One is Television Taipei, portrayed in the epic drama serials which many follow religiously back in Singapore. Another is Green (clean, too) Taipei, loved by both locals and expatriates alike, who enjoy the long rambles in the wilderness on its very doorstep. Finally there is Cultural Taipei. The term here is contentious, because everything and nothing written about here could fall under this very heading. There are two principal, intertwined strains here - the Taipei which originated from imperial Chinese times, another modern Taipei which had its roots in the post-war regimes of the two Chiangs. It might be more helpful here to speak of a Historical Taipei and a buzzing Creative Taipei with its proud monuments to modernism and its bold postmodern doodlings. Again, these aren't discrete categories, for neither could exist without the other. We partook of all the above, in varying measures, to varying degrees of satisfaction.
Below: five Taipeis but one China? I bought this set of figurines (together with one of Teresa Teng, who I suspect had little to do with any form of political dialogue in this or any other parallel universes) from a Ximending souvenir store.
Green Taipei and Television Taipei shared some broad similarities. This is particularly evident in the tireless recycling of plots in the intractably lengthy local soap operas that never seem to end. Moreover, one cannot escape either within the confines of the city, as ample visual reminders of green hills on the city edges demonstrate. We got more than enough of our fair share of Television Taipei in the hotel room. If you thought either 爱 ("Love", the 787-episode series which polarized its Singaporean audience) or 夜市人生 ("Night Market Life", its 940-episode successor) was too much to handle, Taipei cable television ran simulcasts of three or four of these, on different channels, at any one time. Needless to say, our Taipei experience lacked the unquenchable bathos these serials offered.
We had, on the other hand, a more earthy and ordinary experience, especially where Epicurean Taipei and Cultural Taipei. Those who know me know I'm not much of a foodie. And while Taipei contains many stops for those here on a gastronomic pilgrimages, what I remembered more was the ready availability of street snacks - a packet of muah chee here, a bowl of ice shavings with fruits and syrup there, and after another mere hundred metres emerging from another shop with a whole bag of tau sa (red bean) buns with meat floss and a cup of bubble milk tea. On our penultimate day in Taipei, Mary convinced her mother to visit a Hello Kitty-themed cafe on the pretext of sating my obsession with the character. My protestations that I very much prefer cats with mouths fell on deaf ears.
Below: Large Fried Chicken Skin and Dough. My camera lens wasn't wide enough to capture the rest of the signboard.
Below: We stumbled upon this in the Dinghao shopping district (顶好商圈), one of the few places in the world where you can dismember and devour cats at your leisure.
Then there was the shopping. Amongst the three of us I had, predictably, the lowest purchase to shops ratio. The different per unit measurements in this indicator run the entire gamut of consumer behaviour from restrained to rampant. The lowest rung is the purchase per country, then per city, per shopping district, per mall, per level, per shop, per section and finally per shelf. There exists also a range of eco-systems to satisfy every sort of shopping preference. You had your upmarket air-conditioned mall, your utilitarian underground malls located right next to the subway station and your bustling night markets filled with bargain-hunters. A plane full of Singaporeans flying home from Taipei often weighs more heavily than a plane headed there from home.
Below: the perennially-crowded Ximending shopping district, and that unmistakable Taipei landmark, Taipei 101 (a facet of both Historical and Creative Taipei too?)
Regrettably, we did not have more a couple of fleeting glances at Historical Taipei. At least not this time. Historical Taipei, you could say, was everywhere, given our location at the heart of the old city. For us its most recognizable face was the Tianhou Temple (天后宮) on Chengdu Road which we passed everyday on our way out and back. A friendly middle-aged lady who approached me as I was fumbling with my camera in the temple courtyard also provided a brief history of the temple - that it was established in Qing times by merchants when Chengdu Road was (and still is) a trading street. Devotees come to worship Mazu, the Goddess to whom many communities in the Fujianese diaspora previously gave thanks for safe passage. We forget sometimes that Taiwanese isn't completely Chinese.
Below: Tianhou Temple, wedged between modern shophouses in Ximending.
It would be fitting to round off with a description of Creative Taipei, which my cousin, herself a fine artist, goes on and on about. While we comparative philistines lack that finer appreciation, two particular moments revealed Taipei's more cultured persona. The first occurred at the Zhongxiao Fuxing (忠孝复兴) subway station, on the first of our several train changes in Taipei. Mary drew our attention to the colourful walls and some interestingly lit panels. I had earlier instinctively dismissed these as space given over completely to garish over-advertisement, as they would have been done in subway stations the world over. The second was the couple of harpists in Ximending who were dressed as elegantly as their instruments provided a melodious antithesis to the brash consumerism on blatant display all around. On the one hand we felt mightily reassured that harps did not only exist on Guinness mugs. On the other, we recognized full well that these were only velvet cultural trimmings on the edges of what remained an unmovably iron structure of capitalism. After all, Chinese have historically been both shrewd merchants and faithful patrons of the arts at the same time.
Below: great walls of Taipei, and one of our harpist virtuoso.
It was a testimony to the prodigious energy in this pulsating city. As with most urban circadian rhythms, life really begins at sundown in Taipei. But while much of our shopping in Singapore winds down close to ten, in the ceaseless hives of the night markets this carries on deep into the wee hours of the morning. Our wee bit of travel this time just wasn't enough. But then, it almost always isn't.
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