Sunday, February 6, 2011

Chinese New Year With The Wangs



My next few posts will be reporting on various things we did and experienced during the Chinese New Year vacation, which we spent almost entirely in Kaohsiung and Kaohsiung County (forgive me: I still haven’t gotten used to saying “Greater Kaohsiung” or whatever they’re calling it these days).

We spent the first few days in the city of Dashe (大社 or “Great Society”) with our friend Sasha Wang and her family, including her parents and sister, Iris. On Chinese New Year’s day, Sasha’s grandmother also came over.

Dashe is a small town that looks like every other Taiwanese town. It has its famous local produce (green jujubes, which were quite fortunately in season), its main old temple, its one “scenic” spot worth a visit, and several streets worth of pearl tea stands, convenience stores, breakfast hamburger restaurants, lottery stores, blue trucks and the requisite Café 85.
When we first arrived we were treated to a bowl of delicious, crisp jujubes just picked by a family friend. “I feel sorry for you northerners,” Mr. Wang said as he handed us the shiny fruit. “You have to eat all the so-so jujubes that we don’t want. We get the best ones! Once, I sent a case of these jujubes to my cousin in Taipei and he said ‘they’re great, but they arrived mostly rotten”. You can’t pick them right off the tree and still get them to Taipei, so you have to eat ones picked too early and they’re not as good.”



I felt lucky to have the chance to spend a few days in Dashe; it’s the sort of town you wouldn’t think to visit, and would have no reason to visit, unless you have a friend there. We suspect there's at least one foreigner in town because the city seems big enough to support a cram school or two, and there was one (one!) Taipei Times at the 7-11 when we went for coffee. "There is probably one expat in the entire town," Brendan said as he bought the paper, "and I took his Taipei Times!"

The upside of this is that we got to spend a few days in a sleepy Taiwanese town devoid of tourist hype or "Must See" destinations. Everything gets easier when there's nothing in particular that you have to see. It was fascinating to see a town from which the produce we eat in Taipei comes (rather like pineapples from Guanmiao, strawberries from Dahu, Lishan apples, Mingchih peaches or custard apples from Taidong) - a town that is, honestly, "flyover country".

For real - the High Speed Rail tracks go right through the edge of town. You cross under them to head up to the Guanyinshan Scenic Area. I spend a lot of time on the HSR and never really think about what the towns the tracks pass through are like so this was a fascinating glimpse from a different perspective.


The Wangs are masters of old school hospitality - the kind that people raved about in countries like India and Thailand before the tourist hordes showed up. We had our own room, delicious meals ("we can eat out if it's a bother" - "it's NO bother...they WANT to feed you") and while Sasha's parents don't drink coffee, Sasha knows that we're hopeless addicts and made sure that 7-11 coffee was the first thing we got every day. We both had a lot of fun in a town without much to see

The Wangs don’t celebrate Chinese New Year the way you’d expect. They follow Yi Guan Dao, which as far as I can tell is a type of Buddhism that still mandates praying to ancestors, eating vegetarian even for laypeople, and lots and lots of prayer on special days (more than you'd normally expect).

On New Year's Eve, we woke up and enjoyed rice porridge with various vegetarian additions including a dried product that I would have mistaken for beef jerky had I not known that it couldn't possibly have been. We then piled into the car and drove to Zuoying, where we helped burn ghost money ("you two are sooooo cute!" "Are we doing it wrong?" "No...it's just so funny to watch foreigners do that") and met Sasha's extended family, including her "Have Fun Uncle" (he likes to have fun - mahjong, wine, cards and other things that Sasha's parents don't indulge in), her grandmother, her older sister and her nephew.



Not that Sasha's parents are uptight; they're not against others eating meat, drinking alcohol or gambling, and as good old-school Taiwanese from the country, they're quite good at the occasional swear word or colorful comment.

"They always remember my English name," Sasha said, "because it sounds like 'What the ****!?' in Taiwanese." "What's that?" I asked, and Sasha told me (it's "sa shao" if you're curious) in front of her parents, who chortled heartily. Later, her father told us "not to tell anyone in Taipei that I'm a '大社人'", which he said in Taiwanese, which sounds just like the Mandarin 大色狼. Go ask someone if you can't read that.



...and their neighbor agreed. Foreigners burning ghost money is hilarious.

While the family cleaned the house we went into Kaohsiung - we offered to help and were roundly rebuffed - and visited Pier 2 in Yancheng. I'll write about that later.

For dinner, we ate a steaming, delicious vegetarian hot pot with faux duck, faux fish balls, faux squid and all manner of vegetables and beans. The imitation meat was excellent (some of it actually tasted like the real thing) and made mostly from mushroom, tofu and bean ingredients processed to bear a resemblance to meat.




We then watched a bit of the CNY television programming on Formosa TV - the Wangs, being from Kaohsiung, are rather deep green (lots of pro-Chen Chu and anti-Ma invective) before they went upstairs to pray. The ritual called for three prayers - one at 8pm, one at 9 and one at 10. We could have watched but Sasha insisted it was really not all that interesting, and so instead we stayed downstairs to watch the flamenco dancer on the left talk to the Snow Countess that Flash Gordon defeated on the right, mediated by the famous guy in the bowl haircut whom you'll recognize if you've spent even a week in Taiwan.



At that point, an uncle and aunt dropped off Grandma, who "was too tired to climb the stairs to pray". The Wangs own a four-story townhouse-like house, so this seemed reasonable. She retired to her room on the ground floor for a bit, but then came into the living room to talk to us.



Except that Grandma only speaks Taiwanese (and some Japanese). I only speak Chinese and English. She can't read Chinese (except characters on mahjong tiles). We did have a conversation, but I'm not sure how.

I learned a great many interesting things from Grandma. First, it's not that she can't climb the stairs to the top floor, though that is hard for her - she just doesn't really like to pray that much. "Sometimes it's OK...but they do it too much. I can't be bothered" was the gist of what she said.

I told Sasha this...her reply? "Finally, Grandma tells the truth! We always knew it because we don't really like it either! She can admit it to you!"

Grandma also told me that it was OK not to have kids now, but later we should have two (in this way, she's like my Grandma L.). "Three is too many; you can carry two but you can't carry three, so three is just a lot of trouble."

Knowing she had at least three children, I said "Sorry" (不好意思 - paisei).
"Don't worry about it." (不會 - mbe).

Then she told me about how her other son's house is so clean, but this house is messy because her daughter in law doesn't like to clean. I replied "yes, but it's a really nice, big house and they run their own business, so it's OK." Hearing this, I remembered how lucky I am not to have a stereotypical mother-in-law!

"Anyway my husband cleans too. We split the cleaning in half." That earned me a 'you chose well!' pat on the arm and a big thumbs-up.

Our common vocabulary having been exhausted for some time - I understand more Taiwanese than I speak and Grandma used Mandarin words if she knew them, but still - I showed her our wedding photos.

Why? Because around the world, no matter what language, age or culture, almost every woman of every background can understand and connect over wedding pictures. If Grandma and I had any sort of cultural intersection it was here.

This is where her Japanese really got going - asking me why I wore a kimono (I didn't but my dress was inspired by one) and how I tied the obi.

My Japanese inspired wedding dress with obi: photo by Keira Lemonis

You're probably wondering at this point why I said that the Wangs don't do the typical Chinese New Year, because this sounds pretty much exactly like a typical Chinese New Year.

Well, for starters, there was no huge New Year's meal. There were no fireworks. Other uncles, aunts and cousins stayed home; only Grandma came for New Year's Day. Sasha drove out to the only open breakfast joint in Dashe to buy vegetarian rolls and get us coffee. The Wangs went up to Guanyinshan (no relation to the one in Taipei - this one is really just a hill) to the street market to sell their products. We went with Sasha around Dashe to see whatever there was to see.

That's how I ended up spending half a day selling Beigang Peanuts!

You see, the Wangs' business is seed and nut products. The "messiness" (I disagree that it was messy) that Grandma mentioned came from the stacked boxes of peanuts, black sesame, sunflower seeds and almonds in the main room. Mr. Wang is from Beigang (北港) in Yunlin County, a town famous for its peanuts. Their products are wholesaled out to vendors in various Old Streets across Taiwan; if you see peanuts and sunflower seeds in plastic bottles for a hundred kuai each, triangle chewy seed and nut candies, nut candy cubes in bags and cashews in plastic jars, then you're seeing Sasha's family product. Buy some; it's good stuff, and you're helping out small business owners!

New Year dawned bright and sunny in Dashe, and they quickly established that the street market up there was open and crowded, so they got in the car and went to set up their own stand.

We woke up later, had breakfast with Sasha, Sasha's sister Iris and Grandma, who told us to eat as much as we wanted, and then feigned being upset when we "didn't eat enough". "You two come back next year. I like talking to you. Eat more!"

We then went to see Green Cloud Temple (青雲宮), a Sengung Dadi temple in town. Sengung Dadi is the god of herbal medicine, and Green Cloud Temple is approximately 320 years old. Around it, sacred Banyan Tree gods are denoted with red ribbon. It was a crowded day and the high-ceilinged main hall was filled with incense smoke. We prayed with Sasha - I never knew that I needed to tell the gods my address when praying, but hey, I'm not religious so it doesn't really matter. I was sure to pray for "No baby, no baby, no baby please, let someone else have the baby" to Chusheng Niangniang, the goddess of childbearing, and for my mother's health to Sengung Dadi himself. We took free New Year's candy from the many trays sitting around.

I snapped a few pictures, too:


Then we walked up to Guanyin Mountain, where I got a deep tissue "Torture Lady" massage:



Seriously, it was as painful as it looks.



We hiked to the top, stopping along the way to buy drinks at the street market. I also picked up a bar of soap made from human breast milk for NT180. Never seen that before, so I am curious - can't wait to try it! Guanyin Mountain isn't high, but the top follows a narrow ridge with lovely views over the southwestern plain.



We descended and ran into the local troupe of macaques:



...who clearly want Chusheng Niangniang's help more than I do!



Also, macaques are hilarious.



It was kind of cool that we didn't have to go to Chaishan to see them. This troupe is local and fairly tame, not nearly as nasty as the Chaishan troupe or unfriendly as the Tianmu troupe. Sasha was upset that out-of-towners were feeding them "We know never to feed them, because if you feed them they turn nasty and demanding". Which is entirely true, as one man whose entire bag of dried Irwin mangoes was stolen found out.

Then we walked down to Sasha's family stand, which is how I ended up hawking peanuts on Chinese New Year!


They didn't ask us to help - I volunteered. Brendan didn't join in, but I thought it was great fun and it was cool to see them getting more business. More than one person bought nuts or candy after being shocked by the foreigner shouting "bakang toudao jin he jia!" (北 港 土 豆 很 好 口甲) in Taiwanese.

See how nice I am to post this picture of me pretending to be a traditional market peanut vendor in rural Taiwan, even though I look atrocious in it!

We returned to the house at dusk to find Iris spending time with Grandma, who was as opinionated as ever (she asked me "Why is your husband wearing short sleeves? He should put on a jacket!").

The next day, the Wangs headed to Tainan, where they go every 2nd day of the New Year to pay respects to the tomb of a deceased family friend. They call him "uncle" but aren't related - he was their waishengren neighbor before his death and they sort of adopted him into the family. We headed into Kaohsiung city for a few days of playing tourist and enjoying the sunshine, something which is so severely lacking in Taipei at this time of year!

On our way out, the Wangs loaded us up with bags of nut, sunflower seed and sesame seed candy, a bag of fruit, a bag of local lu wei and a custard apple. Now that's hospitality! It's good to see that kind of consideration paid to guests still alive and well. You see it in Taipei but not nearly to this extent.

All I can say is...hooray for southern Taiwan. Nice people, good food, awesome weather. Why on earth the business capital has to be sodden, overcast Taipei is beyond me.

The Dome of Light

We spent most of Chinese New Year in Kaohsiung (more posts - a whole bunch of posts, in fact - coming on that) and one thing I took a lot of photos of was the Dome of Light in Formosa Boulevard MRT Station. I am hardly the first person to do this (a simple Google search proves that) but I still want to share the photos I took in that set. Friends and relatives back home who haven't seen pictures on other Taiwan blogs might enjoy it, I figure.



Most photos I see online of the Dome of Light are large-scale, encompassing the entire stained glass ceiling - I prefer more close-up images that study the various aspects of the design.



I love how almost the same picture from the same vantage point can take on two very different hues with just the tiniest push of color balance when editing photos. Usually it takes more to get such a dramatic change in color and light:


First we're bluish green...

...then we're greenish yellow!


The Dome of Light is the largest single piece of glasswork in the world, and was designed by Narcissus Quagliata, which is officially the coolest name in the world.

Apparently the Dome of Light, which is already a Kaohsiung tourist attraction to rival the British Consulate, Cijin Island and Lotus Lake, will be offered as a wedding venue. If we hadn't gotten married in the USA, I totally would have jumped at the chance to get married here!

I did overhear two separate conversations in which locals from Kaohsiung were telling their relatives in town for Chinese New Year to go see it.

The dome is 30 meters in diameter and is made up of 4,500 glass panels.


I have nothing more to say that Wikipedia can't tell you, so just go ahead and enjoy the photos!















Sunday, January 30, 2011

Taipei City Mall: Journey to the Bowels of Taipei



Hello Kitty men's (yes, men's) briefs on sale at Taipei City Mall

It's been cold and steely gray all weekend, so we decided to spend our Saturday wandering Taipei City Mall, a long two-aisle shopping extravaganza underneath Civic Boulevard. After writing up a few posts on Taipei Main Station, it made sense to follow up with a post about some of the things to see and do in that neighborhood.

It runs roughly from Chengde Road - if it's called Chengde Road that far south - to Yanping Road just north of Taipei Main Station, and is one of the key components of what locals call "車站後" or "Behind The Station".

Above ground, the area has changed both a lot and hardly at all in the past few years: the new Taipei Bus Station was plonked down in all its hulking glory recently, and include a chi-chi department store. Hoity-toity is clearly trying to make its way to this old area.

That said, the twisted lanes and alleys full of shops bursting with consumer goods - from gray acrylic aprons to silverware to lamb's leather and faux leather handbags - those are still there, creating a bit of a tangle of traffic and Made in China goodness all the way up to Nanjing Road. The entire Circus of Stuff reaches a peak at Chang'an Road, where shop after shop of seasonal plastic junk vies for your attention over the hanging drapes of LED fairy lights, blinking off into the distance. So winding are the roads here that the one clear four-corner intersection (of Chongqing and Chang'an, I believe) is called "Ten Intersection" (十字路口) because it looks like the Chinese number ten: 十.

Stuff, stuff, stuff, stuff, stuff

This is also the neighborhood where one finds DIY makeup and beauty care product stores (you'll find these along Tianshui Road - 天水街), DIY beading and jewelry making stores (those can be found down Yanping, to the far west along Chang'an and all the way up to Dihua Streets) and store after store of precious and semi-precious stones (along Chongqing between Nanjing and Civic).

For that matter, don't miss Jiayi Chicken Rice (嘉義雞肉飯) - actually turkey rice, I believe - along Chongqing Road near Chang'an. They're the best place to try this specialty of Jiayi city that I've found.

Below ground, where we hid out for most of yesterday, is a rough-around-the-edges, slightly downmarket shopping experience that, with its ratio of usefulness to classiness (low classiness, high usefulness, pretty much the opposite of the new Bellavita in Xinyi), reminds me of a down-at-heel suburban strip mall. You know, the ones with a Dollar Plus at one end, a Crazy Cal's Discount Liquor, a hardware store, a Cambio de Cheque and a Szechwan Panda Bamboo Palace. Not to mock any of it - it's all very useful stuff. When I lived in Arlington VA I did most of my errands at places like that.

Such is Taipei City Mall. One end has a dance bar and mirrors, and young'uns come here to practice their moves:

And the other has a whole setup of blind masseurs waiting to give you a backrub (NT$100 for ten minutes, and they do a good job).

In between, you can find stores full of beads and semiprecious gems, stores that sell inexpensively made Old Chinese Lady clothing, shops selling tea items, things to hit yourself with (paddles with magnets, brushes made of semi-stiff bamboo sticks, plastic balls with spikes: there is an amazing array of stuff you can beat yourself up with in the name of "improved blood circulation" available in Taipei), about seventy kajillion toy stores, a few Indonesian restaurants and other shops and an assortment of Random.

Back to the Old Chinese Lady clothing: which I totally wear because it's made for sizes that fit older women, not young stick insects, and I rather like Chinese clothing as old-timey as it may make me look (which is totally fine because as a foreigner I get to bend the fashion rules).

Someday I'll take a picture of my Crazy Obasan Jacket and post it here: a jacket I wear to work sometimes made of shiny blue-green fabric embroidered with purple and pink flowers and green vines and trimmed with blue and purple sequins all the way up and around the Mandarin collar, with frog buttons down the front. It's super awesomepants.

Old Chinese Lady Clothing - Love it!

And here are some assortments of Random for you. I am not sure what Maiden School teaches, though it seems to be something like an etiquette school for girls. Below that, the Tea Shop Post Office. Get some Bubble Tea and send your letters, all in one stop!


The Tea Shop Post Office

A great deal of the toys on sale are definitely not for children:



When I first moved to Taiwan, I knew guns were illegal for all but military and police officers (of course that doesn't stop certain unsavory elements from obtaining them). I kept seeing these stores, though, and wondering how guns could be sold so openly if they were illegal - even in the USA I've never seen a gun shop like this, and I've been to Texas! I've taken a road trip through Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, North Carolina and Virginia and never seen such a display of firearms for passerby to notice.

Of course, these are toy guns - they shoot BBs and are exceedingly popular among Taiwan's adult male set. There are entire BB gun shooting ranges where Taiwanese men go to...shoot things with BBs.

The mall has a fairly good selection of food - from tea stalls to full restaurants that look like they serve some tasty meals. There are two Indonesian places - we tried the one at the far end across from M Toko Indo Indonesian grocery, but there's also a place called Nanyang (南洋) that is supposed to be quite good. Both serve decent downmarket Indonesian food - the sort of thing you'd get at a hole-in-the-wall in rural Sumatra. Both places and the grocery are on the western end of the mall.

For more upmarket, take-your-date-there, downtown Jakarta fare, try Milano on Pucheng Street in Shi-da (I'll write a review of it later).

And all down the long corridors, benches are set out where you can find all manner of random people sitting, snacking and relaxing.


Like this guy.

All in all, not a bad place to spend a rainy, overcast day - and I picked up more beading supplies, too!

Friday, January 28, 2011

Cafe La Boheme and Coffee, Tea or Me

On Wenzhou Street just south of Xinhai there are two cafes that we've been going to a lot lately, so I thought a review was in order - especially as they both have cats. One has cheap but strong, well-made cocktails and the other has the best hot chocolate in the entire independent country of Taiwan and I am not even joking, so all the better!

If you enter Wenzhou Street from Xinhai (or walk north), just south of a small shop decorated with hanging CDs you'll find Cafe La Boheme on one side, and Coffee, Tea or Me on the other. The placement somewhat mimics the placement of Cafe Bastille and Shake House down the road (running along Lane 86, catty-corner to the Lutheran church where you often see a guy who walks his Persian cat on a leash). Those cafes are both great - Shake House is better - and so are these two.

Shake House is one of my all-time favorites, with friendly staff, an artfully shabby space, usually decent music, great beer and, for a student beer cafe, pretty good coffee and food. Bastille has a snotty staff and horrid food - though the focaccia sandwich is OK - but good beer, plugs and Wifi. You can use Bastille wifi from Shake House, but there are no plugs.

Anyway, back to the two cafes at hand.

La Boheme, on the west side, has a velvet-furred declawed tabby named Luna, a selection of books in English and Chinese, generally good but more popular-music oriented music, beer (Belgian) and excellent food. I mean truly good: their burgers are stupendous, generous and well-made. The burger choices are unexpected: I recommend the burger topped with apples and white wine sauce.

Their fries are just as fries should be - not too salty, crunchy on the outside and soft on the inside. I've also had their herbed lemon chicken, which was quite good. Their hot chocolate is absolutely excellent - dark and chocolatey, you can smell it before it reaches your table. It's rich and tasty, nothing like the wimpy brews of the various "chocolate" cafes found in Taipei. If you love a good hot chocolate, go here and nowhere else. It's more like drinking chocolate than "hot chocolate" (which in my mind conjures up Swiss Miss).

It has its own wireless network and plugs, and is very "local" (foreigners do come, but they're not the norm). With green and yellow walls and a wood-floored raised area, this place is more brightly lit and comfortable like an old chair.

With its decidedly less healthy (but no less tasty) fare, it's Gongguan's answer to Zabu, whose tasty Japanese food feels downright good for you, despite the many fried menu items. That's Japanese food for ya.

It's rare to find cafes in Taipei that have a good atmosphere and good food, let alone genuinely good hamburgers, so this is something to take notice of.

Coffee, Tea or Me (also called "Cafe, Tea or Me") has two, possibly three cats. It's hard to say and only the orange cat is friendly. You have to steal La Boheme's wireless, but they have their own plugs and truly excellent coffee. La Boheme's coffee isn't bad either. They have more space, very odd books and other decorative bits and bobs, more chairs but a limited selection. You can get drinks of all sorts, from good coffee to a very limited beer selection - really just Erdinger, a few boring choices like Heineken and a vanilla-y French beer in a blue bottle. They also do cocktails, and have an impressive bar for what is basically a coffeeshop. They made me a drink at their suggestion: Jameson, some sort of bourbon and Grand Marnier with ice and I assume something that was not alcohol (or maybe not - coulda been pure alcohol). The serving was generous and it cost NT$140. WAY TO GO.

Coffee, Tea or Me's space is more artfully distressed, with dingier walls, a menu board that's impossible to read, hodgepodge chairs and tables - including one low set of chairs in blue faux velvet and another pair of antique-looking Chinese style bamboo wicker chairs. It has a great atmosphere but is not the place to go if you think you'll get hungry.

I strongly recommend both, but for entirely different reasons!

James Kitchen



James Kitchen
#65 Yongkang Street, Da'an District, Taipei
台北市大安區永康街65號
(02) 2343-2275

Last weekend we tried this restaurant in an old building on Yongkang Street just north of Jinhua. They've only been in business for three years or so, but their ambiance makes it seem like they've been around since the '20s. The front has old Japanese-style menu boards, a window painted aqua-green and two red glass lanterns hanging outside.



James Kitchen - named for the owner, James (I never did get his last name or Chinese name) - an affable older man who hangs out by the counter - specializes in fish. A chalkboard near the counter announces fish specials, and gets erased whenever they run out of something. We chose a red fish braised in a broth with fermented "na dou" beans (the same beans used in the slimy Japanese "natto" but not slimy) and tofu. It was firm and delicious: I tend to prefer firmer fish to softer-fleshed varieties.





We also ordered salted clams, which were stewed in a soy sauce concoction, some basic green vegetables, fried oyster rolls (delicious: definitely try these) and minced pork and onion rice. The restaurant also provided a free eggplant xiao chi (small dish).

The overall feel of the place recalls Taiwan under Japanese rule: strongly Japanese (sashimi and sake were both on the menu, as well as some kinds of tempura and fried rolls) but at its core, still Taiwanese (hence the fried oyster cakes and other more Taiwanese foods). The sake was quite good and for 200 kuai, the serving (a small pitcher that is enough for two) is generous.



In the end, we ordered way too much food, but all of it was delicious. I definitely want to go back, and soon. There's something on the menu that is basically deep fried pastry stick (油條) smothered in garlic and oysters. I am all gung-ho to try it, so we have to return with friends!