Life on the Streets

April 2nd 2019

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For breakfast today is warm soy milk with fried dough and... other hard to define stuff. Afterwards we move on to explore Yongkang Street, a beautiful neighbourhood full of stylish cafes and small shops.
The tea (Sun and Moon Lake Ruby Tea, sounds very fancy) and coffee in the cafe we stop by in comes up at about thrice the price of our breakfast, but it's really pretty in here so we can hardly complain.

Around the corner we find a ceramics shop with windows full of teapots. An older woman is standing on a stool in the back, stretching to reach for a ceiling lamp. She looks over to us and smiles apologetically. 'Busy', she explains.
In the meantime, we examine all the different tea sets on display here. A moment later she steps down from her stool and offers us some Alishan Almond Tea to try. I scrape together as much of my Chinese as I can find and tell her that we will be in Alishan ourselves next week. We absolutely have to try the tea there, she tells us excitedly, and we continue to talk a bit about Taiwan (her English is at least three orders of magnitude better than by Chinese, but hey, at least I tried) - we promise to visit again at the end of our trip.
So, if any of you are interested in buying a fancy tea set... let us know.*
*Am I a proper influencer now? Did you like the blog better before we started selling our souls? Let us know in the comments.
Next, we head to the Martyr's Shrine, the memorial site for the dead of the Sino-Japanese War and the Revolution. About 400,000 names are engraved on stone tablets here.
We arrive just in time for the hourly change of guards, which stirs up something like Taiwanese patriotism in me. After we have thoroughly analysed the tourist groups from Korea and Japan, we are already leaving again.
After consulting a map, we find a hiking trail starting near the Martyr's Shrine and leading right back to the metro station. On our way down the road we encounter three soldiers with assault rifles guarding the gate that, according to Google, leads to our trail. As we get closer to them, one raises his hand in a 'stop'-gesture. My translation of the ensuing conversation is reproduced below:

"Hello! We want go this." (points on map) — "[unintelligible] can't go [unintelligible]" — "Ah, I see I see" — (points out a large semi-circle on the map) — "Ah, thank you, bye!"

So no hiking for us today it seems.
Walking through the streets of Taipei, you're bound to notice something sooner or later: Garbage collection works in strange ways here.
In the evening, cute little garbage trucks drive through the city, always followed by a recycling truck playing a signature tune via speakers ('Für Elise' should be among them, but we haven't heard it yet). At the intersections, residents come together with their blue garbage bags and buckets with paper, plastic, etc. — garbage costs, recycling is free and is sorted into bins right on the pickup.
Those of you who think that sounds like an interesting topic for a 20 minute podcast can check out 99% Invisible - Separation Anxiety.
To end the day, we check out Raohe Night Market and its famous gates. There's tasty food as far as the eye can see (with the exception of the occasional stinky tofu in different variations), but we just had lunch and really don't feel like eating anything right now.
Two pork buns, one fried potato stick, and two egg-yolk-donut-holes later we're back home in Ximending.

I work on the list of streetfood snacks I want to try every day — I'm still missing a few, but there will surely be many opportunities to come along our journey.

Stories We Tell To Scare Our Selves With

Does the headline have anything to do with this post's content? Not really.
But I just liked the title of the exhibition we saw today in the Museum of Contemporary Art a bit too much to not mention it at all.
The Chinese title is 'ugly'* — the connection between them shall remain a mystery.
*Update: The correct literal translation is closer to 'dark ghost'.
日本好不好？

In some ways, Japan is Asia's Germany — nobody really likes them that much. Many Koreans and Chinese can not forgive the Japanese their reign of terror of the colonial era and the Second World War, especially since Japan often does not own up to its past mistakes. In Taiwan, however, we notice a surprisingly large number of Japan-related advertisements, which comes as a surprise to us initially. In Korea, for example, we'd see propaganda clips in the subway that disputed Japan's claims to certain islands. Upon further Internet research, we learn why Taiwan has a mostly positive attitude towards Japan: Taiwan was Japan's first colony and the one where they wanted to set a good example. Also, many Taiwanese have bad memories of the revolution, which is why the period of Japanese occupation is often perceived as a golden age.
We've often noticed the tiny auto repair shops on the ground floor of residential buildings in the city that have just enough room for a single small car. Coincidentally (thanks to the 'take the smallest streets possible' tactic), we end up in a street that specializes completely in car repair — some workshops have taxis in them, others are full of dismantled engines stacked up to the ceiling. It seems that for every part that could possibly need repairing, there's a specialized store here somewhere.
In between, two photographers on hoverboards use the industrial backdrop for fashion shots — not bad either.
Damper Baby

Why do you always have to get badly greenscreened pictures taken while queuing to get to a high place?
We copy the pose of the hyped-up Asians on the poster (it did turn out surprisingly well) and are eventually allowed to board the elevator up the Taipei 101. Besides the usual panorama there's also the world's largest passive tuned mass damper (I think, don't quote me on this) to marvel at, including — of course — it's cute mascot, the 'damper baby'. Bonus points also for an actual outdoor platform without reflecting glass panes, my mortal enemies.