Taiwan

Trees in Taipei are very loud.

The first 2 days I walked in the streets staring at them, facing up in the sky like someone with a serious neck-cramp. People looked at me funnily, I tried to point the trees to them: "Don't look at me, it's your trees! can you not hear that!" I heard birds, yet I saw nothing. In the evening of my second day JJ kindly explained, that it was somekind of an insect.

I quit walking funnily, yet people kept on staring at me. Perhaps it wasn't my neck cramp, perhaps it was the fact, that I'm the only blond in in Taipei. Sometimes I get excited, when I think I see someone with a blond hair. I look closer and realize, it's an old lady with light gray hair.

I don't mind people staring, but it's a bit like being on stage. I used to do all kinds of inapproprioate acts in the streets, like fixing my panties, eating and all sort. In London no-one cares. And even if they do, I don't. But in here, the audience is too wide and it makes me a bit nervous sometimes. Occasionally children starts to follow me.It's fine, I would probably be the one following if I was in that kind of situation. (Once I nearly did in London. I saw a man with a billion of tattoos and piercings, a black cape and a magician's hat. He was so strangely beautiful I couldn't do anything but stare mouth open. I'm sure he appreciated it...)

My Mr.J used to say, that the humidity will hit me hard once I get to Asia. I would say that instead of a violent punch, it wraps around like a wet, hot towel.

I still haven't slept enough. I don't have problems of getting sleep, and I wake up promptly around 7, like in Europe. But like in Europe, I wouldn't mind sleeping a bit longer, but for some reason my body knows when it's 7am, even in another timezone. My problem is that I'm too excited to go to sleep, or sleep long in the morning. Too many things to see, too little time.

Cloud Gate.

"Don't worry, we're not ballet dancers neither, this is a contemporary dance company!" Said my new (male)friend from Cloud Gate Company, and lifted a leg next to his ear.

Without a warning, I had been thrown straight into a ballet class with the company on my first morning in Taiwan. I travelled for 2 hours from my hotel with 3 MTR and one buss.I was proud of of finding all the right trains and busses with my amazing map- and Hanzi-reading skills, plus my newly established, unfailing "if in doubt, look in doubt!"-technique, which invited someone to help me within one minute.Taiwanese people are beautiful.

The dancers from Cloud Gate are alle genuine and open-hearted people. For me, they seem like pure gold in the field of dance. There's no competition among the dancers, no ranking order of any kind, nor could I sense any kind of negative energy of any kind. I felt welcome, and althought I expected to cry out of shame and look like a Kung-Fu panda, I actually enjoyed the ballet class with them. The atmosphere of the class was encouraging, humble yet hard-working, and yes, they all looked amazing.

The assistant artistic director, JJ, has been taking care of me and spent a lot of time showing me around, introducing me to everyone and driving me to different places. She also invited me to a dinner and to Cloud Gates tour in Chiayi next week, as well as her own gig as an assistant for a blind choir's prison-gig in another town in Taipei. 

I Always new I'm a lucky person in an extraordinary world, and the first couple of days has taught me a great deal about life and the universe again. Everything is starting to come together inside my head, after a few months of a great struggle. It all starts to make sense again.

Men of Mumbai

They all have the same bored and mean look in their faces when they stare. And they do, constantly. It’s not a friendly, “I’m interested”-stare, of what European men occasionally give, nor a cheeky, intruding “let’s shag”-smile and a wink, what you get from a Turkish guy. It’s something different. It’s says,(for me, atleast) “I don’t give a fuck”, yet it means something completely different, as it is a lot more intense and shameless than the previous examples. An Indian man doesn’t look away when you look back. Not even when you stare back. His stone-face is fixed. So if you then poor steaming coffee on your fingers in the middle of these stony starings, knowing that about 20 individuals are following the show, you shouldn’t expect any help or sympathy from any of them. The face is so set, it controls the rest of the body, so unlike any other man (or women), who would care to ask if you hurt yourself, (except Finnish, who’d want to ask, but does not dare) an Indian guy carries on giving you the adamant stone face.

Mumbai 4pm

I’v been in Mumbai  for 5 hours now. In an airport, no-man’s land, as a transit.  People stare in Mumbai, and the Wifi is not working. Why does the security personnel need to wear camouflage-suits? Equal rights are not the most significant feature in here, I’m pondering, as I jump in front of a queue of men at the security point. Not as bad human rights violation, as the one I had to witness very closely on a plane:  As soon as I got some sleep, I woke up with someone probing my nipples. That Indian guy next to me. I hit him in the fingers and turn my back at him. Then he tried to approach me from behind. I hit him again and learned my lesson: As I wouldn’t go lying naked near a rat’s nest, I shouldn’t go near (Indian) men without a bra, sixteen shirts and a blanket.  The same kind of behavior seems to apply with both of these species.

(Perhaps this can be a bit over-exaggerated. Surely there are some well-mannered men in India just waiting to introduce themselves, and that’s why they’ve been staring shamelessly at me quite a while in this airport. Also not all rats bite.)

(Me and Mr. Jones) What kind of fuckery is this?

If Finland looked like a perfectly shaped, deep red strawberry, smelled like a fresh birch and sounded like a peaceful wave hitting a wooden pear on a lake, London hit me with a flower (every hour) again. (A perfectly shaped, deep red rose, but with thorns in it.)

This vivid weekend started with a hug and a kiss at the Gatwick Airport. There’s nothing like seeing my very own handsome, gorgeous, precious Mr. Jones walking back and forth restlessly while trying to find me from the crowd of arriving passengers. He always looks and smells nice and the world is smiling at us as we meet again.

This time we were up for an adventure, and we drove intuitively trying to find a majestic hotel for our romantic purposes. We did find it eventually, but as we arrived, we realized that one bag was missing. I had left all of his clothes at the airport buss. It was too late to do anything about it, so in the meanwhile we had a romantic dinner for two from the room services (a shared sandwich with a bottle of Chilean Merlot) and an intense moment of reconnecting in a physical level. In the morning I found a chewing gum from my hair.

The next day we solved a lot of problems. Cut some hair, ran around Gatwick to trade a bagful of clothes to a box of white-chocolate blueberries from Finland and drove about 5 hours to find a next hotel, just to find out there wasn’t any rooms left in London.  Finally we ended up in the good old Holden House In Deptford, where sweet Clare greeted us with a smile. (Again I couldn’t emphasize enough the gratitude I have towards those beautiful people around me. Friends.) 

After a compulsory cup of English tea,(there are no problems in England, there’s just too little tea sometimes) we had a delicious Turkish dinner, and a session of checking out my flight details in Greenwich.  I was tired and confused, so I decided to solve that with a good cry. Funny enough, all of that didn’t ring our bells to check again the first flight for Sunday, which, funny enough, was 9.30am instead of 9.30pm. We realized this after midday on Sunday. This followed by a panic, running around, making a dozen of calls to find out, that the flight was gone. Missed. Wait-for-your-refund-for-3-moths-kinda-Lost.

We had a very few option, and from those few options we chose the only one, which was a new flight. My savior, my personal hero and the greatest love of my life did it again. He saved my ass regardless the fact, that we could not afford this kind of fuckery. (The truth is really, that we can’t afford me. But this he wouldn’t admit, lucky old me.) 

A Jackpot: A partner, who stays calm next to you, when you’ve made the biggest mistake of your life.  
 Priceless: A partner, who keeps smiling in this situation and helps you out of it. 

(I used to think, that my time will come to give it all back, but my favor bank is starting to fill so quickly I have a feeling the universe will get back to me before I get a change.. ‘Thank you’ feels so small nowadays, that I’m in trouble trying to find out a way to show my gratitude. I did promise another child, though. That’s a start)

We managed to get a flight to Hong Kong on the same day. We were exhausted, and by the time we finally got to the check in, we started a fight. A nice, refreshing shout-out-loud just before the departure, followed with let-it-all-out-cry and with an ice cream, a hug, a kiss and auf wiedersehen.  I cried all the way to the plane. This caused a lot of sympathy in the personnel of Gatwick, but luckily I got to sneak to the airplane quickly enough not to ruin everyone’s adventures. Soon after that my future fiancé called and made me smile again which was a priceless act and made me less sad and lonely when leaving Europe. 

Encounters

How often does it happen, that you get a friendly and fun encounter with someone you have met once several years ago, with whom you shagged like a rabbit with and never contacted after? In general I don't have a grudge against anyone I've slept with, but rarely do I get to joke about it neither with the person concerned. Most of them are finnish and I have a feeling that for a Finnish man sex is a serious, if not embarrassing, matter. This is especially noticeable if your incidence happened to stay in the level of so called "one night stand": If you ever happend to meet him/her again, it is very likely to be an uneasy situation.

 For me, I've noticed, this is rarely the case. Not only because I'm very much friends with a majority of men I've ever slept with, but also I tend to think, that as I've been in the most intimate connection with this man, it would be very hypocrite to start pretending a modest stranger. Instead, I have a (perhaps possessive) tendency to think, that I know him already (atleast I've seen him VERY closely) so what's there to hide anymore. And therefore today I noticed, that meeting someone (I've slept with) with a similar attitude makes me feel very warm inside. or excited. a bit.

(maybe also the fact, that it happened in a beautiful countrystyle wedding, we had the summer, the sauna and the lake, he was the bestman and a countrysideboy  ..added a few excitement points to it as well)

Losing is Winning

My amazing adventures has turned out to be slightly hapless. Funnily it happened straight after I decided to start a blog about my extraordinarily fortunate life..

The runaway-weekend plan got wrecked due to a bad flu and one cracked landlady, who had changed the locks before the end of my rental agreement. After a long day of driving around we found ourselves standing outside for one and ahalf hours waiting for her to let us in to the flat, which we used to call 'home'. We needed to move my things out before the weekend trip, and this turned out to be a night of bitter fighting, kicking doors and grumping. If that wasn't bad enough, I then received a letter stating, that she will not pay my deposit back, but instead tries to charge £150 for "professional cleaning" on top of that. 

My first lawsuit, how very exciting indeed.

SO, today I needed to talk with someone, and as Mr. Jones was on a duty the whole day and my social circles are fairly small in MH, I needed to make a new friend. Luckily there still seems to exist somesort of balance in the universe, and it agreed with me that it's my turn to be favoured for a change: I met a beautiful minded streetartist.

He was drawing tigers on a pavement, when I approached him with 70pence and a smile. He had a warm look in his eyes, dirty clothes, long hair on a messy ponytail and the most beautiful smile. We ended up chatting about small matters, like meaning of life, people and happiness, while drawing animals with pastelcolors. I also met some of his friends, who were passing by and stayed for a chat. After a few hours he needed to go, and he gave me a copy of his painting as a gift. We hugged and promised to meet again. I was happy and the world was smiling with me again.

I remembered, what summer should be about.