It’s day 14 out of a 15 day trip to Taipei, and for 12 of those 14 days it has rained… Not just a one hour monsoon shower in the afternoon, but it has pretty much rained for the entire day every day. As such, I haven’t been on as many day excursions as I had anticipated… Well, the rain is part of the problem at least. The other part of the problem is that the drinks here are really cheap and really strong and I have been indulging a little bit more than I should. So, I haven’t been springing out of bed at 5 am like a Sealy Posturepedic model like I usually do. My day excursions have been mainly limited to various restaurants and bars, with the odd museum thrown in for good measure. But hey… It’s an urban vacation in an East Asian city in winter.
I finally got to go to one of the restaurants that I’ve been wanting to try for a long time: The Modern Toilet Restaurant in Ximen. It’s a completely toilet themed restaurant. The interior is set up like a bathroom with exposed plumbing and everyone sits on a toilet to eat their meal. The food is served in toilet bowls and bed pans and the drinks are served in small urinals. The menu features such treats as “Poop stuffed pancakes”, “Diarrhoea Cocoa” and “Taiwanese Urine Beer”. It’s a restaurant that you go to purely for the gimmick of it, and as such, there were no locals there, only tourists. Having said that though, the food wasn’t too bad. I had a vegetarian hot pot served with rice and tea served in a small urinal. The service is a bit slow… The problem is that the restaurant is on two levels and the wait staff have to lug these huge toilet bowls up and down the stairs… It’s not like you can stack a few plates on your arms and do it quickly. They can only do one toilet at a time.
I was in Taipei for New Year’s Eve and went out to partake in the celebrations. I have always maintained that going out partying on new year’s eve is just for amateurs and bogans. It’s their one big night of the year. The cool people stay at home on New Year’s Eve… But somehow, this year I managed to get caught up in the hype of it all. New Year’s Eve parties always have such a build-up, but ultimately are a huge letdown. This year was no exception.
The big ticket attraction for new year’s eve in Taipei is to gather around Taipei 101 and watch the fireworks. Since it was raining quite heavily though, I opted to go to a night club and watch the fireworks on a screen there, rather than stand outside in the rain getting wet. The word on the street was that this club “Cercle” would be fun… I contacted them via Facebook messenger and got a good vibe. 600 TWD for all you can drink all night and a screen showing the fireworks… Woohoo!! This night would go off I thought. You could reserve a table but I figured that wasn’t necessary.
It was a small club, about the size of two large classrooms. As far as nightclubs go, it looked pretty cool and was set up very nicely with lockers, tables and lounges. They had digital lava light type projections on the wall and the DJ was playing house remixes of 70’s, 80’s and 90’s songs. Some of the songs and mixes were pretty cool, but you know, on New Year’s Eve in 2019, can we really not do any better than Sade’s “Smooth Operator” or The Human League’s “Don’t You Want Me Baby”? Nice for nostalgia, but come on…
We rocked up at the club at about 10.30 pm. I realize it’s very early to go to a night club at that time, but since the point of it was to do the countdown and watch the fireworks, I figured it would be ok. When we arrived, there were only four other people there. Thank God for the staff, because at least they boosted numbers and the club didn’t look quite so empty. Up until the time we left at 12.30, maybe another 20 or 30 people arrived. There were about 20 or so tables there and about 15 of them had reserved signs, but most of them remained empty for the whole time we were there. No-one danced at all… All the Taiwanese people sat at their tables playing games and complaining that the music was too loud. At about 11.10 pm, they stopped the lava light show and started to project a stop-watch on the wall in order to do the countdown. It was a bit foolish to start the countdown already from 50 minutes I thought, because it just emphasized how boring the night was. We all just stood there watching the clock for 50 minutes: tick, tock, tick, tock.
So anyway, the clock is ticking away… It gets to 11.52 pm and suddenly the clock freaks out an starts showing the wrong time. It showed that it was 12.52 am rather than 11.52 pm. Next thing, a skinny Taiwanese guy, one of the staff, flurries onto the stage, has a panic attack and screams, what I assumed to be the Chinese for, “Faaaaaark!!! Has anybody got a watch?” He grabs a watch from a customer and starts doing the countdown. At midnight he screeches, “Happy new year”, throws a bit of confetti in the air and then the other staff promptly race in with brooms. Woohoo!!!
After that, we went to sit down at one of the unreserved tables… Not that it would have mattered if we had sat at a reserved table because there was barely anyone in the club and what’s more, the reserved tables were mostly empty … About 15 minutes later, the aforementioned skinny guy sashays up to our table and says, “This table is reserved”. I didn’t need to sit down anyway, so we got up but I proceeded to point out to him in a less than diplomatic tone, that most of the reserved tales were still empty anyway. 10 minutes later, skinny guy comes back and says, “Oh sorry, it’s not reserved after all. You can sit there”. I’m trying hard not to react to people or situations these days… Clearly I need to try harder, because suddenly, my mood plummeted faster than a fat kid on a see-saw… I put my face into his face and pointed out to him in a less-than-kind tone of voice, that this was the worst club in not only Taiwan, but the whole entire world. He apologized. We left.
By this stage, I had drunk quite a bit, so we headed to the Ximen pedestrian area to eat some street food. Ximen was buzzing … I ate lots of stinky tofu… It’s amazing what you’ll eat when you’re drunk. Clearly however, the food vendors didn’t have licences because the police kept driving through with sirens chasing the vendors away. The vendors merely parked in another spot and the customers followed. After three plates of stinky tofu, and being quite wet, we called it a night and I went home.
The days since new year’s eve have just been spent eating more food! I have branched out and tried some other vegetarian places. Thankfully, there are a lot of nice vegetarian restaurants in Taipei. New Year’s Day, I had fake beef and real broccoli, fried noodles and dumplings at Xin Hong in Ximen.
And… on the day after, on January the 2nd, I tried a vegan burger at Ooh Cha Cha.
In between eating and drinking, I did manage to make it to the National Palace Museum. It has an extremely impressive collection of Chinese Imperial artifacts and artworks collected by China’s emperors. When the civil war broke out between the communists and the nationalists, Chiang Kai Shek decided to move the collection to Taiwan. They only managed to get about 22% of the collection before the communists stopped them, but they did manage at least to get the best pieces. And so, the National Palace Museum is one of the most impressive of its kind in the world. As with any large museum, my approach is just to get a quick overview of the whole place and then just focus on one area. I focused on the pottery, which was truly stunning. The funniest thing though in the museum was watching all the (who I presumed to be) Mainlanders, hell-bent on cataloging the entire collection, not looking at anything, just going click-move-click-move-click-move-click-move-click-move-click-move….
And some leek filled pancakes to finish off the day…
Martin's Tripping 