sunday ride
This week was not a good week. I made a big fuckup with some code Monday night which i couldn't find a way to undo, and it's messed up a bunch of people's work from the last 8 years. I was far more upset about it because it was personal/open source stuff and not a work thing. At work, making mistakes is not a big deal. Aside from the fact that there are almost always backups and failsafes, there are also processes for investigating the cause of the fuckup and acting on it. Escalations. Postmortems. Improvements. But when you aren't an actual worker in the company - you are just one of their customers - then when you fuck up, there is no recourse. Companies don't care about fixing their customers' mistakes, only their own.
Anyway, i was up late on Monday and Tuesday trying to go through all my work contacts to see if any of them could get me in touch via backchannels with people at the company i needed to restore the data i accidentally deleted. This is another benefit of working in the tech industry - there's always someone who knows someone who works at Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft etc, so you can often get customer support from those companies via your social network when ordinary customers would never have a hope in hell of reaching a human being.
I did reach two human beings in the company i needed help from, and they linked me up with some other human beings in the right department, but i am still waiting for a response beyond "oh wow, i'm sorry that happened to you". And given it's been almost a week now, my hopes are fading.
In the mean time, i was stressed out, i lost sleep, and i started getting anxious and cranky in my actual for-pay job too. Thursday night i was so wiped out i ended up getting school night drunk, so Friday i called in work from home. Wasn't even calling in sick, i still did some work, but i felt guilty as hell about my hungover inefficiency, so that just made me feel even more shitty about everything.
Plus, you know. Those weird spots and pimply outbreaks on my body continue to take forever to clear up. My ass still itches. Life sucks.
I needed an adventure.
So today i went on one. I decided to try the third fork of the river. If you recall a month or so back - before rainy season started - i cycled from my house where the rivers join out to sea. Then a few weeks ago - on a very rainy weekend - i cycled up one of the rivers toward the mountains. This time i followed the other river up the valley where it meanders, from the direction of Taoyuan.
When i lived in Shenzhen, i had this grand idea of taking a holiday where i would ride share bikes all the way around the Pearl River Delta - through Dongguan up to Guangzhou, then back down the other side to Zhuhai and Macau. I just find the idea of taking very slow and cheap public transport through hundreds of kilometers of urban sprawl amusing and enticing. But then COVID happened and the rest is history.
Taiwan doesn't have quite as extensive a share bike system as China - at least the Pearl River Delta corner of China - but it does have a pretty solid one that covers almost the entire west coast of the country. I know i'd probably need to take a train or a bus to get across some sections, but how cool would it be if i could bike all the way to Kaohsiung without even owning a bike?
Today was a rare day with no rain forecast, so i jumped on and resolved to see how far i could go on a Sunday after a shitty week.
I had to post that picture of the wetlands along the river to show the little strip of blue sky i was following from the moment i got outside the flood barrier. It looked to be raining in the mountains behind me to the east, but that azure streak in the west spurred me on.
The next photo is a pipe. I always find it funny when pipes cross rivers in their own little private pipe bridges.
There is one positive thing about living in a place where it's overcast most all the time and that's how much the colors pop against the relentless gray. Even though i hate cars, i love overpasses. They look so science-fictional, just effortlessly curving up into the air. Even better when they snake between skyscrapers and up into the mountains. And if you paint them cyan? Gorgeous.
These trees at first made me think i had discovered an early cherry blossom. On closer inspection they were just some pink-colored seed pods, but they were still beautiful.
I decided to jump off my bike in a distant corner of New Taipei City called Yingge. The further upriver you go, the further away you get from the shopping malls, suburban highrises and family-oriented neighborhoods that make up the section of New Taipei City closest to Taipei. In the direction of Taoyuan you start getting into that weird mish-mosh of factory zones and smallhold farms that you never see anywhere in the US or Canada. It still feels like dense living, but it's dense in a different way to the wealthier corners of town.
There's no sidewalks any more out there. Motor scooters own the roads, and cars can basically go get fucked. As smelly and loud as scooters can be, i have to admit i do quite like cycling in their neighborhoods, because the cars never drive aggressively, and drivers are used to dealing with smaller vehicles pootling along slowly or pulling out suddenly. It's chaotic, but somehow it feels safer than any car-first road.
The working class areas - just like in China - have a much better selection of food than middle class areas too. I know, i know, i am purposefully ignoring the multitude of chain restaurants, convenience stores and more formal eating establishments that make up a large chunk of Taipei people's diet, but frankly those places all fucking suck. Chain restaurants suck everywhere in the world. Convenience store food sucks (and don't let any gaijin or laowai who is struck blind by just how much better it is in Asia tell you otherwise - it still sucks compared to real food). And more formal eating establishments put meat or cheese in literally fucking everything, as if using unsustainable, unhealthy, imported ingredients is somehow a base requirement for feeding the middle class. No. Fuck all of those places. Because in the working class neighborhoods you have dozens of mom'n'pop restaurants all next to each other, serving freshly-cooked dishes, made by someone literally standing right there in front of you. You can get rice and noodles and pancakes and meats and tofus and vegetables and all of the things. There is no preset meal or special combos. You pick exactly the stuff you want, you get that stuff. And at half the price of even the cheapest fast food chains.
This. This fucking mom'n'pop dining is why i love Asia, or at least the parts of it that i have visited. To just be able to walk along, smell different pots bubbling away, look at all the wares, sit down at a place with just a couple plastic stools and a folding table, no line-up, no QR codes, just call out your order and the boss will cook you something you like. How is this not the norm all over the world? It's the most glorious way to eat. It's so chill. No stress. No pretension. Just simple food and down-to-Earth service. Why do middle-class people from these countries try to pretend these places don't exist, or advise tourists away from them, or fret about how "oily" or "unhealthy" the food is? While then turning around and eating junk from fucking McDonalds or 7/11, or stuffing themselves with butter-poached steak and cheese-drenched pasta. I mean, lordy. Please, Taiwan, don't turn into America.
I walked around a bit after lunch, then got on a share bike, then took the share bike back to where i got it and walked the other way again... Because i was crossing over from New Taipei City into Taoyuan. Both of these cities have bike share services - and they're both run by the same company - but the docks are a little bit different in each city, so you can't just ride a bike across the border like you can between Taipei and New Taipei City. Of course i only figured that out after i had already ridden like 15 minutes in. I didn't mind, though, because it was a nice ride. The road was narrow and busy, but there were constant smells of incense and five-spice and barbecue and the grime and oil of light industry. Coming into Taoyuan there were fruit shops, and vegetable shops...
I mean, for real, i've been living in Taipei for 3 months and i still haven't found a proper vegetable shop near my house. Carrefour - however great its baguettes are - somehow manages to sell simultaneously overpriced and limp/overripe/bland produce. Which is why my vegetable diet has primarily been pared back to kimchi, frozen edamame and the occasional carrot from the nearby vegetable store which is almost never open. (Thank God i found a tiny hole-in-the-wall fruit guy who sells me papaya, guava and bananas on the reg.) But that brief stretch of road on the outskirts of Taoyuan, they had all the different greens i remember from China, and a bunch more besides, a cornucopia of tropical fruits, guys making steamed buns in all of the flavors (bizarrely hard to find in central Taipei), bánh mì guys, cold noodle guys... Man, i regretted already having eaten lunch. I got a 芝麻包 black sesame bun anyway.
And then i cycled through that little band of industrial/rural/outskirts development and it was back to the usual boring stuff we have in the city here. I went up to Taoyuan railway station to see if i remembered it from last time i was in Taiwan. One of the things i did when i last traveled in Taiwan was travel up the west coast by the local/slow train and get out in various random cities to spend the night. Taoyuan was one of those cities, but there are three or four stations in town, and i don't remember which one i got out at. The urban landscape didn't seem familiar to me, but what was familiar was the increased diversity. I do remember in Taoyuan - and, in fact, in many of the west coast industrial centers - there were more visible immigrants from South-East Asia. While Taipei has its share of professionals from Japan, Europe, Canada and so on, the factory cities have migrant workers mostly from Vietnam, Philippines and Indonesia. Just outside the Taoyuan station it's practically a Little Hanoi.
I wasn't quite ready to abandon my steed, though, and i saw on my map that there is a Shenzhen in Taoyuan, so i headed in that direction.
深圳 Shenzhen means "deep ditch", where the "ditch" in question is one of those rice paddie irrigation ditch things. But as i was cycling toward Shenzhen, i passed a bunch more "zhens"! Next to one of them, there was a stall on the side of the road with a lady selling cane juice, so i pulled over for a refreshing drink... and it turned out to be hot cane juice! Not exactly what i expected - something i've never had before, but now it seems like such an obviously brilliant drink. Hot, sweet and with that fresh herbaceous flavor from the cane. Way better than tea. Nice to be in the countryside, eh? Well, it wasn't really hardcore countryside, but there were a few rice paddies and some smallhold farms with people hard at work planting cabbages and sweet potato. These are the guys who will keep the rest of the country alive if China kicks off a naval blockade. No more beef. No more cheese. Whatever will the middle class do?
Eventually one of the other zhens enticed me away - 大圳 Dazhen aka "big ditch". It was a bit more like a canal, raised ominously above the farms and fields around it, and with a walking path on one side and scooter/cycle path on the other. It was a pleasant ride, and i popped out near the Neili train station, where i decided to call it a day. I think i ended up going around 40km. Cost me less than $3 in bike rental.
The great joy of riding a share bike - you just park it and take the train back when you're done.
It was an excellent day. I am tired and sunkissed and hopefully tonight for the first time this week i'll get a long block of shuteye. Back to work again tomorrow, when no doubt it'll start raining again. But i figure if i post now when i'm happy then i can come back later when i'm not and the pics will remind me that this is the fucking reason i came back to this part of the world in the first place.
Anyway, i was up late on Monday and Tuesday trying to go through all my work contacts to see if any of them could get me in touch via backchannels with people at the company i needed to restore the data i accidentally deleted. This is another benefit of working in the tech industry - there's always someone who knows someone who works at Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft etc, so you can often get customer support from those companies via your social network when ordinary customers would never have a hope in hell of reaching a human being.
I did reach two human beings in the company i needed help from, and they linked me up with some other human beings in the right department, but i am still waiting for a response beyond "oh wow, i'm sorry that happened to you". And given it's been almost a week now, my hopes are fading.
In the mean time, i was stressed out, i lost sleep, and i started getting anxious and cranky in my actual for-pay job too. Thursday night i was so wiped out i ended up getting school night drunk, so Friday i called in work from home. Wasn't even calling in sick, i still did some work, but i felt guilty as hell about my hungover inefficiency, so that just made me feel even more shitty about everything.
Plus, you know. Those weird spots and pimply outbreaks on my body continue to take forever to clear up. My ass still itches. Life sucks.
I needed an adventure.
So today i went on one. I decided to try the third fork of the river. If you recall a month or so back - before rainy season started - i cycled from my house where the rivers join out to sea. Then a few weeks ago - on a very rainy weekend - i cycled up one of the rivers toward the mountains. This time i followed the other river up the valley where it meanders, from the direction of Taoyuan.
When i lived in Shenzhen, i had this grand idea of taking a holiday where i would ride share bikes all the way around the Pearl River Delta - through Dongguan up to Guangzhou, then back down the other side to Zhuhai and Macau. I just find the idea of taking very slow and cheap public transport through hundreds of kilometers of urban sprawl amusing and enticing. But then COVID happened and the rest is history.
Taiwan doesn't have quite as extensive a share bike system as China - at least the Pearl River Delta corner of China - but it does have a pretty solid one that covers almost the entire west coast of the country. I know i'd probably need to take a train or a bus to get across some sections, but how cool would it be if i could bike all the way to Kaohsiung without even owning a bike?
Today was a rare day with no rain forecast, so i jumped on and resolved to see how far i could go on a Sunday after a shitty week.
I had to post that picture of the wetlands along the river to show the little strip of blue sky i was following from the moment i got outside the flood barrier. It looked to be raining in the mountains behind me to the east, but that azure streak in the west spurred me on.
The next photo is a pipe. I always find it funny when pipes cross rivers in their own little private pipe bridges.
There is one positive thing about living in a place where it's overcast most all the time and that's how much the colors pop against the relentless gray. Even though i hate cars, i love overpasses. They look so science-fictional, just effortlessly curving up into the air. Even better when they snake between skyscrapers and up into the mountains. And if you paint them cyan? Gorgeous.
These trees at first made me think i had discovered an early cherry blossom. On closer inspection they were just some pink-colored seed pods, but they were still beautiful.
I decided to jump off my bike in a distant corner of New Taipei City called Yingge. The further upriver you go, the further away you get from the shopping malls, suburban highrises and family-oriented neighborhoods that make up the section of New Taipei City closest to Taipei. In the direction of Taoyuan you start getting into that weird mish-mosh of factory zones and smallhold farms that you never see anywhere in the US or Canada. It still feels like dense living, but it's dense in a different way to the wealthier corners of town.
There's no sidewalks any more out there. Motor scooters own the roads, and cars can basically go get fucked. As smelly and loud as scooters can be, i have to admit i do quite like cycling in their neighborhoods, because the cars never drive aggressively, and drivers are used to dealing with smaller vehicles pootling along slowly or pulling out suddenly. It's chaotic, but somehow it feels safer than any car-first road.
The working class areas - just like in China - have a much better selection of food than middle class areas too. I know, i know, i am purposefully ignoring the multitude of chain restaurants, convenience stores and more formal eating establishments that make up a large chunk of Taipei people's diet, but frankly those places all fucking suck. Chain restaurants suck everywhere in the world. Convenience store food sucks (and don't let any gaijin or laowai who is struck blind by just how much better it is in Asia tell you otherwise - it still sucks compared to real food). And more formal eating establishments put meat or cheese in literally fucking everything, as if using unsustainable, unhealthy, imported ingredients is somehow a base requirement for feeding the middle class. No. Fuck all of those places. Because in the working class neighborhoods you have dozens of mom'n'pop restaurants all next to each other, serving freshly-cooked dishes, made by someone literally standing right there in front of you. You can get rice and noodles and pancakes and meats and tofus and vegetables and all of the things. There is no preset meal or special combos. You pick exactly the stuff you want, you get that stuff. And at half the price of even the cheapest fast food chains.
This. This fucking mom'n'pop dining is why i love Asia, or at least the parts of it that i have visited. To just be able to walk along, smell different pots bubbling away, look at all the wares, sit down at a place with just a couple plastic stools and a folding table, no line-up, no QR codes, just call out your order and the boss will cook you something you like. How is this not the norm all over the world? It's the most glorious way to eat. It's so chill. No stress. No pretension. Just simple food and down-to-Earth service. Why do middle-class people from these countries try to pretend these places don't exist, or advise tourists away from them, or fret about how "oily" or "unhealthy" the food is? While then turning around and eating junk from fucking McDonalds or 7/11, or stuffing themselves with butter-poached steak and cheese-drenched pasta. I mean, lordy. Please, Taiwan, don't turn into America.
I walked around a bit after lunch, then got on a share bike, then took the share bike back to where i got it and walked the other way again... Because i was crossing over from New Taipei City into Taoyuan. Both of these cities have bike share services - and they're both run by the same company - but the docks are a little bit different in each city, so you can't just ride a bike across the border like you can between Taipei and New Taipei City. Of course i only figured that out after i had already ridden like 15 minutes in. I didn't mind, though, because it was a nice ride. The road was narrow and busy, but there were constant smells of incense and five-spice and barbecue and the grime and oil of light industry. Coming into Taoyuan there were fruit shops, and vegetable shops...
I mean, for real, i've been living in Taipei for 3 months and i still haven't found a proper vegetable shop near my house. Carrefour - however great its baguettes are - somehow manages to sell simultaneously overpriced and limp/overripe/bland produce. Which is why my vegetable diet has primarily been pared back to kimchi, frozen edamame and the occasional carrot from the nearby vegetable store which is almost never open. (Thank God i found a tiny hole-in-the-wall fruit guy who sells me papaya, guava and bananas on the reg.) But that brief stretch of road on the outskirts of Taoyuan, they had all the different greens i remember from China, and a bunch more besides, a cornucopia of tropical fruits, guys making steamed buns in all of the flavors (bizarrely hard to find in central Taipei), bánh mì guys, cold noodle guys... Man, i regretted already having eaten lunch. I got a 芝麻包 black sesame bun anyway.
And then i cycled through that little band of industrial/rural/outskirts development and it was back to the usual boring stuff we have in the city here. I went up to Taoyuan railway station to see if i remembered it from last time i was in Taiwan. One of the things i did when i last traveled in Taiwan was travel up the west coast by the local/slow train and get out in various random cities to spend the night. Taoyuan was one of those cities, but there are three or four stations in town, and i don't remember which one i got out at. The urban landscape didn't seem familiar to me, but what was familiar was the increased diversity. I do remember in Taoyuan - and, in fact, in many of the west coast industrial centers - there were more visible immigrants from South-East Asia. While Taipei has its share of professionals from Japan, Europe, Canada and so on, the factory cities have migrant workers mostly from Vietnam, Philippines and Indonesia. Just outside the Taoyuan station it's practically a Little Hanoi.
I wasn't quite ready to abandon my steed, though, and i saw on my map that there is a Shenzhen in Taoyuan, so i headed in that direction.
深圳 Shenzhen means "deep ditch", where the "ditch" in question is one of those rice paddie irrigation ditch things. But as i was cycling toward Shenzhen, i passed a bunch more "zhens"! Next to one of them, there was a stall on the side of the road with a lady selling cane juice, so i pulled over for a refreshing drink... and it turned out to be hot cane juice! Not exactly what i expected - something i've never had before, but now it seems like such an obviously brilliant drink. Hot, sweet and with that fresh herbaceous flavor from the cane. Way better than tea. Nice to be in the countryside, eh? Well, it wasn't really hardcore countryside, but there were a few rice paddies and some smallhold farms with people hard at work planting cabbages and sweet potato. These are the guys who will keep the rest of the country alive if China kicks off a naval blockade. No more beef. No more cheese. Whatever will the middle class do?
Eventually one of the other zhens enticed me away - 大圳 Dazhen aka "big ditch". It was a bit more like a canal, raised ominously above the farms and fields around it, and with a walking path on one side and scooter/cycle path on the other. It was a pleasant ride, and i popped out near the Neili train station, where i decided to call it a day. I think i ended up going around 40km. Cost me less than $3 in bike rental.
The great joy of riding a share bike - you just park it and take the train back when you're done.
It was an excellent day. I am tired and sunkissed and hopefully tonight for the first time this week i'll get a long block of shuteye. Back to work again tomorrow, when no doubt it'll start raining again. But i figure if i post now when i'm happy then i can come back later when i'm not and the pics will remind me that this is the fucking reason i came back to this part of the world in the first place.