Taiwan Big School

Every day since I arrived it's been in the 80s, but today the humidity makes the heat evil. A hundred feet in any direction the air becomes hazy. Reluctant to pay $4 for a cup of coffee again, I opened up my computer at the MRT station, but had no luck. So here I am in the coffee shop, drinking the most expensive drip coffee I've ever had, listening to the same 10 muzak'd pop songs on repeat. At least there's AC.

Something I've been meaning to mention is that every fifth person on the street wears a surgical mask. Some of them are the generic light blue that you find in hospitals, but other people have demonstrated more flair, with masks in bright colors and designs (polka dots seem particularly popular). At first I wondered if Taiwan just had a disproportionately high number of hypochondriacs, but then Ivy informed me that it had to do with the H1N1 scare. This sign was on the campus of National Taiwan University (AKA Taiwan Daxue (short: Tai Da) "Taiwan University"; the word for university literally translates to "big school"), in front of the library (you can see it in the background):





A student on campus told me that the library was built by the Japanese when they occupied the island before WWII, and that, at the time, it was very difficult for Taiwanese to get into the university. Now, she said, Tai Da is not so exclusive, although it was recently ranked 95th worldwide.

Tai Da has a big campus, so this is a fairly typical sight:






Shortly after I arrived, it was lunch time (by my stomach, if not by the clock) so I went into the school cafeteria and looked around at the different "stations". Most of them were closed, but there was one with several students standing around, and a couple of elderly ladies cooking behind the counter. They had a gas burner on which they'd put a metal bowl filled with some kind of light brown sauce. They would then add onions, mushrooms, and another unidentifiable vegetable, and the sauce would start to boil. Some kind of meat would be added, and finally a scrambled egg would be dropped in. After a while, they would pour the whole mess on top of a bowl of rice. When it was my turn I asked if they had a vegetarian version, but I ended up settling for eel.





After wandering around campus, around 5:00 I went across the main street to a crowded student shopping area. There's a lot to talk about, but I have to get out of here, so I'll just post a couple of pictures for now:








Last night Ivy took me to the Shilin night market and guided me through the different types of food. What an incredible experience! I'll write about that later too.

Here are some photos from yesterday:

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.

coffee

I went to the coffee shop right after breakfast this morning (I had the same thing at the same place--minus the tea--and this time I got them on a plate!) and actually ordered some coffee. I told the lady I don't drink milk and she gave me an americano. It's no Solstice, but it's actually not too bad! My snobbish prejudices are being pummeled at every turn.

At the breakfast place the guy tried to ask me about the friends of mine I mentioned yesterday. But that was about all I could gather. I managed to mumble "too fast" but I still couldn't understand and he gave up and changed the subject.

Yesterday morning after breakfast I felt great and decided to go venture out in search of a map. Following some directions from an MRT official I took the MRT to the next stop and wandered around looking for a bookstore. The station was in the middle of a sort of plaza that was formed out of the space between the two monorail tracks.







The first thing I saw was this vegetarian restaurant!





It was still only about 10am though, and it was understandably deserted, so I didn't go inside. I passed a bakery that had some interesting-looking fare, and bought some kind of chartreuse bun filled with coconut and "craisins". It was pretty big, and I ate about 3/4 of it. I circled around the several blocks surrounding the MRT station, and I found a store displaying cages stuffed with little birds, a shop awning that said "Angel Cigar Fun", an old man missing all the fingers on his right hand who tried to convert me to Christianity (I think), a little hole-in-the-wall open market in an alleyway that turned out to be half a mile long and jammed with people buying things ranging from surplus clothes to dried mushroom packets, about half a dozen 7-11s, and a store with this sign (I wondered "what is a time gear?" before noticing they were really just selling normal gears to be used in your free time--i.e., bicycles)





but no bookstore. After about an hour I started to feel sort of dizzy and my head started to hurt. The green coconut craisin bun had been a little sickly sweet, but I'm not sure if it was that, jet lag, the time gears, or something else. I ended up just going back to the vegetarian place (where the proprietor spoke English and I ordered a "slightly spicy tomato stew"), and then going home to take a nap.

Afterward I went back to the coffee shop and had another pot of tea and made yesterday's blog post. One of the two ladies brought me a plate of cookies. The taste of the craisin bun was still lingering unpleasantly, and the cookies were regrettably reminiscent of it (was that coconut flavor?) but it was a really friendly gesture and I was touched. Speaking of food at the coffee shop, here is the dinner I had there the first night:





Last night I took the MRT to the center of downtown and met Ivy. I got there early so I went into the department store next to the station. It was completely jammed with people. I decided to see what they had for men. The first floor had makeup and things like that, and the second floor was women's clothing. The third floor was also women's clothing. The fourth floor was designer women's clothing. I think it was the sixth floor where I finally found the men's department. The Polo section had some very nice mannequins, with jackets selling for the outrageously exceptional price of $16,500! It's a little bit disconcerting that they use the '$' symbol here. Thinking of you, Grandpa, I asked about ties, but they didn't have any! They did seem ready to sell me the ones the mannequins were wearing, though. I came to the second-to-last floor, No. 11, AKA the Gourmet Collection, and realized it was time to meet Ivy, so I took the elevator down. Greeting me in the elevator was an elevator attendant. As we stopped at each floor she said exactly the same thing, even in the same tone of voice, although I didn't understand what it meant.

Ivy bought me dinner and gave me an English map (THANK YOU!) and then took me to a fruit stand, where I tried bell fruit, and little tomatoes with pieces of some kind of dark dried fruit stuck inside.

That's it! The day is going by, and this blog post is too long already.

too many cookies

This morning I woke up at 4am, read for an hour, and couldn't fall asleep again. I managed to stay inside until about 7:40, by which time it was light and I decided to try my luck outside.

Stefan, I went looking for the breakfast place you told me about. I walked across the park and started down the side of the street, searching for a little alley that looked like it might contain egg pancake things. Eventually I found this little quiet street with two-story apartments that looked like they were built in an alternate future imagined in the 1950's. Everything was very quiet and turquoise. No breakfast places though. I went around the block and passed a few restaurants that didn't seem to fit the description you gave me, and then finally decided to try one of them. It's the first food place you come to if you go past the 7-11 and then turn immediately right. People were driving up to it on their motorbikes and ordering breakfast to go on their way to work. The place itself was sort of a restaurant but open on two sides and with a big kitchen-booth-stall in the front where people could order from the street. I guess that doesn't sound very unusual. I walked up to the stall counter and said I was searching for breakfast, and tried to pronounce the name you gave me. I said it wrong, but as she was trying to understand what I was saying, the lady held up a thin sort of crepe that looked like it had onions cooked into it. I nodded, and she said "dam bing!" and the lights went on. There actually was a middle-aged guy working there too, with a wide face and silverish hair. He was making the drinks, and I asked for a hot red tea. After about a minute the lady handed me a plastic bag. Inside, there was another plastic bag containing some pieces of something hot. As you described, it was some kind of fried egg wrapped in crepe and soaked in a sweetish soy sauce. Thanks for the recommendation, it was amazing! I've never eaten hot food out of a flimsy plastic baggie with chopsticks before, and I think next time I'll ask them for it on a plate, but I'm definitely going back there. The tea was also served kind of bubble-tea style, very sweet, in a plastic cup with a cover and a little straw to poke through it. Drinking the scalding tea out of the soft plastic, I couldn't help imagining all the little plastic particles melting into the tea, wreaking their cancerous havoc. Thinking I might have stumbled on the right place after all, I asked the middle-aged guy if he knew anybody by the names of Stefan, Andreas, or Fang Yuan, but he said he didn't.

I'd better go; I'm meeting Ivy, my conversation partner, for dinner. I bought a cable for my camera so I can upload pictures, but I'll have to do it tomorrow. Maybe I'll also get around to explaining the title of this post tomorrow too.

A long day

This morning I arrived in Taiwan. I booked this flight because it left at night (12:30am) and arrived early in the morning (6:05am), so that if I slept on the 13-hour trip I would wake up well-rested with a whole day ahead of me. Actually, the flight was more like 15 hours because of some headwinds, and for reasons having to do both with physiology and the design of commercial aircraft seats, I didn't sleep for more than about an hour at a time. But I think I did spend about 12 hours total fading in and out of sleep, waking up just long enough to relieve a sore limb from the task of supporting my head. In the morning the flight attendants came around with Chinese porridge or French toast, but I decided to stick with the cheddar, dried cherries, and candied almonds platter that Mom gave me right before she and Dad drove me to the airport.

Customs, the bus ride to Taipei, and then the taxi ride to the apartment (thank you Wilfred, Fong, and Stefan!) were uneventful and pretty easy. The tricky part was convincing my inner clock that I had a whole day ahead of me. After unpacking, I sat down and started to make a grocery list, when I had the familiar nagging sense that I was wasting the afternoon, despite the fact that it was hardly after 10am. It's about 6:30pm as I write this, and it just recently got dark, but I keep thinking to myself that it's 10pm and wondering when they're going to kick me out of this coffee shop.

Almost nobody I've met or talked to so far speaks much more than a few words of English. In a way, this is ideal, because it forces me to rely on my Chinese. But it's also shown me clearly the considerable limits of my Chinese, in particular the limits of my comprehension. I've for the most part been able to figure out how to say what I need to say, but almost invariably the response contains so many words I don't know that I can only guess at the meaning or infer it based on nonverbal cues. As anybody who has traveled to a place where they don't really speak the language will report, it can be frustrating and tiring when it's a challenge just to do a simple thing like order food or find an address. The only way to keep it from becoming overwhelming (it's my first day so this is really just a preliminary musing) is to make it fun somehow. Luckily, most of the people I've talked to so far--or attempted to talk to--have been tolerant, patient, and good-humored.

I came expecting it to be difficult to find vegetarian food. I was even ready to rely totally on grocery shopping and to cook for myself. But I've been to two restaurants today where I walked in and told them I'm a vegetarian, and in both of them they were easygoing about it and came up with some delicious food with no traces of meat apparent (OK, one of them did have shrimp in it). As soon as I buy a new camera cable I'll upload a picture of dinner.

Because I didn't really have a "good night's sleep" (I think Orwell is starting to influence my thinking about the use of quotation marks) between taking off Sunday night and arriving Tuesday (where did Monday go!?) morning, I don't feel like there's the same boundary-marker between Sunday and today that I normally feel between one day and the next. What happened on Sunday, on the other side of the ocean, feels sort of like it happened in what is still today. But where it happened--and the fact that it happened in a place that I have no reference to in my current location, that is, I can't imagine the path from here to there--makes it seem almost imaginary. My mind can't quite wrap itself around this weird conjunction of temporal closeness and spatial inconsistency.

I think I've been in this coffee shop long enough, so I'm going to wrap this up.