Burn You Up, Burn You Down

Way back in the olden days of January, I joined a gym near my house. I did not join for the gym. That part of the building was unimpressive. I joined for the swimming pools. Specifically, the lap pool with a dozen lanes, the ample hot tubs, and the water massages.

Before the swimming pool, I would jog or ride a bicycle every morning. I was thinking about buying my own bicycle since I always use the city bikes that are parked all over town. Having my own bicycle would save me NT$40 a day, and even though the city bikes are well maintained, anything I bought would probably be a better quality.

After I joined the gym, I mostly swam every morning, and ran or biked maybe once a week. Buying my own bicycle was no longer a priority. Though I did miss riding along the river in the morning. I love swimming, but the pool was indoors, so riding a bicycle outdoors was always a nice change of pace. And the more I thought about it, the more convenient the city bikes were. When I want to use one, I go to any one of a number of stations, scan it out with my MRT card, and return it to any station when finished. Every bicycle has a locking system, but parking and security are not much of an issue when you only have it with you while riding. I never have to oil chains, find a place to keep it, and best of all, I have never had to fix a flat tire. NT$40 is literally spare change. I have no idea what coffee costs, but NT$40 could buy two bottles of water from 7-Eleven.

Then everything changed. As it often does. The current drought closed the swimming pool, which upset pretty much every member of the gym. Almost no one went there for the exercise equipment. Everyone was in it for the pools. Since we were all members, and we had all paid our fees in advance, the gym was in a sticky situation. Giving everyone their money back would probably destroy the gym financially, and doing nothing was not an option. Taiwanese culture encourages complaining, even more than Chinese culture. Since most of the members were in a high enough tax bracket to usually get what they want, legal action was on the table. The government that forced the gym to close the swimming pools probably would have sided with the members over the gym.

Fortunately for all concerned, they were already working on opening a new facility. The timing of the drought was not ideal, but droughts rarely are.

About two years ago, the company that owns the swimming pools started building a new gym. Everyone agreed that the gym in the pool building was a waste of space, but there was no possible way to add onto the building without the neighbors volunteering to abandon their properties. Instead, they built an entirely new building on a separate site.

The new gym is maybe one hundred times larger. That sounds like a ridiculous exaggeration, but the old gym was tiny and the new one is pretty big. The gym above the swimming pool was no bigger than a standard business hotel gym, with two treadmills, two exercise bikes, some light free weights and a couple of yoga mats. The new gym is five stories, with an entire floor of treadmills and exercise bikes, including a few recumbent bikes. It also has a wide variety of machines for each muscle group, including more than a few machines I have not figured out how to use yet.

Most importantly, there is a swimming pool. It does not have as many lanes as the old pool, but it is long enough for laps. Unlike the old pool, it is outdoors, which might be a challenge in an environment like Taiwan. The fewer hot tubs are smaller and indoors, and segregated by gender. I like that part. Unfortunately, the pool and hot tubs are just as closed by the drought as the old pools. When they designed and built it, there was no drought. By the time the gym opened, they were not allowed to use enough water to fill them. They look like they will be nice to use someday.

The old pool was a quick walk from my apartment. The new gym is a quick drive. So far, there is more than enough parking. That will probably change as membership increases. But I have already found a solution to a future problem that may or may not ever occur. My apartment is close to a river. Along the river are a series of parks with bicycle paths. One particular path can take me from practically my front door to within a block of the gym. There are city bicycle stations all along the river and one in front of the gym. Since the city bikes are free for the first 30 minutes, I can ride to the gym for the same price as walking, and get there much faster. At this point, I see no reason to buy my own bicycle.

Since the new gym is much larger, so are the showers and locker rooms. At the old pool, every member could put a lock on any available locker and leave it there indefinitely. Not having to drag all your crap in every day was pretty convenient. At the new gym, all lockers are expected to be empty by midnight. I have no idea what they do with anything anyone leaves overnight, but I have decided to follow their rules and not find out. Carrying a gym bag to the gym is a pretty standard activity.

Something I could not help but notice right away was the amount of public nudity at the new gym. At the old pool, you could hang out in the locker room all day and never see anything more scandalous than someone in a bathing suit. Everyone kept things in their locker, showered in the shower cubicles and changed in the changing cubicles. At the new gym, there are no changing cubicles. I would assume that most Taiwanese, being a fairly modest and shy people, would change in the showers. Instead, everyone changes at their lockers. And since the segregated saunas are adjacent to the locker rooms, some casually walk from one to the other as naked as dolphins. When I lived in China, I used to say that if you were a 12-year-old boy with the super power to turn invisible, China would be a disappointing place. As it turns out, a Taiwanese gym would be just as good as a 1980s teen movie.

At the old pool, no towels were allowed beyond the locker rooms. I never understood that rule. At the new gym, using towels with the machines is encouraged, though most people walk around without one. Gym etiquette is a little different here than anywhere else I have worked out. Rather than let a towel catch your drippings, everyone lets whatever comes out of their bodies onto the machines. But there is always a spray bottle full of isopropyl alcohol near every machine. Instead of wiping off a machine after use with a towel, everyone sprays alcohol on the machine before use. A wide variety of disinfectants have been pretty much everywhere since the last SARS outbreak, and no one thinks twice about spraying and/or wiping surfaces on a regular basis. I don't know anything about the gym's maintenance schedule, but I have seen employees practically hose down machines with alcohol when not in use.

With the loss of the old swimming pools and the addition of the new gym, I went back to jogging or riding a bicycle outdoors in nature every morning, or at least the closest thing we get to nature around here. And now I go to a real gym at night. Someday, I will be able to swim at night, or in the morning, but for now, I climb onto strange machines and push weights around while listening to music on a telephone. Just as nature intended.

Walk Through the Fire

Taiwan is in the middle of a drought. The news is calling it the biggest drought in 50 years. But they always say things like that. Every single year, they dramatically announce that one day in January is the coldest day of the year, even though the year just started, and the coldest day of every year is always in January. If some white supremacist “patriot” assassinates Biden, it will be the biggest American assassination of the 21st century. None of the cable news channels will point out that it was also the first presidential assassination of the 21st century.

I would be amazed if the US Secret Service reads this blog, but just in case, I want to point out how ironic I would consider it if Biden were assassinated. Then a black woman would become president. That is not exactly what the white supremacists want, but are any of them astute enough to figure that out? To be safe, they could take out both the president and vice president. That would be dramatic enough to get them the attention their parents obviously never gave them as children. But then the speaker of the house would become president. All those brave patriots might want to hold off on the killing spree, at least until the next election.

Whether our drought is the most dramatic event in the history of the world or a bit of an inconvenience, it has people talking, complaining, and vowing to make changes. Though most of the country is a subtropical forest, the entire west coast was deforested generations ago. The east coast still gets more than enough rain every year, but almost everyone lives on the west coast, and for reasons a lot of people do not understand, there is no system to transfer water from east to west. There used to be a time when the large mountain ranges between the coasts hindered transportation, but 21st century technology must have a way to get water around mountains.

Taiwan is entirely responsible for turning the lush west coast into steel and concrete, but other countries, mostly China and the United States, are responsible for the lower rainfall every year. But as long as today has record profits, who cares about tomorrow, right? We moved to Kaohsiung during typhoon season, so we saw plenty of rain when we first got here, but it has rained little since. It was only when people started talking about the drought that I noticed how seldom it was raining. Since I came from Hong Kong, I liked how I could leave the house without an umbrella. Typhoon season is coming up, so people are expecting more rain soon, but it will have to pour like there is no tomorrow to flood the drought. We need a large typhoon with all of its water to hit us directly, rather than simply pass by and give us its wind.

As is often the case, there will be some changes made because of this drought. Rather than think ahead, the people in charge of this country, just like the people in charge of every country, react to the complaints of their constituents more than they anticipate a disaster and solve it before anyone threatens to vote for someone else. Taiwan has handled this virus issue much better than most countries. But not because the leaders had the foresight to expend considerable resources on a future emergency that might never come. Taiwan's leaders were fully prepared for SARS 2 because of experience gained from SARS 1. If American leaders are smart, they will learn from their current situation and prepare for the next one, just as Taiwan did. If history is any indication, one political party will show the other who is the boss, and screw over the people.

One of the best things about Taiwan is that one political party does not dismantle everything done by another party. If the people in charge now can find a way to prevent future droughts, the other parties will keep everything in place when they take over. But first, someone has to find a way to prevent future droughts.