I will miss Taipei

For me, leaving Taipei involves rituals. One of them is yakitori. Another is getting really stressed out and not sleeping. I usually wander by the bridge on foot at some point, and I usually wander around to the places I used to live here, in Dadaocheng and at Minquan station. Another ritual is realizing I can't find my passport and spending many hours moving every item in my appartment from one side to the other, one peice at a time. I always go by a night market, (raohe, this time) and I always buy a bottle of whisky and some 臺客 shorts for my grandfather. I would get him the blue flip flops, but he's too old and he'll fall. 

I always have a skate session that I know will be the last one in Taiwan for a while. This one started at linsen park, under the lights, on the flatground. A kid came up who spoke fluent english and we warmed up. he said he was expected to meet his friends there. It's thrilling to know young skaters are starting to spend time in teh streets. He had the begginnings of ray barbee flow, and was a genuinely friendly guy. I hope we can have a proper street session when I get back in September. RMJ arrived and so did the police. They informed us that skating in parks is illegal, and hey, did we know about the bridge? It's this awesome DIY sport with a box and a rail that you can jump on once every ten minutes because it's so crowded and full of dancers that no one can skate there. No, we didn't know about that place, but the cop said we would like it. We started to leave and he said, you don't have to go, I'll just pretend I didn't see you here. But if someone complains, I might have to come back and then maybe you'll have to leave. This was the best kick out ever. He scooted off and so did youngE. So RMJ and I went about a hundred yards away to a series of marble benches, good height, but not long, arranged in pairs with a gap in between that would make them a video quality spot, if I was good enough to skate them that way. Instead, I have to just treat them as a short ledge that is difficult to come out of because they are recessed in the dirt, so you have to swing back out onto the sidewalk to roll away; if you come off the end, you'll just be in the dirt. A weird man plays out of tune guitar there and blasts backing music from a car battery. 

Next up was an unskated black marble ledge on the backside of the park that I've been skating past for two and a half years, but never noticed. It's thick with pedestrians, even late at night, so we had some shocked onlookers as we broke it in. Then RMJ ********* a big boulder, right beside a fat woman playing with her internet telephone. It was loud as fuck, but he made it on the second try, and somehow, she didn't look up. 

We crossed the street but the fountain was full, so we went up a block to a yellow manny pad at the entrance of a parking garage, but traffic was thick going to the brothels, so we went up a little farther to the lychee spot. 

I'm calling it that because it was literred with unripe, fallen lychee fruit. It's got vicious tiles, some loose, and some with unsettling big cracks right on the approach and exit, from both directions. It's right in the middle of whoreville, so even at 3 am, there is a mob of party people and party slaves getting in the way. The draw is the difficulty of skating this spot. It's a low slate ledge, with a poorly pourn cement bank up to it. It's too steep to roll up easily, and too wide to ollie into a grind comfortably. Wheels grab on the bank if you try to ********* it or *********** it, and even doing a mini ******** is sketchy, mostly because of the tiles and cracks. To make it even more difficult, it has a wall on one side, and a rail on the other, so if you stumble and go head first, like say over a crack, you're going to smash your face into one or the other. 

I am mentally weak, so this is not really a spot for me. It's fun because of hte challenge, but I can't skate it like RMJ can. In his own words, it's a spot where you have ot work to even get a *****. He worked for it, and got some good ones; the trend is away from surfing sketchy, committed roll aways, but that sucks. That's what he was doing, and it was stylish. 

Then we went ot my old old hood and went by my house where I really got into street skating. We went up to the yellow jacket rail, and I did some *********s for nostalgia. I still can't ****** up the ledge to the spot; my fantasy line there is a couple of flatground tricks, ****** up, then ********* down the rail into traffic. Next he skated the jaws of death bank, with power boxes on either side, about 24 inches clearance and the busiest road in Taiwan as the started and stopping point. Then we cruised as far back as I could stand, but  I got tired, so we beered up on the old stoop and went home. 

It's not all I want from a night of skating in Taipei, but it's all there was to be had. Next up, America.