Elusive Plants

Yesterday I took the MRT to the Chiang Kai-Shek Memorial Hall. I came up out of the station and was immediately bowled over by an immense, intricately colorful building, surrounded by gardens. I took pictures but I haven't uploaded them yet, so I'll post them tomorrow. Thinking I might be able to go inside, I started circling around. Soon I came to a huge courtyard of stone, empty except for several tourists, and across it there was another building of similar scope and style. Which one was the memorial hall? To the left of the courtyard was a giant gate, and on the other side was something that I realized was the real memorial hall. It was a behemoth tower resting on a wide staircase, everything made out of white marble except for the roof, which was blue. I walked toward it and up the staircase. Inside there was the giant bronze statue of Chiang Kai-Shek. Underneath (inside the staircase), there were two more accessible floors, containing art galleries, gift shops, and a post office.

Daphne, when I was looking at the Google map you made for me (somehow I lost the map that Ivy gave me; I think we left it at the restaurant), I noticed that the botanical garden was pretty close to the memorial hall. So, leaving the hall, I set out in a direction that seemed to most closely correspond to my vague mental image of the path to the garden. Needless to say I got lost. I wound up stumbling into a 7-11 to ask for directions. Inside, on the counter, something caught my eye. It was a pot of what looked like brown, cracked eggs floating in a black liquid. Above this there was a cardboard display showing a step-by-step flowchart: in the first panel, you have a normal group of eggs; in each step, they become progressively more rotten and broken-looking, until--voila!--you get fetid rotten eggs floating in disgusting black water. That was my first impression. I asked the proprietor what the hell was really going on here, and she said "tea eggs." Eggs floating in tea. Horrified, I asked if I could take a picture. She consulted with her manager, and the answer came back "you don't need to take a picture." Ivy told me that if you want to take a picture of something, you should just take it; if you ask, propriety will compel people to say no. But standing there in the store, I didn't have the nerve to just take out my camera and start snapping pictures. Actually, it turns out I really didn't need to take a picture after all. I looked up "tea eggs," and it's a popular Chinese snack--there are pictures of it all over the internet.

I had lunch at a Hong Kong-style restaurant. Most Chinese food in the States is Hong Kong-style. I ordered vegetarian noodles, and indeed, what I got could easily have been served in any Chinese restaurant in the U.S.

After lunch, I passed an interesting yellow store on the corner. On the window there was the logo of a man sort of resembling Bruce Lee, in a fighting pose, holding nunchuks; but on one end, instead of a piece of wood, there was a glass bottle. I went in and found out that the bottle contained lemon vinegar--a potent tonic for all your post drinking-binge needs. That was what the 25-year-old owner--a guy in a t-shirt and red basketball shorts, who went by the name "Christina" (after Christina Aguilera, he said)--claimed, anyway. The walls of the store were lined with big jars of oddly elongated lemons in various stages of pickling. We chatted for a long time and he made me try some vinegar; the taste was really more like strong lemonade than anything else.

When I left it was getting a little dark, and I started searching for the botanical garden in earnest. The streets were crowded with commuters, and the sidewalks packed with students in khaki or blue uniforms. I asked about 3,400 people for directions, and eventually found the garden, at about the same time that it was becoming too dark to see anything. In the dusk light there were a lot of elderly people walking together and doing exercises on the paths, but that's about all I saw before turning around. With more help I found an MRT station and went home.