A long day

This morning I arrived in Taiwan. I booked this flight because it left at night (12:30am) and arrived early in the morning (6:05am), so that if I slept on the 13-hour trip I would wake up well-rested with a whole day ahead of me. Actually, the flight was more like 15 hours because of some headwinds, and for reasons having to do both with physiology and the design of commercial aircraft seats, I didn't sleep for more than about an hour at a time. But I think I did spend about 12 hours total fading in and out of sleep, waking up just long enough to relieve a sore limb from the task of supporting my head. In the morning the flight attendants came around with Chinese porridge or French toast, but I decided to stick with the cheddar, dried cherries, and candied almonds platter that Mom gave me right before she and Dad drove me to the airport.

Customs, the bus ride to Taipei, and then the taxi ride to the apartment (thank you Wilfred, Fong, and Stefan!) were uneventful and pretty easy. The tricky part was convincing my inner clock that I had a whole day ahead of me. After unpacking, I sat down and started to make a grocery list, when I had the familiar nagging sense that I was wasting the afternoon, despite the fact that it was hardly after 10am. It's about 6:30pm as I write this, and it just recently got dark, but I keep thinking to myself that it's 10pm and wondering when they're going to kick me out of this coffee shop.

Almost nobody I've met or talked to so far speaks much more than a few words of English. In a way, this is ideal, because it forces me to rely on my Chinese. But it's also shown me clearly the considerable limits of my Chinese, in particular the limits of my comprehension. I've for the most part been able to figure out how to say what I need to say, but almost invariably the response contains so many words I don't know that I can only guess at the meaning or infer it based on nonverbal cues. As anybody who has traveled to a place where they don't really speak the language will report, it can be frustrating and tiring when it's a challenge just to do a simple thing like order food or find an address. The only way to keep it from becoming overwhelming (it's my first day so this is really just a preliminary musing) is to make it fun somehow. Luckily, most of the people I've talked to so far--or attempted to talk to--have been tolerant, patient, and good-humored.

I came expecting it to be difficult to find vegetarian food. I was even ready to rely totally on grocery shopping and to cook for myself. But I've been to two restaurants today where I walked in and told them I'm a vegetarian, and in both of them they were easygoing about it and came up with some delicious food with no traces of meat apparent (OK, one of them did have shrimp in it). As soon as I buy a new camera cable I'll upload a picture of dinner.

Because I didn't really have a "good night's sleep" (I think Orwell is starting to influence my thinking about the use of quotation marks) between taking off Sunday night and arriving Tuesday (where did Monday go!?) morning, I don't feel like there's the same boundary-marker between Sunday and today that I normally feel between one day and the next. What happened on Sunday, on the other side of the ocean, feels sort of like it happened in what is still today. But where it happened--and the fact that it happened in a place that I have no reference to in my current location, that is, I can't imagine the path from here to there--makes it seem almost imaginary. My mind can't quite wrap itself around this weird conjunction of temporal closeness and spatial inconsistency.

I think I've been in this coffee shop long enough, so I'm going to wrap this up.