Last Days (in Taiwan)

First of all, I want everybody to see this incredible advertisement banner I found on the street:





Yes, there are two of him!

Here are some pictures from the trip to Gaoxiong yesterday:
























Today I walked up the little mountain near the apartment. From the apartment window I can see a large part of the lush green mountain, and near the top a red-pillared temple is visible. Climbing up the steep stairs at the base of the trail, I thought I would set the temple as my goal. Probably in part because it's Sunday, there were a lot of other hikers on the trail, including many families. The steep stairs continued up for several minutes, and then the path forked. A sign indicated four possible trails, and I chose the "scenic route".

There were some plastic bathtubs lining the uphill side of the trail, helping to contain the erosion. Not much farther up, I started to hear something that sounded a lot like pop music. I wondered if there was a concert going on until I came to a covered platform where an elderly trio stood in front of an old TV, singing karaoke. Behind the karaoke shelter, on a bigger platform of concrete, there was a pretty large temple. No one was inside the main room, but I could see a few people through a window in the side room, and there was incense burning.

I kept walking, and before long the trail passed a fenced court with two guys playing badminton. We were pretty high above street level at this point, and seeing a badminton court in the middle of what otherwise could be described as a mountain jungle was even stranger than the karaoke and the temple.

After walking a little farther, I started to hear the familiar sound of reverb-y singing. Sure enough, thirty seconds later I came to another temple with some old people clustered around a TV in front. This temple was actually more of a complex of separate shrines than a single temple, and I walked past several of them across a wooden porch and looked over the railing to see how high I had come. Ten feet below me there was another badminton court, with a game in full swing.

I think I passed at least 20 temples and 10 badminton courts on my walk to the top of the mountain. There were very few sections of the trail from which you couldn't see a structure of some kind, whether it was a court, a temple, a fenced garden, a swing set, or a sheltered platform--often with a sink and a card table, and sometimes someone cooking at a stove. About half of them were occupied, but many of the unoccupied ones had the look of ruins. I came to one open area with a concrete table and stools covered with little tiles, but a big section of the table was missing, and tiles were scattered everywhere; a similarly tiled concrete bench sat next to it, but the end of the bench was also broken off. It seemed like the place hadn't seen another person for decades. On the way back down the mountain, I passed through the same area again. This time, there were three old men sitting at the table; another one sat on the bench; a final two were practicing calisthenics in the middle.

In some of these spaces, there didn't seem to be much separation between man-made and natural objects. The path to a garden was covered with a moldering red carpet. Another section of the trail was embedded with Astro Turf. At the first shelter I had come to with karaoke singers, the railing was lined with plastic bottles, each one with a bamboo shoot growing out of it. A statue of Sun Yat-Sen had cracked down the right side and part of the face had fallen off. Sandbags that had been used to support a platform were turning into soil and now ferns were growing out of them. Land was developed, structures were built, and immediately the forest started to reclaim them.


















After walking back down, I met Ivy at the Yong He Dou Jiang place for lunch and to say goodbye. This time she ordered, and we had dam bing, shao bing (eggs in a kind of crispy pancake, as opposed to the dam bing's soft pancake), tofu pudding, parsnip cake, and a bowl of hot soymilk. Drinking spoonfuls of soymilk, I asked Ivy if Taiwanese people had ever thought about adding cereal. I could see from her expression that I had just blasphemed. Before we parted, Ivy also took me to Longshan temple, a huge one in a crowded part of town. The temple was filled with people praying to the many gods who had shrines there. Then, for something completely different (but no less crowded), we went to Ximen, and I got another couple t-shirts. One of them has a picture of a roadrunner (the actual bird, not the Looney Tunes character) and a boom box and says "The Roadrunner With The Thunder Baetbox." The other, which Ivy bought me as a souvenir, has the Chinese characters lang zi ("long ts'h"). I think lang literally means "wave", but Ivy said the phrase also has the meaning of a person who wanders away from home. Edit: I just looked up lang zi, and apparently it means "loafer; wastrel; prodigal son". Great!





Tomorrow my flight leaves around two, and should arrive in Hong Kong around four. Between now and then I'm just trying to straighten up the apartment a little bit. I don't know how long it'll be before I have internet access again, but maybe the guesthouse will have it. If I can find the guesthouse, that is...wish me luck!

Saturday Times

I just got back to Taipei and it's a little late already so this is going to be a short post. With any luck I'll have time to pick it up again tomorrow.

For lunch today I went to Jack's place. There he, his wife, his friend--a large, bald taxi driver who spoke so fast it took all my focus to understand what he was saying--and I sat down at a table at the back. On the table there were 6 or 7 dishes, including eggplant and basil with garlic sauce, shredded papaya salad, a dish made from wilted spinach-like greens and tiny fish about the size of toenail clippings, fried octopus and fish, Guangdong duck, and a vegetable stir-fry with cow intestine. Jack's wife had cooked the first three; I didn't try the last two. There was also a bottle of baijiu. The clear baijiu pretty much just tasted like alcohol, which with a 56% alcohol content was mostly what it was. Anyway, it was fun to taste all the home cooking while bantering in Chinese. Jack also speaks English pretty well, and that helped when we got stuck. Once, when we raised our glasses I said "gan bei!" and was informed that this obligated me to drain my cup. Thinking of my esophageal tract, I quickly backpedaled to a "l'chaim!"

After lunch I raced to the MRT to meet Ivy at Taipei Main Station, where we caught a fast train to Gaoxiong, a major city in the south of Taiwan. By car the trip would be about five hours, but with this train it only took one and a half. Ivy's twin sister, Michelle, and Michelle's boyfriend, Evan, were waiting for us at the station. We got into the car and they immediately gave me five different Gaoxiong tourist guides and a famous regional cookie. Our first destination was Lotus Pond, which looks to be about the size of Green Lake, maybe a little smaller, and is surrounded by temples. One was a temple dedicated to Confucius. It was actually sort of a park more than a temple--I'll post pictures tomorrow. A few yards off the main path, under a tree, a group of elderly people had set up a karaoke machine and were sitting or standing around it, listening to the music. Another temple had a tiger's mouth for an entrance and a dragon's mouth for an exit; going through one and out the other was supposed to bring good luck. There was also one with a giant, colorful statue of a smiling god sitting on top of it. Under one of his feet was a snake, and a dragon with the body of a turtle. According to the story, this god had defeated these two creatures and tamed them. Next to the entrance of the temple was a little tank with a huge turtle whose head actually looked similar to the dragon's head above. Bringing my face close to the glass, I noticed that the turtle's body was covered with coins.

By the time we had finished visiting all the temples it was starting to get dark, so we drove to a seafood restaurant and had a feast. This one had some similar elements to the one in Danshui: whole prawns, whole crabs, fried oysters with black pepper, and clams in the same kind of spicy basil sauce that the mussels were in last week. There was also a dish of rice noodles with pumpkin, which I enjoyed until we noticed it contained pieces of pork. Then there was miso soup with oil fish, bitter melon with egg white, and a whole fish served on a hot plate and garnished with long thin spirals of onion. For the second time in my life I saw someone eat a fish eyeball (the first time was with Stefan's family at a restaurant on Lake City Way). I hope I didn't forget anything. We washed all this down with cold green tea and Taiwan beer.

While I was still under a massive food coma, we went down to a night market near the wharf (but not before Michelle stopped to pick up a bag of dried strips of fish roe). We sat outside at a little table with plastic stools on a major intersection (but there were many pedestrians and few cars, so this didn't matter), and had shaved ice. Unlike the delicately layered frozen milk from the Shilin night market, this type of shaved ice was actually ice, covered with condensed milked and either custard, red beans, or green beans. I don't think the green beans were the same species as the variety people often eat steamed for dinner; they actually tasted a lot like the red beans.

Now seriously inundated with food, we went for a walk on the Love River (Ai He -- pronounced kind of like "I! huh?"). Actually, we went to a tea station where I got some hot Oolong tea with tapioca balls, and then we went to the river. Ivy told me that the river used to be incredibly polluted and stank terribly, but now it had been cleaned up. We passed someone playing traditional Chinese songs on an accordion. After the walk, around 9:30, Michelle and Evan drove us back to the train station.

platitudes

Last night I woke up to the smell of rotten eggs pervading the bedroom. I opened the window, but outside the air was only worse. It was still bad at 8:30, but by 9:45 it had cleared up. I'm a little confused about the cause of this incident. My best guess is that it has something to do with ChengDe Road, the arterial on which the apartment is located.

Today it was really raining. And it was a little bit cool out--the thermometer says 62 right now, but there's also wind.





I met Jack in the morning and he invited me to come to the cafe at lunchtime tomorrow; I think he's having some kind of party. He said his friend is bringing baijiu and duck. I told him I don't eat duck, but it sounds like that's OK. After that, I'm meeting Ivy at Taipei Main Station and we're taking the fast train down to Gaoxiong, where her sister lives. I'm not sure what she has planned, but I'm excited to go and see another part of Taiwan.

The other day when I was walking through the night market, I passed a store selling discount t-shirts.





So what are the original things? An eagle, a helm, an anchor, and a crown? Sure, I guess so.






Other than the two I bought, I remember one that said something like "Some nice music will cheer you up," and another that said "Sports Championship."

The Heavens, to Betsy, would always be just out of reach.

I'm making this post from the MRT station (Starbucks already closed), and it's a little strange sitting here on a bench on a raised platform, outside but covered, with my laptop on my lap and people constantly walking past and staring at me.

Today I met up with my Celia, the sister of my friend and conversation partner Dora. Celia actually lives in China, but she's visiting Taipei for the week. First she took me to a big restaurant for lunch. The place could probably seat over 200 people, but there were only about 10 diners when we arrived. The tables each had a gas burner in the middle. Soon the waiters brought out a big pot of broth with different objects floating in it which resembled obscure species of nuts and berries. They placed this on the burner, and turned it on. Then they brought several plates of mushrooms, vegetables I had also never seen before, and a few that I had, like broccoli. We would put some of these items into the boiling broth, and after a few minutes they would be ready to eat. This, it turned out, was hot pot, which I've gathered is especially popular in Sichuan.

After lunch Celia took me to the Taipei 101 building, which some of you may know as "the tallest building in the world," or even simply "Henry" or "Pete". The first five floors are an enormous shopping center, with crisscrossing escalators and walkways that make it look sort of like a giant space colony. From there we got in line for "the world's fastest elevator" ("Micah"), which ran at a maximum speed of about 20 mph.





Waiting in line for the elevator, we were welcomed by the four Taipei 101 mascots, Cool Black, Lucky Red, Rich Gold, and Smart Silver, representing the four aspects of Taipei 101's personality (I highly recommend zooming in and reading the character details).





The mascots didn't seem to do much from that point on, but there were action figures for sale in the gift shop.

The air was slightly murky, but the view from the top was still spectacular. For someone coming from the Pacific Northwest, where the mountains are all far away and snowy, the landscape around Taipei is dramatic; the mountains are completely green and the city is directly at their feet (and sometimes partway up their legs).











Before heading back down we stopped at the gift shop. One of the most prominent types of gifts for sale were intricate sculptures made of coral. Another section seemed to revolve around this display:





After that we went into a nearby department store for dinner, and the went around looking at the various shops. One home furnishing store sold the new lowest maintenance pet ever: a little green ball of algae in a glass jar (or plastic bag).





There was also a nifty hat that just said "SINCE" and unobtrusively on the brim in cursive had the word "tendencies".





Then we went to a clothing store selling the two brand names "Ecstasy" (with another four mascots, including Lula), and "Manager". I almost bought a "Manager Style" trucker cap. There was even one with the McDonald's logo in the background.





I booked a room for Monday night at a guest house in Hong Kong. If it's fine there's probably a good chance I can stay there the whole time, and if not at least I'll have more time and a place to keep my stuff while I look for another. I actually met a couple from Hong Kong while I was having dinner tonight at that Shilin Night Market stir-fry place again (this time I noticed how much butter and MSG they were adding to the food), and they said they're in the hotel business. We exchanged contact information. It seems that's a good place for meeting people.

Welcome to my Food Criticism Blog!

Did I mention that I found the guy with the breakfast place that Stefan told me about? His name is Jack. I've been going there most days for breakfast; for less than $2 I can get a cup of tea and a plate of egg scallion pancakes. On top of that, I get to practice Chinese with Jack. Yesterday he offered to make the tutoring "official"--so now I go there near closing time and we talk for about an hour. Once again, I am completely embarrassed and humbled by the generosity of the people I have met here.

After my lesson today I met Ivy downtown. Every Wednesday, she and some of the other people in her office meet to practice English in the "Idea Room". Each week there is a different host, and this week was Ivy's turn. She had asked me to come in as a guest English speaker. The meeting was near lunchtime, so Ivy had also brought a large array of food, which served as the main topic of our conversation. We didn't even try everything she brought, but the foods we did try were spicy hot pot with tofu and noodles, egg onion pancakes (which actually have a consistency kind of like naan), and mushy rice with peanut powder. Then there was what they called "tempura", although it was in a soup and didn't look like the food we know by that name. One of the tempura items: fried blood. Looking at the porous, black cubes, I wouldn't have guessed that they were blood, except that they didn't look like any other kind of food I have ever seen. The meeting went by pretty quickly, and afterward they forced me to take home most of the leftover food. How will I ever go hungry with all this food?

This evening I took the bus to Tianmu (which I actually know both characters for!). Tianmu has a reputation for being an international district full of foreigners. I'm not sure I can verify this, because there weren't very many people at all when I got there around 5pm. I did find one thing, however, that made me believe the hype: a Mexican restaurant. With burritos. I was saddened to find out that it was an upscale place, with actual decor and no burrito offered for less than eight dollars. I moved on. On the advice of a girl at a factory outlet clothing store on the same street, I continued up the street to a place called (I think) Sheng Kou Wei (tones 4 3 4), and ordered the Kezi Mian Xian (1 4 4). I ordered at the counter outside and then went into a little room to sit. The girl had told me that this dish didn't have meat other than seafood, but after hesitating for a second I decided to go make sure. I arrived just in time to stop them from dumping a healthy portion of intestines into my soup. The soup was a thick, gloppy, brown substance composed of broth and noodles so thin, delicate, and short that they were inseparable from the broth. Instead of intestines, mine was filled with small, runny oysters. Despite how delicious I'm making this food sound, it was good. The broth was heavily laden with scallions and garlic. The only thing that gave me the creeps was the fact that the oysters seemed only partially cooked. I learned that there's a secondhand market in Tianmu on weekends, so I might go back there in a couple days.

Now to my troubles. I've been working on finding accommodations for Hong Kong; my friend recommended a couple hostels to me. On Monday I tried booking a room online, but for some reason the site wouldn't accept my debit card number. I sent the hostel organization an email, and got an actual reservation form to fill out. But it's a longish form and I didn't get around to filling it out till today. Actually, I'm still not finished filling it out--it's a confusing form. In any case, that's all irrelevant, because I just checked and they're booked now. If I'm unable to find another place to reserve, my worst-case plan is to make a list of possibilities, and then go from one to the next when I get there until I find one that has a room. Anyway, I'm not too worried. Apparently this is part of traveling!

Below are two pictures from the (outside of the) National Palace Museum. Then there's a picture of Da'an Forest Park, which I walked through on Sunday. It's kind of a strange park. As you can see, the "forest" is composed of more or less regular rows of similar-looking trees. And there's no understory, just a flat, dusty plane scattered with leaves. Elsewhere there's a section for palm trees.

apples and pears

I have a confession to make: this post and the last post were made from a Starbucks. But wait! Before you burn me at the stake, let me explain! Tired of the expensive coffee and tea at Coffee Shop, I inquired about the supposedly free wifi at the MRT stations. The MRT attendant told me to go to Starbucks, where I bought a special Starbucks internet card. So, yes, I am sitting in a Starbucks, but I didn't have to buy any coffee...just an internet card. Actually, I don't really know who I'm trying to convince other than myself.

Last Sunday, before going to Danshui, I had brunch at a Yong He Dou Jiang (I'm not sure what the Yong He means but the Dou Jiang refers to soymilk). The place was very simple, with a little kitchen area, and a seating area inside and another outside with metal tables and little plastic footstools to sit on. I got a picture menu and sat outside. I ordered three things--a glass of cold soymilk (it also came in warm and hot), some kind of steamed bun (I forget the name--Daphne?), and fried bread. There appeared to be two different kinds of fried bread, but I noticed an item on the menu that seemed to contain both of them, so I ordered that one. One kind was in long strips and had a chewy texture. The other was sort of like a thick fried tortilla, and was wrapped around the long strips, forming a bread sandwich. Altogether it wasn't bad, but a little dry and boring. I learned later that you're supposed to put sauce in it. The bun was much better--steaming hot, light, fluffy, and slightly sweet. To my dismay, it was served in a little plastic baggie. I tried asking for a plate, but somehow ended up with a cafeteria tray. The soymilk was possibly the best part of the meal. It was, as I'd been told, different from the soymilk in the U.S. Namely, it tasted like soy. If you can imagine drinking liquefied edamame (April, are you reading this?), that's pretty close to what this tasted like. But it was also cold and sweet, which made it delicious. There were some other things on the menu that I wanted to try, so I'm sure I'll be going back before the week is over.

Monday was spent mostly writing, studying, trying to book a hostel in Hong Kong (so far unsuccessful), and searching for internet. Daphne, for dinner I went downtown to one of the vegetarian restaurants that your friend recommended: Yangming Spring. It was on the tenth floor of a shiny new building with a glass elevator. In retrospect, that should have told me that something was not right. By the time I sat down in the extremely well-furnished room with the panoramic windows and had my fears confirmed by the menu, however, I was resolved to follow through with the experience. This was definitely the most expensive and ridiculous meal I have had so far on this trip. The main course was wonderful--juicy, deep-fried slabs of king oyster mushroom with wasabi dressing--but the rest of the meal was a monument to food-eaten-for-aesthetic-purposes-only. One dish consisted of a small cube of soft tofu dabbed with pumpkin puree, which the cook deigned to sprinkle with two or three pumpkin seeds. After seven courses, I left slightly hungry.

Dinner tonight was much more fun. After getting back from the National Palace Museum (see below), I set out for a walk through Shilin Night Market. I passed a glass counter arrayed with hundreds of identical-looking brown patties of something unknown, but which looked slightly burnt, only to find out that they came in 10 different flavors including taro. Then I saw a chef standing behind a long, curved bar, which was divided lengthwise so that part of it was a dining counter and the other part was a grill. The chef was frying several things at once, and when something was finished he would lift it up with a spatula and place it in front of the person who ordered it. The food was served on a piece of tin foil on the edge of the grill, thus keeping it sizzling hot throughout the meal. I ordered cod with scallions (although the scallions never materialized). The style of eating was really fun. Instead of a plate, I had a bowl of rice; as things were placed in front of me on the foil, I would shovel some of it on top of the rice, and eat them together. Along with the breaded fillet of cod, I also got sauteed greens (which were a little like spinach) and bean sprouts. There was a couple next to me that was dipping their food in a glowing pile of fried garlic and chili peppers. I asked them what it was, and found that they spoke English and were more than happy to order one for me--it turned out that the garlic and peppers were free if you only knew how to ask for them. This was possibly the best meal that I've had by myself here so far (i.e. without Ivy's guidance), and it came out to less than five dollars. The only disagreeable thing was having to watch chunks of pork sizzle in front of me. The helpful couple and I started talking; they were both from Taiwan but the husband's business trips took him all over the world. Jeffrey (that was his name) suggested that they show me around the night market after dinner. We walked down a stretch that I'd been down with Ivy before, but it was interesting to see it from another perspective. They said they came here at least once a week to take in the crowd and browse the stands. We stopped for a minute while Jeffrey tried on a pair of shoes; while his wife and I waited, a group of red-robed monks walked down the street. What are they doing here? we wondered. Jeffrey bought the shoes and we continued. A little further, we passed the shop with the crane game machines where I had almost tried my luck on a piece of toast. Inside the shop, grinning, one on each machine, were the monks.

Today, as I said, I went to the National Palace Museum. The building is actually named (and possibly modeled) after the original Palace Museum in Beijing. When the nationalist government fled to Taiwan after China's Liberation, they brought with them a good portion of the treasures from the Palace Museum. It's a very impressive collection, ranging from prehistoric jade chisels and earrings to elaborate Ming and Qing Dynasty ceramics. But I spent a lot of time reading the historical context plaques--I wish I was more prepared. While waiting for the bus to the museum, I went into a used bookstore called Whose Books, and bought a copy of The Book of Nonsense and Nonsense Songs by Edward Lear. According to the back cover, Lear was the inventor of the Limerick. Appropriately, the book is full of Limericks, like the following:

There was an Old Person of Chili,
Whose conduct was painful and silly;
He sat on the stairs
Eating apples and pears,
That imprudent Old Person of Chili.

I made up one on the way home:

There was a young lady of Florence,
On whose house the rain fell down in torrents.
When it started to leak,
She gave out quite a shriek,
For of water she had an abhorrence.

Freshwater

Yesterday, Ivy and her younger brother Leo took me to Danshui (Danshui means "freshwater" and the name refers to the Danshui river--the Danshui area is right on the shore). Danshui is another commercial district with a night market. There's a walkway along the water crowded with families (at least on a Sunday afternoon). We rented bikes after arriving, but the crowds made riding them kind of tricky (the Taiwanese frown upon running over children).

Eventually we came to a less crowded boardwalk that functioned as a bike path. After a 15-minute ride we came to the Fisherman's Wharf. This was a waiting area for people wanting to take a ferry across the river to Bali, and it was also crowded (noticing the pattern?). The waiting area comprised a long plaza with picnic tables and an equally long row of drink stands.





We bought some tea (at a stand whose sign read "Lie Fallow Small And Pave"), and then inquired about ferry tickets. As luck would have it, the ferry was so full today that they weren't letting bikes on board, so we had to stay on the northeastern shore. It was late afternoon at this point, and we hung out until the sun started to set. There was a big arched bridge that was good for watching sunsets, so we biked over there and walked to the apex.








There were no buildings, mountains, or clouds to the West--just the Pacific Ocean--and you could actually see the exact moment when the disc of the sun fell completely beneath the horizon.

Rush hour and the start of the night market combined to make the ride back slightly more hazardous than the ride there. The street was already narrow, but pedestrians spilling into, along, and across the street made it even narrower. Even so, a motorcade of cars and motorcycles rode down the middle of the street, using every clear stretch to accelerate. Weaving through this line of motor vehicles, we were like three lemmings in a stampede of wildebeest. It was exhilarating, if a little dangerous. But we actually weren't the only bicyclists to brave the combined foot and motor traffic, and I get the sense that this isn't an unusual situation here.

After returning the bikes we had dinner (I might write about that later. For now, see a picture) and explored the night market.