Rues of Roo

I figured I had better write something about Taiwan before I come back from Japan, otherwise this poor island will get no attention.

I flew to Taiwan under the pretense that it would be a fairly modern country. I see a lot of Taiwanese shows on Channel U, which really reminds me of my days in Ghim Moh living with G and he teaching me how to play ‘pei bai pei’ which really was quite hilarious. Nevertheless, as I said, I always thought Taipei was going to be a sort of metropolis city a la Hong Kong or Tokyo, with skyscrapers abounding and plenty of technology geek related stuff lying around. I thought this, well, I suppose from the fact that Taipei is often compared to Hong Kong, and people had always said it was expensive. Expensive sometimes relates to modernisation, but then again, I suppose I was proven wrong.

Check out the window into the shower


Really nice clothes hangers…

I stayed in a rather neat hotel called ‘Ambience’ hotel. It sounds rather sleazy, but it really was rather nice. If you do go to Taipei, I do recommend this place for below average costing for what’s known as a ‘boutique’ hotel that is of pretty high standards. The only rather odd thing about it was that there is a huge window that enables one to see the shower from the bed. Kinky. (And the neighbouring couple seemed to be getting the most out of it).

Anyway, I digress.

Since my days were rather limited and a couple were already taken out by the wedding, I took it upon myself to see as much of the city as I could, which of course began on the first night with a visitation to ‘Shida’ night market. Of course, with my limited mandarin I somehow interpreted this as ‘Shee-da’ which led to a couple of minutes of discussion with the taxi driver. Whether you could call it a discussion when two people are unable to understand each other is another thing, but of course eventually he exclaimed ‘SHER-da’ and proceeded to scold me in even faster Mandarin. Wonderful.

Shida Night Market Food

Sher-da night market was pretty small, one could walk through it in about ten minutes, and that is, if like me you were unable to order any food and talk to anyone in the process. There was a lot of really great looking food around, with dozens of bubble tea stores and even more of what seemed like mini steamboat stores where you chose your raw materials and the chef would then cook it in boiling water. Pretty neat. In the end I settled for some beef noodles at a hawker centre where the conversation sort of went like this:

Owner: ‘beef, chicken?’
Me: ‘er…beef?’
Owner: ‘rice, noodle?’
Me: ‘noodle’
Owner: ‘okay’
Me: ‘okay…’

But it was pretty damn good nevertheless.

Taipei has a very interesting sort of feel about it which oddly felt almost eastern European. The buildings are old and dirty, the streets extremely wide, and everything just sort of seemed to repeat itself, with no real character or distinction between one street and another. In that same sense, the markets, restaurants, stalls, all felt the same and honestly you could show me a photo of one place and I would not be able to tell the difference between that and another.

Clothes in the street at Shilin Night Market

Shilin night market was just like that (I remembered to tell the taxi driver ‘sher-lin’). It could’ve been Shida night market, just a bit bigger (this one took me a good thirty to fourty minutes to get through). The interesting thing about Shilin was that it had more arcade games and clothes in the middle of the street, but really other than that, nothing distinguished it. Nothing set it apart.

Milk Powder in the streets of the Harbour north of Taipei

When we went to a harbour in the north of Taipei, it was pretty much the same story. Streets of neverending shops and bubble tea stores. It was interesting, I suppose, in the sense that there was a lot of items that I had never seen before, but it was just the repetition which really got to me. The classic shot of the rows and rows of Chinese stores does get a bit tedious after a while and all the strange food and snacks does ultimately do very little for you. My regret was that I never made it to the snake market, where they sell snake’s blood, now that I think would have been a real sight.

Streets in the Harbour