Part 33: Third tour
Kaoshiung, Taiwan. The sun was shining behind the clouds. This was advantageous, even so we reached tropically humid 30 degrees, which immediately put a damp film on the skin when we first stepped out of the air-conditioned airport. It was dark when we arrived, neon signs with Chinese characters on the side of the road, cars, scooters, high-rise buildings, street vendors. And I had lost all temporal orientation, we had already been on the road for too many hours, flown through too many time zones. First to Helsinki. It was shortly before midnight and the airport was deserted, only at the counter to Hong Kong there were groups of people. Sometime in the middle of the night the hot meal. Milla slept soundly in her basket. A movie, then my eyes fell shut too, and when I opened them again, sunlight shone through half-slid window flaps on the plane. A clock showed it was half past five in the morning, but I couldn’t remember which location that referred to. At some point we landed again and then we took off again and when we landed again it was just dark. I put Milla to bed at the local time just before midnight. She slept and slept and woke up after ten hours, jerked her legs in the air and put one foot in her mouth. In the following weeks we dragged the half-naked baby through the tropics. Stroller-suitable Taiwan was not either and Milla was not sling-suitable. It went through mega cities, to beaches, through night markets, to national parks and temples and of course to the theater. This time even backstage and the actors waved to Milla when they were changing. Milla made her first jumps with support and laughed uproariously that it brought tears to our eyes.