City skaters everywhere are probably familiar with the idea that the city has a golden hour, or maybe two, for skating. In Taipei in the summer, this is 04:30 to 06:30. The human terrain is minimal at that time, but by 06:45, most spots are blocked by commuters. Also, it's the least hot part of the day that isn't dark. I never skate during that time, because I hate skating within six hours of waking up, and I don't have the stamina to skate all night and still be landing tricks by then. However, jet lag has been waking me up at 04:00, and I don't mean sloppy groggy awake, I mean aderal awake. So I headed east at first light. I was going to go to the flight path circles, a curved ledge plaza by the river, but when I got to the bridge, a construction crew had blocked the stairs, so I had to go back to the MRT and think about what to do next.
I flipped a coin and went two stations west to 菜寮. It's a huge plaza with a mirror smooth granite surface. It has a big monument in the middle, where a hobo was alternately sleeping and urinating. The monument is ringed by 3 stairs of marble, which as partly waxed, and although convex, grind for a long way. Something about the trucks' geometry makes them glue onto the side of the curb. Cailiao's main attraction is the very long and very smooth marble ledges lining the entire plaza. Raised flower beds are inbetween the ledges, and the spot has a surprisingly clear view of the sky for Taipei.
The view of the cloudless sky was not an advantage for me though. Within an hour, I had finished an entire jug of water and a coffee, and my clothes were completely soaked. Everytime I sat down, a puddle formed around me, complementing the stale pools of hobo piss steadily drying all around the monument. It got crowded and plenty of people were giving me the look, but they ignored the bums with their dicks out. I guess part of it was that their dicks didn't make a righteous roar like a jet engine, but my trucks did everytime I grinded the marble.
By 8 am, I could feel the sunburn starting. I had to chase the shadow of the monument, to try and keep my water cool. I have a bleeder on my left ankle that never heels, and I caught it with the razortail on a flip trick that I don't even know how to do. This pissed me off, and the heat was pissing me off even more. I kept getting the feeling that I was at the beach on a 105 degree day. Skating angry worked for a while, but the run rose without remorse and soon all the shade was gone. I rode the MRT down a couple of stops to find an old night spot that I think of as the Great White Rails.
They're actually flatbars, and didn't occur to me that there isn't any shade there either, but it's really far from anywhere, so I tried to skate it. On about the tenth try (it's a pair of 30 m flatbars in a swampy park kind of place), I tried to bail by kicking the board out, but my truck caught on a pillar and ricocheed back into my leg. I decided to call it a day.
I tried to skate all the way back, but on Taipei Bridge, I gave up, owing to the tiles and the heat. This bridge has pretty intense scooter traffic. Because people here are not responsible, they weave in and our of each other at 70 mph, and on one weave, one of them misjudged and scrapped the curb a few hundred meters in front of me. They were still laying in the road when I walked up there. Even though hundreds and hundreds of scooters had gone by, no one had stopped. It was a mother and 8-ish year old boy. I couldn't tell his age because he was pretty mangled. I stood in their lane and waved my hands in the air to try and keep another irresponsible fucker from plowing into them, since the oncoming scooters were unsighted by the traffic in front of them. In the 15 minutes it took for the ambulance to arrive, thousands and thousands of other Taiwanese people rode past a mother and child laying in the street, and only two people stopped to help. I have never been so disgusted by Taiwanese people's immorality. Anyway, the ambulance arrived and blocked the traffic, so I wasn't needed anymore and I went home. Fuck you, Sanchong people.
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