Happy Hermit Crab

Like a happy little hermit crab, I now have a new shell to move over to. The apartment hunting was nerve-wracking because almost all the ads I looked at were only for long-term leases. However, after breakfast yesterday I managed to call the one that I had actually gotten a positive response from. I met the guy at a Starbucks near Taiwan Normal University. He was really nice and spoke excellent English, having gone to school in North America. He and his parents run a kind of international house for foreign students and students from other parts of Taiwan. There were several rooms available, all with internet and private bathroom and AC (my three requirements). Not luxury digs and no kitchen, but I chose one on the fourth floor with a reasonable amount of light and a double bed (as opposed to a dorm-style twin). It's walking distance from my school and in a cute neighborhood, a maze of little residential streets off a major commercial avenue. I tend to be overly optimistic about people sometimes, but I sensed zero sleaze. It's a family business, probably depends on word of mouth, and what you see is what you get. Maybe I'll even meet people there. There are common areas for laundry on each floor. The door of my room has butterflies on it. I can move in tomorrow. Settled, done, no more worries.

I was too busy closing the deal to take any pictures, silly me, but there will be pictures soon enough.

After this, I walked down to my school to test out the walk. Also because I felt so pleased and fortunate. If I had been in a less good mood I might have described the heat as "hideous" (it has stopped raining, alas). But it wasn't so bad. And after all, Australia is warm too. I am going to have to adjust. Here it's nice because the streets on both sides mostly have shaded walkways. And shockingly, wastefully, air-conditioned shops leave their doors wide open, so you get blasts of cool air as you stroll by.

I stared at this sign for a long time, but had to conclude that "Coffee Geek & burger" is actually not some kind of weird Chinglish. I think they were actually expressing that it is a burger place for people who are really into coffee? I'm not sure, but anyway, it's a good example of the shady walkway phenomenon.

I wandered around the little neighborhoods near my campus, and got lured in by a grungy little shop that sold nothing but douhua 豆花 (sweet silken tofu pudding, which I love). And you have to admit that this is a fine-looking bowl of douhua. It has ice, brown sugar syrup, and boiled peanuts. So nom.

Of course, if you were fastidious, you might find the surroundings a little ... dubious. But I am not fastidious. I don't believe in excess purity of any kind, not even a little bit. Neither do these other fine devotees of douhua. And at 35 NT (about $1), what a bargain!

Another discovery of my wanderings was a mysteriously disused water park. This was really disappointing. It's a great place for a water park! And it was a brutally hot day! What not have a water park here? If you cleaned it up and made jets of water fountain out, people would surely come.

Instead, it contained only a few depressed teenagers of both sexes, moping in solitary misery in the shady pavilions. (Not pictured.) What went wrong!? On the way back to the MRT station, I got some baozi 包子 (dumplings), one with cabbage and one with leek. I guess I got them because people were standing in line at the little stand, a funny positive feedback loop phenomenon. You think, if other people are standing in line for it, it must be worth having. They were pretty good.

I will say that despite all my good experiences here, the solitude is taking its toll a bit. I probably should have just skipped dinner. I ended up going out to look for some, but there was nothing I wanted. This used to happen to me in Beijing sometimes too. I'd end up wandering around and around not ever being able to settle on anything because of being more hungry for companionship than for food. I walked for over an hour.

Since my bro requested more Taipei street scenes, here's an interesting and fairly typical one: the garbage truck here sounds like an ice-cream truck but louder, in this case playing Fur Elise. When you hear it, you have to go down and catch it and put your trash in. (No dumpsters or curbside service.) I'm sure this is pretty annoying and tedious when you actually have to do it, but from the outside there is a certain festive element to it.

Finally I ended up at the night market again, where I got some soup with "humane shrimp." I'm not sure what humane shrimp are made of, but it's not shrimp. It's some kind of vegetarian product. One of the more successful fake meats I've had though: they really have both taste and texture that is almost exactly like shrimp, especially in a strong-tasting sauce or soup. This particular soup was kind of mediocre, but when I'm in the wandering "hungry ghost" mood, nothing goes right for me culinarily speaking, so I feel I got off light. At least I didn't end up with something truly disgusting.

I also got a waffle-like dessert that seems to be fashionable now. There's a pun involved with the name of it, at least some types. It's something like this: the Chinese word for cake (like, bakery cake) is actually "egg cake" (dangao 蛋糕), I guess to distinguish it from something like sweet rice cake. Anyway, now on the street you can buy something that is advertised as a "chicken egg cake" (jidan gao 雞蛋糕). But they aren't cake at all; they're waffle batter cooked in egg-shaped waffle-iron moulds! I had been eying them for some time, so I decided to try them. I actually got a smaller one, which is not a pun and just called 雞蛋仔 (I'm not sure of the pronunciation, think it means something like "chicken egglets"). It was a waffle-sheet of little "eggs," kind of like bubble wrap, with each bubble about the size of a grape. You can pull them off one by one.

The fellow who made them earnestly assured me that the outside was crispy and the inside was "QQ." I gave a blank look, but he didn't seem able to explain. I felt kind of bad about myself, since I didn't understand this "QQ" at all. Maybe I wasn't even hearing it right? I tried the chicken egglets to see if I could figure it out empirically. The outside was definitely crispy and the inside was more soft, but not entirely soft? It was a really tasty snack food, by the way. When I got home, I googled it (thanks google!!) and there was a great description here:

It's a phrase mostly encountered in Taiwan that means "toothsome," or "chewy." It is similar to the Italian phrase, al dente. QQ is generally considered a desirable quality in Taiwanese cuisine, as it contributes to mouth feel.

Isn't that pretty awesome? It's a whole new word and taste sensation.


This got me thinking about how when I was here 12 years ago, I did not bring or even own a laptop--much less a cell phone. (Now I have two, my stupidly locked iphone that I am using as an ipod touch, and my Beijing cell phone which actually works as a phone, but pathetically.) I got internet by standing in line for a 15 minute session at the big computer store, which you had to do standing up. Or later I went to the school computer lab. I did this maybe once a day or once every other day. I used payphones but couldn't figure out the phone card system, thus wracking up horrible collect call bills, probably running into the hundreds of dollars, whenever I got really lonely. (Sorry parents!) Now there's skype anytime I want it, and every accommodation I have seen advertised has internet all set up. And I am sort of inclined to complain because the map function on my iphone doesn't work reliably, or because I can't instantly google any question I am wondering about since my phone is locked.... The world changes really fast. I guess it makes me sound old when I say things like that. I am old. Ish. I am a little apprehensive about having my social world be mostly people the age of my students for the next couple months. But all the same, I have signed up to go on a hiking trip this weekend. I think it will be good for me to at least try to meet people. Go through the motions, even though it never really works very well.


Despite having diligently stayed up all day without napping, I again got only 5 or so hours of sleep (10 PM-3 AM). At least I got some work done in the middle of the night. And then I did sleep a little more after dawn. I was still out the door and searching for breakfast by 7 AM though.


It's a town of night owls, and there's not much available at 7 AM. However, because it looked like more walking was in order, I went north up Yonghe Road following a tip from the Rough Guide. I got the Rough Guide because Barnes and Noble didn't have Lonely Planet. I'm not sure it's quite as good for my purposes (not so much adventure hiking or travel). However, the sidebox on the suburb of Yonghe was awesome:

The suburb of Yonghe has become synonymous with delicious soybean milk and associated breakfast snacks, not just in Taiwan but throughout the Chinese-speaking world. In fact, so many soybean shops in Taiwan and Asia use "Yungho" (Yonghe) in their name that even many Chinese don't know it's actually a place near Taipei. Soybean milk originated in China in the 19th century, becoming popular as a drink in the 1930s and imported to Taiwan when the Nationalists fled the mainland in 1949; Donghai was the original store established in Yonghe in 1955 [and its soymilk was wildly popular]... one of the country's most successful example of what the Taiwanese call "selling back" to China. Donghai was renamed "World Soybean Milk Magnate"世界豆漿王 in 1968. (Rough Guide Taiwan p.86)

The guidebook also gave the address, and since it was not far from where I am staying, I went there. I have to say, the soymilk there was indeed really really really good! It proved to be a perfect kind of breakfast place, already open at 7 AM, with a menu where you write what you want (like a sushi place in the US), and labeled examples of each item in a display case. Plenty of places to sit, semi-open air, fast service, and cheap! This breakfast is brought to you by the color white. It is mantou jia jidan 饅頭夾雞蛋 (steamed bun with fried egg), qiancenggao 千層糕 (thousand layer cake, the layers being sponge cake and coconut jelly--unexpectedly cold!) and of course, doujiang.


More to say, but this post is already long enough.