High Plains Panhandler

Gravy Train

I was in our office's break room today, filling my oxygen-tank sized Sigg bottle with water, when I overheard a conversation between three women from our accounting department. Only haiku can do justice here:

Three woman on break

Embrace their love of gravy

They eat it like soup

Massage Leftovers

Critical, absolute, unbearable pain, left over from my foot massage last night. 

It's Saturday morning, and I'm moving slowly. I can turn my head slightly this way and that way, but every way is the way of pain. An elephant must have slept on my back last night.

Today I walk like Herman Munster.

I finally broke down and found a 7-11, thinking I'd buy a box of aspirin to dull the pain, but all I found were cold medications. A few doors down was a pharmacy, so I stepped up to the window and tried my best to ask for some muscle pain relievers. The pharmacist took a long look at me through his puffy eyes and then rubbed his hands together. He brought out a few jars of some strange looking herbs and started talking in rapid Cantonese. 

I think he was going to prepare some ancient Chinese medicine for me. This did not sit well, mainly because I feared it. So I dashed off, not even offering a proper goodbye, and sunk myself into a hot bath back at my hotel room instead. 

I'm achy still but at least I'm not having hallucinations about the Year of the Ox.

Tomorrow, I scratch "Second Chinese Foot Massage" off my list. Instead, maybe I'll have a milk shake. 

The Chinese Foot Massage

Today, after a long wait in the Taipei airport, a short hour-long hop back to Hong Kong (where they actually feed you on the airplane - in the States an hour flight gets you a couple of ice cubes and, if you're lucky, only minor leg cramps), and a quick wade through customs, the entire day seemed to have evaporated. 

Eddie, a Hong Kong native who's helping me get around on this trip, suggested we get a traditional Chinese foot massage after dinner. So we headed over to this small shop whose characters translated as "The Big Bucket." We were ushered to two large lounge chairs where we ordered our massages from a yellow paper menu (one of the options was the traditional Thai massage, a brutal arm-twisting affair that Eddie described by twisting his arms behind his back and saying "CRAACK!").

A few minutes later the big buckets arrived, wheeled in on carts by our masseuses. These wooden buckets, which looked like something you'd churn butter in, were filled with a hot water mixture of foot relaxing herbs. I had chosen mint; Eddie went with ginger. The idea is that you take off your shoes and socks, roll up your pants, and soak your feet in these baths for a bit. It was very nice and, surprisingly, tingly.

While soaking, my masseuse motioned for me to get out of my comfy chair, turn around, and sit on a little bench, all the while keeping my feet soaking in the big bucket. Once I did that, she started kneading my neck, gently for about two seconds, and then suddenly, without warning, her fingers turned into unbendable titanium rods and starting punching my back as if she had evil robot karate hands from the distant future.

Gah! She started digging in so deep under my shoulders and along my spine I thought I'd seen her fingers erupt from my chest any minute. Somehow she found every nerve and jammed them with her iron hands, tracing their pathways into my brain, and then twisting them so all I could say was "unghaaa gaaa."

"More gentle?" asked Eddie, but I couldn't nod or shake my head or reply in any human way. I simply enduring the mechanical grinding and brutal, non-stop fingers of fury.

Twenty minutes later I was told to sit back in the comfy chair for the actual foot massage. Now this part of very nice, but poor Eddie sitting next to me was in unbearable pain. "It's my head," he said. "That part of my foot is connected to my head. Big headache!"

I guess I wasn't reacting the way I should to the massage since I was laughing because I found it ticklish. The masseuse said I was pretty tough, and then she cracked something weird on my big toe and instantly bright flashes of incendiary pain shot up my leg. I lurched forward and almost kicked her backward, but she was strong and had my foot in some kind of judo grip that no man could escape.

My masseuse laughed, and I realized this was the response she had been looking for. Then she told me to relax, but my entire body was on alert, stiff enough I could have levitated, so relaxing was out of the question.

So it was: the non-relaxed, spine-cracked, nerve jangled foot massage applied with diligent intensity by a Number 30 because this is what her name tag said.

I wonder if she soaks her steel fingers in tubs of mint after work to relax them for the next day. Strike that. Instead I bet she polishes them with steel wool and hones them to a fine point on a brick sidewalk. All the better to crush innocent spines on her next shift.

Pearl Milk Tea

It's been an overcast and halfheartedly drizzly day here in Taipei. I flew in from Hong Kong yesterday, and it seems as if the entire region has been shrouded with a thick, dense layer of clouds since I arrived in Asia. My hotel in Taipei is the Highness Hotel, an older place with rooms that still have the unmistakable baked-in stench of stale cigarette smoke. A few minutes after I had checked in and had dropped off my bags in the room, I was supposed to meet a few people in the lobby for dinner. But as I walked out of my room into the hallway, I noticed one of the housekeepers a few doors down in a utility room. She was bent over, pulling on something that was stuck on a shelf.

I was just about to close the door behind me when the housekeeper, oblivious to my presence, took it upon herself to contribute a mighty wind to the hallway's atmosphere. It was a giant eruption, the likes of which you'd think would easily send a spacecraft into low orbit.

I stepped back into my room because I didn't want to embarrass her, waited a minute, and then made my escape. She was quite friendly when she saw me, offering me a "Good evening, sir!" greeting and a big smile. Obviously she didn't know what I knew.

After we had finished a series of meetings the next day, we had some time to take a quick tour of the busy electronics market street in downtown Taipei. This is different than the night market I had been to before, but it was just as crowded and just as frantic. 

My host, Gene, told me I had to try some pearl milk tea, a Taiwanese invention. He handed me a cup that had an oversized, wide straw in it and told me to drink up. Immediately, I noticed the tea was full of these small jelly balls that got sucked up when I took a sip from the straw. I chewed on the first one jelly ball, drank some more, chewed on another, and then drank some more. In a minute I grew quite accustomed to it and found I rather liked it. Tea you could drink and eat. Fantastic!

I noticed Gene was drinking something else, so I asked him why he wasn't having any of this famous tea, which, I noticed on the cup, was also called Bubble Tea.

"I can't have milk like that this early in the day," said Gene. "It makes the  . . . makes the gas happen. You know. It gives me the fart."

"Thanks for the warning," I said. And then he gave me the thumbs up.

I wonder if that's what happened with the Highness Hotel housekeeper: too much Bubble Tea before her shift. 

Maybe the cups should come with a warning.

The Long Flight

It was a series of flights back to Hong Kong today. When I landed in Dallas from Amarillo, this older woman, maybe in her late 60s, was behind me. I heard her asking where the international terminal was, so I butted in and told her to follow me. She then told me she was on her way to Hong Kong, and when she found out I was too she broke into a giant smile and told me she was relieved someone was on the plane who could help her.

After we landed in San Francisco, I waited for her and escorted her to the Cathay Pacific airlines area. This time she had another person in tow; this new woman was going to Taipei, so the three of us stuck together while I, now the glamorous and omniscient world traveler (well, not that all-knowing, since I immediately took us to the wrong place) helped out.

The woman from Amarillo and her new friend were both on the way to the Philippines, both going to stay with family there for about half a year. It must be awful to be gone from home that long; I'm wibbling about being gone for ten days.

We all arrived safely in Hong Kong - well, at least I hope they did, because I didn't seem them after I left the plane. I had to go through customs; they were simply transferring.

I left Amarillo around 4:00 Sunday afternoon and arrived in Hong Kong at 7:15 Tuesday morning. In between, missing somewhere over the Pacific, is Monday.

Movies on the plane: I watched a few minutes of Max Payne, but it was awful. Then I tried What Just Happened, which I had never heard of. It's one of those movies that, at the end, you sit back and think, "Huh. I could have made a medieval castle out of toothpicks instead of watching that."

One of the flight attendants wanted to know if I was from India. She was and said Nair is "a very famous name in India." I shrugged, and told her I liked chai and instead of being famous was probably more infamous than anything and that I liked Slumdog Millionaire.

This did not satisfy her, alas.