The ruthless wind, though largely absent in the summer months, is Penghu’s most prominent off-season feature, giving trees on the island their pronounced southward tilt. The implications of a half year in a wind tunnel dawned on us before winter had even begun. A constant howl raged outside the windows of our ninth story apartment,  a whining that ranged in pitch, tenor and severity without ever going away. Every waking moment seemed to have a weird tinge, and I found myself thinking more and more of switching from travel to horror writing.  My fiancé took to blasting loud punk rock music at all hours to counter the horrible droning.  In heavy rain, the wind drove the water horizontally into the glass of the windows with a deafening thud, as if someone was aiming a fire hose at them.

On sunny days we made the best of it, going out for long bicycle rides on Penghu’s wide and largely traffic-free roads. On good days our rides were fairly evenly split between agonizingly slow pedal-mashing headwind slogs and screamingly fast tailwind sprints. On bad days, the winds just pushed our bikes sideways.

By early spring, a deep sense of isolation had set in. All of the ROC’s outer islands have a remote feel, but in Penghu the isolation is especially pronounced. From Kinmen and Matsu you can see a large body of land on the horizon (even if you can’t legally get to it), and Green Island and Lanyu feel somewhat connected to Taitung.  Geographically and culturally, Penghu feels alone in a vast blue sea.  Perhaps more so than the wind, this is the reason only a handful of westerners call Penghu home for long. There are a few; one of our friends is an Australian surfer (of some renown back home) who came to Penghu specifically for surf and isolation. A few foreign windsurfers have also settled on Penghu, arguable one of the best spots for the sport on the globe. But for the most part, western faces on the island are few and far between.

Amy had mentioned in passing that on Penghu we’d feel like rock stars. Being naive, I assumed she meant we’d be offered access to cheap drugs and easy sex; alas, this did not turn out to be the case. What she really meant was that Penghu people have a tendency that most Taiwanese have thankfully outgrown – the compulsion to stare at foreigners. Penghu people are not shy when it comes to staring. Or pointing. Or calling their friends over to look for themselves before staring some more, as if they were confronted with beings completely alien, curious, or mildly distasteful.  Had Amy substituted the words “burn victim” for “rock star” she’d have been closer to the mark.

It was this combination of local fascination and boredom that turned our wedding into a small media circus. When Laurie and I finally made it official at the Magong courthouse (allowing me to refer to her as my wife both for the remainder of this story and quite probably my life,) someone – perhaps an employee inside the oddly Soviet-looking building itself – took the liberty of informing the local press that two westerners were about to tie the knot.  Before we’d even gotten to the walking-down-the-aisle part of what we assumed would be a quick and mostly private ceremony, a television news crew had showed up with a couple of print journalists in tow. After editing, the most important day of our lives had been transformed into a seven-minute human interest segment aired that night on Penghu TV.

Finding ourselves as unexpected local news celebrities wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. At last, we were able to convince ourselves (sometimes) that people were staring at us because they’d seen us on television, and not just because we happened to sport a mildly different shade of melanin. Perhaps it was because the incident happened in the summer, when the winds had finally died down, or maybe it was because the wedding happened well past the midway point in our year contract, but as the summer progressed we began to feel a bit more integrated into the local tapestry.  Local friends began opening up to us on a variety of local issues, like ongoing-yet-unsettled plans to open up the island to casino gambling, which most regular people seem unhappy about but resigned to (“it will bring bad people to Penghu,” our friend who runs a coffee cart told us) and opening Penghu up to mainland tourists (“more lucrative than gambling and probably not as detrimental,” opined another friend).

As our year-contract winds to a close we find ourselves alternating between champing at the bit to leave and reflecting on the fact that, by and large, Penghu has been fairly good to us.  Too windy for all but the most determined to put down roots, the archipelago has instead proven itself a reasonable perch from which to contemplate future plans. The world is filled with spots that fit well under the heading A great place to visit, but you wouldn’t want to live there; after nearly a year here, we think Penghu fits that bill to a T. And if such places aren’t worth writing about, where else is?

Though marginally under the control of the Ming Dynasty during the period when that court held sway throughout China, in 1622, the Dutch became the first westerners to attempt permanent settlements on Penghu. Before long, however, the Dutch were convinced to leave Penghu for Taiwan by the still-powerful Ming imperial court.  As the Ming fell, Penghu was a crucial way-station for Ming loyalist Koxinga, who, after deforesting the island of Kinmen, stopped in Penghu on his way to Taiwan.

Integrated into the Qing empire in 1683, Penghu spent the next few centuries being visited for various lengths of time by a motley collection of foreign forces; except for the Dutch, who tended to build in stone, little in the way of foreign footprints from this period remain. What does remain from Penghu’s distant past are numerous ancient villages, most notably the beautifully preserved – and well worth visiting – Erkan village on the westernmost island of Hsiyu; houses in this town / living museum are centuries old, and most villagers trace their ancestry back to the original brothers Chen who came from Kinmen following Koxinga’s disastrous experiment in forest management.

In 1895 the Japanese empire colonized Penghu along with the rest of Taiwan, building a plethora of buildings around Magong city in that peculiar Asian / Western hybrid style which the Japanese fancied back then (many of these are still there).  Not ones to step lightly, the Japanese also knocked down the wall ringing the old city, leaving only Shuncheng Gate standing for future shutterbugs.

No article on Penghu would be complete without mention of the archipelago’s abundance  of temples. No mere small roadside prayer-shacks these: We’re talking full blown three-and-five story Buddhist and Taoist maxi-malls, replete with statues, carved granite columns, alters to Matsu and more, not to mention some of the most ornate temple artwork you’re likely to find on either side of the strait. These ostentatious places of worship are clustered in sets of one, two and three in small hamlets all over the islands. In between these towns (most of which boast the population of a Hsinchu cram school on a Wednesday afternoon) there is little else. The effect of coming across one of these enormous multi-layered complexes after ten minutes of riding through empty scrubland offers a striking juxtaposition.  It’s weird, like seeing Taipei 101 jutting from the side of Jade Mountain, or coming across the Core Pacific Mall…well, anywhere, actually.

Naturally, there’s a reason behind Penghu’s tremendous cultural wealth, though it has more to do with the economics of brain drain than spirituality.  Stopping at a temple to chat with locals – mostly elderly – we heard different versions of pretty much the same story.

“Who built this temple?”

“Ah, this temple was built by Mr. Chen. He was born and raised here, but moved to Taiwan, started a successful company and got rich. He built this temple in his hometown as a way of honoring his ancestors!”

“Sounds like a devoted man. Does he ever come back?”

“Every lunar new year. At least he used to. But he’s missed the last few years…”

Reading between the lines tells a more complete story:

• Local boy leaves a town offering little opportunity outside of the dried-fish trade, promising to return once he’s made it big and share his largess with the village that nurtured him.
• Local boy strikes it rich in Taiwan or Mainland China, along the way getting used to creature comforts like restaurants that stay open past nine and supermarkets with imported-food sections, perhaps even acquiring a city-born wife who nixes the idea of spending her golden years (or any years, for that matter) discussing methods of sea-urchin preparation with windswept neighbors.
• Local boy – now a worldly man torn between duty and pragmatism – comes up with a culturally acceptable solution:  Build the largest and most ostentatious temple he can afford in the tiny hamlet in which he was raised (but has long outgrown).

Penghu is replete with stories like these, brought to life by these audaciously crafted wood and granite temples, lying largely empty on the side of the road.

I know what you’re thinking: If this is a travel article, we’re off to a bad start. Travel articles are supposed to make readers want to visit the place being written about, and here I am confessing to wanting nothing more than to see Penghu shrink into a singularity from the window of a Taipei-bound airplane. But the reader will hopefully forgive a writer’s indulgence, with the promise that this article will elucidate as it complains.

Love at first sight is great inspiration for song lyrics; picking a spot in which to live on said impulse may not, however, be the brightest idea. Hence, that we fell in love with Penghu when we first saw it might well have given us pause. We’d come to Penghu to research the archipelago’s tourist-lure factor for a chapter in the soon to be released seventh edition of Lonely Planet:Taiwan. But in the back of my mind – and that of my fiancé – was a vague idea that if Penghu had enough on the ball to lure tourists, it might have enough to keep us there for a year or so as I finished writing the guide and began whatever future projects might come up the pike. When we first saw the archipelago, a sandy string-of-pearls floating on a sapphire-blue sea, we knew we’d found a contender. The shape of the main land mass – a somewhat mangled horse-shoe, thicker on one side, surrounding a clear blue bay – promised endless beaches to explore and long roads for bicycling. We were nearly sold before we’d even landed at Magong airport.

Early explorations did nothing to diminish our enthusiasm. The beaches – long strips of white sand butting up against ocean – were as tropically idyllic up close as they’d been from the air, and even in late October, the water was still fine for swimming. Beaches aside, we were struck by how culture-steeped the place seemed; every hamlet we passed seemed to have at least one temple, if not two. And importantly, Magong – Penghu’s only city – appeared to boast a strong enough local economy (based on a combination of fishing and tourism) to support numerous restaurants, a movie theatre, and a few English schools where my wife-to-be might find employment as I got down into the nitty-gritty of chopping up months of notes into the 80,000 words that would become my half of the Taiwan guide.

So we both said why not? to a year on these islands promising beaches, culture, and seemingly excellent weather. Landing a teaching job was easy enough for my fiancée, though it was the outgoing teacher who provided the first hint that our new island home might not be the paradise it seemed at first.

“Penghu is nice,” she told us as she packed her suitcase, perhaps a bit too eagerly. “But you’ll get tired of fish, noodles and wind before too long. Trust me.”

But before going past the halcyon early days of our year in Penghu and into the long months of near constant typhoon-speed winds, endless stares and culinary boredom, a reasonable condensation of the archipelago’s long and storied history – just enough to justify its being run in this magazine’s ‘travel and culture’ section – is in order.

(to be continued)

“Were there ghosts, evil vibes or other bad Juju floating around?” you had written.  There is, and more telling than the dead are those still living.

It is the fourteenth of July, and I am riding out to pre-dawn Tiananmen Square to watch the elaborate flag raising ceremony that takes place every morning.  It is dark when I leave my apartment in the diplomatic compound, but I ride quickly lest I miss the ceremony.  The sun rises early and quickly here, yet another reminder that Beijing is built on the edge of a giant desert.

Tiananmen Square is not a comfortable gathering place; Neither grass nor weeds poke through the cement tiles that extend in all directions.  There is probably a metaphor in this.  Although it is not yet dawn, there are already many people filing through the metal gate surrounding the square, milling around along with the many soldiers who are busy scanning the crowd, for who or what I am not sure. I sit down on the cold stone ground and wait for the pre-ordained time when the ceremony will begin. The first light of dawn is filtering through the haze, and the streetlights all go off as the lights in the politburo are switched on.

I am contemplating the synergy of this - how it is that the switch from man made light to natural light can be made so seamlessly, when I hear shouting coming from the eastern corner of the square. A woman is screaming the same sentence over and over, a question.

“Wéishénme shā wŏ érzi?? Wéishénme nímén shā ta?”

Why did you kill my child? Why did you kill him?

The woman is perhaps fifty, though it’s hard to tell in the early dim that separates day from night. Her wide brimmed hat, to urbane Beijing eyes, would mark her as farmer – a country bumpkin.

Why did you tear out my womb? Why did you kill my child?

A few people turn to look at her, but most chose to remain safely oblivious. Soon, soldiers have moved in, forming a kind of half circle around her. If the woman is frightened, she does not show it. She only cries louder.

Everyone is watching now! You don’t dare hurt me!

I want so much to try to extricate this woman from this situation, believing (and perhaps not falsely) that the presence of a foreign guest might be enough to convince the soldiers to just let her walk away. The soldiers themselves look like they’d prefer an easier, softer way.

Come on mama, I want to go and tell her, nodding politely to the soldiers as I pull her away, just another dumb untouchable foreigner behaving inexplicably, come home and eat breakfast.

But I am frozen, gazing forward like the giant portrait of Chairman Mao overhead.

Soon more soldiers arrive, and the woman is quickly surrounded and hustled into the tunnel that runs underneath Chang An road, from Tiananmen square into the Forbidden city. The national anthem begins playing over crackling speakers, and as the red flag of China rises with the sun I begin weeping. I turn away from the rising flag and begin a quick march away, towards the metal fence.

~

Breakfast in Tiananmen Published simultaneously in the Taipei Times & the Colorado Daily, 1999

Lake Lugu is the home of the Mosuo tribe, a matriarchal and matrilineal society living in a valley on the border of China’s Yunnan and Sichuan provinces. At the center of their home and cultural identity is a sacred body of water that they call Mother Lake. Sitting at an elevation of around 7500 feet, Lugu is a deep pool of pure azure water dotted by a few small, lush islands bearing Tibetan style temples, shrines and one monastery. The men of Lugu are uncommonly handsome, the women beautiful and exceptionally outgoing. While this trait is strange for rural China, in a matriarchal society it makes sense. In Lugu, women make most major decisions, control household finances, and pass their surnames onto their children.

But what makes the Mosuo truly unique is one particularly juicy facet of their familial relationships, their practice of zuo hun, or “walking marriage.” The Mosuo do not marry – rather, a woman chooses her lovers from among the men of the tribe, taking as many as she sees pleases over the course of her life. In Mosuo culture, having fathered children with different women bears no social stigma. Children are raised communally, more-or-less, and in most cases grow up in the mother’s home, surrounded by any number of sisters, brothers, and “uncles.”

This highly personal practice (and not their colorful dress and tribal song-and-dance routines, as official Chinese tourist brochures would have you believe) has made Lake Lugu one of SW China’s most talked about tourist destinations, infinitely fascinating to Han Chinese tourists and foreign anthropologists alike. This, in turn, has changed the economy of the Mosuo from a herding and farming based economy to one of titillation-driven tourism.

It’s at one of the many outdoor BBQ stands that line the shores of Mother Lake where I meet up with a young Mosuo woman named Yangmei. Though she tells me she’s 19, her face is still flush with shades of adolescence. Perhaps it’s her cheerful disposition that causes me to pick hers over the other BBQ joints on the town’s one dusty street. Maybe it’s the way she calls me over.

“Hey, handsome boy…” she yells in Mandarin “Come on over, I just killed a goat.”

What man could resist a line like that?

“How much?” I ask

“20 Yuan (about $2.20 US),” she replies “with all you can eat, and free tea.”

20 Yuan buys a lot of mutton outside of the big cities, so Yangmei and I have a lot of time to talk. After exhausting the usual foreigner / Chinese chitchat about language skills and chopstick proficiency, the conversation turns decidedly more intimate.

“Why are you traveling alone?” She asks. “Don’t you have a girlfriend?”

“Not at the moment.” I answer “But I think you’re a bit young for me.”

Thankfully, she laughs at this (as opposed to throwing tea on me). “I wasn’t propositioning you!” she says, “Actually, I have a steady boyfriend, though my mother doesn’t approve.”

This strikes me as strange. In Mosuo society, a girl is considered a woman when she turns 13 and has her skirt ceremony. After the ceremony, she’s come of age, free to choose lovers as she pleases. I ask Yangmei what her mother’s objections are.

“Mother thinks I’m being disrespectful to our heritage by having a steady boyfriend. She thinks I ought to follow the old ways, to take more than one lover. It’s a big problem between us. Actually…” (At this her voice lowers) “My boyfriend and I are thinking of leaving Lugu after the summer, and moving to Kunming (capital of Yunnan province.) We may get officially married.”

As we speak, two Han Chinese men with cameras and pockmarked faces walk by. They stop for a minute, not to eat, but to take pictures.

“Why aren’t you wearing your Mosuo clothing?” One asks somewhat disappointedly.

“Ah, I only wear those on special occasions. These are my everyday clothing.”

“You are very pretty! Did you do zuo hun last night?” Asks the other, shooting Yangmei a sly, sideways leer.”

Yangmei just laughs, and offers the men some mutton. They walk on, laughing and babbling in northern-accented Mandarin.

“Doesn’t that bother you, two total strangers asking you about your sex life?” I ask when they’re out of earshot. “Where I come from, a guy gets smacked for that.”

Yangmei shrugs. “I’m used to it.” She says “They’re tourists, they don’t know any better. They don’t care about our religion, our culture or history. To them, Mosuo culture is all about sex, nothing else.”

In light of the tremendous amount of tourist money that’s come into Lugu precisely due to this perception (the Mosuo are the richest tribe in Yunnan), Yangmei’s tolerance of leering tourists is understandable. Still, I find myself wondering if perhaps tourism isn’t the shark-shaped fin in Lake Lugu’s once pristine waters. In recent years, Han Chinese men have been lured to Lugu Lake by the prospect of easy sex, giving rise to various and sundry unsavory businesses on the outskirts of town. I ask Yangmei if that’s what the half-dozen or so single Chinese men walking up and down the town’s one dusty street are after.

“Probably.” She says, “With families, it’s the culture. They really like the singing and dancing shows, that sort of thing. But with single men, they think all they need to do is show up and they’ll be invited home by a local girl.”

“Does this ever happen?” I ask

“No!” she answers, laughing “Those guys will probably wind up spending the evening at one of the Karaoke parlors outside of town. The girls who work there aren’t even Mosuo…. just Sichuan women playing dress-up.”

Yangmei and I continue talking until the sun goes down. I ask her questions about Mosuo culture, and she asks me more immediately practical questions (“how much will my boyfriend and I be able to make working in Kunming?”)

When the sun goes down, I return to my guesthouse, which bears the interesting though nonsensical name “The Customal hotel of the girl kingdom.” Like most of rural China, women (in this case Ms. Tsao, the proprietress of the hotel and her three teenaged daughters) perform the real work, while the men mostly seem to loaf around. In the center of the courtyard, a group of Mosuo men sit smoking and playing cards. The men have an air of serenity about them, a quality I’ve found in short supply in the rest of China. The older men, I find out, are uncles, fathers to Ms. Tsao’s daughters. The younger ones, I presume, are the daughter’s lovers, waiting for the evening to end and the night to begin. In the morning, if tradition is upheld, they will return to their own homes. It is from this, the sight of local men walking home after dawn, that the term “walking marriage” is derived.

In the morning, the men are gone, the women are working, and it’s time for me to be moving on. I decide to hitchhike, and stand by the side of the one road out of town with my thumb out. The first vehicle that passes by stops, and I hop into the back of a converted army jeep being driven by a Mosuo man wearing a cowboy hat with a girl of about seven riding shotgun.

The pickup is rattling along the dirt road when the little girl spots something. “Uncle, stop!” she shouts, and the man dutifully obeys. A moment later, the girl is scrambling up a tree trunk about 15 yards from the road. “Uncle, get a bag! There’s lots of fruit still in this one”. The girl starts throwing down a small yellow fruit, something like a cross between a kumquat and an apricot.

“Your daughter must have eyes like a hawk to spot those fruit.” I say, wondering if I’m making a false assumption about their relationship. The man just chuckled.

“Yeah, that she does,” he says, and offers me one of the sour little fruits “I couldn’t spot them from that far away.” I ask him where they’re both heading, and he says something that wouldn’t be out of place in any modern American father-daughter relationship.

“Back to my house. My daughter stays with her mother on the weekdays, but I take care of her on the weekends.”

As the van bumps along, I find myself thinking about Yangmei’s mother, and wondering if her concerns, which seemed so amusing to me yesterday, might not be legitimate. Might her daughter, by choosing to love in the way so alien to the Mosuo (yet normal in most of the rest of the world) be inadvertently planting the seeds of cultural demise? What will Mother Lake – and the Mosuo – look like twenty years down the road?

The Author in Lugu Lake, 2004

Taipei Skyline by Day from Roosevelt road Area

Taipei Skyline by Day from Roosevelt road Area

Taipei City over the NTU Campus

Peitou at Night

Guan Hoe Soon

Located in Singapore’s Joo Chiat district, Guan Hoe Soon is the city’s oldest Peranakan restaurant in Singapore. In a city of where every hawker center has at least half a dozen humble stalls with histories dating back decades, this says a lot. It’s also considered among the best Peranakan restaurants in town, and since everyone in Singapore considers themselves an expert on food, this counts for something as well. Guan Hoe Soon’s head chef, Raymond Ouyeong, regularly ranks among the top ten chefs in Singapore. This, of course, is very important. And finally comes the restaurant’s clientele, Parliamentarians, prime ministers, and even a certain private Singaporean citizen by the name of Lee Kuan Yew

I’m here with Tony Tan, and another guidebook writer by the very cool name of Gemma Sharkey. Tony has taken us here to experience what he considers to be the best Peranakan food in the city, and as Tony is a food tour guide extraordinaire, his opinion in the matter trumps even that (dare I say) of the Minister Mentor himself.

After some appetizers of fresh cut cucumbers with a fresh chili sauce served with shavings of dried fish (The sauces are generally made with chicken innards; however, we are given a special order, as Gemma shuns poultry and I have gout), the first dish comes out. It is Mee Goreng, a fantastic fried noodle dish. Unlike the fried noodle dishes so common in Americanized Chinese food dishes, in which the noodles are a collective mass, in our Mee Goreng, each individual noodle has both texture and flavor. The trick to cooking this dish, according to Tony, is control of the fire, which allows the heat to permeate the center of the noodle so the flavor of the whole noodle is present throughout. “The Cantonese call it Wok Fire,” Tony says, and it’s a skill that comes only with years of handling the wok.

I loved Chef Ouyeong's fish until the end

Our second dish is Sayur Lodeh, a stewed vegetable with a shrimp based curry sauce. “The trick with this dish,” Tony tells us “is that it isn’t allowed to sit on the heat for too long, lest the coconut milk split in two”

Our third dish is Sotong Asam Goreng, fried squid with tamarind sauce. The taste is exquisite, a sour sweetness that takes the tongue in multiple directions simultaneously. Dipped in chili sauce, the effect is even more pronounced. The main course, at least in my eyes, is the Barba Ikam Bakar, or barbequed fish, made with Sambol Belancham chili sauce that’s been layered over the fish as it’s grilled, giving it both a distinctive look and flavor.

“Next time we come back, we need to have chef Ouyeong’s famous roast pork dish,” Tony tells me. It isn’t usually on the menu, but it’s amazing. A favorite of Presidents and prime ministers alike.”

Nearly full, the last thing to come out and delivered by the chef himself is Guan Hoe Soon’s Signature desert, Chen Dool. This bears some visual resemblance to the more commonly available Chendol, but the resemblance stops there. Served with ice, the cocoanut cream based desert is mixed properly has a flavor of molasses and a slight hint of coffee.

Josambro with chef Ouyeong

After a brief chat and photo op with the chef, we leave fully satisfied. Should I decide to tell a Singaporean tomorrow that I’ve eaten in the best Peranakan restaurant in Singapore, I may encounter an argument. But my opinion on the matter will at least be taken seriously. As an Ang Mo, I suppose that’s the best I can hope for.

The Famous Chen Dool

Guan Hoe Soon Restaurant

38/40 Joo Chiat Place

6344 2761

Taipei 101 in the fog

While the Taiwanese have a reputation for being all business, when the business is holiday merrymaking, they go whole hog (many whole hogs, in fact – try the aboriginal roast pork), removing all stops in the pursuit of festivity. For this, and a few other reasons, consider a visit to Taipei as, to put it into the local lingo, “a worthwhile investment for the first quarter of any year.

Hot Springs

True, Taipei isn’t exactly known for its sunny February skies, but straddling the tropic of Cancer, rare are the days when your breath will be visible anywhere on Taiwan Island. More importantly, Taipei is within striking distance of three natural hot spring areas. The Taipei subway will take you to the “New Peitou” station, where you can have a soak in one of a few public springs, or rent a hotel room for about $50 US and have it piped directly into your room. From Hsintien station (the southernmost stop on the subway), it’s a 30 minute bus ride up to Wulai, a mountain town where you can either soak in a private indoor tub for about $10 US, or soak in one of the public pools right on the river for almost nothing (just cross over the bridge and look for the part of the river that’s steaming). Farthest from the center of the city, the springs in and around the Yamingshan park are known for being especially good for the skin. While there are several resort type places there where you can relax for as long as you like for a $4 admission ticket, there are also a couple of “natural” springs still left where you can soak in the great outdoors.

Pre-holiday sampling feast

While Taipei is generally a bad place for budget travelers, in the weeks leading up to Chinese New Year, the collective spirit of one market street in particular becomes generous indeed. Tihua street is Taipei’s most famous gift street, a great place to buy seasonal gifts like lung-sized chunks of pressed fish roe and vacuum packed bags of Taiwanese green tea. Most importantly for those with shallow pockets is the special status as a moocher’s paradise held by Tihua Street. In the week preceding the lunar new year holiday, sampling becomes a mandatory activity, and a walk down the main avenue leaves the visitor stuffed with strange samples of all sorts — dried fish, octopus balls, chunks of abalone, seaweed, candies and (sometimes) cheesecake. Forget about turning any of these gastronomical oddities down. The Tihua street merchants will not let any guest, especially not a westerner, go away unfed. Tihua street is also a great place to catch a puppet show, albeit one to be performed in the Fukkien dialect as in good old Putonghwa.

Walking Tour of a (Near) Ghost Town

While normally a typically noisy and bustling Chinese city, Taipei empties out as its inhabitants head south for the first few days of the Lunar New Year holiday. This brief patch of calm an excellent time to exploring the nearly-empty city. The area south of Taipei Main station is a good place for architecture buffs, as it boasts several buildings of colonial design. Perhaps the most unusual architectural oddity in the area is the Gothic cathedral on Chungshan S. road and Chinan Rd. One of the few gothic structures in Taiwan, the cathedral was built in 1916. Fans of more traditional Chinese architecture might enjoy having a look at the five gates of the late Qing-era wall that once surrounded the city. While not well known, Taipei was, like most Qing cities, walled. Typically, our Taiwanese compatriots had to do things a little differently, building their wall with not the usual four, but five gates. While the wall is gone, the gates still stand, including the Hsiao Nanmen (‘little south gate’), the fifth gate, built to settle a nasty spate of communal feuding between early Taipei residents from Zhangzhou and Quanzhou. A walking tour of all five gates can be done in a few hours.

Local Cuisine

It’s been said that the Taiwanese are food obsessed, so the Lunar New Year holiday is as good a time as any to experience the local cuisine. Stinky Tofu (tofu fermented to a high degree of pungency, deep-fried and served with pickled cabbage and hot sauce) is Taiwanese delicacy that is quite the acquired taste. Vegetarians will appreciate the wide variety of meat-free fare in Taipei city. The buffet table at any decent vegetarian restaurant is kept stocked with a wide variety of animal-free dishes created with beans, wheat gluten, roots, tubers, vegetables of all shapes, sizes and colors, fruits, rice of various colors and textures, spices, sauces, and of course, tofu. While Beijingers can boast about having a wider variety of lamb-k-bombs than any Chinese city east of Urumqi, fans of stuff skewered on sticks will enjoy the exotic stick fare of Taipei, such as squid, congealed pig’s blood, dried tofu and chicken butt. Diehard carnivores might want to experience a culinary delight peculiar to the province, the ‘Taiwanese beefsteak’. This coronary inducing monstrosity consists of a low-grade cut of beef grilled on searing metal pan, then thrown on top of a pile of spaghetti, and served with a raw egg cracked on top of the steaming slab of meat. Whether you’ll want to have your open-heart surgery in Taipei or wait until you’ve returned home is entirely up to you, though thanks to a well-regulated medical system it’ll likely be cheaper in Taiwan. Consult your insurance company before leaving, and bon appétit!

Winter view of Taipei outskirts