What I want to tell you about now is where we live, and a bit about what it’s like. First, in this blog post, I’ll write about our immediate neighborhood. Later I’ll write separate posts about our neighbors that make this such a fun and interesting neighborhood to live in (Sam, who sells spicy tofu and duck blood each evening and has adopted us and made himself our cultural ambassador. Chicken Man. Lynn who sells bread. The Pirate. The Tea Shop. Tony the Mexican chef cooking Chinese food in the market. etc.) and about what it’s like wandering around Taipei (Scooters! Subways! Pedestrians! Scooters! Did I mention the scooters? OMG, the scooters).
We’re in a big ass city called Taipei (Tai for Taiwan, and Pei = North…guess what? We’re in the North of Taiwan!). Taipei proper is about 2.6 million people The metro area is about 8 million. Pretty similar to Chicago. Our district is called 嵩山 or Songshan (Song = pine tree, also a surname; Shan = Mountain), which is the North East ‘corner’ of Taipei City.
From the maps below, you can see that Taiwan is north of the Philippines, and south of Korea and Japan. It’s sub-tropical here (the south end of the island is tropical). August was brutal for these Michigan kids. A five minute walk would necessitate a shower and change of clothes. October and November have been very nice. December still warm (in relative terms – we’re talking 60s on cooler days, 70s on other days) and rain more days than not. Grabbing the umbrella as you leave home is a way of life. People say Taiwan is shaped like a tea leaf, or a sweet potato. Coming from The Mitten, I like shape analogies.
Look for the blue dot on the city map – that’s us.
The area is, as is most all of Taipei City, straight up urban. Other than everything being written in Chinese, and all the people being Chinese, and the neighborhoods involving smaller alleys and lanes, it feels like we’re living in Manhattan. With really good subways. REALLY good. There are more places to eat (from fancy restaurants to street vendors) than I could ever have imagined. I swear, we could eat every meal for the 10 months we’re here at a different place and never walk more than 15 minutes from home. And often the two of us can eat for $10. Or, we can go to a Western restaurant (a brew pub, a pizza place, a burger joint) and pay $50.
Home! We have a nice little apartment. Two bedrooms, although one is more like a big closet. We have a real shower (many bathrooms here are what they call a ‘wet’ bathroom – there’s a shower head on the wall, and when you take a shower, the whole bathroom floor gets wet). Sorry, call us spoiled Westerners, but one condition for us was a real shower. Kitchen? Well, we have a sink and fridge and small counter. We bought a hot plate. And a toaster oven. A small one. That’s about it. We don’t really cook here. We heat or boil. We each have a desk. We have a clothes washer, but no dryer (typical). And the washer is on a nice little balcony where we hang out in the nice weather. It’s about 3 feet by 15 feet, and the washer is at one end (keeping the washer outside is also typical). We either hang up the wash (inside, because it’s so freakin’ humid outside it would never dry), or I go around the corner to the laundromat and use the dryer. This is called foreshadowing: we are friends with the dude who watches the laundromat, and it’s next to a very socially interesting tea shop….but that’s for the next blog.
Here are some pictures of home:
We have cable TV. A hundred channels of people speaking Chinese, plus CNN, BBC, and a few other English language channels. Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Video are our forms of visual entertainment. We use a VPN to convince them we are in the US, so we can access the ‘normal’ content, and attach a laptop to the TV.
While we love our little nest, what’s really cool is our ‘hood. What I think of as neighborhoods are a series of ‘lanes’ and ‘alleys’ off of the main streets. Here’s our immediate neighborhood:
The star is us. At the bottom is Nanjing East Road – a very main drag. Four lanes each way. Crazy crazy busy street. The East / West roads are called Alleys, and are numbered. The North South roads are called Lanes, and also numbered. We’re on Alley #34, building #6, second floor. But you need to reference the Lane your alley is off, which in our case is #291. The lane and alley numbers reference the closest main street. Nanjing East Road, in our case. Since Nanjing is a really long road, it’s divided into sections. We’re section 5.
Get it? This engineer loves it! So our address is (take a breath): Taipei City, Nanjing East Road, Section 5, Lane 291, Alley 34, #6-2. Our mailbox is a plastic tub on a windowsill…lol…and serves about 4 apartments. It IS possible to mail cards to us. We got two Christmas cards. A nice surprise! The problem is remembering to look for them. Not that anyone will steal anything. That just doesn’t happen here (more on that in a bit). A cabbie can find us from that long ass address (if we tell him in Chinese). I have it, written in Chinese characters, on my phone. It works to get us home in a cab.
Here are some pix of the lanes and alleys in our area. The white 2 story building is where we live:
When you walk down the lanes and alleys, you have to be alert. Like playing defense in hockey….head on a swivel. If a scooter comes by, edge to the side. If a car comes, it takes up the whole damn street, so duck to the side between a couple of parked scooters or into a doorway and let them pass. They are all respectful of pedestrians. Sorta. They know we’ll move, but they wait until we do. There’s no traffic control at the intersections….yet we haven’t seen an accident. Yet. Still, I’m always watching, fascinated by how nobody really stops, yet it works. Kind of like 4 way yields.
The cool features of our area include the Keelung river, with parks along both sides, just to the East. I walk there a lot. I have a few river walking peeps (it’s like mall walking…I guess) that I say hi to when I see them. Up the river a short walk is Raohe Night Market and the Ciyou Temple (see the last post – that’s where we lit incense for Champ after he passed). Just below us on Nanjing Street is the Nanjing / Sanmin subway station. Very convenient. No exaggeration, on this map view I bet there are a hundred or more restaurants. And tea shops, bread stores, cafes, a couple bars, a grocery store nearby, a Carrefour (hyper market – groceries and home goods and appliances) is a ten minute walk. Ikea is one subway stop West (or a 20 minute walk). Taipei arena, where we’ll go see Madonna when she comes (NOT), is close by. You can see the top of Taipei 101 from the next Lane over. As you can from most places in town.
And…convenience stores. Let me count….in this ten square block area on the google view picture above, there are four. And one about to open. And within a few blocks beyond this map detail, let’s say a five to ten minute walk, there are another six or so. Almost all are Seven Eleven (called Seven….think about the logo, and if you knew Arabic numbers but not English….you’d call it Seven also) and Family Mart (which in Chinese is 全家, or Quanjia, or Whole Family). Life revolves around them. Literally.
They have the usual 7-11 stuff, of course with a local twist. Noodle bowls galore. Thousand Year old eggs. I’ll try one before we leave. Maybe. And coffee, beer, etc. The liquor is right out on the floor. It’s open alcohol here, carry it with your while drinking (but very few people do). Want to make copies? Do that here. Buy tickets to a baseball game, concert, train tickets, whatever? Go to the ATM looking machine, look up your event (better be able to read Chinese!), and it’ll print a ticket with bar codes. The clerk will scan that and take your money and print your tickets. Want to renew your car registration? Pay your electric or cell phone bill? No problem. Ship or receive a package? Check! Kristin has bought stuff on line, Amazon like, and at check out you pick which Seven you want it delivered to. There are a few seats if you want to hang out and drink your coffee or eat dinner. Buy a salad? Sandwich (with the crusts cut off!!!)? Got ’em. A hundred kinds of tea drinks. Budweiser! (I prefer Taiwan beer….cheap and tasty enough for every day drinking). Recently, the Family Mart near us (we have a ‘friend’ that works there. She and I laugh at each other all the time because she speaks no English and I speak almost no Chinese) added a small craft beer selection.
Out on Nanjing it’s full on. People, cars, scooters, shops of all sorts, the subway, scooters, bicycles, scooters. Watch THIS video. We eat at (or from) the Ba Fang dumpling shop, Formosa Chang (Taiwanese fast food), Sukiya (Japanese fast food), and lots of other places. The sidewalks are wide. There are always people out walking or riding bikes. But more on that (walking around Taipei) in a future post.
There’s one feature of our neighborhood, besides the people here and how they have welcomed us (we’re the only foreigners living around here), that is as cool as cool can be. Literally 100 meters East of our apartment is Lane 291, which is a traditional market street, about six blocks long. If you’ve never been to a place with this sort of culture, you have to see it to believe it. Think of the American Express or Mutual Fund retirement commercials of the Americans wandering thru the market full of colorful stalls full of local stuff sold by colorful local people. It’s that, but at a very real and local level. Few tourists would come here. But everyone else does. This is not a hipster farmer’s market, although most of the fresh food was walking around or in the ground or on a tree the day before. The colorful people from those commercials? Nah. Just us locals, buying what we need for the next few days.
From about 7am until early afternoon, the street rocks. People on foot, bikes, scooters, wheel chairs, using canes, old, young. Buying what they need for that day. Need a chicken or a duck? Cooked or raw? Whole or cut up? Fish? A shirt? Sunglasses (that’s where I got mine). Fruits and vegetables galore. We ate a LOT of pineapple when it was in season. Odd stuff that I sure can’t identify but I suspect is edible. Chinese herbal stuff. Mushrooms (dried and fresh). Bread. Nuts. Kitchen supplies. It’s wall to wall. It’ll take you 15 minutes to walk the six blocks, and to me it’s awesome (unless you’re in a hurry). I go there just to wander and look. And then I buy a drink (bamboo juice! Smoothie!) or some bread or a bunch of bananas. Or a breakfast thing – scallion pancakes or sesame onion bread, which I have them stuff an egg inside).
It quiets down in the mid to late afternoon, and then the night shift takes over. It’s not a night market by definition, but it’s all about food. Dumplings, noodles, soup, grilled meat (I ate a chicken heart the other night…no shit…it was quite yummy!). We get tofu soup, dumplings, sandwiches, etc. all the time.
As we get to know a few people working in the market, they introduce us to more. One time I went to get dumplings, but Mr. JB (more on him, and his hilarious mom, next post) was out of xiao long bao. I made a sad face (he doesn’t speak much English). ‘Oh! Wait! Here!’ and he took me to his neighbor’s stall. They made me a couple interesting sandwiches (baked the bread while I waited) and this egg / thin dough thing that I didn’t order, but they wanted me to try. They were excited to introduce me to their food. Now we wave and say ni hao whenever we walk by. If I go out to pick up dinner without Kristin, everyone wants to know where my taitai is. The chicken heart was a gift from the grilled meat guy that Sam, the spicy tofu guy, introduced us to when we were hanging out one evening. The onion bread is cooked by Tony, from Mexico, and his Taiwanese wife. I get to speak three languages when I go there!
What are the people like? The stereotype, which is pretty accurate of most people, is that Taiwanese people are super friendly and helpful (see the examples in the paragraph just above, and THIS blog post). We’ve certainly met a LOT of these folks. If we stand on the sidewalk and look around like we’re confused and / or lost, odds are someone will stop and offer help. We walked out of a Family Mart once, bummed cause the bathroom was broken. A dude offered to bring us to his apartment to use his. You can’t make this shit up. Working in the convenience stores are some friendly and helpful folks (we’ve got to know many in the stores closest to us, at least by sight and to say ni hao to). We first met Sam when he saw us watching a ceremony with interest. He introduced himself, asked where we were from, and then explained what Ghost Festival was about.
Of course there are also the people in service positions that just kind of hate their life and wish they were anywhere else. And there’s a little bit of xenophobia. Occasionally Kristin will overhear someone, at the next table or near us on the street or in a shop, grumbling about the dang ‘Waiguo Ren’ (foreigners). Or even using that word to point us out to someone else or their kids. We’re not used to being at that end of this attitude. I believe it’s nothing compared to the reverse situation in the US and don’t let it bother me. Being me (kinda tall…ahem…and very white), I’m used to being stared at here. A smile often changes peoples stares to a return smile and a nod of hello. And they think my attempts to speak Chinese are cute.
I have an ongoing experiment I do in all cities we visit. I try to catch passing people’s eye, and smile. In NYC, the usual response is a frown and a ‘yo, you lookin’ at me???’ look. Other places, there are some returned smiles. Here, in my very unscientific data analysis, the ratio of returned smiles is higher than most places, especially for such an urban area. It’s like hyper – Mid West friendliness, but in a big city.
Is Taipei a quaint a beautiful city, you may ask? Ummm….no, not really, but parts of it are. The temples range from small plain storefronts to amazingly beautiful buildings, the memorials and parks are beautiful and impressive, and Taipei 101 is, to me, the most beautiful skyscraper I’ve seen in person. But the rest, well, let’s just say it’s been described as the ‘ugly stepchild’ of East Asia (no offense to step children…). The newer buildings are fine, but there was a building boom in the 60s or thereabouts, and it’s like ‘what were you thinking?’. Some examples:
The good (I’ve been to all these places and more):
The not so good:
The last thing I’ll tell you about is safety. Crime and stuff. Taiwan is very safe. Extremely safe (unless you’re a foreigner trying to ride a scooter, lol). In fact, we make jokes about how safe it is. Violent crime is almost unknown. Taiwan has the fourth highest safety index (or fourth lowest crime index) in the world, according to one website. One day we were shopping in a big ass mall (it’s called Living Mall – allegedly the biggest in East Asia – I call it Living Hell Mall, and have managed to avoid it other than this one time) and Kristin left her bag of plunder sitting in a store while we were looking at some stuff. An hour or so later, she realized this, remembering where she had left it. We went back, and of course it was still sitting there, on top of some merch, in full view. Nobody had touched it. Everyone we’ve talked to has similar stories. I’ve heard Japan is similar. I remember Korea as being very safe.
So! We love it here. You really should come visit. We’ve had so many adventures that obviously I haven’t (yet) taken the time to blog about. Patience, grasshopper. Patience.
The adventures of Kristin Smitty and Champ 