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Taipei Charlie goes south. Of the border.
Oct. 9th, 2015 11:29 amYesterday I woke up at 3.30am. This is not in fact at all unusual, it's just that usually I sigh miserably and stare at the ceiling and dwell on all my faults for an hour and then try to go back to sleep again. It's a pattern.
Yesterday it was a lucky pattern, because it meant I could leap out of bed and into the shower moments before the alarm would have gone off.
Then I bade farewell to the boys and made m'poor wife drive me to the airport. Arriving at 4am, the first thing one learns is that the baggage-drop feature does not open till 4.45am, but never mind. Time passed, baggages were dropped. I went through security and drank coffee like it was yesterday, and got on a plane and flew to Houston. Where I ate sushi and noodled on the internet and got on another plane and flew to Mexico City, hereinafter CDMX because I think that's really cool.
So: I am here for six days, courtesy of the Ministry of Culture, for the Zocalo Book Fair. Which is five minutes' stroll around the corner from this hotel, and I plan to take that stroll in a few minutes, so this is just a placeholder post really.
No jetlag, obviously, but last night I was just too shattered to go out; ate in the hotel, emailed with m'wife and was in bed before ten.
This morning, I went shyly upstairs to breakfast alone (I hate, hate, hate walking into restaurants on my own; for a foodie, this is something of a handicap) and had barely found a table before I was hailed by name, and there was Adriana, the editor and translator and onlie begetter of the anthology which is the sole cause of my being here. So we were shifting chairs for a table for two when a voice said hullo, and that was Iain Rowan, another of the Brits in the antho and over for the occasion. Who lives in Sunderland, as it happens; we'd had dinner together, ages back.
So that was fun; and then I trotted down to the foyer to meet up with my translator Fausto (or is he my interpreter, is there a difference? At any rate, he is assigned to me; and would keep company with me twelve hours a day if I would let him). We went walking, all around the heart of CDMX. We went up their tallest building, which is still just about in the list of the world's tallest 50; right at the top is this charming little twist, where you've been up two separate lifts and two floors of a spiral staircase and it suddenly turns around and winds the other way in a serpentine motion. I have never seen that before, and have no idea why they would have done it; it's really disorienting.
Also disorienting, in my room here at the hotel there are two Rothko prints on the wall. Big prints, hung about a foot apart. They are marginally different sizes, and different aspect ratios - one portrait, one as near square as makes no difference - and they're too close together and one is hung a little less than an inch higher than the other, and this is bugging the hell out of me. I nearly got up in the dead dark midnight to rehang them.
But anyway. People here are lovely, they are taking ridiculous care of us, I am taking a ridiculous quantity of photos (some of which I really will get around to posting, yes, one of these days; I still have photos of Filoli gardens to go through too), and now I must go below to face my actual mission here...
Yesterday it was a lucky pattern, because it meant I could leap out of bed and into the shower moments before the alarm would have gone off.
Then I bade farewell to the boys and made m'poor wife drive me to the airport. Arriving at 4am, the first thing one learns is that the baggage-drop feature does not open till 4.45am, but never mind. Time passed, baggages were dropped. I went through security and drank coffee like it was yesterday, and got on a plane and flew to Houston. Where I ate sushi and noodled on the internet and got on another plane and flew to Mexico City, hereinafter CDMX because I think that's really cool.
So: I am here for six days, courtesy of the Ministry of Culture, for the Zocalo Book Fair. Which is five minutes' stroll around the corner from this hotel, and I plan to take that stroll in a few minutes, so this is just a placeholder post really.
No jetlag, obviously, but last night I was just too shattered to go out; ate in the hotel, emailed with m'wife and was in bed before ten.
This morning, I went shyly upstairs to breakfast alone (I hate, hate, hate walking into restaurants on my own; for a foodie, this is something of a handicap) and had barely found a table before I was hailed by name, and there was Adriana, the editor and translator and onlie begetter of the anthology which is the sole cause of my being here. So we were shifting chairs for a table for two when a voice said hullo, and that was Iain Rowan, another of the Brits in the antho and over for the occasion. Who lives in Sunderland, as it happens; we'd had dinner together, ages back.
So that was fun; and then I trotted down to the foyer to meet up with my translator Fausto (or is he my interpreter, is there a difference? At any rate, he is assigned to me; and would keep company with me twelve hours a day if I would let him). We went walking, all around the heart of CDMX. We went up their tallest building, which is still just about in the list of the world's tallest 50; right at the top is this charming little twist, where you've been up two separate lifts and two floors of a spiral staircase and it suddenly turns around and winds the other way in a serpentine motion. I have never seen that before, and have no idea why they would have done it; it's really disorienting.
Also disorienting, in my room here at the hotel there are two Rothko prints on the wall. Big prints, hung about a foot apart. They are marginally different sizes, and different aspect ratios - one portrait, one as near square as makes no difference - and they're too close together and one is hung a little less than an inch higher than the other, and this is bugging the hell out of me. I nearly got up in the dead dark midnight to rehang them.
But anyway. People here are lovely, they are taking ridiculous care of us, I am taking a ridiculous quantity of photos (some of which I really will get around to posting, yes, one of these days; I still have photos of Filoli gardens to go through too), and now I must go below to face my actual mission here...