#173 The call of the mountain in Taipei

Transcript

Who doggie, man? I think my medium-term future in Taipei has been decided definitively. I'm looking at some mega-fucking mountains in the distance. And that's my shit. First off, though, important news. I found a plum popsicle at 7-Eleven. That's not as good as the plum popsicles in South Korea. Those ones were worth it.

They were really amazing because they had actual bits of plum in them, but it was very inconsistent as to whether you could find them. That could be the case here too, I guess, because I've only ever seen this plum popsicle just now. But maybe I just didn't know what to look for. I'll keep my eyes peeled. But man, I've become a fan of plum. I remember I wasn't really sure in Japan. Like, do I like plum or not? But last night I bought a bunch of dried, just all kinds of stuff, dried hawthorn, because again, I was like, I don't even know what that is.

Some kind of medicinal, berry-ish plant thing. I don't know. It's all right. Dried guava. Dried this dried that, but dried plum is by far my favorite. And these plum popsicles. Oh god, they're so good. I'm a plum man. But anyway, I thought today I would just go take a little journey to where my next Airbnb is just to make sure I know how to get there. If I got time to do such a thing, I'm staying in a place that's in the same city. That's always a good idea. You know, I've never had a huge problem finding an Airbnb. Well, I guess I've had a couple of rough ones, not on this trip though. And when you first get to a new city, you just gotta go find the place and that's it. I guess now that I think of it too, my problems were all before I had a proper phone with GPS. I don't think that's the coincidence. It's not that hard to just follow the blue dot. But I thought I'd come out here just for the heck of it, because I had nothing else to do today anyway. And this was kind of the decision I was trying to decide on. Where do I book more time it? Because the place I met now, they're both about the same price. The place I met now is right in the middle of She-Man, the really cool anime fun street performer neighborhood.

But I've started to realize that it's surrounded by an expressway. And it is just being inside your inside the city streets. Very exciting and cool and fun at first. But I've been there a little over a week and I've got a little less than a week to go. And I have just kind of fallen into a pattern of just walking around the neighborhood. It's like, I don't even know where I'm going anymore. I'm just walking around. And it's cool enough, but I guess exiting the wall beyond the expressway last episode, which was yesterday for me.

It did make me realize like, oh yeah, I guess I didn't really know I was trapped in that neighborhood. Visually trapped because it's just the only thing I've known of Taipei so far.

I saw a little bit out the window of the subway on the way from the airport and that's it. So it didn't really occur to me that I hadn't been able to see the horizon or see into the distance. And that I was always just seeing two or three blocks ahead of me and that was it. And again, you know, that's fine for now. But in the longer term, yeah, I'm already starting to spin my wheels a little bit in that neighborhood. And I guess I was kind of doing that in Seoul where it's like, oh, I'm just stuck in this big city. I'm trapped in here and I don't like it, but I just made it a habit to go to coffee shops. But that coffee shop thing is I've described just not really a thing around here. This is the land of tea. Anything you can imagine as a coffee, you get it here as a tea instead. Caramel latte tea. Mocha tea. And then a million other kinds of teas.

Which is cool and I'm all for it, but as far as the store you go to and sit at, I don't know how that works. I don't know if tea culture doesn't seem the same as coffee shop culture. Coffee shop culture is a pretty distinct, you know, you go sit there and you just take up space all afternoon. You know, you way overpay for a coffee and then you sit there with your laptop or your phone and you can just do work for two hours in a fight. If there's tea shops like that, I don't know. I don't know how that works. And then even in Seoul, I still started branching out and it took many tries to figure out how to get to the various mountains around Seoul, but I figured it out. I still managed to escape. So the center of new Taipei cities is a lot more pleasant to me than Seoul. I like it a lot better. But it is a bit of that feeling of like, well, I'm kind of trapped in the city, but I can't even do the like, well, I'll just be a coffee shop guy. I'm starting to get a little just a little bit lost feeling. I'm like, what do I do here? I wake up in the morning and I don't have a plan. I don't have a thing to do. 5:00 I could just walk around the neighborhood again, I guess, you know.

So on the way out here, and it's not exactly far, it's like five or six stops north on the subway.

And where I also learned that my little transit card that I got when I first got to Taipei that shaped like a little egg. It's a little egg shaped Hello Kitty character that's very annoying because it doesn't fit properly in my wallet. So I still got it wrapped in the paper pamphlet that it came with. But I realized I don't have to take it out of the paper. I can just scan it through the paper. So functionally, it's rectangular. It's card shaped. I'm just scanning a little folded promotional pamphlet with my egg card in the middle. It's kind of weird, but whatever it works. So I was looking at my phone and I was like, all right, this is the stop I have to get off at. I decided to go one farther than that and just backtrack a little, see the neighborhood a bit. And I noticed on the map an enormous mountain like the biggest fucking mountain in the world that was taking up the entire northeast corner of the country. You know, like the entire corner of Taiwan is this fucking mountain. And it's a national park. Let me see. Yangminshan. Y-A-N-G-M-I-N-G-S-H-A-N. I have a feeling that name. The same way Bukhonson National Park is that emblazoned on my mind because of Seoul. I have a feeling Yangminshan. So it'll be the last time I don't know the name of it. I have a feeling this is soon going to become a part of my life.

Yeah, it's this enormous fucking mountain. And I was like, wow, really? And then I got off the train and there it was just this giant fucking mountain in the distance. And just like, well, there it is, all right, holy fuck. And then as I've been walking around, I just keep seeing it between buildings and from different angles. And it's like quite a range of mountains. It like covers the entire horizon. And it's like, holy fuck, that's pretty. That is so pretty. And that's where it's pretty much decided. Like, I'm gonna wait till I get to the new Airbnb. Just to make sure the place is all right. But it seems very clear that this is what I'm gonna do. Because the Airbnb I'm going to, it's a more modern building, but less cool. The place I'm at now is very cool. Cool neighborhood cool building. But the place I'm going to has air conditioning included in the price, which my place now doesn't. And I thought, you know, maybe being on the outskirts, maybe being in the suburbs wouldn't be as fun in his neat as just walking out of the front door and being in shemen.

But like I said, it's only five or six stops away. I can really easily go back. And I realized, no, this is what I prefer way more. You know, this doesn't have any of that cool anime stuff. It's just a normal residential neighborhood. But in that way, it's a lot nicer because the neighborhood around shemen, I thought was fine. You know, it was cool. You know, it's got random homeless people and prostitutes and stuff, but it doesn't really bother me. And it is just like super duper clean. So out here is also super duper clean, but just way less populated, way more open, way more calm, way more quiet, way less traffic. And I'm looking at the mountains right now, just like boom, you know, like that's what I want to get up in the morning and go outside and see. It's cool to see the anime characters a bit for a week or two, but see in the mountains. That's what I want to see every day. That's what I always want, anywhere that I am. If I can have a beautiful nature view, that's the shit. I just didn't know how Taiwan would be or if that is accessible or whatever. I should have known. Island nations, man, they're mountainous. You know, they all are. And it's the best. I fucking love it. It's so beautiful.

And it's mostly, you know, again, it's not mountains even like in Canada. It's Asian mountains where they're covered in trees, but there's still buildings popping up here and there. There's this one building way up on the top. It's like, what even is that? And just various different buildings popping up all around. So that's the other thing I thought was interesting is it's like, all right, there's the mountains. They are pretty big. But looking at them on a map, it looks like it should be the end of times. It's literally the entire, I say northeast, actually just north. There is actually a bit east of here. Still. So it's just the northern tip. The entire northern tip of Taiwan is this mountain. But when you think of it that way is this is just the entire fucking place. But I'm looking at the mountain in real life. And I'm like, yeah, I mean, it's big, but it's not insane. You know, I'm thinking of some of those mountains in Busan or even I think the one in Jetchon. It was like 700 meters. 10:00 Some of the ones I went to in Busan were like 600. I think there were some like 800 ones that I didn't make it to.

These mountains are certainly no bigger than that. And looking at it on the map, I was like, obviously, okay, the subway only goes so close. You know, subway stops don't go up into mountains. So I was thinking like, oh, maybe I need to figure out some buses and stuff. I guess we'll see. And then there's also some routes out to the coast. And there's like a bunch of places it seems like you could go from here.

But yeah, those mountains, I mean, I'm sure there are buses and I'm sure that will help once I figure out how to get closer to the base of the mountain. But I could walk from here. It's like it's right there. It's legitimately like an hour away. So this started to confuse me a bit where, you know, I guess I'm just thinking of sizes in a relative sense where I'm just thinking of this mountain as taking up the entire northern part of the country.

But I'm looking at it in real life and it's no bigger than any of the other mountains I've been experiencing in Japan and especially in South Korea. So that made me think like, how big is Taiwan? You know, I'm just taking Taiwan as Taiwan not compared to anywhere else. Because when I look at it on a map, I mean, it's just an island. There it is. You know, it's like when I look at Jeju or even when I looked at South Korea or Japan. It's like you can just kind of see the whole thing and you just take it for what it is. It's hard, I guess, for me to understand relative sizes. The bus is still beep. If you can hear that. It's just incessant bus beeping. I mean, of course they still do them not far away. I'm in the same city, essentially. But man, I wish they could find a better way to keep people wary of the buses than just the constant beeping. Anyway, I went on Google Maps and I just on my phone and I just zoomed out as much as I could. Like, okay, just show me the earth. Show me as much as you can. And then I went to look at my home province as an example. So Canadian provinces are obviously really, really big. But I'm from one of the smaller ones. I'm from New Brunswick, which is between Quebec, which is huge. And Nova Scotia, which is much smaller, but Nova Scotia is still way bigger than New Brunswick. New Brunswick's in the middle. And it's kind of one of these forgotten provinces, you know, even my Canadian friends from Ontario. You know, when I first met them started hanging out with them. They had a very hard time internalizing where I was from or kind of really remembering what it was. Because Quebec is famous because that's the French province with Montreal and Quebec City. Newfoundland is a bit famous because it's so far east and the accent is really strong. It's almost Irish. Nova Scotia is just if you're going to know any of those provinces, you know that one. Prince Edward Island had Anna Green Gables. Like, New Brunswick released. We're the one that nobody has a reason to know about it. There's nothing in anyone's brain to make them go like, oh yeah, of course, New Brunswick. Sad but true. But I was looking at New Brunswick on the Google map and I'm like, okay, there's the size of that.

There's a little GPS dot for my hometown and it's like, all right, you know, the dots in the middle of the province and there's a lot of province around the dot. Then I scrolled over to Taiwan and just my same blue GPS dot almost covers the whole island. You can only see a bit of it poking out. So that's where it started to occur to me. Like, okay, so that's how big Taiwan is. Very, very, very small. If my small province is larger than this whole country, then yeah, this is a very small country. So I'm starting to put that together a bit of like, because you know, they're all quite small. Like, South Korea is smaller than Japan. And, you know, yeah, taking the train, I took the train from Jetchon to Seoul all the way down to Busan in like an afternoon, covered the whole country. When you fly from Jeju, it's like half an hour, you know, to get from Jeju to Busan. It's very, very small.

So I think Taiwan is even smaller still that you can see this big mountain range that takes up a huge chunk of the country on Google maps, but you can get to it in like 20 minutes, you know, on a train. And you can just look at it and just plainly see with your own eyes that it's as mountain ranges go, you know, it's like way less than Bukansen. Bukansen was way more huge and intimidating than this.

So as for how the mountains actually work around here and how you get to them and where you can go up and how accessible they all are and what kind of hiking there is, I have no fucking idea. I don't know it all. 15:00 But yeah, it seems very obvious that this is the next route. This is the plan. Coming out here seems like way better of an idea because yeah, I can just, I can just head back into the center anytime I want. If I want to go back into anime town, it is easy to get to. Meanwhile, yeah, right now I'm just walking down a nice little quiet sidewalk next to a little river. It's just way more quiet and general way more open. And yeah, just so you can see stuff, you know, you look into the distance and you can actually see as far as your eyes can see. Where within Shiman, not to tall, in there it is like you can only see a bit of city at any given point.

Still very cool, but yeah, those are the two differences. Shiman feels like the kind of place to visit where outside of there, you know, couple go over a couple of little rivers and get to a residential neighborhood where the entire horizon is a beautiful fucking mountain range. That feels like the place where you want to live. And since I always visit for as long as my visa is well, let me visit. Functionally, that's kind of what I'm doing. I'm basically living here for just a little bit. And yeah, just seeing those mountains. And then also just on the Google Maps, just seeing various little coastline stuff, little hiking trail markers, stuff like that.

It just like ignited my brain of like, ah-ha, a plan. Because yeah, I've definitely hit that point in Shimen where I just don't have a plan anymore. Today, I was like, oh, I guess I could go back to those botanical gardens I was at and try to see the parts that close at five o'clock. But it was already getting late in the day. I didn't know if I'd make it in time. And it's just like, yeah, is that really all I can think of though? I mean, I was just there yesterday. But it's like, yep. I was like, oh, maybe I could go back outside.

I could walk to the park that runs along the edge and go the other way. But I don't know how far it goes the other way. I could have experimented, I guess. But the fact that it's all just stuff I did yesterday is like, I guess I could just carry on with that. It's clear evidence that I ran out of ideas. Where is all of a sudden now? Oh, man, it's got my brain fired up. Do I approach these mountains? How do you get to them? Am I even going to be able to do this? It is still August. Not the best time in the world to be hiking up mountains and shit. But I guess we'll see that too. I think I'll have to go buy myself another big floppy sun hat. Slather myself in sun tan lotion. Make sure I got shit tons of water. And yeah, just attempt an approach. See what happens. Recalibrate, try again. See what happens. You know, try to go to the mountains.

Then try to go to the shore. Then try to go to a different shore. Then try to go to some different mountains. Then just hang out in the city for a day. Yeah, oh, man, it's just like, it's like the adventure makes itself. Once you've got natural stuff to do. Once you've got nature options, city options, especially when I can't read the language. And like, yeah, I don't know. My options are just so limited in the city. There's not that much that I can easily do. And there's not that much that I want to do. I've done it. I did it. I soaked it in. We're good. Now, and by now, I mean, next week when I moved to this neighborhood, it's nature time, man. It's mountain time. Just seeing that mountain. It's like, ah, yes, thank you. Thank you very much mountains. I mean, I guess I knew. I knew that's what I would like to do. But I just didn't know again. Like, I didn't know what the geography and the topography of time I want is like, I didn't know if this was a thing that was going to be possible or available really. But yeah, it is big time here. Very, very much so.

So I was just heading back to the train. And I decided, like, yeah, well, let's not get right on the train. Let's just walk. Let's walk back towards shemen and see how far I make it. It's getting a little late in the day. The sun's on its way down, but it's kind of cool because I can just hop on the train anytime. Anytime, anytime I want to give up, but I mean, I don't know, it's not impossible that I could just walk the whole way. Everything is pretty close around here. Pretty compact. But anyway, I was just standing at a stoplight. They actually have the numbers on them around here. They didn't so much in the central city. And they're very long numbers to be like counting down from 90.

It's like, all right, I guess I have a bit of a weight. A lot more bicycles around here, actually, how I was saying I didn't see any bicycles in the city proper. Here it's a mix. Cars and scooters and bicycles and the beeping buses. We got them all out here. But yeah, it's like, let me just see if I can get on the internet. Why not? I'll just give it a random try since I'm just standing here at the stoplight. And it took a couple tries, a couple different Wi-Fi networks, but I actually did have got on the internet.

It really is nice just because the Wi-Fi situation was so dire in Japan. We're back in 2019. You could at least go to convenience stores. Most of the convenience stores had Wi-Fi. So those were the little Wi-Fi oasis, but those no longer have Wi-Fi. Yeah, it was rare to find Wi-Fi in Japan. So nice, especially in South Korea, but also pretty prevalent here in Taiwan. You can just sometimes you just get internet magically out of the air. It's funny that Japan is so, so behind the curve on that. But anyway, I only had time to hop on and check one thing, just seeing mountains in the distance. I just wanted to check the height of Yangminshan National Park, apparently one of nine National Parks in Taiwan.

And it is taller than I thought it was, although the way they describe it, the little description when you google how taller the mountains in Yangminshan, it distinctly says, unlike most National Parks, this one is actually quite low in elevation, ranging from 200 meters to 1100. The highest one is 1120 meters above sea level. Mount Kixin, QI, XING.

So yeah, if that's the highest one and all the other peaks are lower than that, then I guess that is about what I thought, you know, where I was looking at it. And I'm like, yeah, those like seven and 800 meter mountains, this is about how this looks. And I guess generally it probably is. But the very tallest one, over 1,000, over 1,100, that's more than I expected. I didn't think it was that big. But anyway, I just thought that was kind of cool to be able to confirm that while I was just standing, waiting for a crossing late to change, although I guess if you're a normal citizen of the earth with a data plan on your phone, you can do that all the time. Just any time you want, you can just go on the internet and look up anything at any moment. But that's not my life, man, that's not how I live. So that's not how it is for me. I need the Wi-Fi. And it's just fucking, it's a cool feeling. When you just reach out, you're just reaching out for information. Can I have the information magically? I mean, back in the day, man, you'd have to go to a fucking library and get an encyclopedia set and go find T and look up Taiwan and then find the entry about national parks. I mean, it would take you a whole afternoon. Nowadays, you can just reach into the ether and just request, request of the gods. Hey, I only got a second. I only got a moment. I just want to know one thing. How tall are these mountains? Sometimes the gods say, I don't fucking know fuck off. But sometimes they say, here is the answer. I bequeath unto you the answer you seek. And I say, thank you, Delphi. And then I keep just walking and sweating, because that's what I'm doing.

All right, it's the next day. I'm back in Shimen, although since discovering how close the mountains are yesterday and seeing that the train line, you know, it seems like if you follow the train line all the way to the end, it might not be that hard to get to the coastline. That was my first inclination. It's like, I should go do that. But yeah, I'll be switching to that Airbnb soon. And I think the reality is, once I'm outside of Shimen, outside of this walled area that's surrounded by an expressway, even though it's this cool neighborhood with the performance out in the anime and all the cool shit, I think it's probably pretty easy to not come back. 25:00 You know, it would probably be pretty easy to just find other places to go. So I should probably soak this place in a little more while I'm still here.

So today I'm heading back to the Botanical Gardens. It's kind of nicely overcast. It's not too horribly hot. I just want to see the little areas. So that closed at five o'clock that I didn't get to see last time. And I've just been kind of gandering around and I'm just stuck in sort of, as I notice things that can start adding it to the list of, I don't know, my index of like, so how do things work in Taipei in general and maybe in this specific neighborhood? Because I had really thought that I hadn't seen any bicycles, but I must have. Because ever since seeing a ton of bicycles outside of the expressway wall, there's like a bike path around the river. And there was a shit ton of bicycles. And now I'm definitely seeing bicycles, like not a ton, but I'm seeing a sort of normalish amount of bicycles around. I guess maybe just in my specific little neighborhood, since it's kind of like a, a foot market area. I don't know, though, it's still full of freaking scooters, but I really saw no bicycles there. But now that I'm a little bit outside, there's actually a fair number of bicycles. So it's not a law thing. Like it seemed so severe that I was like, is it against the law somehow? You're not allowed to ride bicycles within the city interior? But no, not at all. I just, I don't know, selective observances. It's a weird thing. My brain just doesn't see shit sometimes until it, you know, it's like you start it off. You start noticing something and then you can notice it all over the place. Along those lines, I noticed a couple of for real motorcycles today. Only a couple, but those have probably been sprinkled in, too, without me realizing. And I wonder how that goes. Like in a place that is so super dedicated to scooters. I wonder what causes a person to go. Now, you know what, I'm an upgrade. I'm going to be a motorcycle guy, a for real motorcycle guy.

But I have no idea. I haven't even got a license. I don't know what the differences are. I assume motorcycles are better for longer distances.

But for just jetting around the city, what is the benefit? I don't know.

I also don't quite know where the botanical gardens are. I think I'm walking toward them.

If those are them right ahead of me, then that would be amazing because I haven't had a single GPS dot since I left the house. That's continuing to be a weird issue. GPS is just really bad here. I thought it was because of all the awnings, but I haven't been under an awning in a while. There's nothing between me and the satellites of God, so I don't know what the hell the problem is. This is awkward dead ends and sending me in other directions. And now I'm walking the wrong way, but there's nowhere else to go. It's like dang it. Dang it. I messed something up here.

How nice. I did find a sneaky side entrance. So I was almost at the botanical gardens, but I didn't have the proper entrance. So there's just this place where this guy is just doing some work. I'm like, am I allowed to even go over there? What is this? And then there was a spinny turn style that said, yeah, open till five o'clock. So I snuck my way through, banged my foot loudly against it like a big goof. And now here I am. Cool. That worked out. I'm at one of the interior parts. So yeah, I'm just at the center of the park now. Oh, here's a little pond with fish in it. And yeah, it's very jungly. And yeah, even though it's a bit overcast today and not so hot, it is immediately hotter feeling in here. I'm in the jungle. Do you know where you are? Well, and here's an actual greenhouse with cactuses in it. I don't think I can go in, but I can just look through. Cool. Cool. I made it. I accidentally made it, which is good because there's my dot finally. Geez. Alright, cool. Well, at least my GPS is working.

Almost in time. Yeah, these fish, they look like coy, but I don't really know fish that well. But if I had to guess, I think that's what they are. They're not orange though. They're dark colored, like dark brown, almost gray.

Time is it actually? So it's a little after three, quarter after three. Yeah, and you're allowed in your chill five plenty of time, plenty of time to soak it in.

Oh, a little lizard or a gecko or something. Hey, buddy.

How are you doing?

Well, this is quite nice. It was worth coming back to. There's a bit of tree pruning happening in the background, so a bit of noise. Yeah, this was definitely worth coming back to see the interior of this park. There's actually a crap ton of this park that you cannot see after five o'clock. I really just got to go skirt around the outside. There's a whole bunch of weird cool trails and stuff. Different places you can go. It's all very jungly, very nice.

And, man, yeah, I'm just sweating, sweating, sweating, sweating. That's one thing that's I noticed yesterday, because in this neighborhood, because I haven't been taking the subway anywhere. I've just been in this in this hood. So I tend to just walk around outside all day, and there'll just be little bits of inside, you know, a little bit of inside if I go into a mall briefly or into a convenience store. And it's always a bit of a shock when you walk back out into the day and you realize just how hot it is out. It's like, oh, fuck. But, along with that, you know, I'm just like, whatever, sweaty, sweaty, sweat, sweat, all the live-long day. It was a little weird getting into the subway yesterday on the way home. And I was wearing a dark green shirt, but not dark green enough, because once I got into the air conditioned train, and I was just standing there, there actually were some seeds. It wasn't crazy busy, but I prefer to stand so I don't exacerbate my cyst by sitting. But yeah, I noticed like, oh, geez, yeah, look at my shirt. You can see so many, just like, well, half of it, just like half darker, because I'm just covered in sweat, just total sweat. It's just like, whoa.

This all just does feel so weird to me, like definitely the heat in Canada. It's just, it's just not the same. I mean, I guess this is the humidity thing, whereas just, yeah, you just start sweating and you never stop.

Well, this is kind of cool, but also very confusing. So I met the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall, CHI-ANG, K-A-I-S-H-E-K Memorial Hall, just because it had a big, one of those big logos on Google maps. I think I first noticed that with the St. Joseph's Oratory and Montreal. There's certain things that have their own big logo on Google maps, which automatically means it's something cool. And it was a big building, well, I mean, I guess I'm in it technically. I'm underneath it right now. A big building like similar to the Lincoln Memorial, and then once you get up there, that's what it feels like, too, except instead of a big statue of Lincoln sitting in there, it's some other guy, just some dude. I was like, oh, this is interesting, but I just have no idea who this dude is. And then I realized you could go downstairs and into this building, and it's a whole museum. And I don't know what time it closes, but it is getting a little later in the day. It's five o'clock now, so I don't know. They do have arrows on the ground, which was nice. At least I knew how to walk through it without getting in everyone's way, but you know, I spent like 20 minutes walking through. There is an audio component. In fact, I'm looking right now, the information desk has permanent exhibition audio guide, and it says that in English. So maybe, maybe if I was here earlier in the day, and I really wanted to spend the afternoon, maybe they have an English version, because every part of the exhibition had a number, so you can listen to an audio thing about it. But yeah, just doing the quick pass through it is, I mean, I've brought up many times just that museums. You know, I feel weirdly uncomfortable or just disinclined to go to museums, even though sometimes it's great. I still think fondly of that museum in Chiba. I really loved that one. And if it's something dumb, you know, like a skateboard museum, then I'm all about it.

I'm just heading outside now. Yeah, this one I think it kind of, oh wow, the doors. They're like gigantic doors, and they have knockers that look just like those two from Labyrinth. You know where you take the ring out of their mouth. There's some Canadian for you, mouth. Yeah, it's like a cool building, and it's just cool stuff, but I really feel completely over my head the whole time. Like, it's just such a weird feeling about museums where I don't know, I mean, like I guess in Jeju, like it took some time, but I did manage to learn a bit of stuff. You know, I did manage to piece together some level of understanding of at least the vague history of the island, which was cool to know and neat, but I'm not even close to there with Taiwan. I still just know nothing. So yeah, it's just an eerie feeling to just be walking through this place and see all these exhibits from all these different time periods and all this stuff that seems pretty weighty, seems pretty important, but I'm just like, fuck, I'm ignorant. I don't know anything. I know so little that I'm not even learning. I don't know that I picked up anything by walking through there. It's just too much. You know, I'm just drowning. I can't tread water. I don't even know where to start, you know. It's just a lot. But like I said, they do have audio guides and stuff. If a person were more dedicated, I bet if you did spend an entire afternoon walking through there with the audio guide, you'd probably learn some stuff.

But yeah, I mean, I just walked here again because I saw it on a map. It was not at all ready for this.

Not it's all. So who knows? Maybe that's a thing. Maybe that's a thing I could do. Hey, but at least the seeds planted. At least I know this thing's here now. It's a big-ass museum that is apparently free and it's begging to try to teach you. It wants so bad to teach you about history of the local area. Yeah, I would definitely need. I would definitely need the audio. I mean, there was a bit of English in there. There were short descriptions of things, but I just feel like it's again not enough to keep me from drowning, not enough for me to get my head above water. I just don't have enough context for anything to understand anything. I just really don't.

I just stopped in a family mart that had a pretty pretty good size little seating area to sit in and eat your stuff. That was just kind of sitting there and I was sort of zoning out a bit cram in my face with delicious family mart junk. And then as my eyes focused, I realized there was an entire row of scooters right in front of me and across the street from there was another entire row of scooters. And I just had a nice little moment of like, ah, I'm in Taiwan. A little memory of like, oh yeah, this is where I am right now. This is pretty cool. You could definitely use that it in geoguester if you see rows and rows of scooters. So that is not the traditional garbage jingle, but those are garbage trucks. I think I did read that yeah, it's not just for release. That's what I've been hearing mainly. I think it did say that there's sometimes a different song. So maybe that's the other garbage song we just heard.

Or maybe that's the recycle song. It is all blue, blue bags. But anyway, to wrap this episode up to talk about the opposite of museums, to go lowbrow, I am getting kind of tired of smelling myself. Man, I mean, I feel like I only smell, I don't know, like a 3 out of 10, but that's a bad sign because that's my estimation of myself. So it's probably lower than reality. It's probably worse than that, but I'm supposed to be a zero. Dude, I've never been a person that smells bad. I'm just not. And now it's just like, oh, gross. I can't wait to get home and take these fucking clothes off. Hop in the goddamn shower. And I just don't know what to do about it. This hasn't even been an especially long day. This is like a half day at best and I'm fully gross.

But like, what could I do about this? You know, bring a change of clothes, change my clothes in 40:00 a public washroom and throw the old ones away. Like, I just don't know. Before I leave the house, I take a shower. I put as much fucking deodorant on as my body is able to fucking handle, because I am the deodorant king now. Now I've got too much deodorant, so I'm like, just give it to me. Give me all the deodorant. And then fast forward four hours and I'm just a fucking garbage pile walking around. It's like, what the fuck am I supposed to do about this? I'm starting to sympathize a bit with when, you know, like old ladies walk around and they're like mega perfumed. And they're just like, you know, it's like, how could you ever think that's a good idea? That is way too much perfume. But it's probably a similar situation with them, you know? They have their various whatever, whatever happens as you get older. Maybe they're a bit incontinent and they're just not, they don't trust themselves. They're not sure how they're going to smell at any given time, so they're just like, whatever. It's better if I just smell like a perfume bomb. It's not, by the way, it's awful. But I can, I can sympathize, man, because yeah, like, I'm a bit at that point. Like, I don't know what else to do. I do not know what else to do. I just have to be gross every fucking day and I'm getting fucking sick of it, dude. It sucks. I mean, it's the price of doing business, I guess. That's what happens when you visit Asia in the summer. In August, you're just a fucking gross smelly white person. That's weird, man. It is weird and I don't like it. So apologies to everyone else who has to come into contact with me because if I think it's gross, obviously the person who can most deal with my own stench is me. So yeah, I apologize to everyone else in the world. Everyone else on earth. I'm sorry. I don't know what to do. I'm at a loss. But yeah, I don't know, man. I'm tired of it, too. I'm also suffering. No one wins. No one wins in this scenario. I'm just fucking gross.

Oh, I just got back to my Airbnb and just a quick little info dump about that place I was at. So the Chiang Kai Chek Memorial Hall. So you may not be shocked to learn that the big statue that I couldn't identify is Chiang Kai Chek. Chiang Kai Chek. The way they say it almost sounds like John. But yeah, that's just how mega ignorant I am. Like, I can't even directly identify if words are a proper name or not, you know. I guess Memorial Hall suggests it's a person, but I don't know. That could be a place. It could be a battle. It could be, you know, I don't know. But it's not. It's a guy. And he was the leader of China during World War II, apparently. Yeah, I don't know. It's just my ignorance knows no bounds. I check to see if I could download the audio of the tour and it didn't, I couldn't find it. But what I did find is just this random side of mine. Go travel tipster.com, they said that the the area underneath the hall, the place where I was at, it used to entirely be about this one guy. And now it's like half about him and half about just rotating exhibits that they change. But they even said on this site specifically that the parts about Zheng Kai-shek specifically were the boring parts. They were the parts that they skipped past a little bit.

Sorry fella, no offense to you. But then I found TripAdvisor's list of the top 10 museums in Taipei. And this is not even in the top 10. So I think it's a passing fancy. It's just an idea of like, oh, I was there. I guess I could go back. But it seems like it's quite a hyper-specific museum. You know, it's neat to piece together little bits of information to kind of get to know a little more about places and pick up information. And hopefully I will in my time here in Taiwan. But yeah, that's a particularly random one. I think I'm probably, probably won't. I won't break my museum fast for that particular museum I don't think. But hey, at least I know now that's what it was. At least I can know where I was. That's something. At least I know this guy now and what his 45:00 position was in World War II related history. That's more than I knew this morning. So hey, that's a win. What can I say, man? We live in peacetime. We live in the time of shallow ignorance.

I'm waving that flag. All right, thank you once again for listening. I just got back and I'm still a sweaty and horrible. So I got to go wash this grime off of me.