Chew the Fat

Ten minutes before our plane landed the loudspeaker says, “ladies and gentlemen this is a reminder that the penalty for drug trafficking in Taiwan is death. Have a nice stay.”
I think this reminder would have been better at the begging of the journey.

We are staying at, First Hotel, right in the city; it is as typical as hotels come. The only difference is the water pipes are thin so you can’t flush your used toilet paper down the toilet. There is a bin provided for that. It has no lid.

The central city has a population of two-and-a-half-million. And every resident drives a scooter, like a maniac. I have never seen so many scooters in all my life. The taxi driver said he feels like an island in his car and the scooters are the water flowing around him.

I wish I had better skills to explain this city. Pictures limit the depth, and words seem to flatten my experience. I wish I could show you the smells of polluted humidity and hawker-stall-food which floats around you. A favorite local cuisine is stinky tofu -tofu placed outside for a few months to rot, then fried and served with boiled cabbage. It is the foulest smelling compost my nose has ever confronted. I tried some three days ago and I still can’t the vomit-mixed-with -bum-rubbed-in-old -sweat smell off my tongue.


I wish you could feel the moisture on your tongue when you breathe, and the insistent buzzing noise of over a million scooters zipping around the city. I wish you could see the narrow alleys full of neon lights, food stalls and stray dogs which disappear into the smog. It is bewildering, imposing and beautiful.

When we arrived, I felt like the city was teetering on the edge of chaos. Traffic rules are bendable. We saw someone who was severely hurt in a scooter accident on our second day. In fact it is amazingly well organized and adaptable. The Subway system is reportedly the best in the world -the engineers took the best parts of the subways in Tokyo, London and New York and put it together. What looks like people breaking the driving rules all the time are actually special rules made for scooters. 24 hour 7-11 stores and chemists are on nearly every single street. Whole areas of the city are divided up depending on your shopping needs; -there is a camera area, computer area, cell phone area, shoe area and even a pet area.



We went to a notorious night market known as snake alley. It used to be the prostitution area. It has now become quirky and expensive. It is set in the middle of one of four night markets in the city. The night markets exhibit every kind of people- madness seen on a picture or movie on Asia. Thousands of people moving like a wave, through narrow streets, snatching up every deal they can. Every orifice, every sense, every atom in my body is experiencing an overload.

Thank God I have Joyce with me, who can hold a decent conversation in Mandarin. I am tall and imposing here. Luckily the locals are honest and friendly.

Snake alley is a small alley which you can buy snake blood and eat snake meat. The locals at one snake restaurant are feeding a cute baby rabbit to a boa constrictor. I tried to take a photo but they didn’t let me. In the next place, the guy was playing with a nice looking snake and talking in Mandarin. I thought he was going to feed it another fluffy creature. Instead he tied it to a rope, pulled off its skin -while it was still alive- and chopped it up.

Our training with the language school starts next week. Ten days of intense kindy training.