I wrote this all in bits and pieces while traveling through Taiwan and on the plane to Japan. Forgive the horrible inconsistency in tenses.
The flight from LAX was long and torturous. The first thing I did on the plane was watch “Lust, Caution,” and immediately after that I was completely over with being on a plane. I checked how much time was left for the flight… 12 hours. I sobbed uncontrollably in my seat. As a side note, I managed to develop a crush on the lead actress of “Lust, Caution.” She mysteriously looked Korean… And so twelve hours and one hour-long connecting flight from Hong Kong later, the Kroks finally landed in Taipei, our first international stop of our tour. We arrived just past midnight, and exhausted.
Our first stay of the trip was a boarding school in the Ban Qiao district of Taipei called Guang Ren. Our bus arrived at this pretty shady-looking alley way through which our bus could not fitted, forcing us to walk into the hot-as-hell-and-humid-as-hell night. I cannot stress to you enough the absolute humidity of this place, even indoors was extremely humid. Our dorms were nice enough, but the air conditioning, however, was nowhere near enough. The biggest trip we got was from the toilets – they were French toilets!!! i.e., no seats – it was this porcelain lined hole in the ground! So in other words, we would be squatting – something males are really accustomed to. Now the beds… They beds were nice enough, except that the beds were essentially wooden boxes with a thin mattress. The Taiwanese love their hard surfaces. I remember visiting my grandmother’s house in Taipei seven years ago and sleeping on their mattresses. Not only were the mattresses rock-hard, they were also covered with a wooden mat! Wtf. I felt sorry for Will Kehler having to sleep in one of these beds since the very top of my head and toes touched the ends of our wooden boxes. I remember waking up at around 3am with my ass completely numb from the lack of softness on it. Poor thing.
Guang Ren is a private Catholic boarding school, so we were woken up at 6:30 in the morning with Chinese inspirational Christian music… and Boulevard of Broken Dreams. Showering (with cold water, of course) in the morning was the most satisfying feeling in the world. Washing away all of the sweat from the day before made all the difference.
After breakfast, each Krok met his guide for the day – two students from the high school. My guides were Dino (she told me she was named after her dad) and Grace. Our first visit of the day was a stop to the National Ceramic Museum, which is pretty self-explanatory. While the tour was, well, as boring as a tour would be, the fun stuff happened afterwards. We were taken to a workshop where we learned about the greatness of Communism… Wait. Wrong country. We actually made clay dragon boats… well, at the very least, we tried. You can see the assortment of dragon boats on my Picasa gallery. And of course, the immortalize the memories of that day, we took thousands of pictures with our guides.
I also learned something new about the peace sign people do during pictures. Apparently, there are multiple variations on it! The traditional “V” form with your palm directly pointing at the camera is a thing of the past. Nowadays, you can point either your index or middle finger at the camera, have the back of your hand facing the camera, have the “V” upside down with the side of your hand facing the camera, etc. etc. We (Americans) are so behind on this stuff.
In the afternoon was our first performance in Taiwan! The audience was a whopping 1500+, including my five aunts, uncle, cousin (and his girlfriend) and grandmother. It was pretty nice to see them, as I haven’t seen them since 2001 – the last time I was in Taiwan. The performance went very well, I’d say (I didn’t get seriously hurt during any dances). I’d say the best-received song was “Name.” The name girl was our very own Dino, and the onstage antics were received with hundreds of piercing screams of Asian school girls… I could barely hear myself sing! Afterwards, I was able to meet up with my relatives, but only after making my way through hoards and hoards of school girls and boys asking for our autographs on CDs, shirts, school uniforms, etc. My grandmother was kind enough to make me a bunch of zongzi (the festival for that was just on Sunday). Awww. She’s a doll. Hundreds of pictures and autographs later, we were free to change and shower to have dinner at the Sheridan Hotel in Taipei, one of thirty top hotels in the world (we had already stayed at one in LA – the Casa Del Mar). There, I finally got to meet our sponsors for our trip to Taiwan – Mr. and Mrs. Feng and Henry Ho – and all of their friends in Taiwan or China. Mr. Feng and Mr. Ho are both Harvard alums who happen to love the Kroks… and have lots and lots of rich and successful friends… and are rich and successful themselves, of course. It was an amazing experience dining and chatting with these uber people of Taiwan, especially when they’re drunk.
The next day, we departed to Hsintsu (新竹), also known as the Silicon Valley of Taiwan. Our next performance was at the National Experimental High School, where Chris Lo attended. What exactly is the experiment? I personally thought it was Chris Lo. Then when we arrive they told us it was the mixture of Western and Asian curriculum. Mystery solved. To explain the peculiar picture, the auditorium where we performed still had the decorations of the graduation of the seniors the day before – a giant ship complete with a huge mast (the theme was “Adventure” (Chris Lo claims to not have remembered his graduation’s theme)).
After our performance, we met our homestays for the night. Mine were twins named Susan (har har, what a coincidence) and Linda. Both girls just graduated from NEHS and will be attending 台大, a university considered the Harvard of Taiwan. Fancy stuff. Our homestays took us out to dinner and then, the next day, downtown to shop around and go sightseeing at a local temple. The pictures will tell the rest.
And then we were off to Taichung, our final destination in Taiwan. There, we met our Taichung sponsor, Mr. Lai and his (fraternal) twin children Maple and Tiger. Mr. Lai is the owner of a new super mall in Taichung called Tiger City. It’s a ten-story mall filled with stores, restaurants, movie theaters, arcades, and private clubs. It kind of reminded me of Silph Co. from Pokemon, minus the evil underground operations… I think. Anyhow, we did plenty of fun things there: play in the arcarde, watched a movie in a private theater (Prince Caspian, which kind of sucked (luckily we got to order booze while watching the movie)), and have dinner at a really nice Japanese restaurant on the 8th floor. I feel so special.
During our two day stay in Taichung, we sang two shows, one at Morrison High School (an American high school) and at the hotel we stayed at, Freshfields hotel . Our sponsor was also friends with Mr. Ting, the owner of Freshfields, which is placed on a mountain, giving us a great view of the smoggy city. Our rooms were huge and nice… and had a hot spring. Each room is equipped with a huge stone tub/pool and a direct tap to the hot spring. Needless to say, it was amazing.
Some amusing occurrences include a Cold Stone visit, in which all the employees sang songs about ice cream, to which we thanked them with a performance of Runaway. Mrs. Feng sang a beautiful rendition of Unchained Melody on the karaoke machine on our bus. And lastly, on our flight to Japan, I was upgraded to business class… it… was… awesome. There was champagne, the seat could recline all the way, there was a foot rest, there were these dividers between each seat so we could have our privacy, and the headphones were noise cancelling. If only we could fly business all the time…
And so that ends our journey in Taiwan. Off to Japan!