taxis and tea

Taxidrivers. I think that my earlier assessment was fair. I recently had one who actually drove on the wrong side of the street for a block. Just went right over the yellow line. Oncoming traffic, who cares? Pedestrians, so what?

Some of the taxi drivers I have met have been great, but I had a bad run for a while. We got into one the other day, and it took my friend 3 minutes to get across where we wanted to go. She was like, I know my Chinese isn't that great, but that is not the problem here. This is not a language miscommunication issue. This is a “you don’t seem to understand basic words” problem. The sentence “take us to the zoo” wasn’t coming through clearly. There is only one zoo in Taipei. It is a subway stop, for chrissakes. It is big and full of animals. Take us there!

A few times, we took public transportation the first part of a trip, and then tried to get a cab from the subway station to the actual place we wanted to go, figuring that if we got a cab that usually drove around the part of town we needed to navigate, the cabbie should have some idea as to how to get where we wanted to go, especially if we handed him the address. Not so. For some cabbies, even in their own neighborhoods they are lost. And I don’t mean that the cabbie needed to slow down a little to see which building was the right one, I mean the cabbie didn’t know where major streets were. Apparently the Taiwanese equivalent to "do you want fries with that" is "here are the keys to your cab."

Getting to one of the teahouses up in the hills outside of Taipei was one taxi ride gone wrong. It took the guy a while to find the right road (you know, the one that goes up the mountain?) and he had to call the tea house to ask directions and then he still wasn’t sure. Luckily one of the people in the car saw the sign for it as we were driving around. It was unbelievable. Take the road that goes up!! All the teahouses are on it! Stop when you see the address that we gave you!

The teahouses up in the hills outside of the city were wonderful. I went 2 times. Once was just with 2 other teachers, once was with a big mixed group. The first time, with just 2 other people, we went to a quiet place where you got your own little outside pavilion, and you could just sit outside and enjoy the mountains. It was raining slightly, which was nice because you could hear the drops of rain on the roof, and there were lots of cricket type noises, and dripping trees. It had an eerie but beautiful ambiance, which was a strange thing to find so close to the city. We just sat and watched it get dark; it felt sort of like we were camping.

The second place was more indoors. We were in a room with big wide open windows, so it was sort of indoors/outdoors, until it started to rain a little and we closed the windows, then it was more indoors. The second teahouse was gorgeous. Beautiful wood carvings, view of the Taipei, pretty little tables and embroidered pillows to sit on. It was just what you would hope to see if you went into the mountains to sit in a teahouse. One weird thing though, they played elevator music the entire time. They would have one terrible song, then one Beatles song. One terrible song, one Beatles song. They played “Memories” from Cats. Oh well, the atmosphere made up for it.

The way you drink tea is this: They give you the package of loose tea of your choice, a pot that boils water, a teapot, and 2 tiny little cups big enough to hold an espresso shot each, one with regular cup proportions, one taller and thinner. You put in a few spoonfuls of tea (which is still in clumps of leaves, not all broken up) into the teapot. You fill it with the hot water, let it steep, then throw out the water. The first batch is too bitter. Then you fill it up again, let it steep, and pour the tea into the elongated cups. Then you pour your tea from the tall cup into the shorter cup, and smell the taller one to get the essence of the tea. –This is surprisingly true; you really do get a nice scent of the tea from the taller little cup. Then you sip your tea.

To pour from the taller cup to the shorter cup, you can either just pour the one like it is a little pitcher, or you can put the shorter one on top of it upside down- so they look like a little mushroom, and then do a quick switch where you flip it over fast so you don’t spill any tea. Everyone was able to successfully flip cups at least once. No cups were broken as a result of this experiment.

There was a sign by the door of the teahouse that said “no din.” I assume no clamor either, but I didn’t ask.

Something I keep forgetting is that it is respectful to hand money to a person or take change or a business card from a person with both hands. I don’t think it is super disrespectful to only use one hand- I haven’t gotten any angry looks- but I feel bad when someone else goes two handed and I forget to. I just thought of this because I asked the first teahouse people if I could get a card, and the guy handed me one with two hands and a bow, and I took it with one hand and a nod, which I felt bad about later, because I should have taken the card two handed. Oh well, I assume he could tell that I was white. And a lot of times over here white=stupid, so no problem.

One case were white does not = stupid is in English class. It is apparently really hard to get hired to teach English classes if you are Asian, even if you grew up in the States. The cram schools want the white skin authenticity. Which is totally crap, I think. At the office I was working in this summer, a parent came in and wanted to ask her kid’s teacher a question. Then when she met the teacher, she wouldn’t believe it was the right person, because the teacher was Asian, but she had spoken English like a native on the phone. Well, she did grow up in the States!!! There was one guy who got hired to teach English at one of the cram schools- he was German. He learned to speak English in Taiwan! But the fact that he was white made him qualified to teach English.

Oh, I feel that I should make a small correction. Well, not really a correction, but an elaboration. I mentioned how irritating it was that there were all these ugly white guys with all these beautiful Taiwanese women over here. Well, one of my roommates started polling Taiwanese women about this, asking why they thought this was happening, and the comments she got about this phenomenon tended to be more along the lines of “why are all these good looking white guys dating all these ugly Asian women?” Perception is everything, I guess. The Taiwanese women said that the women were too, hm. I can’t think of the right adjective, I don’t know what it would be, but they pulled back the corners of their eyes, and laughed. Like the women these white guys were dating were too Asian looking or something. I was incredibly shocked when I heard that they did that. No way could you make that comment in the US.