We tried to get back to sleep and failed miserably. It is now around five in the morning, and we’ve made the executive decision (since decisions made by executive are usually more interesting) to give up. We’ll probably crash by midday but we’ll cross that bridge when we drive over it.

Instead of sleeping, we read. I finished the first of three books I brought on vacation. Idle time during vacations gives me the latitude to read as much as I want. I don’t know why I don’t feel that way when I’m home. It must come back to the distractions. When I’m abroad or traveling, there are fewer distractions, more time with my own thoughts and things that I want to talk about. When I’m at home, distractions surround me and I have few interesting topics. I wish vacations gave me permission to create, but that would be asking too much. Except for my daily tidings report, I’ve been quiet with nothing wandering the corridors of my sleep-fried brain. I’ll eat some yummy caffeine later in the week when we spend some time in one of the many coffee shops around here and see what pops out.

Quest: write a vignette based on nothing I know by researching. After finishing The Fortress of Solitude, I realized that there was no way the author could have known about everything he wrote (if he did, he’s had one incredibly dense life). He must have done a lot of research. By the way, the book was good, but the first third (it was divided into three sections, the first being the longest and the second lasting only a chapter) was much better than the latter parts. The author switched voices, and the new voice complained too much for the reader, or at least this reader, to enjoy. I now know what Doolies was talking about when she mocked the first draft of the FBT and made me change it to create a less pathetic protagonist. The author also developed a music fetish in the later parts, spending countless pages describing the evolution of music, particularly blues and R&B, which bored the hell out of me. But the book is still worth reading, if you’re looking for a beautiful betrayal of childhood in 1970-80s Brooklyn.

I jotted down a few notes of what I wanted to talk about today. Yesterday, a few ideas escaped me during the day. I’ve said it before but it bears repeating: I have a terrible memory. I’ll think of an interesting or funny story that I want to share, and ten minutes after I think about it, it vanishes into the ether. That’s why I started carrying around the Moleskin again. Not to write in it—I’ve long since discovered that writing my words in longhand takes too long, with the slow writing and the electronic transcribing, and doesn’t save me anything. Instead of writing prose, I’ve started jotting down ideas that I want to write about. (I think I might have attempted this once before. I seem to have to try things repeatedly until they finally stick—like giving up television, or video games, which I’m still in the process of doing.) The last few days, I’ve had lots of energy to write, but nothing to say. If had remembered any of the clever ideas, my trip description might have been longer and more interesting. Yeah. That was funny to me also. Imagine that: long and interesting. I slay me!

After waking up at 5am this morning, we rolled out of bed at around 8am to start our day. We went to a wonderful bakery where we bought rolls and sandwiches for breakfast, and flavored milk. Until this morning, I didn’t even know there was such a thing. Flavored milk comes in regular milk containers but, here’s the twist, they add a flavoring. This morning, Doolies bought Apple Milk and (what we think was) Orange Milk. We weren’t sure about the second one since Doolies’s command of the written Chinese language is, well, I don’t want to reveal all her deficiencies, but to give you an idea, she reads Chinese almost as well as I speak Spanish. The Apple Milk (I’ve decided to capitalize the name since it’s so strange I don’t know what to do with it) was quite tasty. It didn’t taste like apple juice mixed with milk, which would have been nasty. Instead, it tasted like milk with an apple aftertaste. It’s hard to explain, but a fascinating experience. The Orange Milk was a little less refined. Its aftertaste was more like the orange drinks that I used to buy in school. I’m not sure if anyone remembers, but the drinks came in small, plastic bottles with a foil top, cost twenty-five cents, and contained orange- (orange colored), or cherry- (red colored) flavored sugar water. If you take that sugar water and add milk, you’d end up with Orange or Apple Milk. My pastry, a buttery scone-type pastry with a yummy chocolate filling, was delicious, as was my fried pork sandwich. They cut the crusts off all the sandwiches, which wasn’t a big deal for me, but since Doolies abhors crusts, she thought it was the greatest thing since, well, since sliced bread (I’m sorry, I had to go there—there was a armed cliché guard that wouldn’t let me not go there).

I know I’m focusing on food, but one of the biggest experiences I’ve had so far has been the food. Taipei has, if nothing else, a tremendous variety and amount of places to eat. There are food vendors in carts on almost every block and no two of them sell the same food. While walking around today, we visited an outdoor market, which reminded me of markets in Paris. Storefronts along three long blocks displayed their wares outside the sidewalks. There was raw fish, chickens (and, yes, I stayed away from all dead birds—the NY Times Sunday Magazine article on avian flu in Asia scared the crappies out of me. Luckily, there were no live birds to run away from), tremendous varieties of cooked and raw foods, clothing, jade, chotskys, school supplies, you name it, they were hocking it. I took some pictures, but you’ll have to wait for those as well.

We spent the rest of the day wandering the streets around the condo. There is plenty to see here, since the condo is in a central part of Taipei—don’t ask me which central part, since the geography, like most geographies, confuses me, but there are plenty of stalls, stores, malls, subways, and vendors in the neighborhood. While it rained a bit when we started out this morning, by midmorning, the sun burnt through the clouds and warmed the day into the balmy 70s. We would have walked more but I finally figured out why so many people wear surgical masks while walking around or riding their mopeds. Taipei, while generally a clean city, has an awful problem with pollution. The smoke put out by the mopeds, the cars, and industries clogs the city and makes breathing difficult. The overhanging buildings, which line most streets, allowing the pedestrians cover from the rain but trapping smog, exasperate this. It doesn’t help that mopeds have no problem driving up on the sidewalk to either park or cross traffic, releasing their noxious fumes into the semi-enclosed space. After a few hours of walking, we decided we needed a break. I recommended an oxygen bar, but they haven’t evolved far enough to open those. Taipei is still at the coffee house on every other block stage. (As a side note, the coffee shops appear to have replaced the yummy bubba-tea shops that Doolies promised me. We’ve not found one place that sells the tea with tapioca balls.)

Buddhism is an important religion in Taiwan. As far as I have been able to tell, there are no bums or beggars in Taipei. Instead, there are Buddhist monks walking around in their orange outfits collecting money. My theory, and this is just a theory for now, is that these monks, who obviously know Kung Fu since, as far as I’ve learned from Hollywood and Hong Kong movies, all monks know Kung Fu, act as a gang to keep regular beggars off the street. Whenever one tries to make his move on a Buddhist monk’s territory, they meet the fists of fury or crane technique followed by stinging bee. Both the jade market and the outdoor market we visited today had one monk wandering the rows. To be fair, there was a strange woman in the Jade market seemingly asking for money, but since she never got any, I can’t know for sure what her intentions were. If she was successful, my feeling is that the Buddhist monk would have unleashed one of his flying palms of death. Speaking of fighting, there are many Buddhist sects in Taipei, each with its own “Master Teacher,” one of which works with Doolies’s parent’s Buddhist association. When I learned there were other Master Teachers—just as in the movies, they always have disciples traveling with them—I began thinking of what happens when two of the Master Teachers get together. I’m sure you see where my mind is going with this. We’re talking epic Kung Fu battles. I’m sorry if all of this appears rascist, culturalist, religiousist, and/or ignorant, but that’s what movies taught me, and who am I to doubt or fight movies’ lessons?

Story idea: From a memory—going to the aquarium, mother gives money; spend all the money on buying gifts for sisters, none left for me. The hard lessons in life and money.