Today after school I took a nap, slept 30 minutes too long, then woke up to read some disturbing news from Austria. While I was reading this my new friend Chris called me and asked me if I want to hang with him and some sister at a coffee shop and maybe get something to eat. Nope, I had to study, plus I was a still a little groggy from my nap and disturbed by the news I had just read.
But a few minutes after his call I found myself pacing the sidewalk outside a little food shop where I wanted to eat, turns out I'm hungry. "Wait a sec, why eat alone when I can associate with my brothers?" So I called him. No answer. Then I called him again a few minutes later, while I was calling him he was calling me back from the first call so I had to call him a third time. Don't you hate that? At any rate I asked him if I could change my mind. Of course, meet him at Guaning station he said, exit 4. OK, that's just two MRT stations away. Within 5 minutes I was on the MRT, sitting in a chair, a rare thing, on my way to Guaning, or whatever it's called. He wasn't there when I got there, but I called him and he came out of a Starbucks right around the corner, that I still couldn't see. As we were going in we met the sister that he was meeting, a sister that I had met the first day I came to Taiwan. Of course I couldn't quite remember her name, so she reminded me Yukari, she remembered mine, but tonight Chris gave her a new name in English anyway, Jen or Jennifer. Even though she already had an English name, Liz, and a Japanese and Chinese names. I asked Chris if it was legal to just randomly give people names whenever you felt like it. He said his randomly given Chinese name was on his official Visa paperwork, so I guess so.
Throughout the next 3 hours or so, over empty coffee cups, and my empty cheese cake plate, we talked about many things. The purpose of this meeting was to exchange American and Japanese music I guess, each of them had mixed CDs for each other. Jennifer, as I will never call her, has very good English, she lived in Canada for awhile, she told us many things we never knew about Japan. A country and language that Chris is especially interested in. Like for an example, tattoos are not popular in Japan, if you have one you are not allowed in the public baths and spas, you are associated with some sort of Mafia. Liz and I extracted as much as we could out of Chris about his girl back home and his plans, which was fun and sweet to hear his cute little story. Then we talked about hugging, cultural hugging, Japanese don't hug their friends of either gender. Yukari does but she's been a little bit westernized as they say, and even though we talked about it, none of us got any hugs tonight. American men don't usually hug or touch each other we told her, but they are more likely to touch and hug women than each other, and women hug and touch each other we told her.
We also talked about phone witnessing and the different responses in Japan, the States, and Taiwan, there is certainly a common thread throughout the world with some small differences.
After midnight a Starbucks employee came up the stairs and told us, and some other people there, something I didn't understand in Chinese, but we figured it was time to go. Lot's of places have an upstairs here, like MacDonalds, KFC, Starbucks.
Stepping out onto the sidewalk reminded me that I was in Taipei again, Starbucks is air conditioned, so it's warm and humid and pretty smelly once you step outside, thrusting you back to reality. Sometimes you can forget you're in a warm smelly city somewhere in Asia.
Chris and I decided to walk home instead of taking the MRT a mere two stops, maybe only a mile, and we both live in the same area. We waved good-bye to Jen, who had kept us so entertained with her inside knowledge of Japanese culture, she walked back into some alley to get her scooter. Chris and I walked for a few blocks chatting about Japan, Liz, and Taiwan. Then a scooter with a tall masked woman pulls up in front of us, I wondered why she was looking at us. It was Yukari with one of those Taiwanese face covering masks on. She told us we were walking south, the wrong way, she had wondered why she hadn't seen us from the road and then realized that she had pointed us in the wrong direction.
Hahah, we laughed thanked her and about-faced, waving goodbye to Jen again and making excuses to each other why we hadn't known we were going the wrong way in a place that we both should have known. Buildings all look the same, internal compass doesn't work here, MRT turns you around, perfectly understandable. Then Chris commented on the Graffiti that you see here, everywhere in the world, Graffiti everywhere, it used to mean something he told me. I asked rhetorically: "Who does it? Why? Why?" While we pondered these deep questions of life, it started to rain. I had considered bringing my umbrella, but decided against it. Oh well, the rain was kinda warm anyway.
Of course no social evening hanging out with your buddies is complete without having talked about girls, so we talked about girls in the rain until we came to Chris's turn, shook hands the parted ways.
I still had about 6 blocks to go, some covered, but most not, I ran, then I walked, I didn't want to slip and hurt myself on the dark empty streets alone. From now on I'm going to to take that umbrella with me. Or maybe not. (edit 321) Permalink