Guns 'n' Roses in Taiwan

In June 2018 , my wife got tickets to see Guns & Roses from Stub Hub, a re-seller site; double price, $200 each, but every other artist is not coming to Taiwan. It will be Celine Dion in the summer and the Roses in November.

      Once my mindset was to enjoy everything she had planned for us, it was fine. I would have planned things differently but my wise wife knew better. Why complicate the Guns & Roses trip with a side track to Taipei? Did it matter that Taipei was fifteen minutes from Taoyuan? That is fifteen minutes to the main terminal, much more time taking the Metro to the Thai food I kept harping on having. Why have Thai food and complicate the Guns & Roses trip? How about the outlet mall at the HSR Taoyuan station before we took the Metro to the hotel in Zhongli? Why complicate the GNR trip? My wise wife knew what to do.

     It was raining when the HSR passed Miaoli heading north and didn't stop raining until late in the afternoon. We would have had to deal with the rain and the crowds in Taipei; instead we rested in a comfortable Fullon Hotel room in beautiful downtown Zhongli. Well, it isn't exactly beautiful. The streets are narrow and crowded. Our hotel street had the center closed for construction of a subway extension. Zhongli is famous for the ugliest Taiwan Railroad station in Taiwan; seriously, it was voted so. It is the ugliest station I have seen here; outside it looks like a noodle factory. Inside it looks like a large industrial bathroom without toilets. The steps up are pitted and pooling up raindrops. The green painted side of the street outside was an improvement for no sidewalk at all. There is no indication at all that a train station, in Taoyuan County's second largest city, is there.  The day-laborers that flood the waiting room with nowhere to sit on their way out of town to greener pastures with brethren are not to blame. 

     And it was those Filipino laborers that made possible the grocery store with imported provisions that I had wanted but couldn't find anywhere else in Taiwan. The fried pork rinds I'd eaten first after landing in Brooklyn and last seen at a pumpkin-dropping fair in Pittsburgh were on the shelf. Apparently only Pittsburghers and Puerto Ricans like them. The can of corn beef hash I'd packed from Giant Eagle was stocked in abundant varieties in the little Zhongli grocery; all the little cans need is home-fried potatoes for a special Brooklyn breakfast side dish. Philippines use it like Vegemite or tuna fish salad on a quick sandwich. But that was only the beginning of our wonderful stay downtown. The Irish Spring soap that I love to wash with at the pool was there in many varieties, too; I bought six bars, three of original and three of Icy Blast. The beverage refrigerator was stocked with cold Mug root beer imported from P.I. and, lo and behold, cans of the Red Horse 8% alcoholic beer I fell in love with on my trip to Oslob earlier in the year. In a tiny annex around the back of the store, Leona found her favorite Thai ramen noodles, not impossible but hard to find in the U.S. or Taichung. The corn crunch snack I ate in bed and finished in the grandstand at Lamigo Taoyuan Stadium I only regret not photographing the package of for this blog story. But the sweet icing on the cake of this grocery excursion was the 5 pound bag of Kirkland packed mini chocolate bars that I had foolishly passed up on buying at Costco in Pittsburgh for the weigh it would have added to my luggage, an error in judgment for the hungry children of my Friday Shengang class that I came empty-handed to because the smaller bag of chocolate was emptied my the eight classes that were bestowed with the American treats; now I had enough for one each to the 30 students and another 120 YORK, 100 GRAND, M&M plain and peanut, Kit Kat, Hershey bars, and Almond Joys for our Thanksgiving and New Year's Eve company, not to mention a sinister snack for my weigh controlling self. Zhongli may be ratty, but this rat from the Brooklyn barrio loved the grittiness. Coco Curry was good enough for lunch, the hotel was comfortable, ten minutes from the airport MRT station, and two stations in the less-crowded direction away from Taoyuan Stadium; the trip was still concentrated on a GNR concert that evening. 

     Truth be told, I wouldn't have wasted so much money buying scalped tickets for Guns & Roses if Slash was not playing guitar for them this time. Axl Rose had lost his voice and his figure decades ago and was only left with an ego. Nine years ago he brought the franchise name he owns to Taiwan without Slash and kept concert-goers in Taipei waiting long enough to wonder if he would ever show up. Not that many Taiwanese were disappointed in this rock-starved island but this was the first tour of GNR with Slash since the pivotal hard rock-punk band broke up in the '80's. With Duff, three original musicians were left to make Axl tolerable again. The word on the street this time was Slash and Duff took in the sights of Taipei before the show while Axl holed up in his hotel room until the limo came. The three and a half hour concert with no opening act was amazing thanks to the tuned down vocal microphones and turned up Marshalls on the musicians. Slash was in top form; the only thing missing from his glory days was the cigarette tattooed to his lip. If it weren't for the obnoxious mandatory 'touch your heart' moment of "Wichita Lineman" into the coda of "Layla" into "Knockin' on Heaven's Door", not that Dylan was dead yet but Axl was closely knockin' and needed an excuse to roll out a Baldwin piano he had packed in his trans-pacific flight, but at least it led up to "November Rain" ironically bringing back the clouds that covered the stars before they threatened to drench us in the canopied grandstand. The song selection was hard and loud with a few Duff punkers to bring it on home. The show ended with "Night Train" and they left the stage to the sound of a pin dropping, the same pin that dropped after every song in their set; Taiwanese do not know how to whoop it up or, Confucius forbid, give a standing ovation, and the extensive usher staff was having no dancing in the aisles, anyway.

The entrance and exit was orderly, unlike the mess at the Little Dome in Taipei for Celine Dion, and there were merchandise tables with apparel, souvenirs, and CD's, though lines were too long and prices over-priced to warrant wasting any time or money than had already been fleeced. On out prompt exit after the un-plugged encore of "Patience" etcetera (they neglected to play "I Used to Love Her but had to kill her" ) we beat the crowd of 12,000 to the Airport MRT station after the mandatory “Paradise City” redox in time to see vendors selling underpriced bootleg t-shirts and tote bags, probably made in the same sweatshops as the official shit, and I got a slightly off-centered concert tour knock-off for 500NT; the list on the back was missing a few stops, but corrected the "Hong Kong Hong Kong" reference to Hong Kong China; at least it still read "Taipei Taiwan" though, truth be told, the concert wasn't in Taipei any more than Taoyuan International Airport is.