Natural Disaster Jogs the Memory
I've just finished cooking tomato pasta in my neglected Taiwanese kitchen, after stabbing open a can of Heinz after buying it unthinkingly at the Wellcome (I have not kept my kitchen stocked! I have a bottle opener but no can opener). Long lines of non-cooks harried in the midst of their typhoon preparations, and a gaggle of people at the Blockbuster counter across the way, hoarding DVDs in expectation of the next 24 hours trapped inside their apartments. Cabbage hiked up to NT$50 as Nicky warned us many months ago. Sometimes it takes a natural disaster to force you to reclaim your life from the automated machine of our modern age.
It is not exactly gourmet I am cooking tonight (I own one pot and no cutting board, I had to be modest in my aspirations!), but it feels as though I am clutching a reclaimed friend as I bring a glass of red wine to my lips after eating something I've made with my own two hands, however simple. I realized one reason why I have so much more time on my hands here - I don't cook. It's too "convenient" to go out to eat. (Since when have I chosen convenience when it comes to food?) I berate myself as I remember the good ol' days in my Halifax apartment: racing Eva to the food prep, spending an entire evening on a whim to make roti paratha from scratch, daydreaming in class about a trip to the grocery store and what culinary inspiration might come of it, poring over Jamie Oliver tomes, drooling as much over the food as the man.
It feels good to slip into old shoes(what is it that I used to do? Who am I? Oh yes, I cook, and I write, now I am reminded, transfixed by the sheets of rain which rattle my glass doors dangerously). As I slurp spaghettini in my nightie and blog, I think, "Tomorrow's typhoon will be like wrapping myself in a warm blanket of snow".
fashion statement
Went to a punk-rock cafe hidden in an alleyway in our neighbourhood called "Vicious Circle". Some days I am amazed at how well Western images travel: the walls were festooned with vinyl album covers of classic American and British rock. Images though, being the keyword. The cultural movements that spawn those images are consistently left behind in this borrowing of Western culture, as though souls were heavier than shells. The feel was right, a dank basement bar with a gig stage and walls painted black, mannequin heads and other requisite art hall knick knacks adorning the display shelves.
We found the place following an address on the back of a business card from a punk T-shirt shop: the card was black gloss, with just the cafe name in small type on the front, and a byline: "ethical food and drinks". A half hour after we arrived, we were served microwave pizza, a club sandwich made with canned ham and Kraft singles, and tea sweetened with processed sugar. The sound system was blasting Blink 182 and Green Day.
It is the same with everything here. Waifish pretty boys dress in punk hairstyles and leather pants. When they get on stage, they sing like just another boy band. Beyond the fashion (bought rather than owned, in a culture of consumerism), there is no understanding that sets them apart. Unsuspecting poseurs, sad only because they lack a youth culture of their own making, from their own place in the world, a place where there remains so much room for fresh questioning of the status quo, and so many centuries of history and rebellion to draw from, borrow, revive, or react against. But the thing that sets them apart from the poseurs back home (a fact which perhaps redeems them more than it condemns), is that they are innocently oblivious to the irony of their fashion statement. In their unassuming eyes, the West simply is a shell of its own images, but unfalteringly cool, still; imitable, still, because these youngsters never knew there was (is) anything more to our culture than the fashion it spawns.
A lesson for us more than them.
A Weekend in the Taipei life... (and Food Festival Taipei)
I thought I would do a post on a typical PamBrian weekend in Taipei to show you how we spend our leisure hours (yes, the majority of it eating!).
Our last classes of the week are on Saturday morning, but this past weekend I had to do a make-up class in the afternoon because of the holiday last Monday and Tuesday for the Dragon Boat Festival (I know! It's fucked up! Whenever we get a holiday we have to make it up on a weekend day!)
Saturday night we went to our favourite Japanese BBQ restaurant, Gang Bei (Cheers). We had thin slices of beef tongue with fresh chopped spring onions, enoki mushrooms in butter broth, and lambchops! Next, we went to the big Vieshow cinemas in the posh Xinyi neighbourhood to see Ocean's 13. (I liked it! Fun like the first one).
Sunday, we turned down an invite to a beach and a pool party (wanted a break from the epic ride up the red subway line to the North Coast that we've taken the past three weekends - sorry Cullum! We won't wuss out next time) and decided last minute to go to the Taipei Food Festival at the World Trade Center downtown. Free food samples from all different countries in the world! (Thanks to a tip from Rebecca and Eric)
We started at the Taiwan section outside where they had misters on the fans to cool you as you walked through. Someone at one of the stalls handed us a little taste cup with what we thought would be rice wine or juice.... YUCK! A big mouthful of vinegar! We accidentally drank vinegar about three times that day. (Sheesh! You offer taste tests of vinegar with a dipped toothpick or a little chip or noodle with a taste squirt on top, not a thumbful of the straight stuff!). Anyway, the things down this laneway were dumplings, sesame and peanut glutinous candies, glutinous dumplings, deep-fried pork fat skin, and some caramel tea that made my face scrunch up and Brian laugh at me. Not sure if Taiwanese is my favourite kind of Chinese cuisine. Everything seems to be made with this translucent glutinous starch rubber that holds things together: everything from dumplings to beef balls to oyster omelettes to crab to dessert.
Here are some other interesting sights at the food fest:
Some multicoloured fish roe (I assume dyed artificially.). We saw the sushi-making station and it really adds a lot of colour to the california (and other) rolls.
Corona girl in the Mexico section
Some gargantuan frozen seafood. (They also had live crab in a tank)
"Zhong Zi" Auspicious at Dragon Boat Festival, they can commonly be found in North American Chinatowns around the Mid-Autumn Festival, but not in the sweet flavours (that are encased in gelatin AGAIN) found here: red bean (above), black sesame, peanut and others). Sticky rice is wrapped in lotus leaves and steamed. The ones you can find back home are salty with boiled egg and meat inside. I tried the sweet ones here for the first time. (Besides the gelatin,) they were quite tasty.
The Canada section! Brian also proudly carted home an Alberta beef chart showing all the cuts of cow you can eat. The guy at the beef station insisted that each of his three children shake the white guy's (Brian's) hand and practice their "Nice to meet you. My name is..." in English.
The Food Fest was an interesting load-up on the senses but tiny samples of prepared frozen and packaged food don't really feed you, so Brian took me to the Sushi Express that Rebecca and Eric took him to the day before. It's NT$30 a plate so that means US$1 sushi! Kinda like a step above supermarket sushi but definitely worth the price, and the food travels by on a train track, kinda like a restaurant-wide lazy Susan. They count up the plates at the end: We had 11 plates, so NT$330 or $11 Canadian for two (that's including two cans of beer!).
After lunch we were still trying to escape the suffocating heat (felt like 40 degrees Celsius with the humidity) so we finally tried an MTV parlour. No, this is not MusicTV but MOVIE TV. You get a private room and a movie rental with a larger than your home TV screen. Oh, and A/C of course. The wait was 40 minutes and as we browsed for a movie and glanced around, it dawned on us why these places are so popular here. Everyone in the waiting area lounge was paired up two by two (except a group of four foreigners) and holding hands. Servers were bringing soft drinks on trays around long winding corridors with motel wallpaper and wood trim.
When we got to the room we chuckled at the *ahem* couch - long enough to lay back in. This is the point where I should mention that nearly all Taiwanese unmarried people who still live in their hometown live with their parents (families are tight). This is when we realized that it wasn't MOVIE TV but MAKE-OUT TV! Haha! No, we didn't nookie in the room (WE don't live with our parents) but we did chuckle about it. Don't worry, the room was clean (except for the thick cigarette smoke coming in from the other rooms).
We actually watched a serious movie: The Last King of Scotland about the Ugandan dictator, Idi Amin. It was really good and I can even tell you the whole plot to prove it. :)
After MTV we got some Pho at the Vietnamese place around the corner and went home, satisfied from another full weekend. (This is why I love you, Bri! Spontaneous days round the city are our specialty!)
More next weekend!
P.S. See more pics here:
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=11980&l=56f42&id=562540836
Dragon Boat Festival Weekend
Started off our holiday weekend at Jolly's microbrewery (was so psyched when I found this place! The Scotch Ale is my fave). They also serve Thai food there - could it get any better? Homebrewed beer and Thai food? Together? In one place?
Next we went to a DJ'ed expat pool party -- decided it wasn't our scene, so the next day we went to the beach:
Baishawan (White Sand Beach) at the very northern-most tip of Taiwan. It was the nicest swimming beach I've been to - the waves were calm, the water warm, and no rocks to cut your feet! The sand was indeed white, and the water very clear and clean.
There were some peculiarities though - only 30% of the people there seemed to actually come to swim. The rest were huddled under these individual white shelters that covered the supervised portion of the beach end to end. You had to pay NT$200 to rent one. We took one look and kept walking to a quieter part of the beach. The second curiosity was that half of those Taiwanese who did go in the water were fully clothed - in long jeans and everything! We splashed around in the water happily for awhile till we tried to swim out a bit farther to get past the waves. Just as I did, a speed boat came cruising by and the lifeguard in it started insistently beeping his whistle at me until I moved close enough to the shore that the water was too shallow to swim in.
I tried again once he'd left and again, he came cruising back: "beep beep BEEP!" Well this was really no fun and rather paranoid! These were the calmest ocean waters I'd seen in Asia. The last few beaches I went to (in Taiwan and India, had waves that knocked me right off my feet and beat me up when I wasn't paying attention! Here it was serene!) Just around this time we ran into some friends who were trying to escape the crowds on the other side of the beach. They explained that the paranoid patrols were because 14 people drowned last year. (Well no wonder! They were probably wearing denim jeans and steel boots and sunk!) (Actually, though, I realize Taiwan doesn't really have a swimming culture - most don't really learn, so probably don't have swimsuits either and are happy splashing around in old clothes).
Anyway, Rich pointed out that everyone was being waved back to the shallow end unless you had a surfboard. So I decided to have a go at Cullum's surfboard. I've always thought it looked so hard but I got up on my knees on the first go and sailed right into the beach! It was exhilarating! I can't wait to rent my own board and really go at it.
After the beach, we walked around Danshui and caught some stragglers from the Dragon Boat Festival parades. Along the board walk we snatched up a couple random street snacks - some crispy prawn fritters and fried quail-egg balls on a stick before we settled on a seafood restaurant for dinner that specialized in crab:
We treated ourselves to some Taiwanese pepper crab and this tasty fish:
Some views of the boardwalk from the restaurant:
That evening we met up with some friends to drink Chimay in Sofa, a chill loungebar downtown. We talked about visiting the National Palace Museum which houses artifacts stolen from Mainland China. And also how Zach proposed to Rachel, in a park, after she opened a box labeled "Open Immediately" an hour earlier, and finding her boyfriend on a park bench. With a ring.
I like holidays. :)
When it rains,
It's been raining for a week and I just got to thinking this morning that how the weather affects your mood changes when you're in a different climate. Rain in Nova Scotia is so grey and depressing: a cold spring day after many cold winter days. But the rain here is a relief. A relief from the thickness of the heat. It washes away the humidity and the pollution, makes you want to open the windows, breathe a little deeper.
I don't know if it is mere coincidence, but I have felt like it has been opening
me up, freeing things, allowing things to be washed away, allowing things to pour again.
I can feel in me that Winter is leaving,
Spring is here
and Summer is coming.
Nova Scotia?... No wait, it's Bitou Cape, Taiwan
April 5th this year was a national holiday in Taiwan called, "Tomb Sweeping Day". It is a day for Taiwanese people to pay their respects to their ancestors by visiting their graves and cleaning the debris off and to leave offerings at the tomb site. For Brian and I, it was an opportunity to dust the film of pollution off our city-dwelling selves and find some fresh air.
Brian expressed a craving to just "stare at the ocean for awhile", so we rummaged through our guidebooks and dug out our maps. A short bus ride later, we were on the North East coast of Taiwan, at Bitou Cape:
So much of the Cape reminded us of Nova Scotia, from the rocky shoreline, to the yellow-clad fisherman above, to the colourful boats tied up at the jetty. Scrambling up the rocky oceanfront to meet the waves on a windy day was so much like visiting Peggy's Cove (minus the sign to be wary of black rocks). The dramatic cliff faces in the cold wetness was just like a walk we took on the beach in Cape Breton on Valentine's Day. Some of the muddier cliffs shaped by erosion patterns even reminded me of visiting the Minas Basin in the Annapolis Valley one October.
There was also the weather: a perfect wet mist swallowed the day and made the trails and rocks slick and precarious. It was exactly what we asked for: a little taste of home.
See our pics of Bitou Cape at:
India Photo Album complete!
