Monday - February 10, 2003
Despite yesterday being rather a pisser of a day,
life goes on and so do vacations. I still have some small hopes that Taipei
might be able to do better than a pair of horns, so I'll continue my daily trek
until the lantern festival.
Yesterday, when we were in the Easy Mall (an
underground shopping mall) adjoining the Taipei Main Train Station we looked at
an archeological exhibit regarding the excavation of some of Beimen or
"North Gate". Traditional Chinese cities were walled, with limited access
points. Taipei was no exception. None of the walls still stand, but the North
Gate still stands not far from the main station and the photography
street.
I've seen that several times, but what was interesting about the
exhibit was the phrase, "Beimen is the best preserved of Taipei's city gates."
That, to me, implies that others still stand. I was pretty sure that
Ximen or "West Gate" was gone. The Hsimenting Metro station stand
where that should have been. (Note: "Hsimen" and "Ximen" are the
same word spelled in different romanization systems.)
The exhibit showed
a Japanese colonial-era map indicating the positions of the 5 gates, Beimen,
Ximen, Dongmen, Nanmen and Xiao Nanmen (North, West, East, South and Small
South, respectively) and the city wall. The city wall corresponds to a small
square perimeter of roads around the old part of Taipei and the gates were
located on obvious oddity locations on the current Taipei streetmap. The CKS
Memorial being located at the Southeast corner of the old city
perimeter.
If I wasn't going to see anything interesting for the
building of the lantern, I decided I'd walk the perimeter "walls" and see what
was left of the other gates each morning.
Yesterday's weather had been
glorious in the morning, but turned grey (but still warm and comfortable) early
on and stayed that way all day. Today was blue and warm all day. Just the
perfect day to go to the zoo. Unfortunately, the zoo is closed on Mondays and
Chu-Wan's parents had made other plans for us to go up to Yangmingshan
for the day. Yangmingshan is a nice place, but I've been there every
trip and wasn't aware of any particular reason to go there
today.
Chu-Wan had to go to the bank to cancel her credit cards. (Banks
in Taiwan are run like post offices, you take a number and wait.) and then she
had to go to the post office because one of her ATM cards was issued by them.
Both required that she turn up in person to complete the cancellation of the
cards she lost yesterday.
While she went there, I took off on my gate
hunt. I started at the memorial and can see that there are still building
something else. Perhaps there's hope yet.
I headed west on Aiguo
road and, sure enough, the odd roundabout depicted on the street map turned out
to be Nanmen. There were no other oddities depicted on the map on Aiguo
road and about halfway down the road to the west wall perimeter
(Zhonghua road) is Xiao Nanmen station. My suspicion is that
Xiao Nanmen station was built on the site of the old gate, which
probably no longer existed, but a quest is a quest.
As I walked down the road, I began to
get the feeling I might see President Chen again. The street was lined with Men
In Black, all wired with lapel microphones and earpieces. Either someone very
important was in the area, or an alien being was being concealed
nearby.
They eyed me suspiciously as I walked down the street, even
radioing my presence to someone at the other end of their lapels, but I never
saw anything. The line of secret service men ended when I reached Xiao
Nanmen station. As I suspected, there was no trace of a gate. In continued
on toward Zhonghua road and there, under an expressway, sat Xiao
Nanmen.
With two gates out of my way, I headed towards
Hsimenting, but Chu-Wan called saying she was done at the bank and the
post office, so I headed home.
The baby was taking a nap, but when she
woke up we headed to Yangminshan. Halfway up the mountain I was told why
were were going. February 16th is the start of the flower season on the
mountain, and for a month everyone goes there to see the flowers. Cars are
restricted for going during that time, so we were going early - flowers being
notoriously indifferent to schedules. Despite being Monday, and the first day
absolutely everyone should be back to work from the New Year holiday, it was
still packed with people.
The
Yinhua (Sakura in Japanese, Cherry Blossoms in English) were
blooming and quite beautiful as was the day, but looking back down the mountain
at Taipei, you could see how awfully polluted the air really was. After viewing
the flowers and walking around a bit, we headed back down.
Yesterday, I
picked up a couple publications in the Metro. One of which turned out to be the
best map I've yet seen of Taipei (in Chinese) and the other was a detail maps
of each Metro station and the surrounding area (in English) with sites of
interest and stores clearly marked.
Taipei is an interesting place when
it comes to stores. For some reason, stores with similar products tend to
cluster together rather than trying to branch out and colonize new markets. So,
if you want a camera, you go to the photography equipment street, if you want
camping gear, go to the camping equipment street, etc. The station map listed
these place, too and it really provides some interesting insight of what's in
Taipei. Take for example these different areas:
- Holiday Flower Market
- Hardware Exclusive Area
- Ready-Made Clothing Exclusive Area
- Old Things Exclusive Area
- Chinese Old Jade Exclusive Area
- Beef Noodles Street
- Furniture Exclusive Street
- Acoustics of Sound Exclusive Area
- Photograph Equipment Material Street
- Old People Tea Shop Street
- PC Computer Sale Area
- Maternity Dress Sale Area
- Popular Clothes Exclusive Area
- Bookstore Street
- Street of Korea's Fashion Dress
I've begun to make a list of the areas I want to make sure I
see before I leave, and this evening it was Beef Noodles Street, which turns
out to be a stones throw between Hsimenting and Xiao Nanmen. It's
amazing how much is packed into such a small area in Taipei.
Beef Noodles Street (actually Taoyuan street) turned
out a bit of a disappointment. Only 4 Niu Ro Mien (Beef Noodle) vendors
were still there, the others were Wonton Soup places. According to a passerby
who saw us looking at the map, there used to be more, but they are now
gone.
Despite the lack of selection, we ate in the place with the
most customers and the food was really good. The noodles weren't hand-made like
at some places but the beef and the soup were really first class.
We went into the store Eslite 116, which we thought was a
branch of the Eslite Bookstore. It turned out to be a clothing/department store
with nothing really interesting in it, but it did win the award for weirdest
bathroom arrangement.
The men's room is on the second floor, the women's is...
somewhere else, but not on 2. The men's room is at one side of the store, in a
little alcove, only accessible by walking up 6 steps. One of the steps has the
handicapped symbol painted on it indicating this bathroom has a wheelchair
accessible stall in it. Too bad there's no way up the steps to get to it.
When you pass through the portal which appears to be the
entrance to the men's room I noticed a couple things. The bathroom only
appeared to have 2 stalls and two women were standing outside them waiting.
One of the "stalls" looked like it might be the handicapped
stall, based on the markings, the other was just a door. I reached for the
door, but a woman walked right past me into the room, which turned out to have
a row of urinals and a couple more stalls. I'd swear this person was a woman,
but "she" bellied up to a urinal like a man. OK, so this was just a girlish
looking freak who desperately needed a haircut. I started to use another urinal
when another woman enteron, he room and plowed into a stall, leaving the
door wide open, so that the woman standing outside by the handicapped stall had
a great look in, and the positioning of the urinals were such that they had a
clear view of everything I had on display.
That was just too much for me and I left. I told Chu-Wan
that she should go look at how weird that bathroom was. She went, but came back
and said, "That's only a men's room, I can't go in there!" I don't think anyone
would have noticed.
Afterwards it occured to me this might be a transvestite
hangout... no pun intended.
On the way home, I thought I'd see if there were anymore
good pamphlets at the Metro and I picked up a full two-page flyer on escalator
safety that was such a gripping read that I accidentally tripped on the
escalator while reading it.
I managed to avoid using the bathroom till I got to the
Metro station. The fact that there was a cleaning woman working on the sinks
didn't bother me in the least, and I didn't blink an eye when the other
cleaning woman came in and mopped the floor between my feet while I was
pissing. This is such a weird place!
After dinner, Chu-Wan bought an ice cream at the nearest
convenience store, but they didn't have chocolate ice cream for me.
(Coincidentally, there was a news story on today stating that Taiwan has the
highest density of convenience stores in the world. Believe it.) Since I wanted
chocolate ice cream, we stopped at the supermarket by the house and bought a
few groceries.
In the freezer section I saw something I couldn't believe -
a bag of ice!
Ice is not that popular around here. Just today at lunch, I
used both ice cubes in the ice machine in Subway. The girl at the
counter clearly saw that it was out as I was grinding my cup into the activator
vainly hoping to get a third ice cube but she made no indication that she was
ever going to fill it.
I had to have that bag of ice, comically small though it
was. When we checked out the cashier looked at it like he'd never seen on in
his life. What he didn't know was that I also own the largest cup in Taiwan and
with that cup, those ice cubes and a 2-liter bottle of Coke I'm going to have a
party. 
(I've included a picture of the ice cube bag, with my Easy
Card for size comparison.)
We plan to go to the zoo tomorrow, but the weather forecast
indicates a new cold front is moving in tonight. It'll probably be miserable
tomorrow.
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Nanmen ("South
Gate") sits in a traffic roundabout