Month: March 2025

the lost marbles of Taroko

On By brosencrantzIn Blog posts, TravelblogsLeave a comment

Taroko Gorge’s depictions in the National Museum raised our expectations; the knowledge that it had been devastated by an earthquake in 2024 tempered them. Our tour booking* was caveated with warnings that a) many attractive parts were still in ruins, and b) if it rained too heavily they’d have to cancel for fear of landslips. It was raining quite heavily as we ate our little packed breakfast from the B&B, but the minivan arrived with four fellow travellers and our guide (an unusually tall Taiwanese bloke with a camo jacket and a deep voice) told us that there was still a chance of cancelling the gorge itself but that he’d do his best to make sure the day was interesting.

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paregoric blues

On By brosencrantzIn Travelblogs1 Comment
Section of “The Beauty of Taroko” landscape by Ma Pai-Sui (also written Bashui). These panels are over two metres high.

We started the grey, rainy second day with another Nick Kembel recommendation, a breakfast place called Ding Yuan Soy Milk, very popular with Japanese tourists. We ate xiaolongbao (little dumplings full of broth, not a million miles from khinkali), fried chive pockets, hot bowls of soy milk (Fran’s sweet, mine savoury with croutons and a slight cottage cheesy texture), and a clay-oven sesame bun. We picked up our train tickets for later at a convenience shop, in a ritual which will be fine the second time but was awkward the first (you enter your details in a kiosk thing which then gives you a receipt that you then take to the till and print tickets…?) This was a different district, a little quieter and more businesslike than Ximending, with gloomy passages through buildings and staircases promising abandoned underground shopping areas, and random shops with excellent names: Mikhail, THREEGUN, Master Max, Murder Gentle.

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of damp cats and coal mines

On By brosencrantzIn Travelblogs1 Comment

The first impression Taiwan gave was of compactness: a small amount of heavily exploited flatland, a lot of unhelpfully steep hills, and a buildable grey-zone between them full of buildings and land reshaped to accommodate each other. Layers of road and rail viaducts crossed each other; very seriously embanked rivers and mossy, steep-walled storm drains suggested everything might get very wet very quickly. The smooth, swift metro dropped us off in the Ximending district, where we found our hotel, past shopfronts crammed with computer valves and maneki-neko, and headed, jetlag-addled but famished, for the Raohe Street Night Market.

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a breakdown on the main production line, a small oversight in the machine design

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A change from comic posts – an entry in the occasional (like… every ten years or so) genre of “I am actually spending money on buying myself something nice” posts. I have worn out two shoulder bags in the last twelve years, one I got for myself and one my other half got me. After getting a medium-sized bonus at work, and probably reading a couple too many r/BuyItForLife adjacent sentiments,* I was in the mood to spend a bit of money on something that would last at least another decade or two. A pal recommended a Hungarian firm called Bagaboo, who are mostly focused on cycling kit but whose messenger bags seemed just the ticket. Their selling points seem to be that a) they handmake everything in Budapest and b) as a result their bags are extremely customisable, in terms of both colour and adjustments.

I just needed a tough laptop bag so ended up plumping for their extra-small messenger bag, in dark blue with burgundy trim and a bright yellow liner, and a laptop sleeve in reversed colours. They warned me that it would take a couple of weeks, but it was actually a matter of days. However, I then lost a week to an unbelievable clown show of incompetence from DPD, whose broken website convinced itself that I wanted to pick it up from a warehouse in Croydon.

The result is perfect, comfortable but extremely tough, with inner pockets for headphones/chargers, and outer pockets for pens and misc things. It also doesn’t attract too much cat hair…

I’m extremely pleased with it, and my only regret is not getting a grumpy frog custom-embroidered on it. Would recommend to a friend or colleague.

* I don’t even use Reddit! But as the world of forums and blogs withers away and disappears from the face of search engines, it does seems to be the last source of real human interaction which hasn’t been either cloistered away into private Discord servers or enshittified into a useless nowhere-land of algorithmic dreck by evil megacorps. I mean, there’s bluesky as well but using bluesky regularly feels too much like pretending that Twitter was good before it got taken over by a ket-addled goose-stepping manchild.