Monday - January 27, 2003
The weather took a turn decidedly for the worse
during the night. Yesterday the high was about 76 and the skies were clear, but
during the night a cold front moved in, bringing an all-night rain and
temperatures that topped out in the 50s that afternoon.
Rain could not
deter my morning ritual, so I headed out on foot to the Cong You Bing
vendor for my breakfast, and then on to the CKS memorial for my daily update on
the building of the lantern.
I decided to try travelling home a
different way, but then realized I had forgotten the GPS and city map. I've
only ever gotten lost once in Taipei, and that happened to be on a day when I
left the GPS at home. At first I decided I knew my way home with absolute
certainty, but as I moved on I began to have doubts, and began to head toward a
landmark I knew. Good thing I did, too - I was heading at a tangent to
home.
During my morning wanderings I discovered something new. If I've
not mentioned it before, Taipei has an almost dizzying variety of sidewalks.
Most major streets have 2 sidewalks - an inner, under the awnings of the
buildings and an outer one, used predominantly by scooters for parking and
attempting to pick up their quota of pedestrian road-kill. On my last trip to
Taipei, the outer sidewalks were being completely rebuilt - and they were all
torn up everywhere making a real mess. This time the work seems to be
completed. The inner sidewalks come in all shapes, colors, sizes, heights and,
most significantly, materials.
Normally, I like to walk on the outer
sidewalk, but, today, because of the rain, I stayed under the (relatively)
drier canopy of buildings and walked on the inner sidewalk. The inner sidewalk
was still soaked in many places and at one point I suddenly stopped moving. It
was almost a comical, cartoon-like moment as I stopped moving forward but my
feet continued to spin underneath me. I'd come across a marble sidewalk that
was so slippery I couldn't get any traction at all. I don't even really
understand why I didn't just fall flat on my butt but instead just stood there
walking in place.
It was along that same street (Aiguo Rd.) as I
was passing an array of wedding photography places that I ran across a baby
photography place. The wedding album we got in Taiwan was really something
special. An album like that for Michelle seemed like an opportunity we
shouldn't pass up. I text-messaged the info to Chu-Wan at home and continued on
my way.
Back at the house, I arrived to find Michelle awake - apparently
I had awoken her when I sent the text message about the baby photo place -
ooops.
The Taipei World Trade Center was hosting a "Baby Show" which was
ending today. We decided to go see what it was about.
First we stopped
at MOS burgers again for lunch. This time it really was lunchtime and the place
was busy - combined with the fact that MOS only has a few seats and there was
no room at the inn for us to sit down. The manager, seeing Chu-Wan hauling a
baby with no place to sit down (not to mention a line of people behind her)
went over to a man sitting at a four person table who was just reading a paper
- having apparently long ago finished his meal. She politely asked the man to
leave. He seemingly agreed, and put away his paper. The second the manager
walked away; however, he pulled out his PDA and begun plunking around with
that. Fortunately, someone else finished their meal and vacated a table to
Chu-Wan could sit down. PDA Man was still sitting there when we finished our
meal and left.
We took the bus, which I'm inherently opposed to because we
have no proper way to secure Michelle as the bus dodges in and out of traffic,
playing tag with the other buses and taxis, but we had little choice - a taxi
provides no more safety than the bus, and less mass to absorb an impact. What
amazed me though was that the bus was unlike any other Taipei bus Chu-Wan or I
had ever seen. It had wheelchair accessibility, seat belts and a digital sign
telling where you were and where the next stop was in Chinese and English. I
felt like I'd somehow accidentally stepped onto a bus in Singapore that had
been mistakenly transplanted to Taiwan. The driver wasn't a complete maniac,
either.
It turned out to be a
trade show for products designed for babies, children and feminine protection.
Thankfully the vendors of feminine protection products were not as aggressive
as the baby product vendors and we were never forced to sit down and be handed
pad after pad to admire the quality.
This can't be said for the other
products. Trade shows in Taiwan don't forbid the sale of merchandise on the
trade show floor and so the vendors are smelling blood in the water. Being so
much smaller than me, they normally can't force me to sit down, but the shear
number of bodies thrown at the attempt brought us into the hot seat a few
times.
Most of the vendors fell into 3 categories:
- English learning products
- Children's books
- Baby photography places (There's synchronicity for
you.)
Before it was over, we'd purchased a baby album package
which we need to go tomorrow and have taken.
There was one other thing of note at the show, although the
crowd wasn't overwhelming, at times it became impossible to move forward.
Throngs of people threw themselves forward just to admire, touch and make funny
faces at Michelle. She was a super-star. One of the photography places even
wanted to use her as a model.
It's amazing just how much a daddy's pride can swell up when
hundreds of people are clamoring to look at your baby.
At one point when we were looking at books, Chu-Wan let
Michelle out her harness so that one of the women could hold her, and while we
talked books, Michelle was handed around to no less than 15 people, many of
them trying to get to hold her more than once. We've encountered this on a
smaller scale before, but this was surreal.
The temperature continued to drop was the day wore on, but
we continued on to do Lunar New Year shopping. Apparently, during this time of
year, people stock up on certain types of items - some of which are not
normally available any other time of the year. A large marketplace is setup in
the north part of Taipei and special buses run shoppers to and forth. 
The crowd was massive. The streets were packed solid with
people. The products, surprisingly to me, turned out to be relatively few, but
there were dozens of vendors selling each thing. The products seemed to fall
into a few general categories:
- Squid (including whole squid, dried squid, squid strips,
squid chunks, squid rolls and squid balls)
- Nuts & seeds (Peanuts, pistachios, pumpkin seeds,
watermelon seeds and cashews)
- Sausages (nasty, fatty looking sausages)
- Dried vegetable matter (of all ilk)
- Candies
The really interesting part was that every place let you
sample their wares, even the pre-packaged candies. My suspicion is that people
simply go to the street to try the samples. Certainly if I'd tried one of each
type of peanut (there were about 6 varieties) at each of the vendors, I've have
easily consumed 100 peanuts. (I ended up with a bag each of Mongolian and
Purple peanuts - now I've got peanut husks in the keyboard of the
computer.)
After leaving the shopping area, we decided to take a taxi
home - it was getting dark and the temperature was now threatening to drop
below 50. The taxi driver was surprisingly cautious, but he dashed my hopes
that if I ever got completely lost in Taipei that I could tell a taxi driver to
go to the corner of Heping East Rd and XinSheng South Rd. and
he'd get me home. The taxi driver had no idea where those major intersections
were - Chu-Wan had to give him directions. |
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