Who let him in here? That sweaty…backpacker shuffling around the Blue Ribbon Club Lounge? Look at him pile his plate high with the free food and–and he just swiped three cans of soda from the refrigerator! He’s just putting them in his bag for later! That’s clear abuse of the lounge’s complimentary drinks. Clear abuse! And he’s just taken his shoes off! He’s sitting at the tables, barefoot! God, he’s so close I can almost smell him.
Matt glances over at the businesswoman leering at him. He maintains eye contact as he wrestles with stuffing an entire pork bun into his mouth. She shies away back into her magazine. Who reads magazines anymore? Apparently everyone; the airport lounge is full of them! Whatever. The airline status he’d accrued through dozens of flight segments at his last job affords him complimentary access to the facilities here in Bangkok. So he’s here for the non-magazine amenities.
He leans back in his chair. He’s still surprised they let him in after the commotion he caused at security.
* * *
“That’s not you,” the uniformed Thai man at the emigration counter says. He’s holding Matt’s passport up and comparing the cleanshaven snapshot from three years ago with the four-month-bearded man before him.
Matt’s heart skips a beat. He’s finally having problems at the airport due to facial hair. The Arab Effect is real. “Yes, that is me. And I have a timelapse of every picture in between to prove it.” He digs in his pocket for his phone.
But Bangkok Airport isn’t so easy to please. Though the man at the counter is satisfied that the fuzzy traveler isn’t going to Allah-Akbar himself any time soon, the women at security pull him aside after he steps through the metal detector.
One at a time they pull out his clothes and various travel supplies. Are these Gillette razors allowed? What about this small bottle of fish sauce? Why are you carrying fish sauce, anyway? Fine, it’s small enough to go through. But this can of soda? No way. Sir, you know you can’t have a can of soda, right? I’m throwing this out. And a can of shaving cream?
“Sir, aerosol containers aren’t allowed on the flight.” The security woman moves to throw the can out, full of grounding certainty.
Matt stops her. “No, you see, this isn’t a real Barbasol can.” He unscrews the bottom revealing an empty can. “I use it to store money and stuff I don’t want stolen while I travel. It’s not a real aerosol.”
The woman refuses to let the her suspicions fall away like the can’s false bottom. “Okay, but you’re still not allowed to have it.”
“What? Of course I am! It’s the contents under pressure that’s not allowed. This just looks like that.”
She shakes her head. “No, sir. No aerosols are allowed.” She moves to throw it away again.
Again Matt stops her. “Look, you can talk to anyone you want, your manager, their manager, whomever, but I’m not letting you throw that away. And I’m not going away. If you want to strip me naked, detain me, whatever, go ahead, I’m not in any hurry to get to Taiwan. But we’re gonna make a scene about it. I’m one-hundred-percent ready for that. This is going to be a thing.”
The woman’s mouth twists at the mention of a strip-search and after a minute of intense whispering with her supervisor, she thrusts the can at the triumphant backpacker.
* * *
Tens of thousands of feet in the air later, Matt looks out into the mists that are the clouds. The purple-dark is disrupted in even intervals by the lights from the wing. Red, white. Red, white. Red, white. Over and over the blinking illuminates the clouds closing in on the window while the monotonous droning of the engines stretches the claustrophobic moment out forever. Red, white. Red, white.
The plane hits a clear patch and the moon bursts into view. It’s like, right there. And then the plane banks at a weird angle, one that shoves the moon aside and puts the window nearly parallel with the ground below. So, so far below. The inertia behind the plane’s turn keeps Matt in his seat despite the perpendicular gravity.
It’s a horrific rail-less rollercoaster he doesn’t want to be on. He shuts his eyes and grips the armrest, remembering to breathe. It’s enough to wish for the mists again.
* * *
Matt opens his eyes and he’s on the airport shuttle bus in Taipei. Has he just teleported? Is he a magician? Not unless you count the clever editing of his blog posts.
The buses in Taiwan feel magnificent, like being conveyed on a royal palanquin. Except instead of sitting on cushions filled with the finest goosefeather, they’re generic-fabric upholstered foam cushions. And instead of a canopy to shield you from the elements and servants to fan you with palm fronds, there are Plexiglas windows and recirculated air conditioning. And instead of riding alone with only your stoic retainers below you, you’re sharing this metal box on wheels with forty strangers.
So in other words, it’s exactly like riding the bus back home. But it’s loads better than much of mainland Southeast Asia’s infrastructure.
Outside it starts to rain. It’s exactly as wet as rain back home.
Matt’s ears perk up at the automated stop announcements. “Taipei School for the Hearing Impaired!” This is his stop for the AirBnB he’s booked for his first two nights before he can move over to a real hostel afterwards.
It’s a shame that none of the school’s students will ever hear how cheerful the announcement sounds.
That night the rain storms off somewhere else, and hundreds of Taiwanese youths wander the puddle-speckled alleys of the ShiDa district night market. Fashion stores jostle for space in the narrow mish-mash of walkways that makes up many ‘traditional’ Chinese neighborhoods.
ShiDa suffers from an almost unforgivable flaw: too many clothing stores, not enough food stalls.
“Aha!” Matt finds one that’s selling what he’s looking for: meat on a stick.
Everything is in Chinese–traditional characters to be precise, though it doesn’t matter. They’re indecipherable and therefore so are the associated prices, ranging from $0.30 to $4.00 (converted from New Taiwan Dollars, the local currency).
“Hey,” the bewildered American gets the attention of the Western guy also looking over the skewered carnal delights, “Which ones are the cheapest here?”
The guy doesn’t even turn his head. “Just check the sign.”
Matt double-checks. It’s still in Chinese. “Right on, but I don’t know any Chinese.”
Now the guy turns. “You came all the way out to Taiwan and you don’t even know the language?” He rolls his eyes and clicks his tongue.
“I mean, I did like, ten hours of Rosetta Stone a few years ago, but I can only say a few things.”
* * *
“Like what?” Mark asks several evenings later in his Kiwi accent. His question comes from the corner of The Meeting Place hostel’s common room where he’s being swallowed up by the recliner he favors.
Matt, who’s been relaying the story of the arrogant Belgian exchange student he met at the ShiDa market, is ready for this question. “Mostly really basic words, like water, shuǐ, and some verbs. The most complicated thing I can say is ‘wǒ bùshì yīshēng’ ”
Mark looks around the room, from Matt to Mike and Fred, a pair of Danes. Neither the Danes know any Chinese beyond the typical ‘hello-goodbye-thank you’ combination that is all that many learn. He looks down to the beer in his hands and the scattering of empties on the central table, but can’t come up with a guess and shrugs.
“It means ‘I am not a doctor’ “ Matt explains.
“When would you ever need to use that?” Mark rocks back in his seat and grins at the absurdity. It’s a winning smile, one that makes his almost-forty age impossible to tell.
He’s a smaller guy, though much more muscular now than when he was a young man. Back then he was a jockey–like for riding horses–which meant skipping meals and cutting weight to obviously dangerous levels. He’s on vacation now, from his current home in Busan, South Korea where he’s a consultant for companies running horse races.
“It’s a real shame what they do there,” Mark shakes his head. “They run these animals into the ground, force them to race when they know the horse can’t take it. They know. But they only collect on insurance if he gets injured during a race, so pffft!” He throws up his hands.
“You going to stay there?” Mike asks. His voice sounds jovial with just a hint of Scandinavian influence, the tell-tale sound of his native Denmark.
“Nahhh,” is the Kiwi’s quick answer. “Maybe another few months, but I’ve got enough money for another big trip.” He’s hit a majority of the countries of the world already and isn’t planning on calling it quits any time soon.
It’s an achievement Mike can only dream of. He’s just finished his equivalent of college-level schooling and it’s expensive to live in Svendborg, Denmark. So expensive that before he left to visit Asia, he’d resorted to dumpster-diving behind supermarkets for food.
“Though it’s pretty great!” he explains with enthusiasm. “They throw out all kinds of meats, cheeses, bread, everything! And it’s so cold that it’s all still fresh. And free!”
“That’s really a thing you guys do?” Matt asks.
Fred nods as his friend goes on to explain. “I can’t remember the last time I bought food from a supermarket! Though I run into whole families digging in sometimes. But there’s so much to go around, they’re happy to share their bounty with me. One hundred crown (Danish currency) salamis, ninety crown bacon, all free. We eat like kings!”
As intriguing as this alternate lifestyle is, Matt has a more pressing matter to attend to. An internally pressing matter. He tries to tally up the cans and bottles they’ve gone through this evening. It’s futile. His mind shifts to thoughts of the hostel’s bathroom. “Hey, have you noticed that these bathrooms smell amazing?”
“Like a barbeque!” Mike agrees.
“Yeah, like woodsmoke!” Matt’s glad to discover he doesn’t have a tumor or something messing with his sense of smell.
“And all the dead mosquitoes crushed against the wall?” Fred adds.
“I call it the mosquito graveyard,” Matt monikers sagely and stands up. “And if you’ll excuse me, I must go pay my respects.” He rests his most recent empty can of Taiwan Beer (an actual brand) on the table.
When he comes back to the ring of recliners and couches in the main room, there’s a new arrival. His name is Tobias, and he’s been sharpening up his Chinese (he’s basically conversational now) and enjoying free room and board by working at the hostel for just over two months. In fact, this is his last night, as his flight home to San Francisco leaves at 7am.
“No reason you can’t enjoy a beer with us while you wait,” Matt offers, checking his watch.
“Thanks,” Tobias grimaces, “but I’ve got a cold, and I don’t wanna make it worse.” He coughs softly and rubs his nose.
“Huh. So this might be–definitely is–a weird question, but have you been coughing anything up? Like phlegm and stuff?” Matt’s parents are both doctors and this is one of the first questions they ask in diagnosing him when he’s sick.
“Ummm, yeah, actually.”
Matt ignores the questioning looks from the rest of the room. “And what color is it? Like, white-ish yellow, or more like milky green, like the color of these couches?” This is his parents’ next question. It’s all coming so naturally.
Tobias looks down. “I guess like, milky green. Yeah, like these couches.”
“Cool, so it’s a bacterial infection. Still active, too. It’s probably a sinus infection–I just had the same thing a month ago in Cambodia. And did you know, ‘sinus’ in Latin–pronounced ‘see-noos’ means ‘bay’, like where you’d store ships. If you look at the skull, the sinuses are these huge bay-like reservoirs up behind your nose. Just think of ‘bays of mucus’, just imagine that, and you’ll never forget the meaning†.”
Matt realizes he’s the only one smiling. “Right. Anyway, you’re gonna want an antibiotic, something solid. I’ve got some Ciprofloxacin in my bag, enough for a full course. Each pill’s five-hundred milligrams, take one every twelve hours–I’d recommend something like seven or eight o’clock so it’s easy to do on both the am and pm. You’ll probably start to feel better by day two, around pill three or four, but don’t stop, take all six days. I’m not letting you become responsible for a new super-resistant germ or whatever. Oh yeah, and no dairy products. Or anything with calcium in it. Calcium will fuck you up.”
Tobias just nods.
“So like, you want me to get it…? It’s real medicine, not some black market shit, but it’s only like five bucks to replace out here, a bit more over in The States.”
“Ummm, yeah. I mean, thank you, but how do you know all of this? Are you a doctor or something?”
Matt stops in the middle of turning to the hallway that leads back to his dorm room to give a small bow. “Wǒ bùshì yīshēng.”
“You are not… a doctor?” Tobias translates amid roars from the rest of the common room.
† You can thank Mrs. Diamente, my 11th grade Latin teacher for that mental image.
The Taipei101 tower disappearing into the mists on a cloudy day.
The Raohe Night Market entry arch, sparkling in the evening. This place had some amazing snacks.
Fred ‘enjoying’ some stinky tofu. It smells somewhere between rotting garbage and feet.