May 12th

May 12, 2025

Zhongli

My very short airline magazine article - with a self-timed snap of me in blue

It pissed down all day yesterday and I felt sorry for Debbie on her pilgrimage, but she seemed to enjoy herself regardless. She got one of those fluorescent orange baseball caps that the guy on the train was wearing on Thursday.

I was stuck inside the apartment all day, but thankfully the sky has cleared.

This morning the editor of an airline magazine emailed me a pdf of a short article I wrote a while ago about cycling on Taiwan's east coast and asked me to give it a once over before it gets uploaded - they no longer print them. It's nice to see that three of my snaps have been included, including a self-timed one of me riding towards camera. It must have been taken when I had the Canon Mk II.

For the past 24 hours, my old 7" tablet has been on charge, yet the battery is stuck at only at 20 percent. The thing must have died.

The tablet something I load screenshots of my route onto and as it's only a week before me departure, it's something that needs replacing. There are a couple of shops in town to try, but first lunch is due and I wheel my commuter bike outside at gone noon and head off towards a cafe called Human Human.

It's on route 113 - about 10 minutes away - and this will be my first visit, done at the suggestion of an old student of mine who's meeting me there.

All that rain has cooled things down a bit, but it's still short-sleeves and shorts weather.

A block from home are a few brooms and mops hooked onto a metal door and I pause to take a snap, then pedal further west along what's a fairly new, four-lane road. It was built less than 10 years ago.

This route is the one I take when heading to Puxin, but when I reach the 113 after five minutes or so, I make a right instead of going straight. The 113 is a busy road and not one that you'd choose to ride along for fun.

My eyes are peeled for more mops, but there aren't any photogenic ones outside the mix of various shops and commercial buildings that pass by as I ride south. All that gets snapped is a open-sided truck loaded with pineapples. It's actually very close to the Human Human cafe.

My bike gets locked outside where there's a row of eight scooters and inside I get handed an English menu by the petite woman of twentysomething who's serving and I order a brownie with ice cream. There's a table free near the back and I sit and wait for Olive to turn up. I'm about 10 minutes early.

My brownie has just about gone when Olive arrives with her Fuji camera. It's a comparatively hefty thing compared to mine - the body is maybe twice the size and then there's the lens. She's thinking of selling the pricey kit and buying a smaller camera. That was my decision many years ago.

We decide to ask the server about the cafe's name and expect some philosophical discourse, but she comes back to tell us that the owner just liked the sound of Human Human.

I tell Olive about my tablet issue and set off for town. After going along beside a small river towards the centre, I end up in a tech shop where the guy tries to sell me one bigger than I want. Seven inches or maybe 8" is OK, as these will fit into my bar-bag, but 10" is too big. There's another place just five minutes away. It's called Nova.

Nova is tech mall located on route 114, where I was on Sunday. In fact I stopped near the corner and took a photo. Today my bike gets locked outside and I start to look around the three floors of tech shops.

All the tablets are a bit too too big, but the final clerk I ask says I should try the unit that sells second-hand stuff and he points me in the right direction. It's a shop I just looked around, but where I only saw pricey Apple ones.

Apart from various iPads, they have two 8" tablets - one is a Lenovo and the other a Samsung. They're both priced at around US$90 and I end up with the Lenovo, as it's fractionally smaller. It doesn't have an SD card, but the guy says I can just connect it to my PC and transfer all the folders and images, which sounds easy enough. What can go wrong?

It's a 20-odd minute ride back home, slightly uphill, not that you can really see any real incline. It's just enough to make you sweat.

The tablet gets connected to my PC and I try transferring the folders, but a message always pops saying it can't do it for whatever reason. After the umpteenth attempt, I give up and plan to go back to Nova tomorrow. What a pain.

A selection of used iPads in a tech mall called Nova

Today's ride: 14 km (9 miles)
Total: 153 km (95 miles)

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