beach tango

I know, I know, you keep asking for pictures / videos of me dancing, and I have nothing. Well, now I have SOMETHING. Actually, it's not much, so perhaps it's more like something. But I like the something that I unabashedly cribbed from my friend's facebook page, although he doesn't know it... yet. Anyway, with so much ado about nothing, here's a picture of me dancing tango with D. on the beach in Tainan.

It was a nice dance.

Vertical Tango

So, there's not much tango here. What tango there is exists in Taipei, which is an hour away by high speed rail, two hours by train, and three by bus, depending on how much money you're williing to spend and whether you have anything better to do with that time. I'm don't, and I'm cheap. Besides, I kind of like transportation. Regular trains are best, because you get the best view and there's a bathroom handy and you can just sit for two hours, daydream, decompress and listen to your ipod. Unless, of course, you buy a "standing if there aren't free seats" ticket and you end up standing for two hours with your nose in some dude's armpit. (Random anecdote: A friend of mine mentioned using deodorant as a teaching tool for the elasticity of economics, in that there are some products you would continue to buy even if the price increased a great deal. Deodorant doesn't work for that example here.)

Anyway, tango. Nope, not much. Funny how something that was part of my life daily for months, and the whole of my life daily for one month, suddenly drops off the radar. I mean, the concept still elicits beeps from my radar, but they are wistful, and now resigned beeps. There are milongas on Wednesday (can't get there and back and then teach the next day), and Saturday, and sometimes somehow there seems to be too much going on in podunk Taichung or in my head for me to make it up on Saturdays. And it's hard to get a dance. I fall into the category of unknown intermediate dancer, and more than half of the people there have been dancing for at least five years, so it's been tough. I always enjoy myself when I do go, but psych myself out in between bouts. And also... tango has always filled a perceived void. My friend B. (Yes, that's you, B.) said that everyone who dances tango has emotional problems, and I agree. But for me, that void is a) shrinking and / or b) filled by other things, so I am not so desperate for a dance any more. I love tango too much to know whether that's a good thing. In the end, I've been going up a couple times a month, and I am determined to whore myself out to Argentina again next summer.

And I've been dancing salsa. Just a couple times so far, but most recently I've signed up for an 8 week course. I am not particularly enamoured of salsa... it is fun, but it is not tango. But the class is easy contact with friendly locals, and I've wondered how to make friends with non-gringos. And it's definitely good for my ego. I've taken a couple salsa classes before, so have a vague idea of what I'm doing, and what with the dance background (I am a dancer?!) and my relative pliability compared to Taiwanese, am the class pet. I even got an unsolicitied discount for the course, because I am the wondrous American creature, and they like that. And right now, I need that ego boost.

To Illustrate...

Coming home...

So I turn on the radio in the car yesterday, on the way back from being lost again and driving around half understanding the signs that I'm seeing (well, this character looks like that part of this character, so let me try to remember the second character because I need to turn on the street with the second character as the second character out of three and the other word that also looks like hui. right.)(Now you see why I get lost), and the only English station in Taiwan has a dj who's speaking... CHINGLISH. I was like wow, that is really awesome. Like, comforting awesome. Like, I want to cuddle up with his words like a security blanket and wrap them all around me because it sounds like I've come home. The dj did half the band interview in English, throwing in phrases like, "I'm gonna run out and..." and "That's hella awesome." I'm sure he did it in order to up the "cool" quotient, since he was interviewing a silverchair-y band that probably didn't respond in a word of English. Granted, I still didn't understand 40 percent of what he was saying in Chinese, but I could pick up a few new words here and there based on the Chinglish context and... it was nice. Despite all of my language griping, I still have it pretty good here, considering most of the signs contain at least one word of English, including the phonetically anglicized street signs. I wish that everyone would speak Chinglish to me. If it ever gets cold here, I could wrap myself up in that with a cup of hot cocoa, and I would be good to go.

on driving

I feel like my status updates usually tell it all: Driving is more like the flow of water here than anything else. Lanes quickly appear and disappear, as do other cars and especially scooters. Pulling away from the stoplight the other day, I was suddenly overtaken by a flock of 15 or 20 scooters, and their movement was erratic but somehow collective, like birds flying. My friend P. was driving directly in front of me, and she said to herself, don't look at the scooters, don't look at the scooters. We made it to the mall without creating roadkill.

P. said it best when she said that todo es intuicion. If there is a space, then you fill the space. If there is a left turn lane, but you can create your own from the middle lane, then do it. People also do that to me as I'm heading out onto the street from a parking lot. A car will pull up alongside, and then quickly turn out in front, while my pansy-a** self is still waiting for a break in the traffic. People incessantly fill spaces around me.

Mostly it is the lane changes that are surprising. Instead of having a separate lane, the left lane _is_ the turn lane whenever there's an intersection. So if you drive on the left inevitably you get stuck behind a line of cars wanting to turn, whereas the right lane charges on. Of course, you could drive in the right lane, but it's slower, technically the scooter lane and it's hard to drive with a one pacing you a foot to the right. So people slip back and forth between lanes, changing so often that there's not much of a point in using the turn signal.

Lanes also turn suddenly... the paint for the lane all of a sudden makes 45 degree spurt, and unless you're paying close attention to the lines, all of a sudden you're drifting into another lane, just like everyone else. There are sudden lane merges, such as at an intersection where there are two lanes on one side and one on the other, effectively rendering the merge at the middle of the intersection. And you can't pay close attention to the lines, because you're too busy looking up at the signal lights, which are horizontal and go from red, yellow, green, yellow, red. That means that yellow could be either slow down or get ready to go, and if you're not watching steadily then you don't know which. Also, they turn off the signal lights later at night so they just flash yellow yellow yellow and you can meander (or charge, depending on how taiwanese you are) through the intersections. So who knows what yellow really means.*

But amidst all of this whining, I have to admit that I am turning into a Taiwanese driver... I think I might have been a little in the first place, as it's almost intuicion to turn when there are no cars, rather than waiting for an insignificant turn signal. And my lane changes have always been swishy. I got it from mah momma, whose lane changes are accompanied by a rush of g-force. It's kind of nice to know that my mother's idiosyncracies that have an origin. It's the whole country, not just her.

*But really, who knows what yellow really means?