I’ve been back in Switzerland for a week and am already planning my next trip. Today my Frequent Traveller card arrived. It’s a good day to finish what I left undone.

March 5: I forgot to mention that I had jellyfish. It’s a lot like mushrooms.

March 7:

I took the train to Oyumino and showed our microscope to a small group of 7th-12th graders at CCSI (Covenant Community School International). They varied in their enthusiasm, but most of them thought it was pretty cool to see the dots of a CD stamper. It was fun to experience what it’s like to teach and interact with students – after all, this is what many of our customers do for a living.
Judith gave me a ride to the Tobu Narita Holiday Inn where I should have prepared for the seminar on the 9th but instead went for shark fin on rice at the hotel restaurant. It hardly has any taste of its own and has an odd stringy texture that has me wondering why it’s a delicacy and what happens with the rest of the shark instead of sitting in rapt wonder with a morsel in my mouth. My main achievement was to re-pack my suitcase and backpack. I like this hotel for cheap rates and being the closest to the airport. Book on the Japanese site for cheaper rates…

March 8:

I did a poor job, but the Japanese ANA girl let me fly with 26 kilograms of checked baggage. She also took my Star Alliance card number for that flight even though Air Nippon, unlike its mother carrier ANA, doesn’t belong to any alliance. In Taiwan I was welcomed with unseasonably cold 15 degrees °C and pouring rain. After sleeping of travel tiredness in the Welcome Hotel I was invited to dinner at the buffet of the Sheraton Hotel, where as usual I overate. Buffets require more discipline than regular restaurants, and in a place with fresh bread, fresh seafood, Taiwanese specialities, and scrumptious desserts from apple crumble to matcha ice cream I fail the test. The buffet stands in the 12-story atrium of the hotel and I find the atmosphere refined, albeit imposing: the paintings on the wall exceed my bedroom in size. Every now and then the elevators will move and send light reflections wandering across the room like a light show, making the place feel like a rock concert on TV with the volume muted.

I prepared my presentation for the next day until 2 a.m.

March 9:

I got up after four and a half hours of sleep, packed, and got ready for a seminar on our microscopes. A good turnout, good demonstration, and a helpful translator made the event a success. I think especially the simple cantilever exchange had people impressed. I’d never been translated before, and found it a helpful experience. It made obvious to me how often I use long sentences that can be hard to understand; it made culturally embedded jokes painfully clear.

After the seminar, I was driven to the airport, mostly because Taiwan’s new high-speed train was all booked out. There, I compensated for delicious food with a visit at Burger King, the slowest fast food place I’ve ever been to. It amazes me that in an international airport only one staff member of a restaurant speaks English.

The airport, by the way, is no longer called Chiang Kai-Shek but Taoyuan International Airport. The name change happened, according to my partner in Taipei, because Chiang Kai-Shek is a mainland Chinese. In the slightly grungy terminal 1 that Cathay leaves from I passed by a store that sold Taiwanese Aboriginal art and picked up a flier because I had no idea that Taiwan had Aboriginals. Apparently they are the northernmost branch of the Austronesian languange group.

I read through the short flight to Hong Kong, where we docked at the gate farthest from the gate I needed to board at. As far as I could tell, it’s tough to get a longer walk in HKG than from 49 to 18. I sat and waited, still reading in Robert Inchausti’s “Subversive Orthodoxy,” unable to shake the feeling that surely this must be a smart and wise book even though I routinely don’t understand what he’s saying because I lack a lot of background knowledge. It’s the first time I’ve heard of William Blake, for instance, and Blake’s the first guy he portrays. In that subchapter, Inchausti quotes Altizer and Hamilton: “Through Blake we can sense the theological significance of a poetic reversal of our mythical traditions, and become open to the possibility that the uniquely modern metamorphosis of the sacred into the profane is the culmination of a redemptive and kenotic movement of the Godhead.” Aside from the problem that “kenotic” isn’t in my Webster’s nor in my vocabulary, even my relative grasp of the other words doesn’t help me attain to an understanding of what these authors are saying. What is a poetic reversal of mythical traditions? Where do I need to look to see this uniquely modern metamorphosis they mention? I want to understand, but I can’t, due to the lack of background and examples. It seems ironic for him to say, “When human beings use words and phrases, they are not responding to stimuli; they are symbolizing: sharing worlds,” and to fail in his attempt to share his world with me – or at least ironic that the possibility of failed communication isn’t even mentioned in his book, at least not before page 80. But I’ll continue and at least try to get it.

BA had us line up in a giant queue for the flight to London. I slept more on that flight than the night before, even though the lady beside me woke me up to go to the bathroom. (On that note, ladies, please don’t travel on planes in skirts.)

March 10:

Heathrow. Or rather, Hea Throw Up. We arrived at five a.m. and I thought I could simply proceed to the next flight and chill at the gate. Well, no. I was carrying two carry-on pieces of luggage and there were two people whose only job it was to speak the following words: “Only ONE carry-on baggage per person.” Occasionally, they’d branch out: “I have nothing to do with the regulations. All I know is Only ONE Carry-On.” So I went through passport control, round to check-in, where I explained my dilemma of having a microscope and a computer and wanting to check neither. “It’s not the airline, it’s the regulations,” she said. I was to hear that from every single BA employee I spoke to in this matter. She continued: “Why don’t you ask customer service what they can do? They’re down there, at counter H.” I walked down there and waited until a guy whose English was hard to understand showed up. “We have a special belt here where we hand-carry your fragile item to the plane,” he said. “But I can’t guarantee for what happens on the other end.” Then he paused. “Where are you going? Basel? Why don’t you go to Terminal 4, where your flight leaves from, and ask them there.” I walked back to where I came from, the elevators, and decided to try the vending machine for something to drink. Of course, although there was no label indicating currency, the machine only took pounds, and the 80p someone had forgotten in the change return weren’t going to buy me water. I said to the guy waiting behind me: “I guess it only takes pounds.” “Tragic,” he said with a supercilious grin. I made off for Terminal 4, and despite the misgivings of Mr. Customer Service the Terminal Express was already running. At least one ray of hope. At Terminal 4 I tried to figure out where I needed to stand in line, and approached a counter that looked BA-ish and reasonable, but an employee approached me and after finding out my destination pointed me to the only counter that had a long line. I’ll take that as a rule of thumb. I stood in line and well, long story short because I’m tired of typing, I checked the microscope with a heavy heart. Then someone drove a loading vehicle into our plane and punctured the skin and made us walk all across the terminal to switch planes and arrive in Basel over an hour late. At least the weather was nice and afforded a neat view of France.

It’s not the airline, it’s the regulations.

March 15: I was waiting for a friend on the cathedral square in Basel. A guy bikes across it. He has a boom box strapped to his bike, and it’s playing this.