The four of us decided to go for brunch today. This is a meal that enrages me more often than not as it is all too often over-priced, mediocre in flavour, more interested in Instagrammable plating or catching trends than quality food. Plus, the sight of hollandaise sauce from a packet, or a baked-from-frozen croissant, sends me into a fury.
Today’s brunch place came recommended by a Taiwanese from Australia who said it reminded him of home. It was a reasonable way away, in Banqiao district, so outside Taipei proper, but luckily it is a fairly direct MRT journey from our nearest station. The brunch place turned out to be completely empty other than the staff, which makes me wonder how long it’ll last – our other potentials had queues out the door from what we were told. Anyway, I ordered an avocado on toast with some prawns as a topping, and it turned out to be quite tasty. I did have to get over the slight hump of the way they do avocado here, which is not mashed or chunky, but pureed with other additives and then dispensed through an icing gun to make rosettes on the toast. Plus the fried egg on top was the hard fried kind which I personally find inexplicable. Nevertheless, it was quite tasty and the place itself was low key enough that I quite liked it. Our second course, of cake and coffee, was less good, but there it is.
We then walked through some fairly busy and borderline industrial roads (passing the Cat Fat Hotel on the way) to the park that runs along the river. The point at which we entered was crisscrossed by flyovers, so it wasn’t as sudden a shift as in the other times we’d crossed over to the riverside park, nevertheless it was pleasantly green, with tall wild grass, and dotted with marshes and wetlands. Since this is a nature reserve, there was a warning sign in Chinese and English: NO CULTIVATION. The Taiwanese propensity to cultivate is admirable; in other countries the sign might have been DO NOT LITTER or DO NOT SET FIRES or whatever.
We spotted no cultivation but there was a fair bit of fishing going on, by groups of SE Asian (Thai?) migrant workers on their day off. It was warm and humid and it smelt swampy, the sort of weather where you can feel the smell adhere to your skin, and the sky was silver grey rather than blue. Nevertheless it was a nice walk, and at one point we saw an energetic and inexplicable bubbling in the water. I can’t imagine what it was.
We arrived at the Crescent Bridge, a very large suspension bridge only for pedestrians and cyclists – most unusual. High up there was a breeze and some nice views up and down the river, with the white cloud-covered sun reflected in the water below us. There were many cyclists, and many families with toddlers playing on the bridge or picnicking on the little daises (is that the plural) dotted along the curve.
Next a quick look at the Banqiao 435 Art Zone, which was a gallery and performance space, but all was closed. It did have some nice gas metres and a cool, dark theatre, the whitewashed kind rather than the velvet-draped kind.
Then on to our next destination, the Lin Family mansion and garden. The way there was through small neighbourhoods where they were definitely not used to seeing foreign faces, so we got well stared at, and the GF got a hello or two, at which he beamed and replied with his best ni hao. One street had an astonishing six family shrines opening onto it, of which the best one was adorned by some very extravagant dragons. Foolishly I didn’t photograph it. There were also many, many signs up begging people to keep their eyes out for a little grey parrot, three months old and answering to the name of yuanbao.
The Lin family mansion and gardens looked lovely from the outside but, unfortunately, the boundary wall and the odd peep inside to see rocks arranged as mountains or a window shaped like a butterfly was all we saw, as it was shut and there was some mighty power washing going on inside.
So that was that and we returned. The Boddhisattva and the Woodland Creature ordered a bubble tea delivery, the GF went off for a massage, and here I am.