Eid began with leftovers as I ate the daal from a few days ago for breakfast. Rather pitiful, since it was stale and old and not at all Eid fare, but it was what I had that felt like home. Also, two cups of tea instead of my usual rigidly rationed one. When the GF arose we went off to Kaohsiung to return his Playstation. A very easy journey, a delight, in fact, and a reminder of how nice effective public transport is. It’s not particularly good (especially by Taiwanese standards) here in Tainan, but once we took a cab to the train station (not the high speed) it took a single 40 minute train ride to get us to near the centre of Kaohsiung, and a single stop on the MRT to the rental place.
With that errand done, we went for a sushi Eid lunch at a rather undistinguished place with very good sushi. It is surprising to me how rarely you find nice interiors in Taiwanese restaurants and shops, they tend to be rather bland and commercial looking. The cafes run by the younger lot – Dwaco in Taipei comes particularly to mind – are often by contrast extremely stylish, and I wonder what they’ll all look like in a couple of decades (barring disruptive events) once these younger Taiwanese are the laobans.
Following lunch we strolled towards the finest bubble tea in Taiwan, via the rather pleasant walk along tram tracks which runs by a series of mid-century factories and warehoues all turned into the inevitable culture and design parks. They are a bit samey after a while, as there is only so much culture and design even a place like Taiwan can support, but nonetheless a very good, and a pleasure to stroll around. In one we walked into a virtual reality screening room and asked for tickets to the next screening. Only one person at a time, said they, which does not seem the greatsest business model. So we walked on.
Kaohsiung, this part of it, is very pleasant indeed, with green open spaces, train tracks running through grass, sea breezes, and views over working ports and ferries, as well as the culture and design parks. Also some peculiar statues, including one grey blocky one of a man, clearly an elderly warrior, staring sternly and pointing his mop at a red dog-hyena-monster with a large penis which had a face.
We purchased our bubble tea and strolled down to the harbour, stopping at an inlet where old men played go to drink our bubble tea, before going on to watch the ferries for a bit, chatting, as is our elevated way, of Kemalism. A fisherman near us caught nothing at all, and it occurred to me that I have watched hundreds if not thousands of people, on most continents, fish in public spaces without catching anything worth keeping. I daresay there is some value to the hobby, meditation or something.
We returned to Tainan in a hurry to pick up the pudding we had ordered.
Then I spoke to various family members and learned the details of the great disaster – my father’s much beloved nala daani, his drawstring insertion device (a bodkin, the internet tells me, but surely not?) had been borrowed by my brother when dressing for the Eid prayer his morning, and had been broken. This was not the old bodkin, an orange plastic one which he had owned since before my birth and until I was in my 20s, but its replacement, bought by my mother a decade or more ago. The string had broken and he was outraged at my suggestion that maybe it had just rotted away of age.