CH2. Life in Germany 11: Released and Active

Hello, Tim!
This week we are going to carry on with the quarantine - and how I eventually got released, wreaking havoc across the land already upon the recuperation of liberty (I did nothing illegal, though). The weather hasn't been steady - sunny on one day and pouring on the following one.

Tidbits of Fear

One thing you can certainly expect from a person in quarantine is that you would spend too much time thinking. There was this once when I was having mine and Eliza's clothes that just came out from the laundry, and somehow it spurred an internal discussion about parenting problems, which was then brought up during a conversation with Johannes.

More often, however, you spend unnecessary time thinking about all the scenarios that might be happening if you really did bring back the coronavirus to the people close to you; how it is going to be passed on to their close acquaintance. You gulp down the droplet of fear that you are the figurative epidemic of the illness, and how the news reports are going to describe you as the center of misfits you really are. Every small cough, each time you register the tingling throat will be magnified (dramatized) into a telltale sign that you have contracted the virus.

Up until now, even after retrieving freedom, there is still this small spot at the back of my head, just two centimeters above my neck, telling me that I still have the potential to add to the number of the infected in Taiwan... All I can offer to myself in times like this is to self inform that I worry too much.
It's the only thing to do.

Side Projects with Eliza

In the two weeks of our home quarantine, Eliza and I had received a lot of inputs of nutrition, including the regular meals, way too much junk food, and a wide variety of fruits. I have stated that I would have managed just fine with only raw ingredients, which would help me wade through the monotony that I had become familiar with, but food came nonetheless.

There was one day when I finally successfully conveyed my hope to cook something for the both of us, and I decided to make it count. I started rather early in the morning, preparing the broth and the vegetables for later. I had the picture in my head already: a Chinese cabbage cream gratin, and a champignon risotto-stuffed squid. The stepped lain out in my head was already time-consuming, but I felt as if I needed exactly that.

The exterior of the squid was lightly roasted with some soy sauce.

Eliza helped as much as possible, and that made my life a lot easier, and the same things goes with the idle banter throughout the cooking process.

The squid turned out smaller than I imagined, and we faced hardship when trying to fill the body of the squid with as much rice as possible. Eliza helped with the plating, something I never pull off well enough. We had a nice dinner.

We also had a discussion about how we should deal with the overflowing amount of berries we received. Among them were strawberries, mulberries, and blueberries. We made it into two and a half hard of jam and gave one to my niece's place. It smelled so good when the mixture of berry puree and sugar and lemon was slowly simmering, and the scent wafted through doors and rooms with its presence: sweet, downy.

It is actually a simple three-step process: Rinse, simmer, serve.

After going to Germany, cooking has become my vent for the surplus of energy as well as the stress pilling up. Let's see how much further I can go.

The Release

It is indisputable that I was more eager to do the count down on the day before I would become a free soul once again. I sat at the doorway at around 11;50 in the evening, knees bouncing while sharing the ecstasy with Jackey and Yu, who had plans to bolt the instant the day changed as well. Eliza was in her (my mom's) room, video chatting with her friends. She told me to have a good time outside, and I told her I would be back soon.

Spent the morning watching the movie The Perfume, an adaption to the novel with the same name written my Patrick Süskind. Might/might not write an entry about it in the next letter.

With maniac, gleeful stomps, I zoomed down the flight of stairs with a hysterical thrill. This was what freedom felt like. After fourteen days of confinement, I was finally free! A part of my brain imagined myself as some evil figure who had reclaimed his liberty after being sealed by an enchantment for centuries, with the forbidding cackling and a small monologue of how the leash on evil has finally come undone and all.

Yes, I sometimes spend too much time thinking about things like this.

Anyway, it was twelve o'clock in the morning, and I took in the road that I was always looking out from the balcony. The road offered way to few cars zooming by me as I relished in the liberation. I had this all planned out: I would be going to the park right across the road for a short jog, and then I am going to trace the first thirty minutes of the path that I would be following to get to the Yangming Mountain. I FaceTimed  Johannes to share with him the joy, and headed back after 90 minutes of freedom. Reportedly, Yu went to have fun at his friend's place, and Jackey left with his sister from their "quarantine house" to his real home.

Meanwhile, Eliza

Eliza was still online chatting as I returned. I followed suit and laid on the bed and whittled more time away as the night went on, people most likely unaware that there was a guy who just got reminded how fresh the air can be.

Online Courses

The online courses are... normal. I guess. And highly predictable. This new form of teaching has now been spreading worldwide as the Coronavirus still is a prominent problem everywhere, and it does not require much imagination to assume that raucous havoc happens in every first period. There were loud banging noises coming from one of the student's speakers, and the professor tried to talk over the sound of his children arguing with each other in German. My loud breathing went disturbingly well through the microphone as I had forgotten to turn it off after answering the question, and there was once I played background music from an external source and it was caught by the professor, even though he didn't know from which receiving end the music was from. It was chaotic.

According to the state my school is in, our online courses would be going all the way until the end of mid April, but people have been guessing that it is very likely to get an extension when the time comes. Either way, the project for my block (these five weeks) would have to be executed and presented through the Internet, meaning my teammates and I will have to carry out one single presentation while we are countries apart. We will see how it turns out in the end.

Trudging Upwards

I am losing track of all the inner musing that were being put into words and, consequently, on my blog here, but after all the solo/team trekking and traveling I have done in Europe, and after listening to people there talk about their home countries -including the Taiwanese people I hang out with in the dorm, in which case their home country would be Taiwan, like mine-, and I gradually felt with a fair amount of dread when the realization hit me: I don't seem to have much appreciation for my land, the place where I grew up. 

Motive for a walk.

Undoubtedly, I love Taiwan. It nurtured me and provided me the home and shelter that I would never check behind. When when you want to go to details, I find myself flailing while grasping for words. Even before really coming back, I made myself a promise to see more of Taiwan when allowed. On the Sunday of this week, I made my first step. I planned a half-day hike in the Yangming National Park, which is actually just in reach, considering the distance I was able to cover when going to Eberbach, Munich to visit Elena and get papers pulled through, or the time I spent trekking in Strasbourg.

Waking up at around six, I had sufficient time to make sure I had all the necessities with me. I met Mom downstairs as she was just heading for work. We had some exchange of words, and we headed our own way. Walking through piles and patches of traffic, I was eager to see something different already.

There was a series of stairs which was quite challenging as starters. Called the "Pipe Lane (水管路)", it signified how the path along which a long tube of pipe came to be when the Japanese colonized Taiwan, how the origin of the water provided more than ample water supply when the original water system was unable to handle the growing population. The pipes, I suppose, are still in use. 

It was a long case of stairs, I assure you, and I guessed it was the lack of breakfast that tired me so quickly, and I stopped briefly to have the bread I had prepared.

I wasn't alone at the beginning. There were people walking down the stairs as well, though not captured in any of my pictures. I thought initially that they started way earlier than I did, but judging from some of their conversations, I would guess that they took the bus to the top of the stairs and walked down.

Dog came at the sight of food.

Ascending the stairs, a sign marked the area for sighting of Formosan Macaque, a local species of monkeys inhabiting the peripheral. I tried to look for at least one of them, which would elevate the hiking experience for sure, but as sure as I was to hear some screeching that is characteristic of monkeys from above, I saw none of them. In the woods, I saw how the trails are not like the ones I had been on in Germany, where you arrays of trees of the same species, while here on this one, there is no specific area where a certain type of trees flourish. Not really. If you get tossed to a random spot along the track, you will likely be able to see more than twenty different types of trees and plants popping out from the muddy land. 

Yeah, the place I live is actually quite mountainy.

There are some more relaxing paths along the way, albeit short.

Starry blossoms on the ground.

All of which are courtesy of the national park

Just for the record, I was not alone on my way. As a matter of fact, people seemed to have filed from different locations and have ended up on the same mountain top eventually, meaning that there would be more and more people visible as the altitude increased.

It is the constant heating up of the unground rocks that got turned into steam between the cracks of the boulders.

It was quite magical, to be honest.
The sulfuric smells wafted here and there all day long, reminding me of boiled eggs.

I would love to give descriptive details about all the sceneries I had stopped for, but that would make this letter way longer than it already is, but I promise you that it was a beautiful, peaceful experience when your brain registered the trees, the blossoms, the fuming stones, and the waterfalls through your pair of biological cameras, and I felt the need to reiterate how happy I can be to go solo on trips like this; you take in the view, you process it, and it can be better imprinted in your mind.

Quoting Johannes: It looks like some place from the movies.

Public free foot hot spring!

Lucky to be all alone on occasions like this.

A small but breath-taking waterfall.

I reached the peak with some wobbly legs. I aimed for the peak of this mountain, knowing that it it one of the nearest with above 1000 meters of altitude, but it was not until I read the signature pole every named mountain in Taiwan has (this mountain is called the QiXing Mountain, or the Seven-Star mountain) that I found out that I just mounted the highest mountain in Taipei. I had a picture of me taken before a queue could form for the photography.

When you go out alone, sometimes you do have to request other people to have your pictures taken.

This was the group of Americans with a really cute  and uncontrollable husky. The dog came by and snooped  in the backpacks of the other hikers, and I responded by sharing some of my apple/

My knees still hurt a bit after that day, a courtesy of the knee-pressuring descent, but I loved the fact that I am living up to my own expectations, finding the rock-hard reasoning that I am still lacking.

The knee challenge starts when you commence your descent.

Another waterfall.

End

If I were still in Germany, next week would be the Easter break of my school. I will try to do something.

Met with Angela at Starbucks for some studies and for picking up the sweater she wanted to give me for my birthday. Now it is what we call matching outfits.

Sincerely,
Hugo