By Long Life

I went to Kaohsuing for Mother’s Day from Tainan and here’s what happened on my way back.

There were a lot of people waiting to get on the train. People just kept getting on and getting on and getting on. Finally, a conductor had to prevent people from pushing on to the train by telling them there was another train in another 20 minutes that they could get on.ÂÂ

Now, I’m on the train, right next to the door. And there’s a man at the bottom of the steps with half his body inside of the train and the other half, mostly his ass, hanging outside of the train. His right hand is hanging on to the rail inside the door and the left-hand is holding on to the door handle. And the train begins to move. Now, everybody next to the door is very worried about this man. But there is no way that any of us can move to make more room for him to get in. So we continue on our way with this strange man, who could be a Taiwanese Superman in disguise.

About five minutes before we get to Tainan, the train conductor- that is literally climbing over people to move his way down the aisle-sees that the door is open and there is a man with his ass blowing in the wind. Instead of letting the man just stay that way for the next five minutes, the conductor gets on the radio and stops the train so that we can all move round to make space for this man to get into the train far enough so that we can close the door. And that took the better part of half an hour. But in the end, we made it.