is such a simple thing but so hard to do at home. You cannot make a great sandwich with mediocre bread. Predictably, Pi Chi’s favorite Paris sandwich was at the Louvre. Paris is engorged with sandwich stands but the one she liked the most was from an overpriced tourist shop.

Since the hotel on this trip was surrounded by restaurants, I never ate at the same one twice. We were within a very short walk to Italian, French, Mexican, Greek, Indian, Tunisian, Thai, Japanese and Chinese. The local Monoprix did not have cookies but there was an Arab pizza shop nearby with horrible looking pizza and some of the best cookies I have ever eaten. They also had very cold Pepsi, which is a find in a city that prefers tepid Coke. I took the Pepsi challenge a long time ago. Pepsi is like mother’s milk. As far as I know. Coke is like brucellosic dog urine. Nevermind how I know. Oddly enough I did not have a single sandwich on this trip.

Pi Chi loved being surrounded by a variety of restaurants.

She mostly ate Chinese food.

Roasted potatoes, carrots and mushrooms with garlic, onions and red peppers
in olive oil, balsamic vinegar, rosemary, thyme, salt and pepper

The purpose of our trip was to honeymoon but what made it possible was Pi Chi’s conference. So while her goal was to get her paper published my goal was to do the things I could not do the last time.

I hobbled around Paris on a cane during our first trip because I was having a bit of gout. This did nothing for my sandwich intake but severly limited my ability to climb towers. I was completely caneless on this trip and managed to climb Sacré-Cœur (255 steps), Arc de Triomphe (284) and Notre Dame (387). We also went up Tour Eiffel and Tour Montparnasse but they have elevators. I am not the most athletic person in the world. Two or three hundred steps are something to me, especially on very narrow spiral staircases. At the top of each of these buildings I was breathing like a stoner at the end of a 10k marathon and my heart was racing like a Chinese person trying to be the first in line to the free spoonful of peanut butter at Costco. At the top of the Arc de Triomphe, our first such climb, Pi Chi thought I was being facetious until she checked my pulse. Then she suggested I sit down sooner than later. While waiting for blood to go back to my brain I saw two children who had just climbed the same steps running and jumping around. “That is why I never give up my seat to children”, I said to no one in particular. Their father laughed knowingly. He was a big sweaty piece of cow meat so he felt my pain.

You would think there are ample places for Americans and other feeble people to sit at the end of all those stairs, but there rarely are. Arc de Triomphe has a single bench for a few thousand people. Sacré-Cœur has stone seats built into the tower but no one seems to know they go all the way around, so everyone stops at the end of the stairs. Notre Dame has nothing. Just too many people in a very small space after climbing too many steps.

The views from all these towers are quite good, especially Sacré-Cœur, and it truly was a once in a lifetime experience. Because there is no way in hell I am climbing all those steps again.

From Arc de Triomphe

From Sacré-Cœur

Sometimes I get a free day to myself on trips with Pi Chi. In Bali Pi Chi went to a day spa while I kicked it by the pool old school. In Durban I got to hang with meerkats and explore the questionable side streets while she was at her conference. We never spent any time apart during our first trip to Paris but I arrived a few days before she did so I got to look around on my own. During this trip she had her conference. This left me with plenty of time to just wander around, which I think is the best way to explore any city. She prefers to go directly to the places in her Chinese tourist books. If it is not in the book it is not worth seeing. And even when it is in the book it should only be seen for the sake of being seen. Pi Chi took a trip to Italy before I met her. She went to something like five cities in five days. She can say she has seen the Colosseum, Trevi Fountain, Ponte Vecchio and Piazza San Marco but she knows nothing about them and she never really saw anything.

When I go to a place like Paris I will likely visit Tour Eiffel. It is the law, afterall. But I also just want to walk around without having any idea where I am or where I am going. This is usually the best part of any trip for me and where I find the most memorable experiences. I have walked past Pont Neuf I have no idea how many times, but I cannot remember anything specific without seeing photographs. But casually mention Pont Louis Philippe and I will immediately remember wandering beyond Notre Dame and around the 4th arrondissment until I accidentally stumbled on a protest march on Boulevard Henri IV to the Bastille. As I made my way through the crowd to cross the street a television news crew pointed their camera at me. So I raised my fist and chanted “Résistance” along with the protestors. I have no idea if I was on the local news, but I never made it onto CNN’s repetitive loop of five images per story. The protest was about raising the retirement age from 60 to 62 and the people were pretty pissed about it. All was peaceful that day and it was a righteous indignation/street carnival atmosphere at the Bastille, but after we left the country things started to get violent.

The march on Boulevard Henri IV

Parisiens love a good protest

Storming the Bastille

From the Bastille I wandered around more quiet streets and found myself at le Mémorial de la Shoah. I have been to a few of these places and they are always too depressing. Mauthausen was eerily quiet in the cold and snow. The Peace Memorial Park in Hiroshima is like any big city park. Except that it has monuments and statues to innocent people who died for no reason and a museum that graphically tells the whole story. Das Mahnmal für die 65.000 ermordeten Österreichischen Juden und Jüdinnen der Shoah in Vienna is for Jews what the Vietnam Memorial in Washington is for baby boomers. The difference in Paris was that a survivor was there and talking to people.

I am not Jewish. I have never been Jewish. I never will be Jewish. My people left Holland centuries before Germany invaded. My family had no direct involvement on either side. I had an uncle who converted to Judaism to marry a Jewish woman but I doubt he was ever very frum about it. I have seen all of Woody Allen’s films to date but otherwise I have no particular interest in the culture or religion.

But there is something terribly impressive about a people who not only survive thousands of years of persecution and near extinction but also manage to thrive wherever they go and assimilate into the local society while keeping their own culture intact. Many cultures have been destroyed from far less.

I understand why some people do not like them. They are different from the people around them. That is always asking for trouble. And Israel is so bereft of political nous that even though Americans think all Muslims are terrorists, they also invariably side with Palestine over Israel. But when you talk to someone who actually lived through the Shoah none of that matters. This is not a movie you can pause to go into the kitchen for some Ding Dongs. This is a real person describing what really happened to her and everyone she ever knew. This is far more depressing than an empty death camp.

I defy any of these deniers to talk to any survivor and still claim that it never happened. And if they can then that is irrefutable proof that they are assholes.

And, yes, I chose to end this here. I have no idea how to segue from the murder of millions of people to the pizza I had for dinner that night and do not want to try.

So You Want To Be Married By A Chinaman

The first time I got married I knew nothing about how to get married. I also knew nothing about being married but that is a separate issue. California used to have a long list of do’s and do not do’s if two wanted to marry. I believe they have since relaxed their policy, although homosexuals are still forbidden to marry, pending decisions by some old dudes who wear robes and wigs to work. The first wife and I decided it would be easier to get married in Las Vegas. At least that is how it worked out.

We met at work. The next time I saw her we talked about Faulkner’s “A Rose For Emily”. That was good enough for me. The next time I saw her after that I asked her out. Our first date just happened to be on a holiday weekend which just happened to end on my birthday. So we spent the whole weekend together. This is why her father never liked me. He assumed that I deflowered his daughter on our first date. What he probably never knew was that we did not have sex at all that weekend and that horse left the barn long before I met her. She had planned to go to Las Vegas for her birthday before we met. With someone else. But he left the scene before I arrived. The Chinese would probably say it is unlucky to marry someone on a vacation if you are the replacement.

But marriage was never the reason for our trip to Las Vegas and we really never thought about it until the last minute. I proposed on her birthday. Because I am romantic like that. She never said yes. She actually said, “Yikes”. I suppose in hindsight that means something. We decided to get married in September.

Getting married in Las Vegas is very easy. You go to one government office to get the license and another to have someone say you are married. I believe the entire process set me back less than $50. No planning is required. You need not hire a coordinator, band, florist, photographer, cake or venue. No dresses or tuxedos are necessary. No months of endless decisions and changes of mind. No food tastings at overpriced restaurants. I did not even have to show any identification. She did, to show that she was over 18.

We had someone at the government office take our picture, but this was in a more innocent age when you had to have pictures developed in a lab. Kind of like “CSI” without the technodance DNA montage or sadoerotic homicide. When we got back from Las Vegas we dropped off the film at the local Sav-On, as was the custom. They fucked up the roll with our wedding pictures and gave us a coupon for a free roll of film.

Afterward she felt guilty because she had already told her family that she was getting married in September, and here she up and married without her mother. So we went ahead with the September gig and never bothered to mention Las Vegas. This meant I got to spend the next three months dealing with endless decisions and changes of mind, venues, photographers, florists, food tastings, cakes, dresses and tuxedos. I felt guilty that she had no wedding pictures and agreed to pay for an overpriced professional photographer who seemed like a bit of an idiot to me. Today those pictures are in a box at my brother’s house. Unless he threw them away.

The cake was the only easy part. I already knew where to go and I knew it would taste great. It only cost $30. And now that $30 cake is my most vivid memory of that day. It was a very good cake.

Four years and a month or two later she was living in the garage of some woman’s family she just met. A month or two later she was living with some old guy she met at work. They took a trip that she and I were originally supposed to take. He and I have the same first name. Read into it what you will.

When I say old guy I should note that he was 40 at the time. This is not an age I consider old. But she was 25, so he was an old guy.

A lifetime later I found myself living on the other side of the world in a strange and exotic land of mosquitos and motorized land vehicles that cannot stop at red lights.

I first saw Pi Chi at a train station and, frankly speaking, I thought she had a nice ass. She still does. We did the talking on the phone and e-mail thing for an amount of time that I simply cannot remember until we went on our first date. The truly amazing part is that her English blows. Even more so at the time. Her e-mails were incredibly difficult to read and took some effort on my part. When we spoke on the phone I understood maybe half of what she was saying and she understood even less from me. As bad as her English was, I knew even less Chinese. I could say numbers and order food but that would have gotten us nowhere.

I lived in 崙背 at the time and she lived in 高雄. Obviously this proved troublesome. For our first date I took the train to her. She took me to a famous beach and we watched the famous sunset. We wrote our names in the sand with a stick, neither of us able to read or pronounce the other’s. She noted that my name was unlike that of famous monosyllabic movie stars such as Tom Hanks and Tom Cruise. I gave her an endlessly fascinating history of Holland lesson and we discussed how awesome I think Amsterdam is. We never discussed the genealogy of her name. I assume it is Chinese.

We had dinner at the famous Smokey Joe’s, or Smoking Jio’s, Pi Chi style. She had shrimp linguine and I had the Mexican pizza, which was neither Mexican nor a pizza. Smokey Joe’s is actually famous around here. It and a few other restaurants are owned by Amy, a local who lived in the United States for a few years and came back home to open an American restaurant with large plates and a bunch of crap hanging on the walls. The place is decorated with totem poles, a large cigar store Indian and merchandise that is probably offensive to many American Indians. The food is not really American, but it was the closest thing I could find while living in 崙背. We used to go every weekend until we found other places, I got a kitchen at home, I got tired of their burritos and they repeatedly increased their prices while decreasing their serving sizes. A take away burrito used to fill a large paper plate. Now it fits in a standard lunch box and costs twice as much. It probably helps if you know the size of lunch boxes around here. They are small boxes used to hold one’s lunch, equivalent in subject matter if not shape to those folded Chinese take out boxes in the US and nothing like the Land Of The Lost lunchbox I had as a child.

Incidentally, I agree with everyone that the Will Farrell movie was stupid, but so was the original show. The guy who played Will could not act his way out of a trash bag. “Dr Shrinker” was always my favorite. That was one mad man with an evil mind.

At the end of our first date Pi Chi took me to the train station and we waited at Starbucks for my train. This is notable because we never go to Starbucks. Neither of us drink coffee and I am old enough to think that $5 for a cup of coffee is absurd. I think $1 for a 330ml can of Pepsi is pushing it. That would be 12 ounces in 美國英語.

Two years later I took Pi Chi to Paris and proposed. That would be some good alliteration if her name were pronounced that way. She was the first woman I ever proposed to who actually said yes. Though none technically said no, so I am batting a thousand. I assume that is good. 1000 = 100% apparently. I have no idea why 100 does not equal 100 in baseball. No one has ever mistaken me for a sports enthusiast.

Four years later we got married. She wanted to get married on 10/10 because that is a lucky day. I said as long as it was not 12/8 I would be ok. She had no idea what I was talking about. Can I be married to someone who knows almost nothing about John Lennon? Time will tell. She knows who the Beatles are and now knows more of their music than ever before, thanks to me. But George Harrison is her favorite.

We were going to get married on 10/10/06 but she developed some thyroid problems. Half of the people who work at her hospital have or will have cancer. The other half kill themselves. Suicide is a popular recreational activity around here. Pi Chi has told me of many nurses at her hospital who killed themselves because their boyfriend left them, their boyfriend would not marry them or their boyfriend went back to his wife. The men kill themselves when the local KTV closes down. Suicide is not as honorable as it is in Japan, but it is a socially acceptable solution to petty temporary annoyances. When I am finally killed in a traffic “accident”, the police will probably label it a suicide since whoever killed me will blatantly lie about what happened and it is impolite to blame 美國人. Crime investigation here is asking everyone what happened and taking someone’s side.

We eventually chose 10/10/10 because that is a lucky day and pretty easy to remember. But then while we were waiting, society decided that 9/9/99 is the luckiest day of all. By then it was too late. Not because 99 is 1999 but because we had already made an appointment for lucky 10/10 and everybody else wanted super lucky 9/9. The year 99 is 2010 to you and me.

There are at least three ways to get married around here. You can book a banquet room at a famous hotel or restaurant, invite everyone you have ever met, pay US$100 per person for everyone to eat duck face and fish eyeballs, watch people poorly sing KTV on stage and sneak out to sign some papers; or you can put up a tent in the middle of the street, invite everyone you have ever met, pay US$90 per person for everyone to eat duck face and fish eyeballs, watch people and maybe a stripper poorly sing KTV on stage and sneak out to sign some papers; or you can go to the Household Registry Office and sign some papers. We chose the latter. Pi Chi thinks that street tent weddings are tacky. I agree. I think that paying large amounts of money to feed horribly overpriced horrible food to people she barely knows is not fiscally prudent. She disagrees.

It is unlucky to be frugal with weddings. People spend the exorbitant amounts they do so they can brag about how much they spent. This is an impressively materialistic society that gorges on ritual and conformity. Feed everyone pizza and you lose face. Feed them a glazed duck’s ass and you bring honor to your country and family. As long as you paid five times more than it is worth.

If $100 per person does not seem like much to spend at a wedding, consider that even a snob can get a meal around here for less than US$3. Fish eyeballs outside of a wedding cost nowhere near $100. Wedding food is not made from better ingredients or prepared by celebrity chefs. There are no rare delicacies that one cannot find from a street vendor. This is not lobster and caviar versus a Big Mac and onion rings. The pig testicles at weddings are fried in the same way at night markets. The food is simply priced much higher because people want to say they spent much more than their friends. Keeping up with the Chiangs.

I told Pi Chi that we could have a duck face wedding if she pays for it. Apparently that is unlucky. Oddly enough, most of the things she does not want to do turn out to be unlucky. She also does not have that kind of money. Her original guest list was 200. And that was only on her side. My side will probably be a little lower. $100 X 200 = a lot of money. I do not have a calculator handy but that has to be at least $200. Maybe more. If I spent that kind of money on eel rectum for people I will never see again I would have to kill myself. And that would cause undue alarm in the KTV community.

Pi Chi agreed to get married the easy way on the condition that we have a reception at a later date. I agreed to that on the condition that she pay for it. Unless we could do it with far fewer people and at a much more reasonable price. But that would be unlucky. She agreed to pay for the elaborate reception if I pay for the wedding cookies. Wedding cookies are a stupid tradition where the wed give ridiculously overpriced cookies to everyone who will show up at the wedding. The cookies themselves are nothing special and are more like crackers than cookies. The high price comes from the elaborate boxes. The fancier the box the better you are. If your neighbor gives you a fancier wedding cookie box you might as well kill yourself. I could wrap up saltines for a fraction of the price and call them traditional American wedding cookies but then Pi Chi would never be able to speak to her family again.

I agreed to pay for the stupid cookies if we only had to give them to family members who lived in her mother’s house at some point in time. She agreed to that if we had a small dinner for said family some time before the reception. We have not yet negotiated who will pay.

At some time in the near future I will likely find myself in a room full of complete strangers, watching them eat duck face and listening to old people scream into their KTV microphone. I will be completely miserable but Pi Chi’s family will be happy and that is why she wants it. That will make her happy and that is why I will do it. But I swear or affirm to Buddha or any other graven idol that there is no way in hell I am paying for it. Compromise should not require bankruptcy.

We went to the Household Registry Office and signed a few papers. Pi Chi gave them her national identification card and within minutes my name was on the back. Women have the names of their fathers and husbands on their ID cards. There is also a space for the husband’s compulsory military service. That space remains blank on Pi Chi’s ID. I gave them my passport and alien resident card and within minutes they made several copies. My passport is new and not accustomed to being xerographed but the old one was copied more than a “Mighty Pirates” DVD in China.

Once everything was stamped we were legally married. The entire process cost less than US$5. It was only so high because I wanted an English version of the marriage certificate as well as the Chinese version. The entire process took about 30 minutes. It only took so long because I wanted an English version of the marriage certificate as well as the Chinese version. They wanted an American address for the English version so I gave them the address I always use whenever anyone wants an American address. It is a real address and someone with my name lives there. Or at least he did ten years ago. I have no idea if anyone has ever sent anything for me to him but I can only assume that it would be somewhat confusing to receive something from a government agency in Chinese. I have no idea why these people always want an American address from people who do not live there. We could have finished sooner but the clerk had to type up the American address, print out the paper, let me correct it, type it up again, print it out again, let me correct it again, ad tedium.

The English and Chinese versions of our marriage certificate have my local address, not the American address I gave them.

We took no pictures of the blasted event because Chinese wedding photographs are about spending too much money on a photographer at exotic or at least amusing locations. They are usually taken before the wedding and shown at the reception. They have nothing to do with documenting when the chain was attached. So soon I will probably have overpriced photographs of myself in a pink suit and Pi Chi in a white dress in front of some waterfall somewhere, but just like every other time, I have no pictures of the actual wedding day.

Legally wed and with reservations and appointments we were on a plane to the real world within hours.

And it was a woman who married us, but Chinawoman sounds stupid.

Typhoon Day

I have lived here for years. I like to think I understand Chinese people. But then they go a little crazy and I am right back where I started.

Monday was a Typhoon Day. This meant that schools and government offices were closed, trains and buses stopped operating and a lot of people took the day off. My school was also closed. This is both good news and bad news. The good news is that I did not have to drive to work. The bad news is that I will be paid less this month and Pi Chi and I are taking a trip next month. There was another Typhoon Day two Thursdays ago. That one did not even hit us directly. I got to drive all the way to work in the rain only to be told that the school was closed and then I got to drive back home in the rain. We are not paid for Typhoon Days. Less money is not better.

Closing schools and offices makes sense when a large typhoon is headed your way. But there was no typhoon on Monday. Typhoon Fanapi hit on Saturday night and all day Sunday. By Monday it was pretty much gone. It did not even rain much on Monday. There was less of a typhoon on Monday than the distant typhoon on Thursday.

I live amongst people who have dealt with typhoons all of their lives. At least one typhoon hits every year and several usually pass by. We had no typhoons where I grew up. Not even hurricanes. And our biggest Earthquake Day happened after I was already awake and at school. No one ever told us to stay home because an earthquake was coming. Yet I seem to be the only person around here who never freaks out during a typhoon. The locals flood Carrefour and 7-11 to stock up on tiny fishes and stinky tofu. I simply stay home.

I would like to say that people are more paranoid than usual after Morakot. That was only a Category 1 but it caused massive floods and a shitload of damage. The mudslides wiped out an entire village and hundreds of people were killed. But people around here were paranoid about typhoons long before Morakot. They are reactionary but in a different way from Americans.

The level of American panic at an impending hurricane is directly proportional to the amount of damage caused by the last hurricane. Hurricane warnings were not big news immediately before Katrina. After Katina the slightest breeze made headlines. Especially if it was headed toward New Orleans. This weekend CNN yammered incessantly about a young hurricane named Igor heading toward Bermuda. It was a Category 1; the lowest category, with 100-120km/h winds. As of this typing there were no reported deaths that I know of and no serious property damage. Yet CNN covered it like it was a new Lady Gaga dress. I am happily out of touch, but even I know who she is.

At the same time, Typhoon Fanapi, a Category 3 (180-200km/h winds), was tearing through my city. It killed three people as far as I know and destroyed about US$8 million. CNN mentioned it in passing during the weather report.

Typhoons bring a lot of rain and heavy winds but they rarely kill more than a few people at a time. Most deaths are from people stupid enough to drive their scooters in the middle of a typhoon. Most of the buildings that collapse are those sheet metal shacks. I have not ridden a scooter in the middle of a typhoon in years, and that was an accident. I did not know it was a Typhoon Day. And we live in one of those well-constructed buildings. Most of the buildings here are much stronger than anything in the United States. Mostly because at least one typhoon hits every year and the area is subject to earthquakes. In fact, there was a tiny earthquake during Sunday’s typhoon. I heard that it was a 4.4. Hardly worth mentioning.

When I lived in 崙背 the electricity would usually go out for several hours during typhoons. During one super typhoon it was out for over 24 hours. That was more than a little annoying since it is usually very hot and humid during a typhoon and opening windows is not the best idea. But even in my tiny farm village I never worried about the building collapsing, though we did lose a few betel nut stands.

Here in the big city the electricity usually stays on during typhoons. On Sunday it went out for about 15 minutes. That is how I knew it was a big one. The rain was never much of an indication. It rained without interruption all day Sunday, but it has been raining practically every day since June.

My neighborhood is not on a hill. It is neither uphill nor downhill from anything. But on Sunday every neighborhood surrounding this one was flooded. The rest of the county just east of us recorded the most flooding it has ever seen. All the television news programs showed us footage of scooters driving in water up to their knees and blue trucks being washed away. There was no flooding here. Which is strange since it used to flood on our street after an hour of rain. Knowing what I know about the powers that be, I cannot imagine that they did something sensible like put in a drainage system, and if they did it was the fastest and most efficient public works project in non-Japanese Asian history.

When I lived in 崙背 I watched the eye of a super typhoon from the roof of my building. It was impressive and more than a little eerie. When we lived in the three bedroom apartment with a much better view I watched smaller typhoons hit us and larger typhoons pass us by. That was less impressive. But when the largest typhoon that has hit us directly since I have lived in this city strikes, I am in a lower apartment with practically no view of anything. All I could see was the constant rain and occasional lightning. But I have been watching that since June.

I cannot wait for winter and blue skies. Weather permitting.

The Death Of Papa Giovanni’s

Pi Chi and I went to 台北 for the weekend. She had some sort of conference or other and she wanted me to go with her. Ordinarily I am up for a trip to pretty much anywhere except 澳門, but I have been to 台北 too many times to care and this trip, like all Pi Chi trips, required waking up at an ungodly hour. And Pi Chi did not particularly want to go either but she is a member of whatever organization was hosting the conference and she has failed to show up at any of their little meetings for the last two years and she figured she should probably make an appearance lest they think she is as disinterested as she clearly is.

Pi Chi often travels out of city for conferences and meetings and whatever else they do. More often than not that requires taking a very early train. That usually means I have to wake up at an unreasonable hour and take her to the train station. The high speed station is about 30 minutes away. This means that by the time I return home I have been awake for at least 75 minutes and that means going back to sleep is a chore. I might as well stay awake and watch the sun rise. Assuming it ever does.

Whenever Pi Chi goes to 台北 she spends the night. Conferences in 台北 often last more than one day, and even when they are only one day long they usually suck up the entire working day. Waking up before the birds, dragging me out of bed, going to the train station, taking the train to 台北, sitting in a day-long conference, and repeating everything in reverse would be a bit much for one day. Although I think the conference in reverse might be amusing.

Whenever Pi Chi spends the night somewhere she wants me to go with her. And she thinks 台北 is romantic for some reason. I know the reason but I am too much of a gentleman to mention that it is where we first fornicated like wild monkeys. We went to 台北 for shits and giggles and planned on going to 淡水, which is considered a romantic spot by most of the locals. We never went to 淡水, for obvious reasons. It was raining.

Often when Pi Chi takes a day trip somewhere, I cannot go because it interferes with my work schedule. Regrettably, it did not this time. And this was the weekend right after Valentine’s Day. Valentine’s Day is in August around here. And in February, as far as Pi Chi is concerned.

So I agreed to go with her even though I did not particularly want to. This is what married people do. We are not married, but we might as well be. She nags me to take out the garbagie and I go places I have no desire to go. That is marriage.

But I got her to agree with me that going with her at such an unhealthy hour was completely unnecessary since she was heading straight for her conference and we could not spend any time together until much later in the day. She sleeps on the train anyway, only waking to complain that the music from my 500mb MP2 player is too loud. If I cannot listen to music on the train I stare out the window and watch the endlessly repetitive scenery pass by. I have seen it. I have taken this train many times before. I have taken pictures of all the farms. I have taken mov files of the signs flashing by. For my Valentine’s Day present she took a taxi to the train station. Taxis are very easy to get around here. We live on property owned by a large and famous hospital. There are taxis loitering outside at all hours. And the fare to the train station is reasonable.

My initial plan was to sleep as late as possible and get to 台北 no earlier than after she was finished with her conference. But this was Valentine’s Day so I started early.

Whenever Pi Chi goes anywhere she packs entirely too many clothes and a big bag of whatnot at least a day or two before she actually leaves. The last time we left the country she packed a week beforehand. I do not own enough clothes to pack so far in advance. And I would not even if I could. I tend to pack just before leaving. Unless we have to leave at an ungainly hour. Then I may pack the night before. The mystique of packing a suitcase and heading for the airport does nothing for me anymore. I get about as excited getting in the car to go to work.

But I know enough to know that different places require different considerations. Europe in winter requires extra clothes for layering. East Asia pretty much any time of year requires extra clothes since whatever you are wearing at any given time will get wet one way or another. I never wear sunglasses at home, but I always take some with me on any trips to anywhere. After our recent move my good sunglasses, the $5 Thai “Ray Ben”s, went into hiding. Finding them took longer than it would to pack for a trip to Mongolia. I almost never wear hats at home, but I always take one with me on any trips to anywhere. Hats are essential in hot places to keep the sun off your head. My hair may be thinner than it was 20 years ago but there is no unobstructed view of my scalp. And yet my scalp has been burned under African skies. Hats are essential in cold places to keep the icy wind from ripping through your skull like an unrealistic television reality program. East Africa during the rainy season requires an umbrella. Preferably a very strong umbrella. East Asia pretty much any time of year requires an umbrella. In places like 台北 it will rain. Especially if it has been raining since June and at least two typhoons are on the way. It rains in 台北 no matter what the weather is like. I have seen it rain in 台北 without a cloud in the sky.

It did not rain at all during this trip.

But I had no way of knowing that while I was packing all this specialized gear for the big romantic getaway and missing the train I wanted to take. So I rushed to get out the door and on the train. The high speed train is unlike any other train in this country. It is on time. I generally like taking the high speed train. You cannot get on the train unless you have a ticket and if you have a ticket you have a seat. Unlike the low speed trains. They sell tickets until the horse leaves the stable. A seat on an eight hour ride is never guaranteed.

The high speed train is also newer. It is still relatively clean, and far more comfortable than the low speed trains; some of which have cars in which the last emperor of China probably rode. The high speed train cars were made in Japan. In this century. Meaning the last century. We old people still consider the 20th century modern. But the cars are relatively new.

Another quaint fact about old people is that we derive great pleasure from small comforts. My favorite thing about taking the train alone is that I can listen to music on my aforementioned 20th century MP3 player. It is not the latest technology, cannot do my laundry, and has no menu to speak of, but it plays the music that I put on it a few years ago and it is more convenient than carrying around the old victrola. I used to listen to music all the time when I was young and careless, before the burdens and responsibilities of working twelve hours a week aged me prematurely. Now I have no computer on which to play music and my old computer was old with old speakers that just made everything sound old. Especially the old songs. The best stereo system to which I have access is in Pi Chi’s car, and it is hard to hear anything with the constant cacophony of all that horn honking and cursing I do while driving.

I got into 台北 later than I had planned and called Pi Chi as soon as probable. Naturally she did not answer my call. If you know Pi Chi then you probably know about the cute little game she plays where she will answer absolutely any phone call from anyone known or unknown but she will never answer any call from me. I could be strewn about the gutter, holding my severed head in my lap and she would still not answer my call. It is just the sweetest thing.

When Pi Chi eventually called me back she told me that her conference was running late and she wanted to meet me nowhere near our hotel or the train station. Despite getting started early and running late I had more than enough time to wait around. Going to the hotel was not an option as Pi Chi had not yet checked in and I had no idea where it was. She was unimpressed with my choice of hotels the first time we went to 台北 together. It was what you could conceivably call clean by Asian standards and in an excellent location. But Pi Chi is a bit of a snob and prefers to stay in hotels where poor people dare not tread. The good news is that I got to drag my bag all over the place.

If you know anything about 台北 then you know that its roads and “sidewalks” are not always paved or what one would call even. What was a light carry-on bag with wheels an hour ago becomes a Sisyphus stone after walking the streets of 台北. Much of 台北 can be reached by an excellent if reliably inefficient public transportation system. It took the powers that be over ten years to build the MRT, and it was several years behind schedule and dangerously over budget. Conventional wisom has it that much of the money found its way into a few pockets. That is standard operating procedure around here. The MRT at home was only five years behind schedule and a mere 400% over budget. But you have to wait much longer for the trains since few people ride them. At home I can get a seat on any train at any time of the day. In 台北 there are no seats available even late at night. When I first went to 台北 I remember being able to sit down on the MRT from time to time. Now it is like Tokyo’s JR, only the trains are always late and you see far more old men picking their feet on the MRT.

The MRT goes pretty much anywhere you want to go. Except to Pi Chi’s hotel. So we met at 台北101, once the tallest building in the world. If you count spires and antennae. People debated the issue for years, but now the Burj Dubai is so much taller that no one cares. The first time I went to 台北 they were still building 101. The second time I went to the top. It did not seem that high and the view from New York’s World Trade Center was infinitely better. The third time they had put up a steel fence around the outdoor observatory to keep people from jumping off the building. A reasonable precaution in a country where people kill themselves the way Americans eat nachos. But an obstructed view of the unimpressive cityscape below is far less impressive. One can always use the indoor observation deck but one would probably notice all the finger, hand, face and hair stains another one left on the windows. And I like to feel that I am on top of a tall building, not just see it. The Donauturm in Vienna is not especially tall, but when you are on the outdoor deck you feel the building sway back and forth and the wind that makes it sway.

But Pi Chi likes 台北101 because it has an overpriced shopping center where poor people seldom go. So our first official act together on our romantic weekend getaway while we were both dragging around our luggage was shopping. I have known Pi Chi for six years. I know that shopping is her favorite activity, next to telling me to take out the garbagie. We could go to the most cultural, historic, exotic, romantic place in the world and she would judge it on its shopping centers. We could go to Antarctica and she would want to go shopping. It is my own fault that I was surprised.

When we finally made it to Pi Chi’s hotel, which is nowhere near the MRT, I was gobsmacked, as they say in places where people talk funny. I may have mentioned that Pi Chi is a bit of a snob. She likes five star hotels (Asian five star is nowhere close to European five star). She likes shopping in places where you could buy the same thing for half the price if you go where people do not drive sport utility vehicles. She hated my hotel because it was not lucky or popular or whatever snobbish reason she had. But her hotel was a dump. The lobby was renovated. During the Vietnam War. I do not generally care what a hotel lobby looks like and most hotels in this part of the world are usually a few decades behind, but the carpeting in this lobby was damp. The hallway outside our room could have been from a five floor walkup on Delancey Street. The room itself was not the worst I have ever seen, but it was nothing close to Pi Chi’s standards. The biggest surprise was in the bathroom. The less said about that the better. If I had picked this hotel Pi Chi would have insisted on leaving immediately.

After dragging our luggage all over the 100% humidity Pi Chi wanted to take a nap. Knowing her as I do I knew that if she took a nap she would sleep until dinner, eat dinner, and then go to sleep. That is not my idea of a romantic weekend getaway. But it was (Chinese) Valentine’s Day and I have seen pretty much all of 台北 that I care to see. And in my rush to pack and make it to this shithole hotel I wore a shirt that I have not worn in a long time. When you live in a place with constant humidity and almost no indoor sunlight you should avoid wearing anything that has not recently been washed. When we got to the hotel my back was as red as Obama. And in my rush to pack and make it to this dump I did not bring as many changes of clothes as I should have. I was ill equipped to paint the town. And who says naps are not romantic.

The only things we planned for this romantic weekend getaway were a trip to 淡水 and dinner at Papa Giovanni’s. We pissed away most of Saturday so 淡水 would have to wait until Sunday. But Saturday night we could eat at a nice restaurant. Papa Giovanni’s is famous amongst foreigners because it has genuine Italian food cooked by genuine Italians. There are plenty of Italian restaurants around here but most are as authentic as Thai food in Vermont. Papa Giovanni’s was the only Italian restaurant I know in East Asia that was owned and operated by Italians. I have heard about others but I have never been there.

The first time Pi Chi and I went to Papa Giovanni’s we were seated at a quiet corner table. Mrs Giovanni took our order. Pi Chi started talking in Chinese, as is the custom, but Mrs Giovanni told us, in English with a strong Italian accent that she does not speak a word of Chinese. This just made the place better to me. Usually when we eat out Pi Chi does all the talking. This time she pointed on the menu and I did all the talking. Most likely with horrible pronunciation. But Mrs Giovanni understood everything. Except when I tried to ask her if they had 雪碧. I am so used to calling it 雪碧 that I temporarily forgot its English name. So Pi Chi helped. But her Chinese pronunciation was nothing like Mrs Giovanni’s Italian pronunciation. Then I remembered how to say Sprite. We all laughed. That’s old people for you.

The food at Papa Giovanni’s was good. Easily the best Italian food I have ever had anywhere in Asia. Except maybe that Italian trattoria in 澳門. But it closed years ago. Everything about Papa Giovanni’s was good. From that point on we made it a point to always eat at Papa Giovanni’s whenever we went to 台北. And by coincidence or not they always put us at our quiet corner table.

So our big Saturday night romantic weekend getaway dinner was always going to be at Papa Giovanni’s. When we went there something seemed different. The sign above the door said “PaPa Gio’s”. The interior was different, but generally the same. Our quiet corner table was gone. They put us in a room that they probably use for large parties. Middle aged white dudes were eating and talking loudly. One of them wore a chef smock.

Mrs Giovanni did not take our order. A Chinese waitress did. We asked her why everything was different and she told us that the Giovannis retired and moved back to Italy. The entire family left and sold the restaurant to the loud white dudes sitting nearby. We saw no cause for alarm and ordered Italian food in Chinese.

Papa Giovanni’s was a family restaurant. Mrs Giovanni took your order if you were not Chinese. Mr Giovanni made the rounds and played host. Their sons and daughters ran the place and made the food. PaPa Gio’s was different. The owner, manager and chef were there, but they appeared to be off the clock. They were not cooking the food or talking to the customers, but they were definitely talking.

They covered a wide range of subjects that night. They discussed how all Mormons are “racist douchebags”, all Catholics are “baby fuckers”, all “towelheads” are terrorists and that the Sons of Abraham only care about “Jew money and controlling the world”. They discussed their world travels as it pertained to illegal narcotics, comparative prostitution and the best places to vomit after a night of binge drinking. They told one of their Chinese waitresses that they were going to put mirrors on the floor and not let the waitresses wear anything under their short skirts. The waitress did not seem to understand what they were saying, which might be part of the reason they said it. But they must have known that the foreigner sitting two tables away could understand them, as could the few other foreigners in the restaurant. Most of the customers were in a different room, but the loud white dudes were loud enough for all to hear.

I could have stormed out in righteous indignation, but Pi Chi had no idea what they were talking about and we thought that the food would still be good. Plus I was a little curious to see what other crazy shit they would come up with. The food turned out not to be so good. Pi Chi hated the pasta, and Pi Chi loves pasta. She has been to the actual Italy and she freely admits that actual Italian pasta is better than any type of Chinese pasta. If you know anything about Chinese it is that they rarely consider any foreign food better than their own. I got a pizza because Papa Giovanni’s had the best pizza in the country. You can find pizza almost anywhere here, but Chinese pizza is nothing like Italian pizza. No New Yorker would ever recognize a Chinese pizza as pizza. PaPa Gio’s pizza was not as bad as a Chinese pizza, but it was nothing like a Papa Giovanni’s pizza. It was closer to Pizza Hut.

Papa Giovanni’s also had some of the best bread this side of the Himalayas. PaPa Gio’s had the same bread the locals use for toast that you can find in any grocery store. An Italian restaurant with bad bread is like a brothel without those ceramic bowls full of condoms. Don’t act like you don’t know what I’m talking about.

As we left, the loud white dudes were debating whether the David of David and Goliath was the same as King David. Most thought they were different people and one said that he was appointed king right after killing Goliath. In the middle of their colorful and heated discussion one of them broke away from telling another to “suck my dick” and thanked us for coming. I gave him my best what-the-fuck-is-your-problem / rest-assured-we-shall-not-patronize-this-establishment-again, not-that-you-give-a-shit look. I considered telling them about Saul and Michal but thought it best to let them wallow in their secular ignorance.

The other restaurants favored by foreigners are either not to my liking or largely unknown to me. Grandma Nitti’s has been around since before anyone knew who Monica Lewinsky was. They have a good breakfast, but they are too expensive and Pi Chi does not care for their food at all. Several years ago my favorite 台北 bakery took a dirt nap. There are probably still a few good places to eat non-Chinese food in 台北 but I no longer know where they are.

Pi Chi has agreed with me that the next time she goes to 台北 I should stay home.

And we never made it to 淡水.

A Month Of Wet

It rained in June. A lot. I realize that this is the rainy season, but I have lived in this city for about five years and I have never seen it this wet. My county is considered the hottest in the entire country. Typhoons either hit us directly or come pretty close every year and none of them have brought as much rain. I lived a little farther north in a wetter county my first few years in this country. It never rained nearly as much there. There was a category 4 super typhoon during my first typhoon season in the country that ran right over my little town and a category 5 the next year. Neither brought as much rain as this June.

It rained every day in June. It was not a constant Forrest Gump rain. Sometimes it would stop for a few hours, but there was some amount of rainfall every single day. And it was raining every day I drove to work. If you know anything about the way the Chinese drive then you know why this is exceptionally dangerous. It rained almost every day in July, but there were a few relatively dry days and even one or two where one could see the sun.

When I was 8 it rained a lot. It seemed like it rained forever, but it was probably only a few days. I looked it up online and some almanac site said there was 33.44 inches (849mm) of rainfall that year; the most in over 100 years. So maybe my memory is not so exaggerated. That same site said that 2005 was even worse (38”/964mm), but I was not there.

By comparison, we usually get about 1800mm of rain here every year. There are no official figures for this June yet. At least I could not find any in the five seconds I looked. But I found a news article that reported 611mm of rainfall. In one month. That seems like a lot to me. And it rains less here than most counties.

I have been to Thailand during the rainy season. It rains a lot there, too. Bangkok gets about 300mm in September. It is always hot and humid in Bangkok, but I have never seen it rain there as much as it is raining here. I have been to Hong Kong in August, when they get an average of 400mm. It did not rain nearly as much as it is raining here. But Hong Kong’s weather has been odd lately, what with a horrible pollution problem and all that fake climate change the Boston reenactors like to tell you about. The last 10 years have set new records in heat and rain.

One of the foreigners at my school is from England and he said it has rained more here than anything he has ever seen there. I always thought London was a particularly rainy city, but everything I have seen during my brief rainfall research says that there is rarely over 60mm in any given month. That seems piss poor by Asian standards.

There was one day at work when lightning was clearly visible from the classrooms. The reason we saw lightning on only one day is because the buildings here are so close together that one cannot see the sky without standing on the top floor and making an unreasonable effort to look upward. My school is in a small town, but the downtown area likes to pretend that it is a big city. The children reacted much as my class did when I was five years old. Except that these children are all over 10 and they live in a part of the world that sees far more rain and lightning than I did at their age. Their exaggerated reactions to common events never fail to surprise me. Lizards used to enter the classroom every day in the tiny farm village I lived in a few years ago. The children would always scream and panic at first sight. And then their attention was always fixed on the lizard rather than whatever fascinating grammar point I was teaching until it left the room. Mosquitos are the most common pest around here; in numbers probably as numerous as cockroaches and scooter monkeys. And yet every single time one flies into the classroom it gets the students’ undivided attention. When a cockroach enters the room I might as well dismiss the class. I suppose I should be most surprised by my own reactions since their melodramatics are such common events.

In sharp contrast to the predictable reactions of Chinese children, my American adult reactions sometimes even surprise myself. With all the rain there has been a fair amount of lightning. Largely invisible in the classroom, it is noticeable at home and even more obvious on the road. Usually when I drive to work there is lightning somewhere in the distance. After watching it almost every day for over two months it became far too commonplace to warrant a mention. But one day the lightning realized that sparks in the distance were not impressing me and it decided to give me a more interesting show. Instead of ignoring brief flashes from one direction I was looking at bright lights bursting all around me. And the accompanying thunder was so loud that I could hear it over the tunes blasting in the car. I wanted to pull over and watch but I was on the way to work. And I never leave early enough to make time to stop and watch the lightning.

The good thing about driving in constant traffic is that when you drive through a lightning storm there really is no need to worry about your car acting as a lightning rod. There are always plenty of trucks and larger vehicles around me to take one for the team should the need arise. I never got to see that, but while I was at a red light I watched a nearby tree explode like Peter North. It was super cool, as the kids say. I assume some children somewhere say that. I have never been the kind of person who particularly cares about fireworks shows, but watching that lightning tear the shit out of that tree gave me all the oohs and aahs I need to fill my recommended daily allowance.

Another oddity and something that did not really occur to me until late June is that despite all the rain there has been little if any flooding. There was a typhoon last year that killed about a thousand people and left over 100,000 homeless. The agriculture industry is still recovering. Most typhoons kill a dozen or so people. And this was only a small category 1 typhoon. It was unusually dry prior to the typhoon so once the rains came they caused mudslides and floods that did most of the damage. An entire town was wiped off the map by mudslides. It is no more. Pi Chi went there. I have seen pictures.

This year’s month of wet was proceeded by plenty of rain. It did not rain every day in May, but there was more than enough for my liking. One of my concerns when we moved to our current apartment was that the windows do not let in nearly as much light as in our previous apartment. This has not been an issue since there have only been a few sunny days in the entire time we have been here. It has been the opposite of super cool.

Seven Year Itch

It is over. I tried everything I could to fix it, but it simply was not meant to be. I really do not believe that things are meant to be or not, but sometimes it is much easier to tell yourself when something turns to shit that it was not meant to be. And I suppose I cannot say that I exhausted every possible means to fix it. The more I think about it, the more options there probably are. But I am getting older and less willing to put more time and effort into lost causes than I used to be.

I bought my computer before I moved to this strange and exotic land where unbridled selfishness and bridled generosity coexist side by side. Actually, I only bought half of it. My brother and his wife threw the other half into the pot. That was a very good deal for me since I was trying to save as much money as I possibly could to move to the other side of the world. As it turned out I had just enough cash to make it to my first paycheck. We will call it a paycheck for the sake of discussion. Nobody is paid in checks around here. Had I bought my computer by myself I would have had to cash a traveler’s check. I am not really sure why I had traveler’s checks. They seem completely unnecessary now. Bill Gates could walk down the streets around here with whatever he spends on blow each week and he would be completely safe. I use Mr Gates as an example because you have to assume that his addictions are far more expensive than ours and he is not exactly Mr Olympia. A 90 pound Chinese dude could take him down.

I want to say that the computer was good to me, but it was trouble right from the beginning. The first time I turned it on it would not turn on. There was always some problem between the battery and the steam pistons or whatever the battery connects to to make the gears and widgets spin round. It turns out my computer was what people in the know call “refurbished”. I bought a used computer without knowing I was buying a used computer. This meant that in addition to all the problems you get when you buy someone else’s computer, it was older than a new computer would have been. This will be an important point as this riveting tale develops. Believe me, you do not want to just skip to the end. You want to read every little detail from beginning to end so you get the full effect of this topsy turvy, yet literarily oblique and heart-warming story of a hooker with a heart of gold and an abandoned companion monkey for the handicapped who shows her the true meaning of Columbus Day just before her top secret rocket scientist ex-fiance discovers that meteors are heading toward the Moon and that the impact will cause the Moon to collide with the Earth and the only person who can save the bookish college girl’s rags to riches wedding to the prince (of darkness?) is a former professional baseball player turned alcoholic bounty hunter whose mother discovered a cure for Tourette syndrome just before she was shipwrecked on a deserted island that holds strange powers for anyone willing to make a leap of faith and journey into the unknown world of those orange traffic cones. I am thinking Judi Dench as Earth President and Steve Guttenberg as the voice of the caterpillar.

Eventually I found that my computer worked best without the battery. This was not much of an issue at home since I could plug it into the wall, but proved problematic whenever I wanted to utilize its portability as a laptop, or what the kids today call a notebook computer. I have never actually used a computer on my lap, so I suppose notebook makes more sense. But I still call them laptops.

Another consideration is that I lived in a very dirty town for the first few years that I had this computer. Most of the towns around here are dirty. This is a pretty dirty country. I guess after five thousand years of brutal rule by emperors and dictators cleanliness becomes less of a priority. If you take your laptop off your lap and take the battery out you may notice that the innards of your computer are exposed for all the elements to see. A laptop without a battery in a dirty environment soon becomes a dirty laptop. I am no expert on electronical things but I assume that filth and insects having a party inside the computer is not good. So I used to unplug the battery and leave it inside. This is actually a bad idea.

Computers get hot. Laptop computers run hotter than those lapless computers. There is a little sticker on my computer that says it is supposed to run hot and the user, in this case me, should just chill. Ain’t nothing but a thing. I am paraphrasing.

Did you know that the contacts on laptop computer batteries melt easily? They do. Or at least mine did. My computer’s battery was rendered useless by my actions only a few months after I bought half the thing. This was never really an issue since the computer never worked with the battery anyway.

Since this was my first laptop I was not at all familiar with the mouse. When I first got it to turn on I was all like dude. My sister-in-law said, “Yo, Homes. Don’t go all mental and stuff. You’ll get used to it.” And she was right. I took to using that weird laptop mouse like a duck to sweet and sour sauce. And then it broke down on me. The little finger pad that moves the cursor around was fully functional, as they all are when I use my fingers, but the buttons were as useless as earplugs on Buddha’s birthday.

Then I up and got me a virus. This was one of those famous viruses that was doing the rounds so I felt better about it. Then I realized that I was just as stupid as every other dipshit in the world who got the famous virus. Boss Lady’s husband also got the virus and he said he took his computer to some guy somewhere and gave his computer some antibiotics. This presented an interesting dilemma. I could either buy a new computer or let some guy somewhere have my computer for a few days and hope for the best. The first lesson all foreigners learn when they come here is that not a single one of these people can drive to save their lives. The second lesson is that absolutely none of them seem to take any pride in their work. Everywhere I have ever gone I have seen that doing a mediocre job is always good enough. Perhaps the horrid driving, laziness and indifference to the consequences of both are related. I settled on using some questionable bootleg CD from Boss Lady’s husband and it completely wiped out the virus. As far as I know.

Bootleg CDs are a dime a dozen around here. Go to any night market and you will see bins full of CDs, often at prices as low as 10 for $1. A dime is never what it used to be and a dozen is an alien concept. Eggs sell in cartons of ten or less. Or more. But not 12. You can get movies that have not yet come out in American theaters and music CDs by bands that misspell their own names and do not seem to know which songs should be on which albums. I have seen that Tom Cruise movie, “Top Guy”, more times than I can count. Bootleg software is also very popular.

Pi Chi has at least three computers, which is how I am able to make the magic that you are reading at this exact moment in time. None of them have an officially authorized copy of Windows. One of them has a little popup message every time she turns it on that tells her that real Windows is better. Other than that popup her bootleg Windows seems to work just as well. The computer that I am using right now has a bootleg antivirus program that constantly says that the same virus is alive and well. Whenever I tell it to do its job it says it has. The next time I turn the computer on that same virus pops up according to the bootleg software.

My own computer has the latest and greatest of official antivirus software known to humanity. It was not easy to get. One can actually buy legal software around here. It is uncommon, but possible. The hard part was finding what I wanted in English. I would have settled for what I did not want in English. Everything readily available is in Chinese and when I began this quest five or six years ago my Chinese was limited to “how much for special service” and “is there any eel rectum in that”.

I tried to download the official English version of what I wanted but the Internet said no. That could have been because of some virus that was smart enough to keep me from getting what I needed to kill it or it could have been because quite a few websites around here are blocked. I have no idea why an official English antivirus website would be blocked, but poems seldom rhyme in Chinese and reason is subjective.

I just happen to know someone who works for the very same company that makes the antivirus software that I wanted. He said he would send me a copy. A legal copy, I assumed. Unfortunately, he seems to be busier than St Claus on the odd year when the new viagra prescription coincidentally comes in on Christmas day and our frequency of communication trickled down as it often does when people move to the other side of the world. I seem to talk to very few people on that hemisphere these days, and only rarely.

When I went to Korea in the spring or autumn of whatever year that was I thought I might be able to find something in Seoul. After all, Seoul is a hotbed of computer-like activity, as hot beds go. It took some effort but I found something in English in that computer area that you have to walk through that tunnel to get to. You know the one. My concern was that English does not always mean English. It said English in English on the box. I checked for any typos or the obvious mistakes one finds in everything written in English by people who do not know English. It said it was official and had an official seal, but so do many bootlegs. I took a chance and bought it since I never found anything better. When I took it home everything looked English and official. It never worked. I have no idea why. If I used to know then I cannot remember. If it was a bootleg it was the best looking bootleg of anything I have ever seen.

I eventually got my official antivirus software in English from a Best Buy in California. They did not ship it to me. None of those places ship out of the United States. I just happen to know someone who went to California during my antivirus quest and he was as busy as Claus in July when the Mrs is in niddah. It is not who you know but when you know them.

What finally killed my computer was not any virus or battery problem or mouse. My computer actually still works. The problem is that the adapter is dead. If you have been paying attention you know why I cannot use my computer without the adapter. Finding a new adapter has proven impossible* (refer to the opening paragraph). It seems that my adapter was made about ten years ago. They simply do not make them in that size any more. I can get an adapter locally with the correct volts and amps but it will not physically plug into my computer. I can get an adapter to the adapter online, but the two sizes that seem to be available with the correct volts and amps are not the right size for my computer. The person I spoke to who seemed to be the most knowledgeable about these things said that it is generally assumed that nobody has a computer that was made ten years ago. Not in the laptop variety at least.

I can use one of Pi Chi’s largely illegal computers and keep searching in vain for a used 10-year-old adapter or I can get a new computer. The problem with buying a new computer is the same as buying anything else around here. Getting Windows in English legally will be difficult. My Chinese is better than it was six years ago, but if I know anything about computers it is that wacky shit will happen. Sometimes it is hard enough to interpret English messages when it happens. I do not think anyone teaches a course on wacky computer shit Chinese. Pi Chi’s probably illegal computer was nice enough to prove my point and did some wacky shit while I was typing the part about Korea. It did things I have never seen before on any computer in any language and I pushed enough buttons to stop it. I have no idea what happened or how I fixed it. Which only means I have no idea what to do the next time.

Finding Windows in English is only half the battle. Once I did I would have to install it myself. If I let the computer people install it they would do their usual half-assed job. I installed Windows 95 on a computer 100 years ago. It took a very long time. I assume whatever the latest version of Windows is takes longer. Since it is new and improved maybe it is faster. Somehow I doubt it. If installing Windows Today is anything like installing Windows 95 then I know the Chinese computer shop guy will simply click yes to everything or no to everything. Neither is probably in my best interest. There will also be other options that he does not understand and he will just click at random. And the installation will probably be incomplete so I will have constant issues for the life of the computer. Installing it myself is the only option. My complete lack of faith in Chinese professionals is not mere cynicism. It comes from experience.

Another point to consider is that the computers here are crap. Everything is made in China anyway but what they make for the Western market is of much higher quality than what they make for Asia. All the Chinese on the keyboard does not bother me since I never look at teh kyebroad wehjn I tipe anjwey. But the quality bothers me. It is like playing on a Playskool instead of a Steinway. My old powerless Chinese American laptop has a sweet keyboard. The Chinese Chinese keyboard that I am typing on now reminds me of an old 10-key calculator I used when I worked at a bedroom furniture manufacturer in Lynwood. That place was about 30 years behind the times then.

The good news about getting a new computer is the same as it always is when you leave behind a 10-year-old computer. My late computer has a 40GB hard drive, 512MB memory. That was pretty good 10 years ago. Every time I plug anything into a USB port I get a message that says, “This device can perform faster.” Sadly, it cannot. The USB port is 10 years old. When I play CDs on the computer it is not really what you might call CD quality. And DVDs are hilarious. If you like the Keystone Kops.

I was using Word 2000. There was nothing wrong with it, but now that I have seen the newest version, or at least the newest Chinese bootleg version, I am a little perplexed by all the bells and whistles. There are icons that might as well be in Chinese. And more than a few that are.

I have thought about buying a computer online. Buying a computer online seems strange to me. Like renting a car to buy a new car. I have never been much of an online shopper. None of the American manufacturers or retailers that I have looked at ship internationally. Pi Chi and I will be taking a trip soon. I am thinking about getting a new computer then. English Windows might still be a challenge but at least I should be able to find it in a language I am more comfortable with than Chinese. Pi Chi routinely tells me that I should have bought a computer when we were in South Africa last year. I could live with the improper British spelling but my time machine is still in the shop. I am letting Chinese repairmen work on it so it might be a while.

Little House In The Big Woods

I cannot for the life of me remember how many times I have moved. We moved when I was two years old, but I have no memories of that. I have vague memories of the little house I lived in for the first two years of my life, but those could be memories of photographs I have seen of the house. We stayed in the house I remember most from my childhood for a long time. Until we started moving again. This is the house my sisters and I were accused of trying to burn down. We could have for all I know, but they say we did not, and they were always older than I, so I am inclined to take their word for it. There is also a far more likely suspect. When an angry crime has been committed and your main suspects are a four-year-old child and a violent sociopath, you should probably rule out the four-year-old.

This is the house where I never had a bedroom. I slept in a bedroom until I was six years old, but I slept in a sleeping bag inside a closet. This did not seem unusual at the time. And we were not even Irish. It is only when you become an adult that you realize how bizarre childhood is. Not that my siblings had it much better. They slept on beds in bedrooms, but their bedrooms were also the only entrances to other rooms. This was not a house designed for privacy.

One day when I came home there was a fancy new bed in the living room. I was told it was a gift to me from my mother. This was very unusual. The bed stayed in the living room for a long time. At age six I was not the Herculean specimen that I am today. Moving a bed from one room to another was beyond my power. Getting someone else to do it was even less likely. Eventually the bed was moved to the garage. That is where I slept until we moved out of the house. Sleeping in a garage without insulation is not the exciting boy scout adventure it seems. Fortunately, we did not live in Minnesota. The garage was also never cleaned. Ever. Most of what I know about entomology I learned as a child.

This is also the house that had one bathroom for about 50 people. The less said about that the better.

This house had a large front yard, which was the perfect place for children to run around sprinklers. And it was large enough to hold all the bloody bits and pieces of a litter of kittens that had been violently torn apart. The house was on a very wide residential street on which our cats loved to sleep. We found more than a few of them dead as the day they were born. I do not remember a single driver ever stopping after running over our pets. On one occasion I was in the living room eating a bowl of Sugar Smacks when we heard about a dead cat in the street. We went out to take a look and I got a good view of the cat’s brains spread out in a tire pattern. It looked a lot like the Sugar Smacks. The rest of the cat’s body was intact. The car ran over only its head. When I went back in I tried to finish my cereal but was unsuccessful. I have never eaten Sugar Smacks since.

But the best part of this house was the backyard. It was huge. There was a large walnut tree in the middle of the yard that we used more for climbing than picking walnuts. We let most of the walnuts rot on the ground. We were never the smartest people in the world when it came to grocery management. There was also a very large brick barbecue grill near the tree. I only remember it mostly broken apart, but according to old photographs it was once an impressive outdoor kitchen. My friends and I would always try to climb higher up the tree than each other. All of them fell out of that tree at one time or another. I never did. One of them fell on a mangled brick and concrete wall. I do not remember if he broke anything, but his back was badly cut.

I vividly remember the day we moved out of this house. I walked through the rooms when all of our crap was finally removed and thought it strange to see the house I had lived in for almost all of my life completely empty. To this day I have lived in this house longer than any other.

Once the moving began it never really ended. We lived in several houses before I went to high school. We were in one for about seven months. What I remember most about this house was that it had air conditioning. I thought this was the greatest thing in the world. I would not see such an electronic marvel again until my first year at college. The air conditioning came in handy because this was an unusually hot summer. I spent most of the summer drinking a soda called Aspen. It was an apple flavored drink made by Pepsi that boasted the most caffeine and sugar. That might be why they discontinued it. I think Aspen was my gateway drink to Mountain Dew. I loved Aspen until it left me and I lived off Mountain Dew until drinking it interfered with living.

I got my first taste of apartment living just before high school. The building called the unit we were in a townhouse, but it was really a large apartment. The benefit to living in an apartment was that we had access to something I never thought we would ever have; a swimming pool. It was not at all private and at one point the building manager put a fence around it, making it impossible to run around and jump into, but it was still a swimming pool.

When I went to college I lived in at least three or four different apartments. Two of them were in the same building and had not only a swimming pool but also a hot tub. A hot tub is a very good thing to have when you are in college. This and driving a van in high school did more for me with the ladies than my hunger strike physique and sarcastic indifference.

After college I moved pretty much every time I changed jobs. I would usually try to commute only to give up and move. And then repeat the process for the next job. Sometimes I would grace relatives with my delightful presence. If it is any consolation I reaped the karmic rewards when Pi Chi’s sister lived with us for a year.

Eventually I moved to the other side of the world, where everybody walks on their hands and hamburgers eat people. This curtailed my moving habits considerably. I have mostly lived in two cities the entire time I have been here, not counting the first few weeks before I found a job. I stayed in the little farm village for almost three years. That is longer than I lived in most apartments in my own country. From there I lived in Pi Chi’s apartment for about a year. With her younger sister.

The difference between Pi Chi’s sister’s freeloading off Pi Chi and my freeloading off my relatives is that Pi Chi’s sister had a job the entire time she lived with us. She then made and continues to make more money than Pi Chi and I combined. Although that does not say much. She also makes more money than Pi Chi, Pi Chi’s second sister, Pi Chi’s second sister’s husband and I combined. She also drives a very expensive car that she could sell if necessary. But she would never need to because her parents own a relatively new and sufficiently spacious house with enough spare rooms for her and other wayward adult children if the need ever arises. Also unlike me, Pi Chi’s younger sister has a healthy relationship with her parents and has spoken to them in the past ten years.

I moved into Pi Chi’s apartment the day I left my first school. I did not have a job and was in no hurry to find one. After working six days a week I wanted to take some time off. This is not as easy as it seems when you live in a country where your residency is predicated on your employment. I have also noticed that no matter where in the world they are, most women are not thrilled when their man has no job. But when I got back on that horse I found myself working 45 minutes away from Pi Chi’s apartment. A 45 minute commute in the real world is nothing. Around here it is like slowly peeling off a layer of skin from your entire body in one motion while peddling a unicycle with one toe and juggling Fabergé eggs. On a moonless night while wearing sunglasses. During a typhoon. While you have malaria.

In order to take Pi Chi’s car to work I had to wake up at the crack of ungodly early and take her to work. After my work I had to go to her work to take her home. This is logistically very easy, but annoying when you consider that she works days and I work nights. We both had to wake up early and get home late every day. She had to wait around her work for about five hours, which only meant that she would do more work. Off the clock. This kind of thing is not rewarded in her country. It only encourages the people in charge to create more and more work. I had to wake up about ten hours before I had to go to work. If it sounds like slacker whining to complain about waking up early in the morning, try waking up ten hours before you have to go to work every day and see how your day goes.

I tried to find an apartment closer to my work, but Pi Chi and I would have lived apart since there is no way in hell she is ever going to live anywhere near the tiny town where I work. Pi Chi is a bit of a snob and can only live where rich people might conceivably live. Even though she has never been rich. There are no rich people in the town where I work. No rich person could ever live there without losing face. It also might be impossible to find an apartment in that town.

But it was very easy to find an apartment closer to Pi Chi’s work. Her hospital owns two separate apartment complexes right next to the hospital. The older complex is full of older buildings where hospital staff live. We looked at a few apartments there and hated them. Pi Chi hated the fact that none of them would ever impress anyone and I hated the fact that they all sucked like a drunken prom date who is about to vomit.

The second complex is much newer and nicer. And more expensive. It consists of four buildings. One is used as a temporary hotel for relatives of patients. Another is supposedly going to be a hotel. Some day. This country is littered with empty apartment buildings that the owners would rather see empty than rent or sell for a lower price. There are also more than a few buildings that no one seems to know what to do with. So someone comes along with a rumor about what it will eventually become and everyone accepts it as fact. The old condemned telephone company building across the street from Pi Chi’s old apartment is going to be a shopping mall. Some day. That is what they told her when she bought the apartment 15 years ago.

Two of the apartment buildings in the newer hospital apartment building complex are actually used for apartments. I was told they only had three-bedroom apartments so that is what we looked at. The first thing I noticed in all of the apartments was light. Chinese people are deathly afraid of sunlight. They cover themselves like non-French Muslims from head to toe when they go to the beach. They walk with umbrellas on moderately sunny days. And they all cover every inch of their windows. Most of the apartment buildings I have seen here have small windows. I am not even sure why they have them at all since windows are obviously festering portals of evil sunlight. But the newer hospital apartments had large windows. In every room. Sunlight was penetrating those apartments from every direction like a teenager lucky enough to have a drunken prom date who is about to vomit. The first thing Pi Chi said was that we would need to buy curtains. I told her that was simply not going to happen. I found the one building in the country where I do not have to turn on the lights in the daytime. Since it was high enough to be above the surrounding buildings I saw no reason to cover those windows. Unless Superman flies by, no one will ever be able to see in. And Superman almost never comes here.

The newer hospital apartments also had another rarity in these parts. They had real kitchens. Every other apartment I have seen in this country has at best a half-assed kitchen. It is usually a sink and maybe a stove against one of the walls. Even the nicer apartments where the “rich” people live have shitty kitchens. But these were real kitchens. Not only were they separate rooms but they also had more counter space than any kitchen I have ever had in any country. When I saw these kitchens and the windows I knew we were going to live in one of these apartments, regardless of how unlucky the address might be or where the bad spirits are or whether there was good 風水 or not.

By living very close to her hospital, Pi Chi could walk to work and I could take her car without having to wake up at any particular time. We assumed that selling her old apartment would help pay for everything. What we failed to realize is that this country is littered with empty apartment buildings that the owners would rather see empty than rent or sell for a lower price. It is very much a buyer’s market, and none of the buyers are very interested in her apartment. It is not fancy and it is nowhere near anything interesting. Pi Chi hopes it will be worth something when they build that new shopping mall across the street. I think it will be worth something when the sea rises enough to make it beachfront property. Unfortunately, no one around here wants to live near the beach. Too much sunlight.

Now I have moved yet again. It turns out there are one-bedroom apartments in this complex. I could have saved a small fortune if someone had told me that a few years ago. Or at least enough to take a nice vacation. We have decided that it might be a good idea to save money. Try as we might, we cannot get much younger and the older we get the closer we are to the shit hitting the fan. I can only work up to a certain age in this country and old people are treated like lepers here anyway. Poor people are not treated any better in my country. When Pi Chi retires she gets an impressively small check. When I am forced out because old people should be neither seen nor heard I get nothing.

The best way to save money as far as I know is to make more and spend less. Pi Chi will never make more. She is a nurse. They are underpaid everywhere in the world. She is a seasoned veteran in management at her hospital and already making more than they are willing to pay. I can only make more money if I go back to some tiny farm village. There is no way I can do that and live with Pi Chi at the same time. Spending less money is even more difficult. Pi Chi is physically incapable of saving money. She has had the same steady job for over 15 years and I recently saw her bank statement. She had less to show for those 15 years than I make in a single day. And what I make in a day would not impress anyone. I am our only hope of ever saving any money. So you know we are screwed. I only spend money on rent, food and gas. As long as I drive to work I need to buy gas. Food here is very cheap and what I spend each month is less than I would spend in a few days in the real world. Rent is the only thing I can cut back on.

We paid sweaty manual laborers about NT10,000 to haul all of Pi Chi’s crap from her old apartment to the three-bedroom twenty minutes away. That is about 4,000 Mexican pesos. They had to use a large truck with a crane. I drove all of my crap over in her car. In one trip. By comparison, one of the few people who will ever read this blog paid sweaty manual laborers about NT5,000 to haul his crap, his wife’s crap and his young daughter’s crap to a completely different county. If I have told Pi Chi a million times, I have not told her enough, but she has too much crap.

When we moved from the three-bedroom to the one-bedroom Pi Chi found a good deal and only paid the sweaty manual laborers about NT7,000 (3,000 pesos) to move most of her crap to the one-bedroom and some of her crap to the old apartment. Not counting all of the crap I broke my back moving in the week I broke my back moving her crap. We only had a week to move because Pi Chi loves few things more than doing everything at the last minute. We had access to the new apartment for about a month before we started moving and we have had access to her old apartment for years. I could not move anything to the old apartment until the last week because the building decided to change the locks on the elevators and never bothered to give us the new key. This proved to be a more difficult operation than one might assume. I could not move anything to the new apartment until Pi Chi cleaned it which, true to form, she only wanted to do at the last minute. If you have ever lived in rented apartments around here you know that the previous tenant probably trashed the place. I think it is considered unlucky to clean an apartment when you leave. Or at least a dishonor to the spirit voices in your head. I could have simply cleaned the new apartment sooner, you say. You obviously do not know Pi Chi. It is not clean until she says it is clean. Ironically, her standards of clean are much lower than mine. Have nightmares about that if you dare.

So we went from a three-bedroom to a one-bedroom in the same building. Everything is the same style, but smaller. The kitchen is much smaller and not nearly as impressive. All that counter space is gone. The windows are just as big, but now we face another building. So now we have curtains to keep out the evil sunlight. Gone is the extra bathroom. I think one of the reasons Pi Chi and I are still together is that we have never had to share a bathroom. Until now. Time will tell how well that works.

We have lost the spare bedroom. In the three-bedroom apartment we used one bedroom as a bedroom, conventional as we are. Another bedroom was an office of sorts. Meaning it had all of our computers and all of Pi Chi’s research materials. And they needed their own room. I have the same small laptop computer I have had since before I left the real world. Everything about it is out of date, but if I buy a new one here it will have a Chinese keyboard and getting an English version of Windows will be difficult. I have enough experience with local service personnel to know that they will do their usual half-assed job and I will have to waste too much time and energy dealing with the consequences of their lust for apathy. And I know that Windows sucks fat ones, but that is what I still use.

Pi Chi has three or four computers. They all serve a different purpose and some are owned by other people and organizations. Her research sometimes requires her to have multiple computers in multiple locations. It also requires a large collection of medical journals, in many of which she has articles published, most of which I translated, in few of which am I credited. But some of my photographs have been published in said journals. For some reason this is not on my CV. And I am probably not credited with those either.

What was once quietly tucked away in a bedroom is now in what I assume is meant to be a dining area. We rarely dine anyway.

The third bedroom in our three-bedroom apartment was used as a guest bedroom. Almost all of our guests were relatives of Pi Chi. They usually stayed in our apartment because it is very close to her hospital. Whenever anyone Pi Chi knows needs to go to the hospital they go to hers. The great thing about universal healthcare is that it is dirt cheap and nobody goes bankrupt from hospital bills or dies because they cannot afford a procedure. The bad thing about it, at least around here, is that everyone seems to go to the hospital for every little thing. Most of the people in the emergency room at Pi Chi’s hospital are there because of traffic accidents. The second largest population are there for minor headaches and coughs. These people go to the hospital if they sneeze. This makes any hospital visit a lengthy ordeal. Unless you happen to know a head nurse whom the chief of staff has a crush on. More about that later. I go for a state-required physical once a year. Having Pi Chi there cuts my waiting time down drastically.

I say that we moved into the one-bedroom to save money, and that was always my primary motivation, but eliminating the ability of Pi Chi’s family to spend the night was not a completely uninfluential factor. Most of them live within a thirty minute drive anyway. Why do they need to spend the night. Now they can go to the hospital from home like everyone else. Or stay at the hospital’s patient hotel.

But in the rare event that anyone wants to visit me, all is not lost. We no longer have an extra room, but now we have an extra apartment. Since no one showed any interest in buying Pi Chi’s old apartment during the two and a half years it was on the market we have decided to use it as a storage space. Try as she might, and believe me she tried, Pi Chi cannot fit all of her crap into this one-bedroom apartment. If anyone comes from out of town we cannot offer a spare room, but we can offer a spare three-bedroom apartment in a secure building (by local standards) with a fully functional kitchen(like area), air conditioning in most of the rooms (an absolute must), a bed, plenty of couches and chairs, a full dining room set, free parking (a rarity around here), a pool (usually empty), and boxes of crap we could not fit into our apartment. I plan to move more crap in when Pi Chi is not looking. The spare apartment is conveniently situated between two 7-11s. As is every other apartment. And there is a brand new KTV across the street next to the abandoned telephone company bulding. I have no idea if they offer special service but I am sure the drinks are watered down and overpriced. Mountain Dew is available nearby.