We had accidentally timed our trip to coincide with tomb-sweeping weekend, when good Taiwanese go to their ancestors’ graves in the countryside and maintain them. Taiwan has about the best public transport network I’ve ever experienced, but it was likely to be packed completely solid, and we needed to get to Tainan, halfway across the country. HSR (bullet train) tickets with seat reservations had sold out well in advance; they always have several unreserved coaches, but it’s first-come-first-served onto the train, so we were expecting a fair bit of queueing on platforms. However, we took a punt at a ticket machine while in the station to lock up our bags, and managed to nab two seats on a perfectly timed train that evening! On top of managing (mainly through luck and Fran’s diligence) to get tickets for the Alishan forest railway (more anon, but tickets sell out instantly online and you have to be fortunate to catch the trickle of cancellations) we were rather chuffed; everything was coming up Milhouse.

Continue reading “made it, 媽! top of the world!” →

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.

Continue reading “paregoric blues” →

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.

Continue reading “of damp cats and coal mines” →