With Daisy headed back to the States, real Taiwan life was set to begin. I spent the afternoon with my aunt, as we went down Dihua Street toward the fabric market. Dihua Street is the oldest in Taipei and it has Western style architecture and stores hawking Chinese herbs and medicines, as well as stuff people use during traditional festivals and celebrations.
I suspect a lot of it has to do with how old people mix into the city, and how that sort of filial respect translates to interactions. Compare this, with say, New York. Or the hilly landscape of San Francisco. I’d be curious how metropolitan Chicago is in this respect, as it’s a city that is relatively flat and populated with broad age ranges.
After ducking into a side street with a bunch of arty cafes and stores, we headed back to our Zhongxiao area and I went to go meet Veronica in the semi-burbs, Neihu. There, we ate at an iyazaka specializing in oden, which I’d never had before. Oden is a Japanese dish where you pick what you want, such as vegetables, fishcakes, eggs, and they brew it up. Kind of like lu wei come to think of it. This was my first Taiwan bus journey and it was just a pleasant an experience as riding the subways.
We wrapped up by watching David Nicholls' adaptation of his own book, One Day, on DVD because DVDs are still a thing here. Anne Hathaway and Jim Sturgess should be more appealing but the central conceit of the film, that we see their characters on the same day every year for twenty years, failed to drum up much interest in book or film format.
"Dihua Jie was constructed in the 1850s after merchants on the losing side of an ethnic feud in the Wanhua area fled to Dadaocheng… After Taiwan's ports were opened following the Second Opium War, Western tea merchants flooded into the area and built handsome mansions and trading stores. Later, during the Japanese era, baroque and modernist architectural and decorative touches were added to many shops, making Dihua Taipei's most historically diverse street."Both my aunts here are afflicted with polio and they now both use motorized wheelchairs. (Everyone from San Diego should be familiar with the Salk Institute and Jonas Salk, right?) Taipei is a tremendously easy place to get around for the physically handicapped. Public transportation is obviously plentiful and the streets, although narrow in places, are flat and well maintained. And while I don’t have much to compare to, it seems like people are tremendously respectful of those with physical disabilities and helping them get around.
I suspect a lot of it has to do with how old people mix into the city, and how that sort of filial respect translates to interactions. Compare this, with say, New York. Or the hilly landscape of San Francisco. I’d be curious how metropolitan Chicago is in this respect, as it’s a city that is relatively flat and populated with broad age ranges.
After ducking into a side street with a bunch of arty cafes and stores, we headed back to our Zhongxiao area and I went to go meet Veronica in the semi-burbs, Neihu. There, we ate at an iyazaka specializing in oden, which I’d never had before. Oden is a Japanese dish where you pick what you want, such as vegetables, fishcakes, eggs, and they brew it up. Kind of like lu wei come to think of it. This was my first Taiwan bus journey and it was just a pleasant an experience as riding the subways.
We wrapped up by watching David Nicholls' adaptation of his own book, One Day, on DVD because DVDs are still a thing here. Anne Hathaway and Jim Sturgess should be more appealing but the central conceit of the film, that we see their characters on the same day every year for twenty years, failed to drum up much interest in book or film format.