7-Eleven, Mr. He, and New Foods

There's a sports center with a gym not far from my apartment where I usually go for exercise. Afterward, I typically go to 7-Eleven for soy milk, a tea egg, and an onigiri.

As an aside, 7-Elevens in Taiwan are the opposite of 7-Elevens in the States. The version in the States, of course, is best known for its 48oz. Slurpees and food items made primarily from leftover industrial waste and discarded cattle feed, which can hospitalize an otherwise healthy person if eaten in any significant quantity. That's about all it has to offer.

The version in Taiwan is different. For one thing, it sells items that resemble real food: sandwiches, pasta, onigiri, almond slivers with tiny dried fish, the aforementioned tea eggs. It's still all laced with preservatives, and it's still a minefield of industrial sludge shaped like potato chips, but the point is that things with nutritional value can be had.

Then there's everything else: the clean bathrooms (again, no need to buy anything to use one), the ATMs (no transaction fee), the clean, bright seating areas inside and outside, the free WiFi, and the all-purpose vending machines, where you can buy things like plane tickets, train tickets, bus tickets, and concert tickets, print out contracts, get a passport photo taken, make photocopies, deliver or receive packages, or do pretty much anything else that would otherwise require you to go to some specialized place that does only one of those things. I'm pretty sure they also print wedding certificates, though I haven't tried.

So usually I go there for my post-exercise snack. For the sake of variety, however, today I went to the lunch cafeteria next door. It was in a small shack that looked like it was caving in. A couple people who had just ordered were waiting outside the open entrance, and a woman with an apron was standing over a cart with two cauldrons of hot liquid. I ordered a shrimp fried rice and the woman told me to sit, nodding in the direction of the door of the adjacent building.

Inside was a long room of tables with people eating. Every seat was taken except for one table at the back, where an old man was sitting by himself, facing the wall. I sat down across from him.

He looked up and smiled at me, revealing long, crooked, discolored teeth with several large gaps, and asked where I was from.

Mr. He (pronounced like "huh") is 70 and worked in real estate from high school straight until his retirement. He's one of nine children, eight of which are boys, and has five sons. He's been married and divorced twice, and now lives with his girlfriend of 18 years. His dream is to travel around the world, but he's afraid of flying and so has only been as far as Korea and Japan.

Why don't you take a boat? I offered. You still look plenty young to travel the world.

Thank you, he said. You've comforted me.

He asked me how old I was, and when I told him he nodded approvingly and laughed. Good! He reached into a bag and produced a seaweed snack, which he offered to me. Then he pointed at his teeth and laughed again.

You don't brush your teeth? I ventured.

Five times a day! he replied. He reached into the bag again and produced a toothbrush and rinsing cup to prove it.

Maybe that's a few too many times, I caught myself thinking.

Mr. He took his phone out of his pocket and showed me a video of cats in a cage.

These are my cats, he said. I have twelve cats, and two dogs.

I wanted to ask why they were all in cages, but thought better of it. We exchanged phone numbers, and wished each other the best of luck.

These are dishes I had last night at a 熱炒 ("Hot fry") restaurant. Clockwise, from top-right: Birds-nest fern with small dried fish; Deep-fried oysters and basil; Sweet and sour Asian swamp eel; Whole squid with ginger; Basil omelet. Not pictured but consumed: Deep fried, breaded pineapple shrimp balls with frosting and rainbow sprinkles on top.

A chandelier store, I assume.

This gloopy dessert, which I had two nights ago at the 寧夏 night market, is made from grass jelly (仙草). Inside, hidden in the jelly, are fun things like boiled balls of glutinous rice flour (湯圓) and pinto beans. Another dessert I had here, which was even more of a gastronomical revelation, is a pungent, sweet and sour, pinkish soup made from fermented rice (I'm pretty sure it's made with koji). The version I had contained large glutinous rice flour balls stuffed with sweet black sesame paste. I was so excited about this that I forgot to take a picture.

The entrance of a temple.

This past weekend I went to Taichung (台中). Here are some photos and episodes from that trip. 

A karaoke house in Taichung. The night special lets you sing from 11pm until 8am, and includes a buffet with things like noodles, miso soup, porridge, and ice cream. 

萬能青年旅店 playing to a packed house at TADA方舟 in Taichung.

Downtown 台中.

Square in front of the Science Museum.

Fish and onions with deep-fried soybean paste granules.

Taichung's annual international jazz festival. This is one of several stages scattered throughout the city parks. 

These four pictures are from the coffeehouse I stayed at, 艸田空間 ("Grass Field Space"). Run by three artists and longtime residents of Taichung, it's actually more like a community center than just a coffeehouse. Two of the artists, Ahuan and Xiaolian, live in the rooms behind Grass Field Space. While I was there, friends were constantly coming and going.

On Saturday night they invited two local farmers to come and talk about the problems with industrial eggs and chicken, and the difficulties with small-scale, traditional farming. I was at the jazz festival that night and when I got back around 10pm the presentation was already over, but people was still talking in the living room. They talked about slaughterhouses, raising goats and the need to keep them separated to avoid a critical mass that would lead to violence, and of course the ethics of killing other animals, on which topic everyone seemed to have a different perspective. I had a hard time following the discussion after that, partly because I was tired and partly because it seemed to be getting more and more abstract as the night went on. Around 2am everyone else moved to the patio and I fell asleep on the living room couch to the sound of voices and the occasional snap of the mosquito zapper.

The next morning at about 11 I woke up to a low chime sound and the smell of frying butter. Xuezong, who runs 松竹本部 ("Pine Bamboo Headquarters"), a teahouse he opened together with the artists at Grass Field Space, was sitting on the patio in the same spot where I'd last seen him the night before. Another friend, a pharmacist who had just come back from Germany, was asleep on the floor in the living room. Xiaolian and Ahuan were carrying plates of vegetables, beans, seitan, omelets, and rice porridge with pumpkin slices to the patio table.

While we ate we talked about crop circles. Ahuan showed me a picture of a crop circle from Brazil that looked like a big spiral with a smaller baseball next to it.

The spiral is the world, and that's the motor, he said, pointing to the baseball.

I asked him how he knew it was a motor. He pulled up a YouTube video of a three-dimensional yin and yang construction. It started with two flat circles, and then lines started filling in the space between them. At one point Ahuan pointed -- there! -- and it did indeed look like the same shape. He explained that the yin and yang shape and this motor design are just two dimensional representations of a black hole.

After breakfast, five of us went to a warehouse in the alley behind the coffeehouse. They had bought this building recently and were using it temporarily as a storage space for the materials and props they needed to run an annual music festival, the first of which was last February. All the buildings they used during last year's festival they had built themselves with these materials, which appeared to be mostly scrap lumber and dilapidated furniture.

A few of us climbed up an unfinished staircase and stepped into the loft, completely filled with boxes except for a narrow uneven walkway and a small room in the back with bedding and a mosquito net.

Guests sometimes stay here, Xuezong informed me.

From the loft, we climbed up a wobbly metal staircase lined with thin, nailed-together plywood, and came up to the roof. The roof had another structure built on top of it, made mostly from tied-together bamboo and corrugated metal. Again, it was mostly full of boxes and furniture, and at one end there was another empty room with bedding and a mosquito net.

Ahuan built all this, Xuezong said. People often ask him how he learned all this stuff. He always tells them that humans originally have the ability to build shelter. But we didn't learn any of it in school, so now we have to teach ourselves.

We made our way up a narrow cardboard ramp into the DIY roof structure, careful not to prick ourselves on the nails sticking out of the plywood railing. In the front there was a balcony with a charcoal grill, looking new in comparison to everything else. Xuezong was hauling another box up from the street below, using a thick rope.

There's no place to put it! he shouted down to Ahuan, shoving it into a corner.

As we climbed carefully back down, Xuezong told me they were going to turn this place into a performance venue.

We just need to take care of all this stuff first, he said.

Looking at the boxes behind chairs behind broken pianos behind stacks of paper behind more boxes, I asked how they could be so calm in the face of such a great task.

We wait until it's sunny and we're feeling good before doing any work, Ahuan told me, beaming.

These two pictures are from Pine Bamboo Headquarters, the teahouse. Most of the furniture, the cabinets, and the bar itself were either salvaged or made from salvaged materials by Ahuan, Xuezong, and friends.

The space has housed poetry readings, a pickled plum workshop, and other events. The menu consists of a few kinds of black tea grown in 日月潭 ("Sun Moon Lake", where I happened to be a few weeks ago -- post forthcoming) and a sandwich. Xuezong is teaching himself how to make Japanese snacks so he can expand the food menu.