Taiwan Day 12: Back to Taipei

All the news today has been about this bloody typhoon that is heading our way and supposedly will be right on top of us on the day we take off from the airport. Lovely. But in anticipation of that, today was pre-typhoon weather. That is, all the crap gets blown out of the air and Chia-yi showed what it looks like on a sunny, scattered clouds day without a haze of carcinogens hovering overhead. It was also bloody hot.
Last night we spent packing, and both Mike and myself were faced with a similar problem: where do we put all this stuff? In one case I have the new water boiler, still in the box (and with socks and fragile teapots packed inside) and everything packed around it.
This morning, the family took us out to the stinky tofu place down the road, the one with the best hot sauce in the area, but blast it all, it was closed. We continued walking, until we came to another former neighbor who had a very popular duck noodle stand. Now she’s made enough money to expand that into a bigger shop. The noodles are still lovely and the thick broth is still as multi-layered as I remembered it. Mike and I also sought out some watermelon juice on the way back, probably this trip’s most popular drink.
There was some last minute shenanigans over taking gifts back. Mama wanted Jessica to take back some “long life noodles” for a family friend in Santa Barbara, but the noodles weighed a ton, so we halved it. Mother and daughters hid money in each others’ bags/beds to help each other out. That’s the Chinese way…
We caught a coach up to Taipei and two films played on the way up: Four Chefs and a Feast, one of those slapdash New Year’s comedies from Hong Kong about three chefs trying to recreate a famous end-o-WWII banquet (the fourth chef was their mentor); and “Needing You…” starring Andy Lau and Sammi Cheung in some sort of romantic comedy or other. It had no subtitles, so I didn’t really know what was going on. Sammi Cheung is cute, tho’. As is Wu Chien-lien, who plays one of the chefs in the first film–she has a Anita Mui thing going on…
By the time we got to Taipei, the weather had soured and was now dark grey and drizzly, while at the same time being oppressive and humid. So on one hand I had to wear my jacket, on the other it was really to hot for such a thing.
We took a taxi, dragged three bloody heavy suitcases up four flights of stairs and waited for the sisters to return home, which they eventually did.
We took a train back out to visit Berry’s company, where she is main packaging and grpahics designer. The company is called UCI, and they make USB storage devices, MP3 players, and an upcoming movie player which will probably arrive after iPod movie busts out on the scene. Berry works in at a desk in the corner of the small office, which is two floors away from Rock Records, one of Taiwan’s main record publishers. She has all the cool goodies–all the other desks looked rather bland. The boss, a rather unassuming youngish guy, gave us a little tour, and let us play with the movie viewer and even asked us, the two Americans, for input.
We decided then to walk to one of the night markets and saw some nice upmarket areas of Taipei (at least some with architecture that pleased my eye. At the night market (the most popular one, I’ve forgotten the name, but we’ve visited once already this trip), I tried a refried donut (a donut thrown back in the deep fryer and then sprinkled with sugar) and it wasn’t as horrifically greasy as I’d imagined it would be. I also had some sticky pork rice and some herbal jelly drink.
Taxi back. Called my friend William to arrange tomorrow’s day out, and then watched some bad HK movie called The Three Lusketeers, which starred Euro-looking Simon Lui as a lothario trying to scam millions out of one of his father’s old Filipino mistresses. Quite unfunny yet compulsively watchable, for some strange reason. Those strange reasons included Gigi Lai…