Love Freedem
Believe yourself
And all the way you are
And to be an earn Lever
-T-shirt on a girl in the Taipei MTR
Taipei is a most civilized city. I mean that not in a “look-dear-the-little-Chinamen-are-progressing” kind of way, but rather in a “we-need-to-dispatch-a-dozen-fact-finding-missions-to-find-out-what-they-are-doing-how-they-are-doing-it-and-why-we-are-not” kind of way. The architecture is innovative, the streets clean, the people friendly, and the transportation efficient.
Actually, efficient only begins to tell the story. It’s hard to imagine a much better Metro system than Taipei's. Trains run often and on time. Fares are paid with touchless scans. Announcements are made in Mandarin, Taiwanese, Hakka and English. There is air-conditioning – on the trains of course – but also in the stations, which have bathrooms in them as well. The restrooms are clean, and they have live plants in them, and friendly signs over the urinals beckon the user to “come closer please:” because there is “automatic flushing when you draw near.” And amusing but not-so-politically correct signs offer "waiting zones for female passengers at night."
Like any great modern city, Taipei has a towering skyscraper. The Taipei 101, until 2007 the tallest building in the world, is as impressive for its engineering as for its height. With a 660 ton pendulum suspended from the 92nd floor, serving as a mass-tuned damper. The building can withstand major earthquakes and powerful typhoons.
The aesthetics of the building are equally impressive. Built to resemble bamboo, the tower rises upward in eight sections, each of which tapers inward from its wide top until it meets the next section whose top juts back out again. The glass and steel give the building (and the city) a sleek, modern feel, while the organic design and symbolism ensure you never forget what continent you’re on and what culture you’re in.
From a nearby park, you can see nearly unobstructed to the 101, which reflects in a large coy pond full of turtles and lily pads. Interestingly, the closer one goes to the building, the less impressive it becomes (for me anyway, the novelty of staring up the side of a towering skyscraper is lost on the Chicagoan.) All around the tower are smaller buildings that range in their aesthetics from unimpressive and generic, to plain ugly. Unnaturally clean streets wait to impress business travelers but tell a lie about the city. A mall inside the 101 has all of the high end stores found in any international city, where people can spend ungodly amounts of money on flashy clothes and gaudy jewelry. And the tower itself begins to disappoint as you get closer. The green-blue glass that gives the building an organic look from afar, becomes tacky from close-up, and takes something away from the otherwise truly impressive structure.
But architectural ingenuity, efficient transportation and visible progress wherever you look are not what make Taipei the city it is; had Taiwan catapulted into the 21st century and left its character at the door, Taipei would be a cold city, efficient but sterile, with on-time trains packed full of empty people. Step out of the travelling businessman’s sphere (or into the right alley inside of it) and the city’s real character is revealed. The new and the old coexist harmoniously, locked more in a dance than a duel.
Starbucks, Dunkin Donuts and numerous local imitator chains are everywhere you look. The city, it seems, has a serious caffeine addiction and little time to find their fix. But you’re never far from an old teahouse, where burning charcoal is still used to heat the water and add a subtle smokiness to the teas.
Seven Eleven has its own local imitator chains, and if it seems like there is coffee everywhere, 24 hour convenience stores are literally on every-other corner. Like anywhere, oddly uniform encased pork products slowly turn on the ubiquitous rollers, their grease reflecting the fluorescent sheen. But wander into the alley market behind the store and you’ll find a world of splendid chaos, where chicken feet and intestines are piled high, and pig hearts are suspended over trays of various livers, spleens, lungs, brains and wobbly trays of congealed pork blood. Under the table, beneath heavy woven baskets, chickens cluck away their final hours in oblivious futility. Big-eyed fish stare up at you from beds of ice, the occasional twitching gill telling the customer how fresh it is, while below in buckets, eels and catfish furiously writhe and crabs snap at each other, fighting for whatever space they can get in the cramped quarters. Dry goods sellers hawk different rice, grains and beans, and a beautiful variety of spices and chilies. Fresh produce is everywhere, and kaleidoscopes of fruit set the eyes to dance and the mouth to water. Amid all this, women wander about, filling baskets, gossiping, socializing, and buying the fresh ingredients for that night’s dinner.
Not everyone will get to savor such a dinner. Some will no doubt opt for one of the many Western fast food options that have been springing up here for the last few decades. Those with money to spend may go for a fancy meal, maybe in a Benihana-style Japanese restaurant, or perhaps in an American steakhouse. Some of them, no doubt, are exceedingly good and if I had the money, I would probably go too.
But there is really only one way to eat in Taipei, and it is literally everywhere you look. You wouldn’t have to wander far from the Ruth’s Chris – yes, Ruth’s fucking Chris has a steakhouse here – to find one of the countless stalls, carts and tiny storefronts that churn out Taipei’s immense variety of street food.
A truly civilized way to eat, the street food is clean and safe, offers limitless possibilities of taste and texture, and most importantly, is unbelievably good. One tiny stall lets you pick your meats and vegetables and they barbecue them for you while you wait, the smell so enticing you want to lap at the smoke. The marinated mushrooms were at once light and airy, and also laden with salty, juicy flavor. The steak and lamb were immaculately seasoned and grilled to perfection. And the bacon-wrapped I-don’t-know-what-kind-of-fruit-that-is was a three-way marital bliss of sugar, salt and pork fat. It was simple, it was cheap, and the whole operation could be packed up and wheeled away if you turned your back for too long. It made me wonder how Ruth and her goddamn Chris can get away with charging what they do in a town like this.
A most unobtrusive-looking storefront, frying up chicken along a most unobtrusive-looking street drew me in with the sound and smell of what is one of my favorite foods. There were breasts, wings and drumsticks of course, as well as feet and all sorts of internal bits and pieces. I ordered a breast and a portion of feet, and the smell had me smearing my face in hot grease, ignoring the burn to get at the fried goodness before it could even cool. It was miraculous. The crispy skin crunched between your teeth but melted in your mouth. The tender flesh inside was perfectly cooked. It was sweet and spicy and savory and utterly delicious – a true marvel of fried chicken. It was the best I’d ever had, and it made me want to firebomb the KFC down the street. I had found fried chicken paradise and I wanted to wage greasy-fingered jihad against the infidel Colonel and all else that is evil in the world of hot oil and poultry.
At any time of day there is street food in Taipei. In the morning, small omelets slide around inside of woks before they're eaten with scallion-filled steamed buns. Midday gives way to noodles, noodles and noodles. Simple and nutritious, these soups are exceedingly good bowls of salty goodness floating in rich broth with cheap bits of meat. But the crown jewel of Taipei's street cuisine doesn't reveal itself until after dark. As the city's night markets come to life, nocturnal smorgasbords of food carts and stalls appear seemingly out of the shadows. Knock-off Coach bags and bootleg DVDs abound, but it is the food that really draws the crowds and creates the atmosphere.
There is vegetarian food, stalls that only do drinks, meat, meat and more meat, and stalls that sell fresh fruit where the bright fuchsia insides of the dragonfruit beckon you like no advertisement could. Nearly everything is small -- a few bites only -- and so cheap you can snack for hours trying an endless variety of food and only spending a few bucks. Like any good city, Taipei has its own take on the hot dog. A big fat rice sausage is grilled, split open like a bun and toasted open face. A thin grilled sausage is placed inside, with a sweet chili sauce. The works means sweet pickles, diced cabbage and pickled daikon. It is really cool looking but actually quite disappointing. It just wasn't very good, and one of the only times Taipei let me down.
The night markets get crowded. Locals and tourists -- mostly Koreans when I was there -- pack themselves tightly into the narrow streets. Even with the heat, the crowds are not stifling, and they add a festive air that is not unpleasant. What is slightly off-putting is the smell of decaying flesh that lingers near the stall that serves up the stinky tofu. They say that it's really quite good if you can get past the smell; I could not so I'll just have to trust them.
As bad as that smell is, I would gladly bathe in it if meant I could eat just one of the king-of-foods in Taipei. There is little I wouldn't do for the explosion of all that is right and good that comes when you bite into a hot, steamed dumpling. Inside the thin doughy exterior lies a soup of pork and cabbage, and in it, I may have found religion. You know when you find the dumpling ladies in the Shida night market because there is always a line. Always. They simply can't make them fast enough to keep up with demand, and there are five of them. Three sit, hands and arms white with flour, working the dough with caring diligence. Between them, buckets of pork, cabbage and mushrooms supply the fodder. As fast as they can make them they're passed to the two women working the steamer. The dumplings are placed in sealed bamboo trays and pressure cooked inside of them. They are served piping hot in orders of five or a dozen. It is almost more painful waiting for them to cool than scorching your mouth with the scalding juice. When they're finally cool enough to eat, or close enough, the suspense has already built to near climactic levels. When you finally take a bite, the dumplings blow hot loads of soupy, juicy goodness into your mouth, and if you're not careful, on your shirt and on the people around you (always embarrassing). What was a solid ball of minced pork and cabbage when the dumpling was so lovingly made, has become a soup, a molten core held in by only millimeters of dough. My god, they are good.
I went back for more the next night, but they were gone -- vanished -- the easy mobility of street food its best and worst asset. I searched up and down every alley of the Shida night market but the dumplings, and the wonderful women who make them were nowhere to be found.
The picture that the business traveler takes away from Taipei is a misrepresentation. Maybe a white lie. While he sees clean, ordered streets and sleek modern buildings, most of the city is still cement apartment block construction with peeling paint, chipped tile and ugly bars over windows and balconies. Large signs protrude from all sides of them, and satellite dishes are often the only indication of the changing times. Taipei has preserved its third world charm even as it has embraced the civilized ideas that almost all of the first world takes for granted, like excellent healthcare, available to all. Of course the people have happily taken to the new found prosperity. You can see this easily in everything, especially in fashion trends. Stylish shirts with English writing on them are, not unlike what they actually say, all over the place. Despite the English, Taipei does not look to the West for its fashion, music and art, so much as it does to the North, to Japan and Korea.
Prosperity, undoubtedly a good thing often carries ill effects with it. Too often, people wrap themselves in materialism and turn their backs on traditions of family, community and food -- traditions that have sustained them for countless generations. Not here. Not in Taipei. People here seem firmly rooted in their Chinese and Taiwanese tradition and culture, even as increased travel and foreign investment bring in new influences and conveniences. Of course there are bumps along the way, but the Taiwanese seem to be handling them alright.
And, they are incredibly friendly. Stand on a corner in Taipei staring at a map, or just looking around in a daze, and it is only a matter of time before someone will come over to help you. One man walked me ten minutes out of his way to find a temple that was a straight shot down the road. This can be a little off-putting at first, but you realize quickly that there is no angle, no scam; the only ulterior motive, if there is one, is a desire to practice a little English.
There really isn't much to do in Taipei. There are some museums, a few memorials, a garden, the 101 and some temples that make up the bulk of the tourist attractions. The markets are very cool, and Snake Alley draws many curious tourists, but there isn't that much to speak of the way a guidebook might hype up an attraction. And yet, I still felt drawn to the city. I'd tell anyone to go there, but there aren't many things I'd specifically recommend they see. Rather, I'd tell them to spend their days taking in the city, by wandering, by getting lost, and by meeting the locals -- almost unavoidable in such a big, friendly city.
What you will inevitably find when visiting Taipei is a city putting on a clinic on modernization. This is how it should be done. The best of the old preserved, even while prosperity brought democracy, infrastructure and great healthcare. Want to see how a truly world class city in a first-world nation works? Go to San Francisco....then hop a plane to Taipei.
No comments:
Post a Comment