how to ensure a clear and sunny day in taipei
It appears the best way to bring about a sunny day in Taipei is to not be in Taipei.
Sunday morning i decided to pack a small bag and jump on the 高鐵 bullet train to Kaohsiung, on the south side of the island.
One of the best things about taking the bullet train in Taiwan - as opposed to China - is that it's more like taking a subway than taking an airplane. You get to the station twenty minutes before the train leaves, buy a ticket and just get on. Although it's possible to pay for assigned seating, that requires booking in advance, which obviously i will never be organized enough to do. So you get on one of the unassigned seating carriages, and if there's a seat - great. If there isn't a seat, oh well. The express takes about an hour and a half to go the full 350km. I was standing till Taichung, then slipped into a free seat for the second half of the journey. Walked out of the station in Kaohsiung and swiped my subway card to get a share bike to cycle into the city proper. So easy.
Kaohsiung was the first place in Asia where i set foot on dry land after traveling from Europe in 2017 and it holds some kind of sentimental value for me in that regard. But, aside from that initial appeal, i still remember it as my favorite spot in Taiwan. Going back was a chance for me to try understand why that is.
I mean, of course it's irrational. Why does anyone like any place? There's no especially good reasoning. All i know is i like Kaohsiung. It's true that the weather is slightly warmer than Taipei on average, and there are almost twice as many sunny days per year. I love sun and i hate rain, so that's a good reason to love Kaohsiung. But other towns in the south of Taiwan are sunny too, and are much less polluted, and have more attractive scenery, and more famous foods. Meh. I wonder if one of the reasons i like Kaohsiung is precisely because it is a dirty, ugly, unpretentious port town.
But it's not really ugly. That's the thing that struck me, going back there. It wasn't just my imagination, the rose-tinted spectacles of memory. Kaohsiung really is prettier than Taipei. Sure, it doesn't have the mountainous backdrop, or the elegant swooping flyovers and cyberpunky elevated rail lines. But it has wide roads. Wide roads with trees. Walk around Kaohsiung, you will hear birdsong - something you rarely if ever hear in Taipei. The bushes and trees all burst with color - tropical pinks and yellows and oranges. Taipei is concrete gray and moss green. Kaohsiung is... well, also mostly concrete gray and moss green to be fair, but with enough extra splashes of blossom to feel at least mildly cheerful.
And there's palm trees! I mean, it's a question of degree. It's only a few hundred kilometers to the south after all, and we're still on the same island. But palm trees up here are less common than down there. The fields up here (or, well, Taoyuan), they grow rice and cabbage and sweet potatoes, perhaps. Down there, pineapples and bananas!
I tried to do the "walk into a random hotel to check in" and failed, several times. Everywhere was booked solid due to the long weekend. I guess a bunch of other northerners had also had the idea to head south to get some sun. Eventually i fell back on Booking.com and found a cheap place close to the central train station and the 電腦街 "computer street" that seemed so cool when i first visited in 2017 but after living in Shenzhen (and this part of the world in general) is now just kinda "eh, bunch of computer stores and anime stuff".
One of the things that's changed since last time i was in Kaohsiung is they got a proper bike share. They had one before, if i recall, but it wasn't easy to access as a foreigner. Now they have the same 微笑單車 YouBike service as several other cities of Taiwan, which is really convenient because you can just swipe the same 悠游卡 public transport card that you use on the bus, tram, subway etc to get on the bike.
I should have little interlude here to discuss another of my personal language words. This one needs a bit of back story. The bike share system over here is called 微笑單車 wéixiào dānchē which literally means "smile bike". The logo is a smiley face which looks like the letter U, plus the English word "bike". This leads to the English name for the service being Youbike. But there is an overlap there with the public transport card that you use to pay for the bike. The public transport card is called 悠游卡 yōuyóu kǎ which means something like "leisurely travel card". In English they translated it as EasyCard. But yōuyóukǎ is easier to say, so i call it a yōuyóukǎ. Now, this is pinyin, which is a phonetic representation of Chinese that is not pronounced like English. So, "you" in pinyin is pronounced like "yo" in English. Yōuyóukǎ represented in English might be "yo-yo car". So. What do i call the Youbike in my personal language? I call it a yo-yo bike, of course! 悠游單車 yōuyóu dānchē. One day i said that out loud to someone and then i realized that they had no idea what i was talking about, because i just invented the name myself due to the amusing overlap of the English spelling of the bike ("Youbike") and the pinyin spelling of the public transport card ("yōuyóukǎ").
While we're on the topic of my personal language, i also call bananas "nanos", which is pronounced nah-no. I think i picked that up traveling in Colombia where south of the coast they call bananas "bananos". Banano is a stupid, unpronounceable word, but nano sounds cute and fun. Incidentally, on the Caribbean coast (and in Panama) the word for banana is guineo, which totally rules. Guineos sound like something pirates trade in, so it feels swashbuckling to ask for guineos at the market.
Apropos, the Chinese word for banana fucking sucks, it's ugly and i won't even tell you what it is because nanos are better.
Anyway, Kaohsiung now has yo-yo bikes, so i jumped on one to explore some of the places i remember from last time i visited.
First day i went around to the National Sun Yat Sen University, which is one of the most beautiful university campuses i ever saw, and has been/still is my backup option for staying in Taiwan if work doesn't pan out. How great would it be to study international relations in a campus with a mountain on one side, sea on the other, a secret tunnel to get into the city and monkeys running around the dorms? I mean, it's a rad fucking university.
Aside from climbing up and down the monkey hill and grabbing a can of grass jelly drink from the vending machine at the temple by the old British consulate, i wandered through the arts center they built at the old docks and the railyard they have now finished converting to a public park, then headed way out east to a night market that has remained in my memories as the best night market in all of Taiwan.
The night market i remembered is gone. I asked a guy walking along the canal where it used to be, and he said it 搬走了, which means moved, but i'm not sure where.
The thing about night markets in Taiwan is that they fucking suck.
I know, it's sacrilege, but honestly... Night markets are so fucking overrated. I already knew it the first time i traveled here. You've been to one night market, you've been to them all. They all have pretty much exactly the same greasy, deep-fried junk food masquerading as "authentic" local fare. It's exceedingly rare you will ever find something unique, despite the tourist brochures suggesting that every night market and every region has its own specialities. What you will find a ton of is fried chicken, various pancakes and waffles, different meats on a stick, milk tea, bubble tea, fruit juice... And you can find all that stuff anywhere, usually much cheaper outside the night market than in it. The conclusion i came to when i traveled through Taiwan in 2017 was that the best places to buy food were the ordinary street vendors that sell their wares to local people on their way to and from work, and i stand by that conclusion today.
All that said, at the night market by the canal in Fongshan that now no longer exists, there was a vendor there who did stinky tofu, which is one of the classic Taiwan night market foods. Most places will just give you a deep-fried version, maybe with some kimchi on it, and that's a perfectly fine snack food, but not super interesting. This place, though, it was a stewed stinky tofu, and they served it in a 麻辣燙 hot and numbing soup with 金針菇 enoki mushrooms and 大白菜 napa cabbage and some other stuff i forgot. It was a flavor i never tasted before or since, and it was awesome. Alas, revisiting that funk was not to be.
I did get some other classic Taiwanese foods while i was traveling around, and i will make a separate post to talk more about those.
Yesterday i got up early again and went on a bike ride to some places i had never been in Kaohsiung. I first headed north and passed through a couple of fantastic early morning wet markets. It's much more of a scooter city than Taipei (which is saying a lot, because there are millions of scooters here), and there's something kinda chaotic and fabulous about a throng of people inching their scooters along the road and then - still sitting astride their steeds - leaning over the stalls to pick out fruit, veges and meat. Stinky, but nobody ever said Kaohsiung wasn't a polluted disaster. (It's the only city in Taiwan you can't drink the tap water, even after you boiled it.) I enjoyed the vibes (not the fumes) and then headed east toward Pingtung County.
The best thing about getting out of the city was seeing these classic vistas that i associate very deeply with Taiwan. The brilliant, almost impossible green of young rice in the paddies. The skinny, white-tiled, prefab buildings that leave the maximum amount of space for the crops. The tiny straight roads with concrete irrigation ditches on both sides. Banana trees. Palm trees. Pineapple bushes. Temples. The smell of incense. The smell of steamed rice. The smell of five spice.
At one point i hauled my bike up on top of a dyke so i could ride beside the water. I stopped briefly at a 亭 tíng (pavilion) and was approached by a stranger. This is very rare in Taiwan. People here are not especially conversational. The person had long hair and a high-tied ponytail. They were dressed in blue, in something that at first glance i thought was indigenous clothing, but when they started speaking to me i got distracted and made no further note of the clothes. They addressed me in a deep voice that sounded kind of masculine, and they had somewhat masculine features, but pretty hair and eyes. They said to me "i noticed you over here, you are very pretty", but in a way that sounded curious, or complimentary - not sleazy. They asked if i needed any help and i asked if i could ride along the dyke all the way to Donggang. They said yes and explained the directions (just keep following the dyke, cross the river on the second bridge, then turn right), and gave me a wave before heading back to their seat.
It might've been interesting to talk more to this gender non-conforming unconventional character sitting in a tíng on a dyke in the middle of nowhere, but i had places to be!
I kept on cycling to Donggang, which is a fishing harbor and the departure point for a ferry to one of Taiwan's outlying islands. It was packed. After cycling through rice paddies it all felt like too much to deal with, so i skipped the seafood market and cycled a bit further along to a black sand beach where i dipped my hands in the ocean and splashed some salty water on my face. I was going to sit down till i saw a pack of wild dogs heading in my direction. The worst part of adventuring in Taiwan. Wild dogs. On a bike at least you can pedal away... but not if you've wheeled the bike out to the soft sand. So, i left, and sat down on a fishing pier under a bridge instead.
And then i headed back to the city. It had been a long day, but i still made a little detour up a small hill (there are no big hills in Kaohsiung) where i saw some pineapples and a pagoda.
I took a fortunately-open-to-the-public shortcut around a reservoir and made it back to the end of the subway line as the sun was setting, a magnificent orb of fire cutting through the smog on the horizon. I picked up some nibbles from the nearby market before getting on the subway back to my hotel and another early night.
This morning i had originally planned to take the slow train back to Taipei. To be clear: the bullet train has an express version and a "slow" version - the slow one takes about two and a half hours. But the regular train goes on different tracks and can take anywhere from 4 to 7 hours depending where it stops. I thought it'd be fun to trundle along all the small stations, order one of the famous Taiwan Railway bentos, and just enjoy the vibe. Alas, getting on the regular train in Taiwan is more complicated than getting on the bullet train, and requires more mindful booking. So, fuck it, i splurged again for the high speed rail and ended up home by noon. Plenty of time to do laundry, groceries and type up a journal entry while the memories are fresh.
It was a great 48 hours. Cost 1500元 for the bullet train each way, plus hotel came to around 6000元 or us$200. Compared to the sort of money i spend in my everyday life that is an insanely huge amount, more than an entire month of groceries. But compared to how much i earn, it's the sort of thing i can and probably should indulge in from time to time. Just getting to explore this country where i live as a tourist instead of a resident, enjoying a change of scenery and some good weather... it was totally worth it.
Sunday morning i decided to pack a small bag and jump on the 高鐵 bullet train to Kaohsiung, on the south side of the island.
One of the best things about taking the bullet train in Taiwan - as opposed to China - is that it's more like taking a subway than taking an airplane. You get to the station twenty minutes before the train leaves, buy a ticket and just get on. Although it's possible to pay for assigned seating, that requires booking in advance, which obviously i will never be organized enough to do. So you get on one of the unassigned seating carriages, and if there's a seat - great. If there isn't a seat, oh well. The express takes about an hour and a half to go the full 350km. I was standing till Taichung, then slipped into a free seat for the second half of the journey. Walked out of the station in Kaohsiung and swiped my subway card to get a share bike to cycle into the city proper. So easy.
Kaohsiung was the first place in Asia where i set foot on dry land after traveling from Europe in 2017 and it holds some kind of sentimental value for me in that regard. But, aside from that initial appeal, i still remember it as my favorite spot in Taiwan. Going back was a chance for me to try understand why that is.
I mean, of course it's irrational. Why does anyone like any place? There's no especially good reasoning. All i know is i like Kaohsiung. It's true that the weather is slightly warmer than Taipei on average, and there are almost twice as many sunny days per year. I love sun and i hate rain, so that's a good reason to love Kaohsiung. But other towns in the south of Taiwan are sunny too, and are much less polluted, and have more attractive scenery, and more famous foods. Meh. I wonder if one of the reasons i like Kaohsiung is precisely because it is a dirty, ugly, unpretentious port town.
But it's not really ugly. That's the thing that struck me, going back there. It wasn't just my imagination, the rose-tinted spectacles of memory. Kaohsiung really is prettier than Taipei. Sure, it doesn't have the mountainous backdrop, or the elegant swooping flyovers and cyberpunky elevated rail lines. But it has wide roads. Wide roads with trees. Walk around Kaohsiung, you will hear birdsong - something you rarely if ever hear in Taipei. The bushes and trees all burst with color - tropical pinks and yellows and oranges. Taipei is concrete gray and moss green. Kaohsiung is... well, also mostly concrete gray and moss green to be fair, but with enough extra splashes of blossom to feel at least mildly cheerful.
And there's palm trees! I mean, it's a question of degree. It's only a few hundred kilometers to the south after all, and we're still on the same island. But palm trees up here are less common than down there. The fields up here (or, well, Taoyuan), they grow rice and cabbage and sweet potatoes, perhaps. Down there, pineapples and bananas!
I tried to do the "walk into a random hotel to check in" and failed, several times. Everywhere was booked solid due to the long weekend. I guess a bunch of other northerners had also had the idea to head south to get some sun. Eventually i fell back on Booking.com and found a cheap place close to the central train station and the 電腦街 "computer street" that seemed so cool when i first visited in 2017 but after living in Shenzhen (and this part of the world in general) is now just kinda "eh, bunch of computer stores and anime stuff".
One of the things that's changed since last time i was in Kaohsiung is they got a proper bike share. They had one before, if i recall, but it wasn't easy to access as a foreigner. Now they have the same 微笑單車 YouBike service as several other cities of Taiwan, which is really convenient because you can just swipe the same 悠游卡 public transport card that you use on the bus, tram, subway etc to get on the bike.
I should have little interlude here to discuss another of my personal language words. This one needs a bit of back story. The bike share system over here is called 微笑單車 wéixiào dānchē which literally means "smile bike". The logo is a smiley face which looks like the letter U, plus the English word "bike". This leads to the English name for the service being Youbike. But there is an overlap there with the public transport card that you use to pay for the bike. The public transport card is called 悠游卡 yōuyóu kǎ which means something like "leisurely travel card". In English they translated it as EasyCard. But yōuyóukǎ is easier to say, so i call it a yōuyóukǎ. Now, this is pinyin, which is a phonetic representation of Chinese that is not pronounced like English. So, "you" in pinyin is pronounced like "yo" in English. Yōuyóukǎ represented in English might be "yo-yo car". So. What do i call the Youbike in my personal language? I call it a yo-yo bike, of course! 悠游單車 yōuyóu dānchē. One day i said that out loud to someone and then i realized that they had no idea what i was talking about, because i just invented the name myself due to the amusing overlap of the English spelling of the bike ("Youbike") and the pinyin spelling of the public transport card ("yōuyóukǎ").
While we're on the topic of my personal language, i also call bananas "nanos", which is pronounced nah-no. I think i picked that up traveling in Colombia where south of the coast they call bananas "bananos". Banano is a stupid, unpronounceable word, but nano sounds cute and fun. Incidentally, on the Caribbean coast (and in Panama) the word for banana is guineo, which totally rules. Guineos sound like something pirates trade in, so it feels swashbuckling to ask for guineos at the market.
Apropos, the Chinese word for banana fucking sucks, it's ugly and i won't even tell you what it is because nanos are better.
Anyway, Kaohsiung now has yo-yo bikes, so i jumped on one to explore some of the places i remember from last time i visited.
First day i went around to the National Sun Yat Sen University, which is one of the most beautiful university campuses i ever saw, and has been/still is my backup option for staying in Taiwan if work doesn't pan out. How great would it be to study international relations in a campus with a mountain on one side, sea on the other, a secret tunnel to get into the city and monkeys running around the dorms? I mean, it's a rad fucking university.
Aside from climbing up and down the monkey hill and grabbing a can of grass jelly drink from the vending machine at the temple by the old British consulate, i wandered through the arts center they built at the old docks and the railyard they have now finished converting to a public park, then headed way out east to a night market that has remained in my memories as the best night market in all of Taiwan.
The night market i remembered is gone. I asked a guy walking along the canal where it used to be, and he said it 搬走了, which means moved, but i'm not sure where.
The thing about night markets in Taiwan is that they fucking suck.
I know, it's sacrilege, but honestly... Night markets are so fucking overrated. I already knew it the first time i traveled here. You've been to one night market, you've been to them all. They all have pretty much exactly the same greasy, deep-fried junk food masquerading as "authentic" local fare. It's exceedingly rare you will ever find something unique, despite the tourist brochures suggesting that every night market and every region has its own specialities. What you will find a ton of is fried chicken, various pancakes and waffles, different meats on a stick, milk tea, bubble tea, fruit juice... And you can find all that stuff anywhere, usually much cheaper outside the night market than in it. The conclusion i came to when i traveled through Taiwan in 2017 was that the best places to buy food were the ordinary street vendors that sell their wares to local people on their way to and from work, and i stand by that conclusion today.
All that said, at the night market by the canal in Fongshan that now no longer exists, there was a vendor there who did stinky tofu, which is one of the classic Taiwan night market foods. Most places will just give you a deep-fried version, maybe with some kimchi on it, and that's a perfectly fine snack food, but not super interesting. This place, though, it was a stewed stinky tofu, and they served it in a 麻辣燙 hot and numbing soup with 金針菇 enoki mushrooms and 大白菜 napa cabbage and some other stuff i forgot. It was a flavor i never tasted before or since, and it was awesome. Alas, revisiting that funk was not to be.
I did get some other classic Taiwanese foods while i was traveling around, and i will make a separate post to talk more about those.
Yesterday i got up early again and went on a bike ride to some places i had never been in Kaohsiung. I first headed north and passed through a couple of fantastic early morning wet markets. It's much more of a scooter city than Taipei (which is saying a lot, because there are millions of scooters here), and there's something kinda chaotic and fabulous about a throng of people inching their scooters along the road and then - still sitting astride their steeds - leaning over the stalls to pick out fruit, veges and meat. Stinky, but nobody ever said Kaohsiung wasn't a polluted disaster. (It's the only city in Taiwan you can't drink the tap water, even after you boiled it.) I enjoyed the vibes (not the fumes) and then headed east toward Pingtung County.
The best thing about getting out of the city was seeing these classic vistas that i associate very deeply with Taiwan. The brilliant, almost impossible green of young rice in the paddies. The skinny, white-tiled, prefab buildings that leave the maximum amount of space for the crops. The tiny straight roads with concrete irrigation ditches on both sides. Banana trees. Palm trees. Pineapple bushes. Temples. The smell of incense. The smell of steamed rice. The smell of five spice.
At one point i hauled my bike up on top of a dyke so i could ride beside the water. I stopped briefly at a 亭 tíng (pavilion) and was approached by a stranger. This is very rare in Taiwan. People here are not especially conversational. The person had long hair and a high-tied ponytail. They were dressed in blue, in something that at first glance i thought was indigenous clothing, but when they started speaking to me i got distracted and made no further note of the clothes. They addressed me in a deep voice that sounded kind of masculine, and they had somewhat masculine features, but pretty hair and eyes. They said to me "i noticed you over here, you are very pretty", but in a way that sounded curious, or complimentary - not sleazy. They asked if i needed any help and i asked if i could ride along the dyke all the way to Donggang. They said yes and explained the directions (just keep following the dyke, cross the river on the second bridge, then turn right), and gave me a wave before heading back to their seat.
It might've been interesting to talk more to this gender non-conforming unconventional character sitting in a tíng on a dyke in the middle of nowhere, but i had places to be!
I kept on cycling to Donggang, which is a fishing harbor and the departure point for a ferry to one of Taiwan's outlying islands. It was packed. After cycling through rice paddies it all felt like too much to deal with, so i skipped the seafood market and cycled a bit further along to a black sand beach where i dipped my hands in the ocean and splashed some salty water on my face. I was going to sit down till i saw a pack of wild dogs heading in my direction. The worst part of adventuring in Taiwan. Wild dogs. On a bike at least you can pedal away... but not if you've wheeled the bike out to the soft sand. So, i left, and sat down on a fishing pier under a bridge instead.
And then i headed back to the city. It had been a long day, but i still made a little detour up a small hill (there are no big hills in Kaohsiung) where i saw some pineapples and a pagoda.
I took a fortunately-open-to-the-public shortcut around a reservoir and made it back to the end of the subway line as the sun was setting, a magnificent orb of fire cutting through the smog on the horizon. I picked up some nibbles from the nearby market before getting on the subway back to my hotel and another early night.
This morning i had originally planned to take the slow train back to Taipei. To be clear: the bullet train has an express version and a "slow" version - the slow one takes about two and a half hours. But the regular train goes on different tracks and can take anywhere from 4 to 7 hours depending where it stops. I thought it'd be fun to trundle along all the small stations, order one of the famous Taiwan Railway bentos, and just enjoy the vibe. Alas, getting on the regular train in Taiwan is more complicated than getting on the bullet train, and requires more mindful booking. So, fuck it, i splurged again for the high speed rail and ended up home by noon. Plenty of time to do laundry, groceries and type up a journal entry while the memories are fresh.
It was a great 48 hours. Cost 1500元 for the bullet train each way, plus hotel came to around 6000元 or us$200. Compared to the sort of money i spend in my everyday life that is an insanely huge amount, more than an entire month of groceries. But compared to how much i earn, it's the sort of thing i can and probably should indulge in from time to time. Just getting to explore this country where i live as a tourist instead of a resident, enjoying a change of scenery and some good weather... it was totally worth it.