We came to Tainan last night, at last by ourselves for a short while. In the morning I went to collect the GF’s birthday present – I’ve rented a Playstation for a month and bought him The Last of Us II, a game he dearly wanted to play. It was a bit of a hassle: I had to get the Boddhisattva to help arrange it some weeks ago, arrange for the renting company to make sure the unit was available in Kaohsiung. Then go to their office, with my limited Chinese and his limited English try to make sense of the terms and conditions and the contract I had to sign. Goodwill and translation apps proved inadequate and when one said “there is a mottled carapace” for what later turned out to be “faint markings on top surface”, we gave up and called the Boddhisattva to interpret. Anyway, we have it now.
Then to Tainan, 15 minutes on the train and 20 minutes on a bus, once more lugging that ikea bag. The flat is on the 5th floor so that was a final mighty effort, but here we are.
It’s a pleasant flat, and so lovely to have our own place. The kitchen is the big problem: the photos on teh website showed a brand new stove wrapped in plastic and when we arrived it was still wrapped in plastic, with no gas connection. Instead there is a single hotplate, an electric skillet, a toaster oven and an air fryer.
We went for our customary stroll in a new town in the evening, through a large park where the GF was pleased to find plenty of places where he can hang his rings and even a bar with rings already attached. A little way past the park was a supermarket, and it turned out to be one of those monstrosities not meant for humans unaided by steel and rubber. We got a couple of things, but today we found alternative sources which are closer and more pleasant, so will happily pay a premium to not return.
Tainan, our part of Tainan, seems a fairly nothing sort of city. Grey and uninteresting, like many Taiwanese cities, a few very wide roads and a few very small residential streets, one of which is where our flat is located. I gather the other side of Tainan, Anping, is the more picturesque part, but I won’t have a chance to explore till next week when I have a reduced workload. It’s not quite the sort of town we were hoping to go to after Taipei, a little too big and bland for that, but I imagine it will become more interesting as we stay and explore.
Looking around the area on Google Maps before we arrived I found what appeared to be a small bakery next to our flat, which only appeared to open 2 days a week for 90 minutes. One of these slots was today, so we went there at the moment it opened. We were the first inside and the woman said they had sandwich bread, rolls and tiramisu. Of course we asked for the tiramisu and she said no, we couldn’t have it. It was all pre-ordered. We asked if we could pre-order it for tomorrow and she said no. Will you be open tomorrow, we asked, and she said no, but we couldn’t pre-order tiramisu as they were not making tiramisu tomorrow. So we asked if we could pre-order what they were making. She looked doubtful and showed us a blurred photo of something orange on her phone and said, it’s not tiramisu, but we could pre-order it if we really wanted. So we pre-ordered it, still uncertain what we will get, and also bought a bag of rolls. Meanwhile, within seconds of our coming into the shop, a flood of people arrived, grabbed their pre-ordered tiramisus and paid. By the time we left a few minutes later, most of the tiramisus were gone and the shelves of bread were much lighter. The rolls turned out to be the best European-style bread we’ve had in Taiwan, and up there with some of the best anywhere, with a lovely crumb, stretchy and chewy, little specks of walnut and nutty, flavourful flour. So hopes are high.