Tainan is a city of gentle hills that slope down to the sea. This is very convenient for cruising, as long as you happen to be going to the sea. For the discerning skate tourist, I suggest starting as far east as possible and cruising the sidewalks, with their kickers and curbs and steps, for about an hour. It doesn't take much pushing.
It had been bitter cold and pouring rain for nearly two straight weeks, so I decided to take up a standing invitation and head south. If there's one thing I love, it's train rides, and a train ride south, out of the rain and into the tropical sunshine, is just the thing to cheer up dampened spirits. At Main Station, an older couple approached me to ask about my skateboard. They were from San Diego, and expressed their approval of my having left the States for a skateboarding life in Taiwan.
I listened to Flashman on the way down, and saw sunshine and blue sky for the first time in a fortnight. The HSR station is about 40 minutes from town by car, and I missed the shuttle by a few minutes and found myself with time to kill. So I started trying ***** a manny pad there at the station, and failed for a long time. A gang of ten year old bicycle thugs rode up and watched, and eventually I got it. The ground is super rough there at the station. Parts of the city are rough as well, but about half of it has been recently paved.
My Airb was in a decent area, but it was a quirky and dark building with a shared hallway, toilet, and shower that came from the sink attachment. You get what you pay for. It was on a cute street though, and had a cool orange front door. It was a step up from the NFRH from my last tour of Tainan.
I met up with a former client for coffee and we ended up spending the rest of the day together. It started off with a green onion pancake (Tainan's is better than Taipei's in every possible way) and I was so intent on telling FC about whatever I was droning about that I didn't notice I had spilled runny yolk on myself from gut to groin to knee to shoe. FC helped clean it off, to my embarrassment. We scooted all over, which made for a much more intimate experience than I ever expected to spend with said client, and went to fantastic fried fish soup and one of the best nightmarkets in Taiwan, where we swam through the flood of people and ate an overwhelming amount of food. After much swagger, I demonstrated the finer points of air pistol shooting and FC acted suitably impressed. Then we went to a bar, and I ended up a bit more buzzed than was advisable, considering I still had to mount up behind her for the ride back to the airb.
The following day, I closed the orange door and stepped into the cute street and went for a skate. I had a light backpack, so it wasn't as free as I wanted, but it's impossible to hit the little sidewalk spots as I cruised either. I ended at Switch, where I bought a shop shirt and chatted with the owner. From there, I went to the river park, with the intention of skating to the Dutch fort.
At the river park, one of the most remarkable things happened to me in all of my Taiwanese experience. I was pushing past an area which would make a truly excellent DIY, with banks and tall ledges on the levee, when a bicyclist went by, maddoging me. This isn't so weird in Tainan, because at any given moment, someone is going to be staring at you, slackjawed in disbelief that a
foreigner is standing right in front of them, and in my case, a foreigner with a
skateboard. So at this moment, I didn't really think much of it. A few hundred meters later, and he was back. One of the creepiest parts of the whole affair was that he never spoke a word or made a sound the entire time. He rode next to me on the narrow blacktop on the top of the levee, and started pointing at my stomach. I asked him what he wanted and slowed down, partly cause I was tired, and partly out of innocent trust that he had something worth communicating.
To my surprise, he poked me in the belly button and I laughed awkwardly and he just stared at me, unblinking, completely without expression or speech. At this time, I picked up my skateboard and started up the steep of the levee, noting on my phone notes what had just happened, more bemused than anything. I started to feel the hair on the back of my neck prickle though, when I realized he was racing around the bike ramp, so that he could cut me off, which he did. I told him I want to play skateboard, and tried to skate off, whereupon he tried to block me. I skated around him, and he pedaled beside me again, trying to grab my wrist. I twisted away and started shouting as I pushed, asking him what he wanted. He never made any facial expression, but after a few half hearted grabs, he lunged hard for my wrist. Seeing him unbalanced from the effort, I gave him a solid shove and he rode off the top of the levee and down an embankment into some bushes.
The first time I really felt afraid was when he immediately started back up the embankment, still completely expressionless, like a Taiwanese terminator. I popped the deck up into my hand and cocked it back, to show him that I could smash his fucking fishface if he tried to come up the bank. He stared at me for a minute while I told him to fuck off or I'll kill him, and then he got on my his bike and took off up the road.
It remains a total mystery what he wanted or why he thought it would be a good idea to fuck with me. I got more weirded out as I went down the road. I don't like things that just don't make sense, or events that have no plausible explanation.
At any rate, the locals should consider building a DIY spot there to commemorate the event.
I got to the fort and had crab and a beer, then I walked back across Tainan as the sun set behind me. I got on the crowded as fuck TRA without a seat, and huddled on my skateboard in the atrium at the back of the train for four hours until I got to home. My battery died ten minutes before arrival, and about ten seconds after the end of flashman. It's cold in Taipei, but at least it's not currently raining, and noone is trying to aggressively poke my bellybutton.
