After moaning yesterday about too much sociability, today was even worse: the GF and I both felt we had been in hiding too much and so we made a plan with our flatmates to go for a stroll and visit the national museum (not the National Palace Museum) and then meet our linguist friend for dinner. So first a quick lunch at a beef noodle place which does a sort of pan mee style handcut noodle, then the museum which was ok, but with a fairly realistic ticket price of 40 dollars per head. There wan an exhibition on four versions of a famous map of Taiwan, a rather startling display of natural history in Taiwan which seemed to be the collections of colonial era Europeans and Japanese, including their collections of indigenous objects. The specimens were rather well displayed, even the ones that were a bit past their best, so I photographed them as a reference for a friend who works in museums in Pakistan and who despaired when we visited Islamabad’s Natural History Museum.
The next stop was a return to Mongka Coffee, a lovely little neighbourhood joint with about 10 seats and a variety of customers, ranging from the hipster to old men and women sipping coffee with their friends. The Woodland Creature sulked a little as they had nothing other than coffee and apple juice to drink (both of which are apparently poison to him) and the usual Taiwanese requirement of ordering a drink per person. We ordered a drip coffee on his behalf and the rest of us shared it.
After coffee we strolled to the Botanical Garden which the GF and I had once walked through. It was late afternoon and fairly busy, mostly with walkers but also with a cluster of photographers in combat gear setting up to photograph fireflies.
Next was a mad dash to the MRT as we were getting late for our early dinner with the linguist and the revolutionary. Along the way the GF and I lost the Woodland Creature and the Boddhisattva and took the opportunity to go not straight to the restaurant but to a bread shop where, legend had it, the sourdough was nice. They were out of sourdough, in fact they were out of everything except one pain au chocolat and a danish, so we bought those (they were only ok).
Dinner was pleasant enough. We all decided to go omakase, a risky business since it was a new Japanese restaurant to all of us, but it turned out quite pleasant with a few very nice dishes. Conversation was largely on the Taiwanese and Finnish conceptions of fairness and went on longer than I would have liked, perhaps, but was moderately interesting for most of it. Finland, apparently, has a more crab in the barrel idea of fairness while in Taiwan it’s more about all having equal chances to get ahead. In the latter case this also contributes to a rigid and exam based education system, and in the former tax returns are published and people shake their heads at anyone who earns too much. Made me rather pleased to belong to a highly unfair society.
Returned home feeling terribly, profoundly, people-d out, and vowing to put myself in isolation.