Yesterday morning the GF and I walked westwards, through the Botanical Gardens which were small, but free and very pleasant. I do like tropical botanical gardens, the wild lushness combined with being well-kept. The streets were quite quiet, late morning on a Sunday, and Easter I suppose, though there were few indications of that despite Taiwan’s thriving churches. Presumably they were all in church.
We went on to a small Buddhist restaurant so it was vegetarian and the GF could eat it. Quite pleasant, including a bowl of rice with a mysterious herby paste, sort of like a Chinese pesto, that we’d got from a farmer’s market once before and were never quite sure what it was for. I used it as a topping for white fish and it was a tasty thing. It now appears to indeed be a sort of pesto, made of Chinese mahogany leaves, and in English is given the unappetising name of toon sauce. In Chinese it is xiangchun.
We next went to Longshan Temple, perhaps the most significant temple in Taiwan, which was destroyed in a bombing raid during World War II but Guanyin rose and spread her robes in the sky to protect her statue from destruction. Outside it is the Mongka park with a lare plaque detailing the history of its reconstruction which entailed clearing it of the many homeless people and drug users that congregated here. They were all back of course. Such old places, those with power and perhaps more mundanely, those with alms and food distribution, do seem to be a place where society’s refuse congregates, like Daata Darbar in Lahore.
Near the temple are a few points of gentrification and we visited a couple of them. One was an old wet market, shaped like a U. A really lovely art deco building, now converted into design studios and filled with trendy young (but not too young) Taiwanese, quite unlike the grimy old men screaming at trees in Mongka park. Before entering we had to have our temperature taken and hands cleaned, of course, but we also had to fill in a Google Docs form giving our names, phone numbers and time of visit, against which our temperature was recorded. I thought the building was beautiful, though the studios largely appeared closed. A few hundred metres away was a restored historical street where again we had to do the whole social distancing thing. These were the remains of the old town, with tiny brick buildings for visitors to the city to stay in. Again, beautifully restored, but I am starting to think this Taiwanese gentrification does suck out some life from a place as well. They do not seem to go in for mixed use spaces, for example.
We walked on to Ximending, the Shibuya of Taipei. Here it was crammed, though not as much as in earlier years, and there was the usual overload of signage, advertisement and colour. We looked, very briefly, into a Korean skincare shop but were swiftly overwhelmed and retreated. I think it’s partly the consumer aesthetic, but very largely that one can’t begin to read the script so it is quite overwhelming, there is no way to find meaning in it all. Maybe it’ll become easier once I knew a few more characters.
We also walked through the Red House – again, temperature, alcohol spray, taking our details. Sadly nothing interesting there. I’d hoped to find a watch to replace mine which broke whilst I was in Pakistan, but no luck. I might just have to resort to another Casio or Swatch.
And then back, through the 228 Park and the Chiang Kai Shek Memorial gardens, a visit to the supermarket for supplies, and return to find that the Boddhisattva and the Woodland Creature had taken almost our identical route about an hour behind us.
The distancing here is ramping up, slowly and surely. I wonder if and when we’ll be confined to our flats.