I have now been living in Taipei for one
year. For the most part, I love it here, but as with any place, there are a few
things I don’t like so much. So I plan to post a series about the best and
worst things for a foreigner living here. Each day I’ll cover two things I love and one
I don’t so I can keep things balanced. They are grouped based on themes, not
based on how strongly I feel about them.
7.
Adventures around every corner
This
one is kind of a general term, but I’ll try to explain what I mean. I’m a very
adventurous person, so one of the things I love about being in another culture
is the fact that things are so different. I already wrote about Taiwanese food,
but even if it wasn’t so good, I’d still be trying just about everything. I’m
proud of being willing to taste almost anything offered to me. I figure if it’s
good, I’ve had a fun experience, and if it’s gross, I get a good story out of
it.
But
more generally, I enjoy the strange things I see walking down the street. I
like looking at the little carts that drive around selling snacks. I live near
a fashion design school, so the students’ clothing is often quite interesting.
The birds, trees and flowers are different from the ones at home, so to me they
seem especially beautiful and exotic. There are some really beautiful old
buildings around, too (but most of them are Buddhist temples, which makes me a
little sad). Every time I take off for a place I haven’t seen before, I get a
thrill because I know a new experience is just around the corner.
8. Night markets
One
type of adventure I am particularly fond of is walking through Taiwan’s night
markets. They tend to be insanely crowded, so I like them best in small doses,
but they are certainly an interesting cultural experience. I tend to think of
them as a college student’s dream come true: very cheap food and clothing.
Many
night markets exist in streets with shops that are always open and at night wheel
out racks into the street to compete with the stands that line the road only
after dark. Vendors wheel carts in or lay down blankets in the middle of the
street offering jewelry, shoes, skirts, hats, souvenirs and tee-shirts,
sometimes with hilariously bad English (or “Chinglish”). Periodically, many of
these booths pack up their wares and run into a dark alley where they hide for
a few minutes. This is because they don’t have licenses and they have received
word that the police are coming to do a raid. But within five or ten minutes,
the illegal booths are back and continuing their business. Of course, there are
some legal businesses that remain open constantly. The streets are usually
packed with people as lights shine in many colors and pop music in Chinese,
Korean or English blares from the stores’ speakers. (If you stand in just the
right place, you may end up listening to two songs at once, which can be quite
a weird experience.)
I
already wrote about Taiwanese food, but night market food definitely deserves a
mention. You’ll see carts, stands and shops selling baked, boiled or fried buns
stuffed with meat or vegetables; wraps with a variety of meat; vegetables and
ground peanuts; oyster omelets held together with a sticky batter; shaved ice
topped with fresh fruit, nuts, sweetened beans of various kinds or various
flavors of jelly and tapioca balls; freshly cut fruit, including cherry tomatoes
stuffed with dried figs; and drink stands selling tea mixed with milk or fruit
juice as well as fruit smoothies made of freshly cut fruit put in a blender
with milk and/or ice. This would be a mouth-watering combination of smells if
it weren’t for the distinctive and ubiquitous scent of stinky tofu, a
well-named type of fermented tofu served boiled or fried with pickled
vegetables. You can easily get dinner, a
drink and a dessert at a night market for much less than $10, and it’s a great
way to remind yourself of the fun side of living in a different culture.
Things I don’t
4. Guessing Games
The
other side of living in another country, though, is the sheer amount of things
you don’t know. My reading ability in Chinese has improved a lot in the past
year, but it doesn’t mean I can read every sign I see, so when I need to buy
something specific, like baking ingredients, I often spend a significant amount
of time wandering through the store before I give up and ask someone. Then they
usually take me to a shelf I already looked at and point to something I missed
the first time I went through. The other challenge is figuring out what brand
to buy, since I’m not familiar with all of them and the ones I do know tend to
be more expensive. I usually go with the
least expensive option, but sometimes, one brand will have two types of the
product that cost the same amount. For example, today I bought some shampoo. I
chose a brand that was on sale and that had two kinds: one with an orange label
and one with a green label. I knew they were both shampoo, but I had no idea
what the difference was. So I picked the orange label at random and decided to
just see how it works.
Language
barriers aside, my other least favorite guessing game is trying to figure out
the toilets. They have two kinds of toilets here: Western-style ones and squat
toilets. The squat toilets are made of porcelain, and they do flush, but there’s
nothing to sit on. I can use them, but I prefer not to. Many public places will
have both kinds of toilets, and sometimes they are labeled, but often they are
not. In that case, I just have to guess which one to go into. I have learned
that stalls with doors that start well above the ground are always
Western-style, for obvious reasons, but doors that almost touch the ground can
go either way. When I went back to the States on vacation, I still remember the
rush of excitement I got from walking into the airport restroom and realizing I
didn’t have to guess what kind of toilet I’d go into!
