My alarm went off this morning at 5:40, but Kaitlin and I had been up, off and on, for most of the night, thanks to the joy that is a hostel full of late-night incomers who are not so great at keeping quiet. We were not exactly awake.
We packed up our stuff in the dark, discovered we couldn't actually check out early like we'd thought we could, so we left our stuff at the back of the main room and left one set of keys and a note on the front desk, then headed towards the MRT. The plan was to try to make it in time for the last shuttle bus to Brittany's race at 6:30am or, failing that, to just go ahead and take MRT all the way there.
After all, I reasoned, the race was at Tamsui Gate 6, so all I would have to do was go to the Tamsui MRT station and then just follow the crowd. At Jiantian, we saw a white guy in running shoes get off and I wondered if he was going to the race. But that couldn't be, I reasoned--the shuttle was at Shilin! We got to Shilin a few minutes later, just as the last shuttle bus would certainly be pulling away. No problem, we thought, we'll just shoot for the backup plan!
About 20 minutes later, we pulled up to Tamsui and got off. There, we discovered precisely one thing: there was no race there. It was utterly deserted, and even the Starbucks was closed. Not only that, but no one there had ever heard of a race--a race which was being held on a closed-off portion of the number 1 expressway.
How was this possible? I do not know. But when I asked information, at the MRT station, where the race was, she directed me to the footpath by the river. "If you want to, you can race there..." she said. When I assured her that Kaitlin and I had not, in fact, come to Tamsui with the intention of finding a good racetrack to see who was faster, she tried to direct me to a gym. I gave up.
After a call to Rachel that revealed that, not only were we at the wrong stop, but that even if we'd gotten off at Shilin we would have been at the wrong stop--Jiantian had the shuttle, after all, meaning both that the guy with the running shoes had likely been going to the race and that we could have made the last shuttle easily.
Instead, we got to explore Tamsui a little bit, then we were the first people in the door at Starbucks before we headed back to Jiantian. Once there, we flagged down a taxi--who had no idea about the race. Seriously?? The expressway was closed! This guy was a taxi driver, working less than 10 minutes from the race, and he somehow had no idea what was going on.
The next cabbie, fortunately, did.
(Did I mention yet that this trip stretched my Chinese abilities further than they've ever been stretched before? Because it totally did.)
We got to Brittany's race around the time she'd estimated she'd get in, and waited with Analicia, Rachel, and Rakitia (a friend of Brittany's who lives in Taipei) until Brittany crossed the finish line. She made it!
A convoluted getting-back-and-making-plans process followed, but soon enough Kaitlin and I were heading on MRT to meet Brittany and Rachel for brunch at a Western breakfast place. It was easy enough, just one stop away.
Except it wasn't. We hopped on the train, got off at the next stop, and then realized something: we were in the wrong place. My first thought was we hadn't gone far enough, so I pushed my way back through the crowd and the closing doors to see---Kaitlin on the other side.
After some frantic gesturing and an anxious wait at the next stop, Kaitlin and I were reunited, and we found a train going back to where we went wrong. Right around then, we got a call from Rachel--saying she and Brittany had also taken the wrong train. Lack of sleep is never great for things like navigation...
It was a day of forgetting and having things forgotten, things that had no cause to be forgotten. But, as a result of them, today won't be!
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