On Saturday we left, just as the crowds arrived. We took our bags and went to I-Thao for lunch, wanting to try indigenous food. What had been a deserted town was now packed, though still far from capacity, as people arrived for the weekend. This was only Taiwanese tourists, as there are none from overseas these days, so it must be a hellscape in other times. We had a rather terrible lunch, and then as a storm broke over the lake, took a boat crowned with a life-size golden horse to cross the water to the other town, where the bus leaves from. The boat ride was pleasant – it has to be a truly terrible tourist trap, congested and with no fresh air, for me to dislike a boat journey – and we arrived just in time to catch the bus to Taichung.
In Taichung our hotel is a fairly generic one, which means it has an excellent shower and a comfortable bed. We went straight out for coffee, picking a place on spec. This turned out to be a small corner shop inside an old market building, just a couple of benches set along an open space under bare beams. The owner came over, asked us to sit, pointed out where the water was, where we could charge our phones, and where the hairdryer was – the last was unexpected, to say the least. As we went to get water, he asked if we wanted cold water which we accepted gratefully and he poured out a jug of liquid whch was iced, but certainly not water, as it was a mellow amber colour. It turned out to be his own special concoction, made of the run off from his drip coffees, and very pleasant and mild, though still certainly not water. He also brought over a CD cover so we could see what he was playing – Shostakovich.
The owner was a true enthusiast, what every hipster probably aspires to be. We ordered our coffees – he insisted that he would choose and make coffees for us of his own desire, and madeleines. These we were instructed to dip into the coffee. Also, he brought along a tiny dish with very finely shaved iberico ham which he told us, following a great deal of experimentation, he had decided was the perfect accompaniment to coffee and the trick was to have a sliver and immediately take a sip of coffee. Those of us who tried this clearly lacked the palate, but he was certainly enthusiastic.
Then he asked if we wanted to see the other room. There seemed to be no sign of another room so we said yes. He led us across the market corridor through a door into a small room which was set up like an English country house parlour, with wedgewood coloured walls, two little tables, and a bluetooth speaker. Then he left us there, sitting around the table looking nonplussed as he closed the door. To me it felt rather as though he expected us to enter into an orgy or something but this was not a joke that anyone else found funny so perhaps I shouldn’t have made it.
After we finished our coffee, he showed us another room: a rickety staircase going into a ceiling led to a little Japanese style room with floor seating, and above that another staircase led to a storeroom with a rather dramatic and hard to follow mural which he was working on, with women and birds getting swallowed in what seemed to be clouds of smoke, but might just have been incomplete.
A very odd experience – the coffee was good but not mindblowing, but the rest of it more than made up for it.