The blog enters 2016! I'm excited. Are you excited?
This year is shaping up to be one of the oddest ones yet for me, as my plans are yet unformed. I've had a great time teaching here but I want to move on to new things, so I will be leaving Japan later this year to do other stuff. I won't mention anything specific because everything is still in the works right now, but hopefully it should be good and not terrible.
Anyway: my winter holiday in Taiwan. This was my second attempt to go to Taiwan, and I was finally successful (my first attempt was thwarted by an ill-timed megatyphoon). The weather was balmy, the people were friendly, and I only got food poisoning for half a day. I learned about eight Mandarin phrases and somehow managed to remember and repeat them at the appropriate times. It was great. Some highlights:
- I ate Maltesers, Galaxy and Kinder Buenos for the first time in two years. I found them in the convenience store at the airport arrivals lounge, so right away I knew I was in for a good time. Taiwan has lots of branches of FamilyMart, same as in Japan, but they somehow manage to be better. Good Western chocolate selection and a much better array of microwave meals - lots of things you might actually want to eat, instead of weird pasta splattered with mayo.
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| Sadly, those Buenos left me no room for Modern Toilet ice cream. |
- Night markets. This holiday was basically an eating holiday - wander down to a street market, hand over almost no money, eat something amazing. The surprise highlight was deep-fried mushrooms - simply seasoned with grey and red pepper, spicy, filling, delicious. I also got to try muskmelon, and dragonfruit (which tastes different from what I expected - not explicitly tropical, more gently perfumey and....aquatic?). Soup dumplings, tiny bites that burst into an explosion of yummy soup. I had an ice cream in a flowerpot, dusted with tiramisu powder to look like soil. I was also bullied into buying a big bag of nougat, but it was so cheap I didn't mind.
It wasn't all great - I bought some intriguing stuff which I soon realised was chicken feet. I gave them a try, but they were cold and chewy. Also, one of the most popular night market snacks is something literally called stinky tofu, which is exactly what you imagine it might be. Walking through a market and simply enjoying all the smells could have been great, except you were always wondering when you were going to get the hit of briney, pungent awfulness. - When you cross the street, the pedestrian light shows a cartoon of a little man walking, and when there are only a few seconds left to cross he suddenly starts running. It's adorable. It's also helpful, as you really don't want to be hit by the millions of scooters everywhere.
- You can get an hour-long shampoo and head massage for almost no money, which is great when you're all tense from trying to communicate to non-English speakers that you want a shampoo and head massage.
- Seeing in the New Year with the most underwhelming fireworks ever. We were told that fireworks would take place outside a certain mall, and that they were renowned for being spectacular. When we got to the mall we found crowds of people, and joined in the countdown - as much as we could in Chinese - only to find that at the end two piddling flares went off and everyone instantly went home. When we got back to our hostel we found out that they had changed the venue for the fireworks that year. Still, got to walk back through the markets full of tofu.
- Instead of getting a ticket at the subway, you get these cool tokens. Look how cool!
So that's Taiwan. Let's see what the rest of the year brings us.
