Dispatches from Elsewhere: Into the land of lotus eaters
Day 4: Taiwan
Today, I am writing from the hotel room again. We've just finished packing up our many hauls in preparation for our flight to Japan tomorrow. It's been another long day, but one filled with many side quests, just the way I like it.
I don't have a breakfast photo for y'all today, because it was a bit of a scrounge today. We hit up the downstairs Family Mart and pick up some rice balls and a tea egg, and there is a funny moment where we dug this up post-breakfast, thinking it was a face mask:
It's a free gift from the department store. We got a ton of random things for spending about $200, and this was one of them.
"Let's use it up," my mom said. I read the package and tell everyone we should split some inner beauty.
Turns out, if I just read the tiny Chinese on the package, I could've avoided the ten-minute long back and forth about what this was. As it turns out, it's a drink.
It tastes like a sweaty foot. I make a face and hand it to my sister. "How is it sour, bitter, spicy, and earthy?" She cried. My mom says it's not that bad, but I end up sipping away at in anyway, not wanting to waste it. It's not so bad after a while, and I ask if I'm glowing with inner beauty when we're done.
We didn't have any big plans today. I read my dad's coffee cup this morning and saw a film festival being advertised. There were movies from around the world across different years, and I make a tentative plan to catch the one entry from Taiwan (it's called A Foggy Tale and sounds like Grave of the Fireflies levels of sad).
We head to Ri Xing Type Foundry, supposedly one of the world's last Traditional Chinese type foundries in the world. It's unlike anywhere I've ever been before.
When you enter, you're greeted with shelves of metal, sticks carved with tiny characters at the end, and you wonder how anyone finds anything. Imagine a library alphabetized in some sort of ascending or descending order, but now instead of 26 letters, it's every individual Chinese character under the sun, which--according to a quick search--is over 100,000 in number. While most of reading Chinese comes from recognition and memory, there is an order to the madness. There is a certain order in which radicals are written, and categorizations based on which radicals are used. There is no doubt that a sorting system would work, but it's still amazing.
My sister writes her name on a slip of paper, and in minutes, the staff returns with the right pieces and they put together a stamp for her. In the sample book, you see creatively laid out pieces to form a unique shape. This lobster, for example, is created from 11 different stamps:
I was tempted to get a stamp made myself, but couldn't justify it. I had a seal made just last year with my Chinese name. "You don't have a stamp that's font," my sister said. Actually, I tell her, I was given one a few years ago by some random girl. It's in Traditional Chinese too--customized yet mass-produced. The magic of Aliexpress/Taobao/Temu, I joke. I wish I had more occasion to use it. Maybe I'll start stamping all of my books.
Next, we head to Dihua Street. It's a hot, hot day, but I was promised a compromise between culture and shopping, so I'm excited. As I'm looking up the English name of this place, I learn that this is actually Taipei's oldest street.
There are tons of vaguely European-looking buildings all around, juxtaposed by both traditional and modern looking stores. We pass by a whole slew of fabric stores to get there from the metro, and when we arrive at the Dihua Street sign, I'm actually beelining my family to the nearest cafe with AC to cool down before looking at anything else.
"Oh, look, it's the oldest Watson's!" My mom exclaims.
"We're looking at that later," I tell her.
The cafe was on a square overlooking some of the more iconic buildings in the area, including the oldest Watson's in the world:
I don't know how many of my friends of Turtle Island would know Watson's. In case you're unfamiliar, it's a massive pharmacy/beauty/healthcare type store in Hong Kong and Macau. Kind of like our Shoppers, but more fun in some ways. Watson's is a big part of anyone who spent any time at all in the Hong Kong/Macau area, but as it turns out, it actually didn't enter Taiwan's market until the late 80s.
Wait, how is this the oldest Watson's in the world, then?
Well, I've been digging around the Internet for 20 minutes now, and I can't seem to find a clear answer and I'm getting so sleepy. I hate modern Internet. Wiki says that Watson's entered the Taiwanese market in the late 80s, but this location, which was gutted by a fire in 1917, was also an attempt at expansion. There are also so many old British guys name Watson, as one can imagine.
If someone can help me figure out the history of this building, please drop me a comment and let me know what you find.
The rest of Dihua Street is a bit of a blur. We visit the old Watson building, which is now a visitor information centre. You can rent cheongsam and take photos of recreated old timey things. There's a school room, a lantern room, and an old pharmacy set-up. It's all pretty contrived for the social media age, but I'd be lying if I said we didn't have fun taking pictures (we didn't rent the costumes, but plenty of people around us did).
We wander a bit further and it takes literal minutes for everyone to melt from the heat, so it's gift shop time. Here is one of many excellent items from the gift shop:
The visitor centre pointed us to Taiwan's oldest tea shop, so we take a little trek to get there. It's a 15 minute walk, which, naturally, feels like 15 hours in the heat. People get a little grumpy, but we make it to an old building in a residential building with giant tins of tea all over the place. It's not fancy at all, and my mom is overheated and not impressed, but I pick up some tea anyway before guiding my family into AC for refuge once more for lunch.
Lunch is Marugame Udon, a place newly arrived in Vancouver, but fills Taipei the way Subways fill our cities. It's cheap, fast, incredibly Q udon, and what I wouldn't give to replace every Subway in Canada with Marugame. What I wouldn't give for noodles beside ramen in my corner of the world.
My sister and I split up from our parents when we return to the hotel. There has been something we've been wanting to check out for a while now, and our parents needed a rest.
For context, one of the best parts of our trip 7 years ago was scouring the city's claw machines to see what we can win. The way most machines work here is that every game is 10 TWD (approx 40 cents CAD), and once a certain threshold of dollars spent is met, you get a guaranteed win. We made it a rule that if the threshold is 100 TWD (~$4.50)or less away, we'd play until we win. That's how we got Tubs.
Back to 2026--my sister and I follow these extremely loud, brightly coloured stairs.
Down and down we went.
We emerge into bright lights and meandering bodies and rows and rows of claw machines as far as the eye could see. "Holy shit," we both whisper as we pass by the first few machines, too awe-struck to say anything else. "This is the land of the lotus eaters," I say once we catch our bearings.
"Mom is going to be so mad," my sister says on account of all the extra luggage we're going to be lugging back tonight. I agree.
We agree that strategically, it's best to get a lay of the land before we set off, but every other machine makes us stop. There is so much here--more than we knew what to expect. You'd think claw machines were just plushies and other tchotchkes, but no. There are snacks of all kinds, bowls, tumblers, laundry detergent, even empty boxes just for points if you wanted to exchange something off the shelf (we later see a lady exchange a basket full of plush oyster babies for a different prize from the shelf, for example).
Honestly, things are pretty reasonably priced. As mentioned, there's usually a dollar threshold to meet before a guaranteed prize, but most of the thresholds aren't priced too much more than regular stores. I imagine it's pretty important to move stock. A pack of chips, for example, might have a threshold of 50 TWD ($2), so it's like buying it from a 7/11, but with a component of fun. The higher tier and popular IPs are priced higher, but that's where you hope a bunch of people have played a few times and walked away, leaving a reasonable gap until threshold is met.
The machine's are bonkers though. You can angle the claw perfectly above the object, and it will pick it up for a moment before springing the claw open (before returning to the open slot), often flinging the prize backwards into the machine. At some point, I hear a couple of youths strategize on how to fling the object against the wall, so it would roll into the hole on the rebound. I don't succeed this technique.
Even so, we end up with quite the haul.
For dinner, we head to a restaurant that is credited with the creation of the bubble tea. It's a milky concoction, shaken in a shaker with crushed ice, and with smaller than average tapioca pearls. I love the textures, but the flavour is pretty mid (honestly, not that far from the 2 for $7 milk teas at Green Leaf in Lansdowne). The food is pretty mid too. Both times I tried the beef noodles here, it has just made me crave the Taiwanese beef noodle shop in Richmond.
I also bought a shirt that I fell in love with immediately. My mom was with me, and while I was just standing there, holding the shirt, the salesperson tried to sell me some pants too. "My daughter just graduated and got her first job, and your prices are too high," my mom said.
I'm confused. It wasn't until I was replaying the interaction later on, somewhat annoyed, that I decide to ask my mom why she said that. It turned out, she was trying to angle for a discount, and I look like a pretty convincing 22-year-old. I'm still feeling weird about the whole thing, especially when I didn't end up getting a discount either way, but I am pretty happy with my new shirt.
Anyway, I drank most of the bubble tea this evening, so now I'm wide awake.
Wish me luck on tomorrow's adventures!
Over-caffeinated Flor, out!