Category: Taiwan2024

Monday, October 7, 2024

Today’s update should be quick, and relatively painless.

Woke up at 2:30 AM, starving. Had some chips and went back to bed.

At 7:00 AM, I didn’t even make a show of going to the hotel lobby for breakfast. I let Chuwan get her “free” food while I waited in the room. Afterward, we went to Sukiya. Sukiya is more or less a clone of Yoshinoya. Both are gyudon restaurants and, in fact, Sukiya was founded by a former employee of Yoshinoya. Sukiya now claims to be the largest gyudon chain, surpassing Yoshinoya. I make no statements as to the accuracy of these claims, but I can say this is the first I’ve seen or heard of them before this trip. Their expansion to Taiwan may be relatively recent.

I chose to be a bit bold, and rather than just getting a gyudon bowl, I went with a three-cheese gyudon bowl. This was good, although if I were choosing the three cheeses, parmesan would not be one of them.

My “combo” meal also came with some karaage chicken. All told, it was a good, hearty breakfast for the day’s adventures.

Melz has school at NTNU five days a week, so they could not join us on our mini-vacation. Visiting family in Taipei is fine, but if you’re coming here, get the fuck out of Taipei and see the country.

This time, we chose Sun Moon Lake. We’ve been there before. The first time was back in early 1999. This was just a few months before the 921 Earthquake (Sept 21, 1999) which basically levelled the area, killing 2,500 people and injuring over 11,000 people. The epicenter was very nearby.

We saw the area again afterward, and it was devastated, with collapsed buildings all around the lake. I can report that they’ve rebuilt and improved the area considerably since then.

Why did we choose Sun Moon Lake? We have, pretty much, been to every place in Taiwan over the years, so some recycling is inevitable. Sun Moon Lake was a simple, easy to obtain destination, and it has been many, many years since we were last there.

There was another reason. In the years since I first started coming to Taiwan, bicycling has taken off immensely. From non-existent infrastructure to round-the-island bike routes, the transformation has been incredible. There is a YouTube channel called Taiwan Plus, and they’ve been producing a series about bike rides around Taiwan. I watched one about the round-the-lake ride around Sun Moon Lake, and at only 29 KM and flat, it was a simple enough ride that we could rent bikes (maybe even eBikes) and make the circuit (even if we just puttered along and took all day.)

But we had to get there first. Like all things coming into this trip, Supertyphoon Krathon had originally looked like it was going to roll right over Sun Moon Lake which is in the central mountains. The mountains in Taiwan are steep. (Unimaginably steep and so densely vegetated that I have never been able to get a picture that adequately conveys how damned steep the mountains are. They’re largely impassable and often rise at angles of nearly 80-85º. Typhoons bring on major landslides and block roads and communities for days or weeks at a time. Luckily, Krathon missed Sun Moon Lake.

Near our hotel was a sandwich shop claiming to be Taiwan’s No. 1 Sandwich. Called Hung Rui Chen, there are epic tales online of people buying these sandwiches to take home to Korea, Japan, and other countries. (There’s also a less-than-reassuring story about hundreds of people getting food poisoning from an outlet location in Hong Kong, but I’m just going to blame that on the Red Chinese’s lack of health and safety standards and try to ignore it.)

These sandwiches are not to be believed. They are ham and cheese on crustless white bread, I kid you not. In any case, I picked up two for the train ride to Taichung.

Are they any good? Well, sure, it was fine. The bread was really light and fresh, but… it’s just a packaged ham and cheese sandwich. What was I supposed to expect? The weirdest things get “famous” in Taiwan.

The train ride to Taichung was via the High Speed Rail (HSR). I cannot gush enough about the HSR. It’s fantastic, fast, comfortable, easy to navigate. It’s great.

Why do people always resist them when they’re being built?

Less wonderful was the hour-long bus ride up the mountain from Taichung to Sun Moon Lake. With cramped, uncomfortable seats and a suspension that meant every movement of the wheels was felt in your butt.

Until this point, we’d not had any trouble with our cellular provider, but the quality got bad on the trip up the mountain.

Perhaps I should explain. During my last trip to Taiwan, eSIMS weren’t a thing, or at least they hadn’t caught on yet. My previous phone had a physical SIM and space for one eSIM, but I never got to test it. On prior trips, we had to replace our SIMs with physical SIMs from a local provider, and these had gotten increasingly difficult to obtain.

On the first trip, when we got SIMs, we walked into 7-Eleven and picked up prepaid ones from a shelf. On the second trip, 7-Eleven still had them but wouldn’t sell them to people without a household registration (i.e., foreigners.) We had to go to a cellular phone shop and apply. It got harder for us as foreigners on each trip, although, in theory, foreigners can get SIMs at the airport when they arrive; however, they aren’t open 24 hours, and we never arrive when they’re open.

With the advent of eSIMs, there are now a plethora of apps in the iOS App Store where you can purchase eSIMs for your trips before leaving home. Listening to some recommendations and going with what seemed like the best deal for our trip, we selected Holafly.

For this trip, we selected 15 days of unlimited data. The downside, however, is you don’t get a local phone number. Would this be a problem? Chuwan’s family can call her via Line. We can call each other via FaceTime. I can talk with friends at home via iMessage, except for those poor, benighted souls with Android phones, and for them, I can use my Google voice number.

But what about if someone in Taiwan needs your phone number, or you need to call a business in Taiwan? Would that be a problem? We weren’t sure, but we decided we’d risk it.

Taiwan has amazing cellular coverage, island-wide, and it wasn’t clear why we kept losing the signal. We’d have 5 bars of 5G in one moment, and 10 seconds later, it would be gone. The mountains are steep, and the road is winding, but there seemed to be no rhyme nor reason to the spotty coverage.

When we arrived at the small village of Sun Moon Lake, we found the first drawback: We couldn’t call the hotel to ask for a shuttle to pick us up. We could have re-engaged our Verizon coverage and called from our US phone number, but that automatically incurs a $10/day charge, and Chuwan wouldn’t have that.

We walked the 1 km to the hotel, hauling our luggage.

It’s Day Three, and my back is still killing me. The flight really did a number on me, and walking slowly or standing still is the worst. It doesn’t take long for it to become unbearable. I have meds that can ease the pain, but I don’t like taking them all the time, day in and day out.

We got to the hotel, and it was time for a nap.

The hotel we stayed at was the Sun Moon Lake Hotel, and it was fantastic! (Make sure you get a lake view.) Our room was a Japanese-style room with a living/dining area, two large beds, and a giant soaking tub with views out onto the lake. The hotel is right alongside the lakeside bike pathway, and they offer bikes to the guests for free use.

While the freebie bikes were well-used and not in the best of shape, we took a couple of them into the village and grabbed dinner from the 7-Eleven. This time, I tried a three-cheese hot dog, and the addition of the cheese actually helped mask the odd “wrong meat” flavor of the dog. I also grabbed an instant noodle for later on.

Had a very long, and very welcome to my back, soak in the tub, and turned in for the night, hoping I’d sleep through till morning.

Sunday, October 6, 2024

You might want to go back and read my Prelude to Day Two to understand my motivations for the day: Avoid spending time with my in-laws.

I'm writing this snippet on Day Six. I've been writing this account of Day Two since Day Two, and I wouldn't say I like it.  I mean, I actively hate it. It doesn't flow. Nothing happens. It's boring. I feel like I've set it up to be epic, but it wasn't.  I'm sorry. I'm going to finish writing it anyway. You can come back for Day Three if you like, maybe it will be better.

I cannot speak Chinese, but I understand more than they think I do. Yesterday, I heard them planning to feed me pizza, despite the fact that they don’t like pizza, and it would not be pizza I liked. My wife was urging them not to do it. They weren’t listening.

This gave me nearly 24 hours to plan an exit strategy.

Dammit, my in-laws prefer eating Chinese food. My wife has returned to Taiwan so she can eat real Chinese food that she cannot get in Arizona. Don’t fucking plan your meals around me!

Go eat what you want, be together, do all that talking in Chinese that I cannot understand (or at least participate in) and don’t worry about me. I’m a grown man, I can feed myself, and I can amuse myself without relying on the company of others.

You’re not offending me. You’re not hurting my feelings. You’re making me feel bad because you aren’t enjoying yourselves.

And we simply cannot get that through to them.

But that’s not how Day Two began. It began by waking up at 3:00 AM, starving. I used the opportunity to write up my Day One blog, and then, around 6:00 AM I realized I wasn’t going back to sleep, I decided to have another soaking bath.

…and I promptly fell asleep in the tub, again. This time for over an hour. At least it was finally time to go out and get some breakfast. There’s a 24-hour Yoshinoya in the area, I could get a gyudon bowl. There’s plenty of green onion pancake vendors. There’s a place nearby that makes a mean plate of spaghetti for breakfast. There’s omurice. There are loads of neat things to eat in the area.

Oh no. We couldn’t have that. Our room comes with free breakfast buffet, and that’s what my wife insisted on having. We’re not wasting that money!

The buffet was some very unappetizing looking buns, oddly pale fruits, gruel, and various forms of pork lint. My wife saw what was on offer and looked at me, “There’s a 7-Eleven nearby. We can go there afterward.”

…and so I had toast at the buffet before heading to FamilyMart for food. (Turn left out the door of the hotel, you hit 7-Eleven, turn right, you hit FamilyMart.)

Breakfast at FamilyMart was a hot dog. I’m guessing it was pig. I certainly wasn’t cow, chicken, or that unique, delectable blend of mystery meat so common in low-end dogs.

On my first trip to Taiwan in ’98, I got very ill, and I still needed to build up a repertoire of Taiwanese food I could eat. Recovering, I was still feeling like crap, and we were out somewhere a little less urban, and I was starving, and we came across a 7-Eleven, and they had a hot dog. It was like a light from heaven shining down on me as I bought that dog and hastily devoured what, to this day, I’ll still describe as the worst hot dog I’ve ever eaten. I have not had a convenience store hot dog in Taiwan since then, until today.

This was still weird but wasn’t inedible, and it came with what seemed like a damned clever half-mustard, half-ketchup packet for the dog. Now, to be clear, ketchup doesn’t belong on a hot dog, and that’s a hill I’ll die on, but I can acknowledge ingenuity when I see it.

That is until I realized that the packet is designed to open both halves and dispense both together, either depriving the dog of the essential mustard or ruining it with ketchup. It was a tough choice. I tried circumventing the pouch and ended up with mustard on the hot dog and ketchup on my hands.

While eating breakfast, Melz and I conspired to avoid being at the in-laws’ house all day.

Taipei has a couple of underground shopping malls, and just before leaving, I saw that a new one had recently opened at the newly completed Taipei Dome. We headed there but were very disappointed. It was very empty, and most of the shops and restaurants were closed.

We decided to go to one of the older ones near Zhongxiao Fuxing station. We spent some time there and didn’t find anything interesting, and still, several shops were closed. Yes, it was Sunday but I’ve never noticed that being an issue before.

We decided to go into Sogo (a Department store located at the same station), and even that was weird. Security guards were everywhere, and the store escalators were cordoned off, save for the underground food court. At one point, a security guard followed us to help us leave.

We took the hint and decided to go elsewhere.

Melz wanted to buy a belt but didn’t want to buy it at the big department stores because they tend to be expensive. We decided to try Uniqlo, which was pretty close, but that’s when we realized they opened at 11:00 AM, and it was only 10:55 AM.

Could it be that the other places didn’t open till 11:00 AM, too?

The nearest Uniqlo was in the Breeze Center, and we struck out looking for a belt – at least a belt that fits. We did find some gifts for folks back home, so the trip wasn’t wasted, and it was now lunchtime, and also my back was killing me. It hadn’t recovered from the flight, yet. I needed to sit down for a while.

Knowing that we were avoiding being at the house so that the in-laws wouldn’t order pizza, I decided we were going to go have pizza, but, and this was the important part, we could never tell them where we went!

We went to Pizza Rock, a small Taiwan-based chain set up by a foreigner. I heard about it just before we left Taiwan on the last trip but never got to try it.

Let’s start by saying I’m incredibly proud of my kid. Not long ago, Melz wouldn’t special order food in a restaurant that wasn’t explicitly printed on the menu, yet here they were, ordering pizza in Mandarin. I was really moved at how far they’ve come.

Bonus: Pizza Rock sells Dr Pepper, which is damned rare in Taiwan, and an extra treat for Melz and me.

The damage done to my back by the plane flight continued to bother me, and walking the streets wrecked me for the rest of the day. I returned to the hotel for a long nap.

Later that night Chuwan and I met up with Melz again, originally to go for a curry katsu, but somehow ended up having Bafang dumplings. 25 potstickers and a bowl of soup all for under $US 7. Taiwan can be very economical.

Train trip tomorrow.

Before I tell you the tale of Day Two, let me recount something that happened 22+ plus years ago. This will inform you about my frame of reference when eating with my in-laws.

We arrived in Taiwan, battered and bedraggled after the flight, as usual. On the first day, it’s obligatory that we eat together as a family. Back then, there were six of us, including my brother-in-law, Johnny, and his then-girlfriend.

Unilaterally, they had decided that I’d appreciate hamburgers since I was an American. It didn’t matter that none of them liked hamburgers. We were having hamburgers for my benefit. (For the record, I love a good bacon cheeseburger, so this isn’t immediately problematic.)

Johnny had identified a new hamburger place that served real, American-style hamburgers.

When we arrived, my wife was told that when Johnny and his girlfriend arrived, we’d have hamburgers, and she was told a little bit about this great new place that served real, American-style hamburgers.

My wife relayed this information to me and, I thought, “That sounds damned nice of them. We go to a hamburger place, and I can pick out a burger and, even if it isn’t really a ‘real, American-style hamburger’ I’ll get by and probably even enjoy it.”

Before I finish this story, let me say that this story turns out well. I had a great bacon cheeseburger, which really was American-style. But it very nearly was a burger disaster.

We did not go out to eat burgers. When Johnny arrived, he brought the burgers. There were six of us, so he ordered six hamburgers off their menu more or less at random.

The burgers, still in their packaging, were placed on the table and everyone — remember that burgers really weren’t their thing – just grabbed one from the pile at random.

At first, I reeled in shock that “random burger” was the modus operandi of the day, then I reeled in horror at some of the abominations that were included in the stack. I cannot even remember what some of them were, they were too horrific to commit to long-term memory. I’d probably have PTSD to this day if I had.

I got lucky. Not only was one of the burgers (towards the bottom) a bacon cheeseburger, but I was able to grab it and not appear like I was desperately trying to grab the only “burger” there that I’d eat.

I’m picky, I know it, I’ve made peace with it.

I hate the fact that they try so hard to be nice and accommodate me, and I’m a picky-assed eater, who has a very limited capacity to “choke it down.” That’s on me.

Yet at the same time, they’d never think to actually ask me what I’d like. They feel obligated to anticipate and present me with something I’ll love.

We’ve had over 25 years of this dance, and I’ve developed coping mechanisms to avoid the problems when possible, and my wife helps facilitate them, because we’re a team.

Whether you look at this scenario and think, “oh god, that’s a crime against humanity,” “that seems completely normal to me,” or perhaps you take some position in between, this is nonetheless what I have to navigate as best I can while trying to save face all around.

Now we can discuss Day Two.