A few months ago, I took a train from Taipei to Hsinchu, a place people kept telling me was the Chicago of Taiwan, a city known for being windy. Like many people who go to Chicago, I was going to Hsinchu for a baseball game. I'd be interviewing players of the the Uni-President 7-Eleven Lions about their diets.
The Uni-Lions is a team in the Chinese Professional Baseball League (essentially Taiwan's MLB). It was founded in Tainan in 1990, and has won the Taiwan Series Championships five times in the last decade alone. I'd be talking to the players before their away game against the Lamigo Monkeys.
At the train station, my Taiwanese friend Eric gave my taxi driver directions in Chinese, only he wasn't in the car with me. I was holding my iPhone up while Eric talked on speakerphone through a Facebook Messenger call. I can't speak Chinese and had no way of communicating with most of the baseball players, so Eric graciously agreed to translate my interviews this way from Hualien, a small town in Northeast Taiwan.
When I got to the stadium, it was 88 degrees outside with 77 percent humidity. The team's general manager took me to the field where the players were warming up. The GM brought me an ice-cold bottle of tea. "Drink this, no sugar," he said. The cool beverage could not combat the torrential downpour of sweat running down my face.
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