City Life

Nobody is about to be impressed by this insight, which could have easily been gained from the first sentence in a result of a very basic Wikipedia search, but I'll say it anyway: Taipei is big, y'all.

Restaurants and shops and office buildings, stacked atop one another, scratch the sky (unusually blue in this photo). In big American cities, we know that businesses belonging to the food-and-entertainment category go on the ground floor; anything above them must be something boring: loft apartment housing, cubicle-studded office complexes, law firms and insurance agencies. Who, in wandering the streets of New York searching for cheap lunch, bothers to look up? But in Taipei, there's simply no room. More than once, I've had delicious meals at places hidden not only down an alley somewhere, but also up five floors.

Meanwhile, shopping takes on similarly impressive proportions. To the right is one location of the Sogo shopping center here in Taipei, and it's something like seventeen floors. Each floor has its theme: Coach and Kate Moss and Nine West all have storefronts on the Accessories floor. A whole level exists for Bose and Sony and Dell and their cohorts. A vastly overpriced grocery store resides in one of the several basement levels. On every floor, though, the atmosphere is the same: people, everywhere. Fingering handbags and holding designer dresses up to themselves and pressing buttons to test headphones' sound quality, there are innumerable people in places like Sogo (which, incidentally, is very close indeed to the Princeton Review office).

The city is not without its moments of respite, even in the midst of the craziness. This Zenlike garden, complete with pagodas, moss-covered boulders, and carefully scraped sand designs is actually in the Sogo center. In fact, the window in this photo is the same window that you can see up in the air in the photo above: on the fifteenth floor, there's a strange quiet as people sit on the benches that dot this artificial garden and enjoy their food-court ramen.

Even eating can be a crowded experience. American restaurants give us room for our elbows and our massive handbags, and we're never too close to anyone else. Well, the average personal-bubble size is quite a bit smaller here, and sometimes we have to, say, fit six of us on two sides of a supremely tiny table. Ah, well--all part of the fun at the Drunken Monkey. Yikes, my hair is bluer than I realized. I should tone that down.

Anyway, last night, Connie--who knows things and also is immense amounts of fun, thus rendering her a useful person to know--took us to Ximen. Tentatively, I'm going to describe Ximen as the Times Square of Taipei: its lights, its colors, its wide swaths of pavement crawling with vendors and tourists and locals alike, all seem reminiscent of our great American landmark. I'm sure that such a statement bespeaks only my vast Western ignorance of all things non-Western, and that someone like Connie who knows things would put me in my place. But that's what it feels like to me. It's touristy--but does that make it any less legitimate? As much as I value exploring the side-streets, the areas unreachable by metro stations, and the things that a guidebook can't tell me, there's something very meaningful about sheer, well,  touristiness. What does a city, a people, a culture find impressive or interesting enough in itself that it wants to package that thing, market it, sell it with pride to the visiting world?

Last night, I had a delicious thing that was simultaneously pancake-y and egg-y. Oh, and cheesy. It was amazing and enormous and only about US$1.50. And then, because apparently my unspoken Taiwan goals include eating mango ice literally every day, we went to a famous ice place. Here, they make the ice itself out of milk: it was creamy and delicious and topped with mango ice-cream. Mmmm.


I think it probably says a fair bit about me that I have easily four times as many photos of just food as I do of people. I will work on this, dear readers.