Today I’d like to share with you just what a day in Taipei can be like. I’m thinking it can be quite informative about what everyday life is like here. Enjoy!
Today was finally the day I went into the heart of the city. It’s been over a month since I’ve left my neighborhood (if you don’t count bike rides and runs), and I’d been going stir crazy for the last two weeks. I’ve had some things that needed doing and some people I needed to meet in the city, so as not to waste time I’d been trying to schedule them all for one day. Which usually meant plans would fall apart and I would just end up staying home and try to reschedule everything for another day. Today everything feel through again, but I didn’t care, I had to get out of the house or I was going to explode.
My first stop was the book store where I get my Chinese textbooks. I wanted to see what my next textbook would be. However looking over the ones I was interested in, showed that I might be past all textbooks. But don’t worry I’ll have a much more detailed post about this in the future.
As this was near where a friend is going to grad school, she tag along to the book store and then we went to the puzzle store I showed in a previous post. As a much belated birthday gift, she was willing to get me one of their nice plastic puzzles, which I admit are quite cool. However they didn’t have the one I wanted, which may have been a sign. I was already hesitant of getting one, as they are quite expensive, especially given that I just recently found a place that has very cheap yet good quality puzzles. If anything I just wanted to click a few of the plastic ones to see what it felt like, and once the lady let me try out one of the puzzles in the store, my curiosity had been sated.
After this, my next stop was CKS memorial hall. The reason for going here was that a foreigner had mentioned to me that there is a small vendor who sells some pretty good ice cream. As this foreigner seemed to have respectable taste in ice cream, I decided to give it a try. I had no idea where in the building it was, so we had to walk around a bit. The first thing I did see was a souvenir shop. I mentioned before that it’s extremely difficult to find souvenir shops in Taipei, something I give it credit for. However after needing to find one myself about a year ago, and showing a friend’s mom around a few months ago as she also wanted to find one, it was quite troublesome to find one, especially one with the things we wanted. Well this one was right there and had all the things we were looking for. Sigh, well at least I know for the future. Granted the price of things there was about seven times what it was at those smaller places I had found, so if you do want me to send you a souvenir, the answer is still going to be “oh sorry, there are no souvenir shops in Taipei.”
Eventually we found the ice cream place, and it was a nice surprise. It was Meiji ice cream which is a Japanese brand. The thing with Meiji is that they have two levels of ice cream, the good kind and the trashy kind. The convenience stores used to carry the good kind for a relatively cheap price, but that stopped years ago, replaced with large cartons of their terrible kind. So it was nice to retaste their good kind at this vendor. After I had my ice cream, I asked if I could have a sample of another flavor, to which the lady said they don’t give samples. Now one fear that I’ve had is that if I am good at Chinese, I will just call out people when they are being unreasonable. So in a way not being good at Chinese is saving a plethora of morons from my wrath. However without thinking I did say something a bit…uh…on the nose, in Chinese. Regardless, even though the ice cream wasn’t the best, I was already considering going back every now and then, however with them being absurd, they lost my business for forever.
After ice cream it was time for my friend to go home to work on her thesis, before she left she commented on how quickly we walked from place to place and how close everything was. In her mind, as in most Taiwanese people’s mind things are extremely far apart, so when you say “let’s walk” they react like you told them to walk across America. Yet it never fails that when you are all done, they remark that it was shocking how close everything was, and they had no clue that Taipei was small.
My next stop was to the main train station, as under it is a mall that is well known for having lots of videogame stores. I had two old games I wanted to sell, both the American version of the games, meaning English only. One of them fetched me a good price as the only other version available in Taiwan is in Japanese. The other game didn’t get me much as it’s one of the few games that has a Chinese language version, so being English only was a drawback. I asked if they would give me more money if I use it towards buying another game from them, and they said yes. I figured this was a good idea as probably the only game I will buy this year comes out next month. I asked them if they would have the game, and they said yes. I mentioned I would just come back at that time, but they wanted me to preorder the game.
Now if you are a gamer you might know that the big game store in the states will attack you to get you preorder games just so they can make money off of your five dollar deposit months or weeks before you actually buy the game, but while they benefit, you get nothing. Here though if you preorder a game, they actually sell it to you at a cheaper price. This is mainly because game stores never know how much to order, so it’s better to have guaranteed sales at a lower price than have product left on the shelf. I admit that it was a good deal, however supply of anything in Taiwan is not very stable and never guaranteed. So I decided that I’d just wait until they actually have the game and come back, rather than give them money now for something that might come a month later than it should, or perhaps never at all.
The great thing about this whole interaction was the standard miscommunication of it all. This occurs when somebody expects me to speak English, when I speak Chinese, and when somebody speaks English, when I expect them to speak Chinese. Which results in them not understanding me because my “English” is horrible (since I’m really speaking Chinese), and vice versa. Then when it dawns on you “oh they are speaking English, not Chinese.” And you tune your ears to listen for English, it’s too late, they have switched to speaking Chinese since you couldn’t understand their English. This usually goes on and on, back and forth, with whoever is speaking using one language, while the person listening is thinking they are speaking the other language. It all just shows the dangers of judging a book by it’s cover. That it would never happened if people automatically just think I would speak English, or if I wouldn’t automatically just think they would speak Chinese.
After that it was off to the biggest night market in the city. I hoped on the subway, and got on one of the new ones that has tv’s on them showing advertisements. As is the case with most advertisements, I got upset. This particular ad started with a young lady on the phone with her friend going to a “______” I can’t remember the name of this thing in Chinese, but what it means is a group of friends (guys and girls) get together to do an activity and just see if any of them will hit it off with each other. Anyway, while this young lady is on the subway, a pregnant lady gets on, so she gets up to give up her seat. However a young man gets up first to give the pregnant lady the seat. The young lady sees this and thinks he is a good guy. At this point I’m thinking “Wow this ad is great. It’s going to show the lady going up to the man and saying that she thinks it’s really nice what he did and that they should maybe get a cup of coffee one day.”
Well this didn’t happen, instead they both get off at the same station, and there is an old man who needs some help, so the guy is going to help him, but the lady does it first, and he looks at her and thinks that she is a nice lady. At this point I’m thinking that it’s cool that the guy will go up to talk to the lady, but I’m a bit sad that the ad couldn’t show the woman being proactive and going up to the guy first. But of course this didn’t happen either, the guy just walks away. This is all until of course the two of them arrive at the same place for the group activity. At this point I just explode, that in no way was this ad telling people that if you see somebody you like you should not be shy but rather just go up and talk to them. That you really have nothing to lose, especially since anything worth having you have to put forth some effort to get. Nope, instead this ad was saying that you should just be shy and meek and you can only talk to somebody if by chance you are formally introduced one day. This may not seem like a big deal, but this is an infuriating part of life here where somebody may be interested in a colleague, classmate, local shop worker, etc but just too paralyzed by shyness to even speak to them. It would have be nice if this ad motivated people to be strong and just say “hi” to another person. Yes old people need help getting off the subway, but let’s not forget all those young people who need help meeting each other.
At the night market my goal was to find a pull up bar for my home. This area has quite a few sporting good shops so I thought it might have what I want. Most stores just sold stylish yet impractical sports wear, without any equipment. I eventually got to one that did have some weights and other things, but I didn’t see a bar. I went to ask a worker, but recalling my previous language confusion, I decided to go mostly visual, and while mocking pull-ups, ask in slow English if they have a pull up bar. The guy responded food English that they don’t, so I asked where I may be able to get one, and he said the shop across the street may have one. There I found a similar set up but not pull up bar. I did my pantomime again, and the guy said no in very scared English, so this was my clue to speak Chinese and ask where I could get one. He said that maybe he could order one from the catalogue, unfortunately he couldn’t locate the catalogue. By this time a friend had arrived and we went to go have dinner.
I was craving a specific Vietnamese place, but when we got there, there was a sign that it was taking the day off. It wasn’t surprising as shops and restaurants in Taiwan just take sporadic days off, meaning you have to always have a back up plan. My back up plan was across the alley, a lunch box place which has a quite unique dish. It’s basically a chicken breast where they cut it open, but some butter and seasoning inside and then sew it back up and cook it. Not doubt unhealthy, but it was the first time I’d had it in years. Also this shop has some pretty good milk tea, which again while unhealthy, is something that I haven’t had in years.
During dinner my friend was complaining about Taiwan. This is an easy short cut to being my friend. If you are a Taiwanese person who can be critical of Taiwan, than we will be fast friends. I’m not saying that Taiwan is a horrible place, but I do feel that the blind admiration that most Taiwanese feel for Taiwan, does much more harm for Taiwan, and the only way forward is for people to open their eyes more, be critical, and then do something about it.
Anyway after she finished her story about how Taiwanese treating other Taiwanese like idiots, just serves to make all Taiwanese idiots, I decided that this was my chance to bring up my rage towards the ad I had seen on the subway. After my story I was glad to see that she shared my disgust, as her being Taiwanese, she has no obligation to sugar coat things. I could tell we both had to deal with friends who were to shy to talk to somebody, and while I have to very carefully phrase what I say, lest I come off as an uncaring foreigner and all foreigners then be judged that way, she can just say to her friends “well if you don’t put yourself out there to try for happiness, than you don’t deserve happiness.” I pray for the day when the actions of one foreigner no longer reflect on all foreigners, and I can then produce that kind of straight talk.
She also proceeded to tell me the story of her recent experience doing speed dating. She had gotten roped into it as she thought her friend was inviting her to one of the aforementioned events where a group of friends get together to do an activity and see if anybody catches their eye. However what it really was, was speed dating. It was not a fun activity for her as all the guys were over 45. Her disgust came when at the end the guys voted on the most popular girl, and the women vote on the most popular guy. The lady that the guys choose was a university student, which made me gag. Let me remind you that every single guy there was over 45, and the girl they all liked the most was 20 years old. My friend was quite annoyed by how disgusting the guys were, but I flipped it around by saying this was a good thing. It shows that society is working properly is 45 year old men who desire children are still single.
This story reminded me of a foreigner friend of mine about seven years ago who started a speed dating service specifically for Taiwanese women and foreigner men. The problem though is that like it or not, if you are a foreigner in Taiwan, you don’t really need speed dating. Which meant that he went around paying foreigner men to join the activity, and just pretend they were interested in finding somebody. I never did this, but it was always a more quandary when Taiwanese friends would mention they were considering giving it a try. I would debate if I should tell them that the foreigners were actually getting paid to be there, and weren’t really interested in finding somebody, in fact many of them had long time girlfriends and a few were even married. However I could never decide if the idea was that you were just paying to meet new people, albeit for a short time, or if what you were really paying for was the possibility of something more. In the end I would just keep my mouth shut, as I figured no matter what it’s an interesting experience, a chance to practice English in a time sensitive setting, and it would definitely leave them with a story to tell.
This actually relates to something else that happened today. While walking on the street I saw a foreigner with a Taiwanese lady. This particular lady is quite well known as she has spent time with a large majority of the foreigners in Taipei. Taiwanese women are normally curious about foreigner men, and quite a few prefer to only spend time with foreigner men. However there are certain few Taiwanese women who seem almost addicted to foreigner men. These specific few usually can be found at foreigner pubs around closing time, trying to pick up whoever is left. It’s always surprising whenever I see them out in the daylight, and it’s almost always with some doe eyed foreigner who appears to be just off the boat.
Whenever it happens I always consider if I should do something to warn them. Now I need to say that I have no problem with promiscuity, and in fact hate it that a guy who has been with a lot a women is a viewed as a good, while a women who has done the same thing is viewed as bad. I also don’t fault anybody for what they like, or for going after what they like, in fact I commend this. But thing is that they are well know to cause some problems for foreigners. The word “addicted” was a good word to use, as when the thing you are addicted to goes away, you go a bit crazy and do some pretty out there things to try and get it back.
In the end I never say anything. Of course because it’s not my business, but more so because I think it’s unfair to judge somebody for their past actions. None of us are the people we used to be, so perhaps they have changed. And really, if I did warn them, than it would mean no more great horror stories that we tell around camp fires. No doubt I’ll run into that guy somewhere down the line and he’ll talk about how the lady went to his parent’s hotel when they came to Taiwan and was screaming that their son (insert whatever scares you most here). Then you say “oh yeah I saw you with that lady on the street a few months back. I was thinking I should give you a heads up, but I figure it wasn’t my place.” To which they only have one response “Oh man, I wish you would have told me then. It would have saved me having to buy a new scooter after she burned my old one.”
Yes those exact words have been said to me more than once.
Ah well, I finished the day with what you see above. Awhile back I came across a candy store in that night market that has loads of different candy that you buy by the weight. It was nice to take a trip down memory lane, sampling all the ones I ate as a kid. These two particular kind are actually quite good. They are very juicy when you bit into them. It’s a jolt of enjoyment. They were so good that first time I tried them, that I actually made it a point to go into every candy store I came across in my daily life, just to see if another place has that particular kind. Thankfully for my health, no place else does. But this also means that every time I’m up at this night market, I’ll get a few of them. Again, thankfully I’m only ever up there once every few months.
